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.
Zarathustra pursued a life as a poet, priest, and spiritual teacher in northeastern Iran about 3,500 years ago, several centuries before the Vedic poets and Homer. He is thus the earliest known writer in any Indo-European language. That his poems can be read in the condition in which they were sung and speak directly to us through the millennia must be considered a veritable miracle.
The Gathas is a hymn in praise of timeless wisdom and with its aphoristic exposition the work resembles a didactic philosophical poem. Zarathustra wants to present a true picture of reality, of the imperishable archetypes of the world of thought as well as of the role of the individual in the material world. More than anything else, he urges us to value our free will, to listen to the voice of our conscience and contribute to the good renewal of the world.
In this translation, the Old Avestan literature is presented for the first time in Swedish in direct translation by Ashk Dahlén, docent of Iranian languages at Uppsala University, who also has provided the book with an introductory preface as well as comments, and a glossary.
Bis in die jüngste Zeit werden von der Forschung zahlreiche Fragen zu den Beziehungen zwischen dem frühen Sasanidenreich und seinem römischen Nachbarn kontrovers diskutiert. Auch zur innenpolitischen Entwicklung des Sasanidenreiches unter den Nachfolgern Šāpūrs I. bis in das frühe 4. Jahrhundert finden sich unterschiedliche Rekonstruktionen und Bewertungen. Im Rahmen der hier vorgelegten Untersuchungen wird das facettenreiche und teilweise aufgrund zahlreicher Divergenzen schillernde Bild der wechselseitigen Politik der beiden Großmächte und ihrer nicht-militärischen Interaktion (bis zum Jahr 363 n. Chr.), wie auch der innenpolitischen Entwicklung des Sasanidenreiches unter den Nachfolgern Šāpūrs I. vorgestellt und analysiert. Was präsentiert wird, ist im Wesentlichen Forschungs- und Quellenkritik. Anhand von Beispielen aus der Forschungsliteratur wird ausführlich dargelegt, in welcher Weise zugunsten einer These argumentiert wird und ob bzw. inwieweit die jeweiligen Vorstellungen auf verlässlicher Überlieferung beruhen.
Zoroastrianism was the religion of the ancient Persian kings and following the Arab conquest, it remained the religion of a significant portion of the population in Iran and parts of Central Asia. This book investigates the most important polemical treatise in the Zoroastrian tradition, the Škand Gumānīg-Wizār (“The Doubt-Dispelling Disquisition”), which was written by the theologian and philosopher Mardānfarrox son of Ohrmazddād. The text was composed in the ninth or tenth centuries in a language known as Middle Persian.
A sophisticated work of rationalist theology, the Škand Gumānīg-Wizār systematically critiques several rival religions of the late antique and early medieval Middle East, including Islam. The critique of Islam found in chapters 11 and 12 is the only sustained, systematic polemic against Islam in premodern Zoroastrian literature, one that attacks monotheism by focusing on the problem of evil. The text is of fundamental importance for understanding Iran’s transformation from a predominantly Zoroastrian society to a predominantly Muslim one during the Early Middle Ages.
This is the first book devoted to the Islamic sections of the Škand Gumānīg-Wizār. It provides a new translation and commentary of these important sections along with introductory chapters that explore Zoroastrians’ relationship with other religions in Late Antiquity and the early Islamic period; Mardānfarrox’s intellectual milieu (especially the influence of Islamic theology and interreligious debates); and the history of Zoroastrian polemics against Islam.
