Tag: Achaemenid

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Afterlives of Ancient Rock-Cut Monuments in the Near East

Ben-Dov, Jonathan & Felipe Rojas (eds.). 2021. Afterlives of ancient rock-cut monuments in the Near East. Brill.

This book concerns the ancient rock-cut monuments carved throughout the Near East, paying particular attention to the fate of these monuments in the centuries after their initial production. As parts of the landscapes in which they were carved, they acquired new meanings in the cultural memory of the people living around them. The volume joins numerous recent studies on the reception of historical texts and artefacts, exploring the peculiar affordances of these long-lasting and often salient monuments. The volume gathers articles by archeologists, art historians, and philologists, covering the entire Near East, from Iran to Lebanon and from Turkey to Egypt. It also analyzes long-lasting textual traditions that aim to explain the origins and meaning of rock-cut monuments and other related carvings.

Three chapters of this volume deals specifically Ancient Iranian rock-cut monuments:

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Books Translation

شاه و نخبگان در شاهنشاهی هخامنشی

به کوشش ووتر ف. م. هنکلمن. ۱۴۰۰. شاه و نخبگان در شاهنشاهی هخامنشی: گزیده مقالاتی در باب بایگانی باروی هخامنشی . ترجمه از یزدان صفایی و حمیدرضا نیک‌روش. تهران: موزه ملی ایران.

Henkelman, W.F.M. (ed.). 2021. King and Elite in the Achaemenid Empire: Selected Studies based on the Persepolis Fortification Archive (Treasures of Ancient Iran 1). Translated by Yazdan Safaee & Hamidreza Nikravesh. Tehran: National Museum of Iran.

کتاب شاه و نخبگان در شاهنشاهی هخامنشی مقالاتی را شامل می‌شود که موضوع آنها بر شبکه روابط میان شاه و گروه نخبگان اطراف او تمرکز دارد. این مقالات عمدتاً ماحصل تحقیق بر روی متون بایگانی باروی تخت‌جمشید هستند، یعنی یکی از مهم‌ترین منابع برای شناخت تاریخ هخامنشیان. مقالات مذکور در اصل به انگلیسی منتشر شده بودند و ترجمه فارسی آنها در این کتاب با هدف انتشار بخشی از نتایج پروژه بایگانی باروی تخت‌جمشید در دسترس قرار گرفته است. از این روی کتاب فوق‌الذکر مجموعه‌ای از مقالات محققان پیشتازی است که در این پروژه مشغول به تحقیق هستند: آنالیزا آتزونی، مارک گریسون، ووتر هنکلمن و متیو استولپر.

کتاب حاضر مجلد نخست از مجموعه‌ای است به نام گنج‌آمار ایران باستان: منابع و مطالعات فرهنگ و تاریخ آغازین ایران که به همت موزه ملی ایران منتشر می‌شود که هدف آن انتشار ترجمه‌هایی فارسی از تحقیقات جدید در مورد ایران باستان است.

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A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire

Jacobs, Bruno & Robert Rollinger (eds.). 2021. A companion to the Achaemenid Persian empire. 2 vols. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

The Achaemenid Empire is often addressed as the first World Empire. However, its roots are in Near Eastern traditions, some of which have been the subject of recent intensive reevaluation. This book takes a unique and innovative approach to the subject, considering those predecessors to whom the Achaemenid Empire was indebted for its structure, ideology, and self-expression, by examining both written and archaeological sources. It addresses the empire’s legacy, and its contemporary, later, and even modern reception.

A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire takes into account all relevant historical sources, including archaeological ones. It places particular emphasis on looking at the Achaemenid Empire from its different centers, paying just as much attention to the widely neglected eastern parts as to the commonly covered western parts of the empire. The book considers, not only its political history, but also its social, economic, and religious history, institutions, and art and science, in an effort to draw a complete picture of the empire and to foster an appreciation for its lasting reputation.

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Articles

Quatrefoils of Early China and Their Achaemenid Parallels

Kim, Minku. 2021. The Pinnacle Ornament of Flowers: Quatrefoils of Early China and Their Achaemenid Parallels. In Guolong Lai (ed.), Occult Arts, Art History, and Cultural Exchange in Early China: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Li Ling on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press.

Roof tile-ends (wadang) with double quatrefoils. From the site of Shuzhuanglou 梳粧樓, Warring- States Zhao 趙 city of Dabeicheng 大北城, Handan 邯鄲 (Hebei). Fourth to third century BCE.

The quatrefoil is an ornamental design formed by a cruciferous arrangement of four leafor petal-like projections radiating from a mutual hub. The form was widely circulated across the ancient Western world, most distinctively in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Iranian plateau, with a variety of related schemes, including the dual quatrefoil (also known as the petal-and-calyx alternation), as well as those more commonly called the rosettes or lotus flowers. In China, quatrefoils began to be regularly seen during the late Springs and Autumns period, most notably on the assemblage of Jin bronzes. The usage of quatrefoils gradually intensified in the following periods, reaching an apogee during the Han empire, with a range of variants applied to numerous articles of material culture. With the quatrefoils being a design largely unknown prior to the mid-Eastern Zhou period, this essay argues that a foreign stimulus, most notably from the then emerging Achaemenid empire, provided a primary catalyst for the subsequent adaptations of this type of ornament in China.

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Persia (552 BCE-758 CE). Primary Sources, Old and New

Gyselen, Rika (ed.). 2020. Persia (552 BCE-758 CE). Primary Sources, Old and New (Res Orientales 28). Bures-sur-Yvette: Groupe pour l’Étude de la Civilisation du Moyen-Orient (GECMO).

The articles in this volume present, comment on and interpret primary sources from different eras: Achaemenid, Sasanian and post-Sasanian. While most of these sources were discovered in the 21st century, a few were already known. Recent Iranian surveys and excavations have uncovered: (1) new Sasanian sites in the region of Sar Mashad in the Pars, (2) Sasanian administrative bullae on Tappe Barnakoon, west of Isfahan, (3) a clay sealing with the impression of a royal seal of Peroz in Taxt-e Soleiman. New data for Sasanian numismatics come from unpublished coins in the Johnson collection. Three documents from the “Tabarestan Archive”, published in recent years, have been re-read and interpreted in the context of Zoroastrian law. Also, sources known from much longer have been the subject of new “readings”. They highlight that the message these inscriptions and royal objects convey is strongly conditioned by the type of ‘public’ to which it is addressed.

Table of Contents

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Journal

Elite responses to the rise of Achaemenid Persia

Medenieks, Selga (ed.). 2018. Elite responses to the rise of Achaemenid Persia. Special issue of Hermathena 204 & 205.

This issue of Hermathena was published in December 2020 and currently has no website. The digital version of the journal will soon be available on JSTOR. Until such time, orders and inquiries can be directed to: hermathena@tcd.ie. ~AZ

Table of Contents

HERMATHENA (2018) 204-205

Elite responses to the rise of Achaemenid Persia
Edited by Dr Selga Medenieks
(Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

Acknowledgements
Selga Medenieks 5

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Dynastic Deeds

Poggio, Alessandro. 2020. Dynastic Deeds: Hunt scenes in the funerary imagery of the Achaemenid Eastern Mediterranean. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.

This study adopts a transregional approach that focuses on connectivity dynamics in order to present a wider picture of artistic, cultural and political phenomena in the Mediterranean. It examines dynastic funerary art at the end of the fifth century and in the fourth century BC by focusing – through a wide range of evidence – on what funerary images can reveal about the societies that produced them. It analyses renowned dynastic tombs from south-western Anatolia (present-day Turkey) such as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the Nereid Monument of Xanthos, but also from Phoenicia (present-day Lebanon). A common element among the similarities displayed by these tombs is the nearly constant presence of the multiple-quarry hunt iconography, which consists of prey from different species depicted in one figurative programme. The Eastern Mediterranean under Persian Achaemenid rule is portrayed as an interconnected cultural and political area with specific features instead of merely being an area between the Greek and Persian worlds. << Less

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Violence and the Mutilated Body in Achaemenid Iran

Llewellyn-Jones, Lloyd. 2020. Violence and the Mutilated Body in Achaemenid Iran. In Garrett G. Fagan, Linda Fibiger, Mark Hudson, and Matthew Trundle (eds.), The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 1: The Prehistoric and Ancient Worlds. Cambridge.

Little thought per se has been given to women as agents of violence in antiquity, let alone to the role of the royal harem as the site of revenge-fuelled violence and murder. This chapter addresses this gap by exploring how royal women in the Persian Empire could be instruments of violence. While acknowledging the Greek obsession with this topos, it goes beyond the Western preoccupation with the harem as a site of Oriental decadence and attempts to put stories of women’s violence against women into its ancient Near Eastern context. It explores the mutilation of the body and is particularly focused on the Herodotean tale (which has genuine Persian roots) of the revenge mutilations of Amestris, wife of Xerxes I.

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Ancient West & East

The latest volume of Ancient West & East, dedicated to Professor Amélie Kuhrt to celebrate her 75th birthday, contains several interesting papers. Table of contents of vol. 18 (2019) of the journal comes in the following:

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Studies in Ancient Persia and the Achaemenid Period

Curtis, John (ed.). 2020. Studies in Ancient Persia and the Achaemenid Period. A collection of essays in memory of the curator and scholar Terence Mitchell, exploring the history and archaeology of Ancient Persia. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co. Ltd.

An important collection of eight essays on Ancient Persia (Iran) in the periods of the Achaemenid Empire (539–330 BC), when the Persians established control over the whole of the Ancient Near East, and later the Sasanian Empire. It will be of interest to historians, archaeologists and biblical scholars. Paul Collins writes about stone relief carvings from Persepolis; John Curtis and Christopher Walker illuminate the Achaemenid period in Babylon; Terence Mitchell, Alan Millard and Shahrokh Razmjou draw attention to neglected aspects of biblical archaeology and the books of Daniel and Isaiah; and Mahnaz Moazami and Prudence Harper explore the Sasanian period in Iran (AD 250–650) when Zoroastrianism became the state religion.

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