Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

  • Priscian: Answers to King Khosroes of Persia

    Huby, Pamela, Sten Ebbesen, David Langslow, Donald Russell, Carlos Steel & Malcolm Wilson (eds.). 2016. Priscian: Answers to King Khosroes of Persia (Ancient Commentators on Aristotle 1). London. Bloomsbury Academic.

    Priscian of Lydia was one of the Athenian philosophers who took refuge in 531 AD with King Khosroes I of Persia, after the Christian Emperor Justinian stopped the teaching of the pagan Neoplatonist school in Athens. This was one of the earliest examples of the sixth-century diffusion of the philosophy of the commentators to other cultures.

    Tantalisingly, Priscian fully recorded in Greek the answers provided by the Athenian philosophers to the king’s questions on philosophy and science. But these answers survive only in a later Latin translation which understood both the Greek and the subject matter very poorly. Our translators have often had to reconstruct from the Latin what the Greek would have been, in order to recover the original sense.

    The answers start with subjects close to the Athenians’ hearts: the human soul, on which Priscian was an expert, and sleep and visions. But their interest may have diminished when the king sought their expertise on matters of physical science: the seasons, celestial zones, medical effects of heat and cold, the tides, displacement of the four elements, the effect of regions on living things, why only reptiles are poisonous, and winds. At any rate, in 532 AD, they moved on from the palace, but still under Khosroes’ protection. This is the first translation of the record they left into English or any modern language.

    This English translation is accompanied by an introduction and comprehensive commentary notes, which clarify and discuss the meaning and implications of the original philosophy. Part of the Ancient Commentators on Aristotle series, the edition makes this philosophical work accessible to a modern readership and includes additional scholarly apparatus such as a bibliography, glossary of translated terms and a subject index.

     

  • Images of Daēnā and Mithra on Two Seals

    Shenkar, Michael. 2015. “Images of Daēnā and Mithra on Two Seals from the Indo-Iranian Borderlands“, Studia Iranica 44(1), 99-117.

    The article discusses two seals from the recently published collection of Aman Ur Rahman that depict previously unrecognized images of Iranian deities. It is suggested that the first seal, of eastern Sasanian manufacture, depicts a unique image of the Daēnā accompanied by two dogs. The second seal shows a well-known motif of a chariot of Mithra. The inscription connects it with the Pārata kings and helps to date the seal to the third-fourth centuries CE.

  • The making of Turan

    Payne, Richard. 2016. The making of Turan: The fall and transformation of the Iranian east in late antiquity. Journal of Late Antiquity 9(1). 4–41.

    Contemporaneously with the fall and transformation of the Roman West, the Iranian Empire yielded its East to Hun—and later Turk—conquerors. This article traces the development of post-Iranian regimes through the dynamic interplay of nomadic and sedentary political institutions in the fourth through early seventh centuries. The conquerors adopted Iranian institutions, integrated the Iranian aristocracy, and presented themselves as the legitimate heirs of the kings of kings in a manner reminiscent of post-Roman rulers. At the same time, however, the Huns and the Turks retained the superior military resources of nomadic imperialism, included the Ira-nian East in trans-Eurasian networks, and distinguished themselves as rul-ing ethno-classes tied to the steppe. The resulting hybrid political culture came to be known as Turan.

    The article is also available from the authors’s academia.edu page here.

  • Parthian kingship

    Edward Dąbrowa, “Kingship ii. Parthian Period,” Encyclopædia Iranica, online edition, 2016, available at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/kingship-02-parthian-period (accessed on 25 July 2016).

    Parthian kingship started with the Arsacids monarchy and was an original form of Oriental kingship. The royal ideology was created by combining elements of different provenance; Greek elements were systematically removed or relegated to be replaced by Iranian traditions.

  • The Star of Bethlehem and the Magi

    Barthel, Peter & George van Kooten (eds.). 2015. The star of Bethlehem and the Magi. Interdisciplinary perspectives from experts on the ancient Near East, the Greco-Roman world, and modern astronomy (Themes in Biblical Narrative 19). Leiden: Brill.

    This book is the fruit of the first ever interdisciplinary international scientific conference on Matthew’s story of the Star of Bethlehem and the Magi, held in 2014 at the University of Groningen, and attended by world-leading specialists in all relevant fields: modern astronomy, the ancient near-eastern and Greco-Roman worlds, the history of science, and religion. The scholarly discussions and the exchange of the interdisciplinary views proved to be immensely fruitful and resulted in the present book. Its twenty chapters describe the various aspects of The Star: the history of its interpretation, ancient near-eastern astronomy and astrology and the Magi, astrology in the Greco-Roman and the Jewish worlds, and the early Christian world – at a generally accessible level. An epilogue summarizes the fact-fiction balance of the most famous star which has ever shone.

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  • Conference Program | societyforiranianstudies.org

    The eleventh biennal conference of the International Society for Iranian Studies will take place in Vienna from 2 to 5 August 2016.

    For more information on the conference, see this link. And here is the conference programme.

  • Vermin and poison in Zoroastrian thought

    Lincoln, Bruce. 2015. Toward a more materialistic ethics: Vermin and poison in Zoroastrian thought. Studia Iranica 44(1). 83–98.

    Absent from the Older Avesta, vermin and poison first appear in a few verses of the Younger Avesta, whose authors misinterpreted Yasna 34.5c (where they mistook adjectival xrafstra- for a substantive) and Yasna 49.11c (whose ‘evil foods’ [akāiš xvarəθāiš] they took to be poison [viša-]). The Pahlavi texts take the argument further, developing a narrative in which these creatures and substances become prime weapons of Ahriman in his assault on Ohrmazd’s Good Creation. Speculation along these lines introduced novel understandings of evil as a lethal substance, rather than a destructive disposition or spirit, moving questions of morality from metaphysics to physics.

  • Achaemenids and Greeks

    omslagDahlén, Ashk (ed.). 2016. Antikens Persien. Umeå: H:ström Text & Kultur.

    The  Achaemenian Empire was the first of the Persian Empires to become an important political and economic power in the ancient world for more than two hundred years. It transformed the entire area from the Greek islands in the west to Central Asia in the east to a continuous trading with efficient infrastructure and monetary economics. However Greco-Persian Wars, also often called the Persian Wars were a series of conflicts between the Achaemenid Empire of Persia and Greek city-states that started in 499 BC and lasted until 449 BC. , and as long overshadowed the western image of the Ancient Persia.

    This volume is the first introduction to the Achaemenid Empire in Swedish. It is dedicated to Swedish archeologist, professor Carl Nylander and is a tribute to his pioneering work in the field of early Achaemenid archeology.

    “Antikens Persien” covers a range of interrelated topics such as political history, multiculturalism, architecture, language, and literature. Its aim is provide a general introduction to ancient Persia for Swedish readers and also to highlight the diverse and flourishing interactions between Persians and Greeks in various fields.

    Table of Contents:

    • Förord
    • Lennart Lind: “Persien och Grekland”
    • Johan Mårtelius: “Arkitektur och konst”
    • Bo Utas: “Språk och litteratur”
    • Ashk Dahlén: “Kosmopolitism och mångkultur”
    • Vidare läsning
    • Appendix: Bilder

    About the Editor:

    Ashk Dahlén (PhD 2002) is Associate Professor in Iranian Languages at Uppsala University and founding president of the Scandinavian Society for Iranian Studies. Among his research interests are classical Persian literature, Iranian cultural history, mythology, religions, and historical continuities between ancient and medieval Iran.

  • Repetitions or Omissions? Different Versions of Widēwdād 22

    Ferrer-Losilla, Juanjo. 2015. Repetitions or omissions? Different versions of Widēwdād 22. Studia Iranica 44 (2).  207–225.

    The present paper analyses two versions that appear in the 22nd chapter of an intercalated text of the Zoroastrian Long Liturgy, the Widēwdād: a longer version in the Iranian manuscripts and a shorter in the Indian ones. It is shown that we stand before two different real versions in the ritual praxis of this ceremony, though it is difficult to evaluate the date in which each version appeared or whether one version could arise from the other after the beginning of the written transmission. Other passages of the Widēwdād containing similar problems are analysed in a brief appendix.

  • DABIR – Vol. 1, Issue 2

    The latest issue of DABIR has been published and is available here: Issue 02 – Dabir Journal.

    The Digital Archive of Brief notes & Iran Review (DABIR) is an open access, peer-reviewed online journal published by the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture at the University of California, Irvine.

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