Tašakorī, ʿAlī-ʾAkbar. 2020. tārīḫ-e ejtemāʿī-ye zartoštīyān-e yazd [Social History of Zoroastrians of Yazd]. 3 vols. Irvine: Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California.
Ali Akbar Tashakori’s three-volume Social History of Zoroastrians of Yazd (in Persian) deals with the social history of the Yazdi Zoroastrians from the medieval to modern times. While the focus is primarily on the Yazdi community, the work also covers the wider history of Iranian Zoroastrians. The book examines the challenges faced by Zoroastrians in the medieval and early modern periods, as well as the beginning of the nineteenth century social and intellectual empowerment among Iranian Zoroastrians supported by the Parsis of India. It also highlights the growing political and economic influence of the community in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi era, as well as the remarkable role of the Pahlavis in elevating the status of Zoroastrians within Iranian society as a whole.
The first volume covers the lives of Zoroastrians of Yazd starting with the arrival of Islam in Iran, in 641 AD, until the formation of the Anǧoman-e Nāṣerī of Yazd in 1892 AD. This book discusses the treatment of Zoroastrians under the new Muslim rulers who regarded them as monotheists and “people-of-the-book”. It highlights two massive internal migrations to the Yazd region elevating its status as the center of Zoroastrianism. It also focuses on the formation of Anǧoman-e Akāber-Ṣāheb by Parsis and their efforts to abolish the Jazzieh tax and improve Zoroastrians’ lives.
The second volume covers the formation of Anǧoman-e Nāṣerī by Keykhosro Khān-Ṣāheb in 1892 AD until the beginning of Pahlavi dynasty in 1924 AD.
This third volume covers the period that starts with the rise of Reza Shah and the formation of a secular government, which relied heavily on the pre-Islamic image of Iran, something which had a direct influence on promoting the social status of Zoroastrians. This volume focuses on the rule of Mohammad Reza Shah and the modernization of Iran, two elements with a profound influence on the lives of Zoroastrians of the Yazd region.
A special issue of the Journal of Art Historiography: A Historiography of Persian Art: Past, Present and Future, No. 28, June 2023, guest edited by Yuka Kadoi and András Barati.
Table of Contents
Yuka Kadoi: ‘A Twenty-Year Retrospect on ‘The Mirage of Islamic Art’: Polarising Islamic art, consolidating Persian art’
Nile Green: ‘The rekhta of architecture: the development of ‘Islamic’ art history in Urdu, c.1800-1950’
Ebba Koch: ‘Discovering Mughal painting in Vienna by Josef Strzygowski and his circle: the historiography of the Millionenzimmer’
Henry P. Colburn: ‘A brief historiography of Parthian art, from Winckelmann to Rostovtzeff’
Iván Szántó: ‘West-östlich diplomacy and connoisseurship in the late Habsburg Empire: Baron Albert Eperjesy and his dispersed collection of Persian art’
Kassiani Kagouridi: ‘Musealisation and ethno-cultural stereotypes in Persian art: the case of Baluch carpets ca. 1870s – 1930s’
Tomasz Grusiecki (Boise State University), ‘Rethinking the so-called Polish carpets’
Dorothy Armstrong: ‘Persophilia and technocracy: carpets in the World of Islam Festival, 1976’
Jaimee K. Comstock-Skipp: ‘The ‘Iran’ Curtain: the historiography of Abu’l-Khairid (Shaybanid) arts of the book and the ‘Bukhara School’ during the Cold War’
Robert Hillenbrand: ‘Eric Schroeder: maverick polymath’
Andrea Luigi Corsi: ‘A matter of timing: the modern history of a ‘Sasanian’ silver plate from Rashy’
Johannes L. Kurz: ‘Dashi 大食 reconsidered’
Jens Kröger: ‘Kurt Erdmann (1901-1964)’
Jens Kröger: ‘Carl Johan Lamm (1902-1981)’
Joachim Gierlichs: ‘Ernst Cohn-Wiener (1882-1941) and his contribution on Islamic Art and Architecture in Central Asia’
In this paper, I will briefly examine the concept of superiority/inferiority in the Achaemenid administrative system in particular and in the ancient Iranian world in general. In doing so, I will focus on the word bandaka, its meanings and its nuance in Iranian languages in the context of ancient Near Eastern culture, as this word plays a very important role in the definition of terminology related to slavery and associated terms in the Iranian world. In addition, I will discuss two additional words related to this topic that shed more light on the concept of superiority/inferiority in Ancient Iranian societies. Our main sources for this study are inscriptions, letters and contracts from a variety of Western and Central Asian cultures. In this study, I chose three Middle Iranian languages, Sogdian, Pahlavi, and Bactrian, because the geography in which these languages were spoken was a part of the Achaemenid Empire.
Michał MARCIAK, Robert S. WÓJCIKOWSKI, Daniele MORANDI BONACOSSI & Marcin SOBIECH: The Battle of Gaugamela in the Navkur Plain in the Context of the Madedonian and Persian Art of Warfare
Meysam LABBAF-KHANIKI: The Sasanian Stuccoes of Notheastern Iran Khorasanian Imagery in Late Antiquity
Rika GYSELEN, Samra AZARNOUCHE & Mohammad-Ali AMIR-MOEZZI: Une ‘traduction’ moyen-perse du verset du Coran 5:8 sur un poids d’époque omeyyade
Maryam NOURZAEI & Thomas JÜGEL: The Distribution and Function of Person-Marking Clitics in Balochi Dialects from an Areal Perspective
Luxurious objects are celebrated for their exoticism, rarity and style, but also disparaged as indulgent, extravagant and corrupt. The ancient origins of these attitudes emerged at the boundary between the imperial Persian and democratic Athenian Greek worlds.
Luxury was at the centre of the royal Persian court and behaviours of ostentatious display rippled through the imperial provinces, whose elite classes emulated luxury objects in lesser materials. But luxury is contrastingly depicted through Athenian eyes – within the philosophical context of early democratic codes and the historical context of the Greco-Persian Wars, which suddenly and spectacularly brought eastern luxuries into the imagination of the Athenian populace for the first time. While Athenian writers rejected luxury as eastern, despotic and corrupt, the elite adopted Persian luxuries in imaginative ways to signal status, distinction and prestige.
Under the Macedonian empire of Alexander the Great and its subsequent kingdoms, royal Achaemenid luxury culture would be adopted and displayed by the Macedonian and local elite across the Greek and Middle Eastern worlds: behaviours of ostentatious display were a means to seek advantage in the new Hellenistic world order.
Ultimately, this publication demonstrates how competing political spins woven around 2,500 years ago still continue to shape the modern perceptions of luxury today.
The table of contents of the latest issue (57) of the journal Iranica Antiqua:
Kathryn KELLEY, Logan BORN, M. Willis MONROE, Anoop SARKAR: On Newly Proposed Proto-Elamite Sign Values
Mohammad BAHRAMI: The Evidence of a Castle of the Ellipi Kingdom in Khorramabad, Western Iran
Esmail HEMATI AZANDARYANI, Hossein NASERI SOMEEH, Mehrdad MALEKZADEH, Hossein TORABZADEH, Michael ROAF: Haji Khan. A Median Temple in Hamadan Province, Iran
Anahit Yu. KHUDAVERDYAN, Seda H. DEVEJYAN, Ruben H. DAVTYAN, Azat A. YENGIBARYAN, Arshak A. HOVHANESYAN, Shota A. VARDANYAN: Disability and Murder. A Paleopathological Case of Ankylosing Spondylitis in a Woman from the 7th-6th Century BC Lori Berd Burial (Armenia) with Skeletal Evidence of Probable Fatal Blade Injuries
Amir SAED MUCHESHI, Mohammad E. ELIASVAND, Shoaib FAIZI, Amir ESNA-ASHARI, Shreya SARMAH, Mojgan SEIF PANAHI, Ali BEHNIA: Qaleh Qamchoqay. An Archaeological Investigation into a Defensive Castle in the Province of Kurdistan, Iran
Mahnaz SHARIFI: Second Season of Excavation at Cham Routeh in Seimare, Ilam Province, Iran
Mozhgan JAYEZ: What has been done and what has to be done? Statistical Assessment of Iranian Paleolithic Research 1906-2021
This volume is dedicated to the logos of Cambyses at the beginning of Book 3 in Herodotus’ Histories, one of the few sources on the Persian conquest of Egypt that has not yet been exhaustively explored in its complexity. The contributions of this volume deal with the motivations and narrative strategies behind Herodotus’ characterization of the Persian king but also with the geopolitical background of Cambyses’ conquest of Egypt as well as the reception of the Cambyses logos by later ancient authors. “Herodotean Soundings: The Cambyses Logos” exemplifies how a multidisciplinary approach can contribute significantly to a better understanding of a complex work such as Herodotus’ Histories.
In the early fifth century BC rations of bread and wine were issued to small numbers of horses at Persepolis, the Achaemenid Persian capital located in what is today the southwest Iranian province of Fars. Although considered puzzling by many students of ancient Persian history, ample evidence exists in the historical and equine veterinary literature of mediaeval through early twentieth century date attesting to the widespread practice of giving bread and wine to horses for both nutritional and therapeutic reasons. This evidence is reviewed in order to contextualize the Persepolis evidence within the broader framework of equine management across space and time.
The King’s Road offers a new interpretation of the history of the Silk Road, emphasizing its importance as a diplomatic route, rather than a commercial one. Tracing the arduous journeys of diplomatic envoys, Xin Wen presents a rich social history of long-distance travel that played out in deserts, post stations, palaces, and polo fields. The book tells the story of the everyday lives of diplomatic travelers on the Silk Road—what they ate and drank, the gifts they carried, and the animals that accompanied them—and how they navigated a complex web of geographic, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. It also describes the risks and dangers envoys faced along the way—from financial catastrophe to robbery and murder. … In shifting the narrative of the Silk Road from the transport of commodities to the exchange of diplomatic gifts and personnel, The King’s Road puts the history of Eastern Eurasia in a new light.
The Routledge Handbook of Ancient, Classical, and Late Classical Persian Literature contains scholarly essays and sample texts related to Persian literature from 650 BCE through the 16th century CE. It includes analyses of some seminal ancient texts and the works of numerous authors of the classical period.
The chapters apply a disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach to the many movements, genres, and works of the long and evolving body of Persian literature produced in the Persianate World. These collections of scholarly essays and samples of Persian literary texts provide facts (general information), instructions (ways to understand, analyze, and appreciate this body of works), and the field’s state-of-the-art research (the problematics of the topics) regarding one of the most important and oldest literary traditions in the world.
Thus, the Handbook’s chapters and related texts provide scholars, students, and admirers of Persian poetry and prose with practical and direct access to the intricacies of the Persian literary world through a chronological account of key moments in the formation of this enduring literary tradition.
