Issue twelve of Historia i Świat (2023) has been published. Contributions to this issue relate to Iranian archaeology.
Zohreh OVEISI-KEIKHA, Hosseinali KAVOSH: The Investigation of residential architecture in the Bronze Age. Tape Yal, Sistan and Baluchestan province, Iran
Sepideh JAMSHIDI YEGANEH: Cremation in Elamite period (Sukkalmah): Hirbodan site
Morteza KHANIPOUR, Hamed MOLAEI KORDSHOULI: Cairn Burial of the historical period around Khansaar dam, Toujerdi district of Fars province, Iran
Ehsan KHONSARINEJAD, Reza RIAHIYAN GOHORTI, Sahar TAVAKOLI: Arrowheads in the cultural-historical property repository of the Administration of Cultural Heritage of Kerman. An Introduction
The book of Ezra is a remarkable testament to a nation’s ability to survive and develop a distinctive identity under imperial rule. But Ezra is far more than a simple chronicle; it constitutes a new biblical model for political, religious, and social order in the Persian Empire.
In this new volume, Tamara Cohn Eskenazi illustrates how the book of Ezra envisions the radical transformation that followed reconstruction after the fall of Jerusalem and Judah. The extensive introduction highlights the book’s innovations, including its textualization of the tradition, as well as the unprecedented role of the people as chief protagonists. The translation and commentary incorporate evidence from ancient and contemporaneous primary sources from Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Persia, along with new archaeological studies of Judah. With great care and detail, Eskenazi demonstrates how the book of Ezra creates a blueprint for survival after destruction, shaping a new kind of society and forging a new communal identity.
Among other interesting contributions offered to this volumes, a Tribute to Simo Parpola, are two individual papers that correspond to ancient Iranian history:
Edward Dąbrowa: The Babylonian Astronomical Diaries as a Source for the History of the Arsacids
L’empire perse achéménide fascine les Grecs, qui le perçoivent de façon très déformée, et qui comprennent mal son fonctionnement. Au ve siècle avant J.-C, son observation alimente leur réflexion politique, parallèlement à la stasis, terme par lequel ils désignent les conflits internes de leurs cités. Dans ce double exercice, Hérodote, les Tragiques et les Sophistes pensent le politique, et ils préparent la naissance de la théorie politique au siècle suivant. Le débat sur la meilleure constitution en procède : Hérodote le projette sur les conjurés perses de 522 (III, 80-82). La crise qui éclate cette année-là dans l’empire perse tient à ce que la succession de Cyrus, mort en 530 avant J.-C., n’était pas réglée, bien qu’il ait désigné son fils Cambyse pour lui succéder. Ce dernier a probablement compromis lui-même ce processus, en faisant éliminer son frère Bardiya, en dévoyant à cette fin le rituel originellement babylonien du substitut royal, ignoré des Grecs en tant que tel, mais transformé par eux de façon totalement inconsciente sur le mode du dédoublement et de la ressemblance. L’instrument de cette machination, le mage Gaumāta, était devenu Bardiya, en vertu même du rituel, et il a prétendu régner à la place de Cambyse avant même sa mort, survenue selon toute apparence de façon accidentelle. Darius, probable cousin de Cambyse, a renversé le mage avec 6 conjurés, pour régner à son tour, en prétendant restaurer la légitimité dynastique. Le débat constitutionnel qui précède son avènement chez Hérodote est fondé sur une arithmétique élémentaire opposant constamment le petit nombre, réduit jusqu’au chiffre un, un effectif un peu plus important, mais qui demeure restreint, et le grand nombre. Cette distinction se retrouve entre la monarchie, pouvoir d’un seul, l’oligarchie, pouvoir d’une minorité, et la démocratie, pouvoir du grand nombre. Les Grecs l’appliquent au champ du politique, alors que le monde indien répartissait les fonctions duméziliennes selon le même critère. L’historiographie grecque des rois mèdes et perses est fondée sur une typologie d’inspiration tout aussi tri-fonctionnelle, qui réserve à chacun d’entre eux un rôle : roi fondateur et organisateur, roi guerrier, souverain lié à la Troisième Fonction. Cette typologie n’est pas un carcan rigide, et elle s’adapte à chacun des règnes, et à chacun des monarques.
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.
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.
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.
This paper reflects on the circumstances that could be held to account for the singleton tablet in Greek, Fort. 1771, of the Persepolis Fortification archive. It proposes that this tablet possibly records a wine ration for a functionary of the Persepolis administrative system, which could have been drafted by this functionary himself. The use of Greek would imply that he was a native Greek speaker.
This paper deals with questions regarding the nutritional rations paid to individuals as reflected by the Persepolis Fortification Archive focusing on the inequality and its meanings in terms of labels of social status. The author has examined these unequal rations distributed among travelers and various workers and subordinates of different status (puhu, Kurtaš and libap).
