Jcsss 21 (2021) contains six articles that were presented online at the University of Ottawa, Department of Classics, on November 14, 2020. The symposium theme was the Christians within the Sassanian period. I am thankful to Professor Geof-frey Greatrex for leading this symposium in his Department and to George Amanatidis-Saadé for his great help in this symposium. I am also thankful to both of them for editing the papers published here. Two more papers were submitted by members of the CSSS, one on ancient bronze lamps and another, a note on Corpus Juris of Īshō‛-bokht.
It is by now widely acknowledged that between late antiquity and the first centuries of Islam, Syriac-speaking Christian communities were more than just scattered minority communities with little impact in geographical areas strongly shaped by the Iranian element. “Iranianate and Syriac Christianity” bridges across different specialized disciplines, first and foremost Iranian Studies and Syriac Studies and the History of Christianity, and assembles a range of authoritative voices on the subject. The 14 contributions are arranged in two sections: Mission, Conversion and Power and Languages, Texts and Concepts, representing a wide range of approaches and reflecting the complexity of the religious, political and cultural history of the Christian communities in the Eurasian area up to the year 1000 and beyond.
This book concerns the memory of the Persian Wars in Athens, in relation to the Panhellenic scenario, from the immediate post Marathon to the so-called ‘First Peloponnesian War’ (461–446). It analyzes all the pre-historiographic forms of memory (poetry, inscriptions, monuments, topography, theater, rites, cults, festivals, public discourse) through which the Persian Wars were remembered and represented before Herodotus told them in historiographic form.
Filling a gap in current research, the book starts from the awareness that the Persian Wars as told in the Stories of Herodotus do not exactly correspond to factual history, but are instead the result of a multiform and stratified process of memorialization, which decade after decade has reshaped events in the light of present needs. Combining a philological approach to literary, epigraphic and archaeological documentation with a theoretical and methodological landscape influenced by cultural anthropology and memory studies, it reconstructs the images and meanings associated with each layer of this process, thus offering a sort of stratigraphy of the memory of the Persian Wars before Herodotus.
The latest issue of Studia Orientalia Electronica (Vol. 9 No. 2) is dedicated to the theme, “Identity and Empire in the Ancient Near East.” It conveys, inter alia, three articles that fall into the scope of ancient Iranian history and culture:
Silvia Balatti – Yau̯nā and Sakā: Identity Constructions at the Margins of the Achaemenid Empire
Jennifer Finn – Persian Collections: Center and Periphery at Achaemenid Imperial Capitals
Ehud Ben Zvi – The Art of Bracketing Empire Out and Creating Parallel Worlds: The Case of Late Persian Yehud
The second volume of the Handbook describes different extractive economies in the world regions that have been outlined in the first volume. A wide range of economic actors – from kings and armies to cities and producers – are discussed within different imperial settings as well as the tools, which enabled and constrained economic outcomes. A central focus are nodes of consumption that are visible in the archaeological and textual records of royal capitals, cities, religious centers, and armies that were stationed, in some cases permanently, in imperial frontier zones. Complementary to the multipolar concentrations of consumption are the fiscal-tributary structures of the empires vis-à-vis other institutions that had the capacity to extract, mobilize, and concentrate resources and wealth. Larger volumes of state-issued coinage in various metals show the new role of coinage in taxation, local economic activities, and social practices, even where textual evidence is absent. Given the overwhelming importance of agriculture, the volume also analyses forms of agrarian development, especially around cities and in imperial frontier zones. Special consideration is given to road- and water-management systems for which there is now sufficient archaeological and documentary evidence to enable cross-disciplinary comparative research.
This is an open-access volume. For information on the first volume, see here.
Abstract: Editions of Persepolis Fortification documents that compile multiple records of fruit, a category (provisionally labeled C1/W) postulated by Henkelman & Stolper Persika 21, p. 169ff.; editions of selected tabular accounts of fruit (Category W) cited in the same article; a hypothesis about connections among C1, C1/W, and W records of fruit in information processing at Persepolis; a hypothesis about underlying practices of fruit production on terms comparable to those of contemporary Babylonia; appendixes on some Elamite words connected with fruit orchards, fruit processing, and wine.
The author is of the opinion that as a result of Alexander the Great’s conquest of Syria (late 333–332 BC), which had been a single administrative entity under the Achaemenids, it was divided into two satrapies – the northern and the southern one. He believes that Menon, son of Cerdimmas, was appointed as the first head of the northern satrapy (winter 333/332), to be replaced by Arimmas (early spring 331), who, in his turn, was succeeded by Asclepiodorus, son of Eunicus (late summer 331). Besides, it seems that Andromachus became the first head of the southern satrapy (shortly before winter 332/331), and after he was killed, Menon, transferred from the north to the south, took his place (early spring 331). Already in Alexander’s lifetime, probably in 329/328, Syria was once again merged into one satrapy. It is unclear who was installed as satrap of the unified region. At any rate, it could not have been Menes, son of Dionysius: the hypothesis that in winter 331/330 he was made satrap of the new province including Syria and Cilicia does not stand scrutiny. In the author’s view, the main task Alexander assigned to Menes was to take control and then to keep open and organized the sea communications with the coast of Syria, Phoenicia and Cilicia, and in the matters concerning these activities Menes was fully independent of the local satraps.
The newest issue of the Journal of the Himalayan and Central Asian Studies, Vol 25 (1-2), 2021, guest-edited by Shernaz Cama is dedicated to the Zoroastrisn Studies.
Recent discoveries by international teams from varying backgrounds of academic study have found rich artistic and linguistic material along the Silk Route. So far, these discoveries remain in volumes on Zoroastrian studies. This edition of the Journal of Himalayan and Central Asian Studies brings some of these findings to a wider audience. This will help make links between multicultural concepts, oral traditions as well as iconography. These multicultural links will be taken forward to a much later colonial and post-colonial period of history when adaptation and absorbing new influences once again becomes vital to the creation of a Parsi Zoroastrian culture. It is this multiculturalism, the ability to straddle different geographies and adapt to historical circumstances, while maintaining a core essence, which has been a feature of the Zoroastrian identity throughout its long history.
One of the most heated scholarly controversies of the early twentieth century, the Orient-or-Rome debate turned on whether art historians should trace the origin of all Western—and especially Gothic—architecture to Roman ingenuity or to the Indo-Germanic Geist. Focusing on the discourses around this debate, Talinn Grigor considers the Persian Revival movement in light of imperial strategies of power and identity in British India and in Qajar-Pahlavi Iran.
The Persian Revival examines Europe’s discovery of ancient Iran, first in literature and then in art history. Tracing Western visual discourse about ancient Iran from 1699 on, Grigor parses the invention and use of a revivalist architectural style from the Afsharid and Zand successors to the Safavid throne and the rise of the Parsi industrialists as cosmopolitan subjects of British India. Drawing on a wide range of Persian revival narratives bound to architectural history, Grigor foregrounds the complexities and magnitude of artistic appropriations of Western art history in order to grapple with colonial ambivalence and imperial aspirations. She argues that while Western imperialism was instrumental in shaping high art as mercantile-bourgeois ethos, it was also a project that destabilized the hegemony of a Eurocentric historiography of taste.
An important reconsideration of the Persian Revival, this book will be of vital interest to art and architectural historians and intellectual historians, particularly those working in the areas of international modernism, Iranian studies, and historiography.
