Callieri, Pierfrancesco & Adriano Valerio Rossi (eds.). 2018. Civiltà dell’Iran: passato, presente, futuro (atti del Convegno Internazionale Roma, 22-23 febbraio 2013); (Il novissimo Ramusio 6). Roma: Scienze e lettere.This book is a collection of papers presented at the international conference “Civiltà dell’Iran: passato, presente, futuro” took place in 2013 at Sapienza Università di Roma and Museo Nazionale d’Arte Orientale ‘Giuseppe Tucci’.
Issue seven of Historia i Świat (2018) has been published. A number of the contributions relate to Iranian Studies.
Looking East: Iranian History and Culture under Western Eyes
The latest issue of journal Electrum features Electrum, with the issue gathering the contribution of the workshop “Looking History: Iranian History and Culture under Western Eyes” held at 2016 in Ravenna, Italy.
Potts, Daniel Thomas. 2018. Iran and America: A forgotten friendship. The Conversation.
As President Donald Trump’s rhetoric against Iran heats up again, it is worth recalling a time when the two countries had a distinctly different relationship.
M. De Chiara, A.V. Rossi & D. Septfonds (eds.). 2018. Mélanges d’ethnographie et de dialectologie irano-aryennes à la mémoire de Charles-Martin Kieffer (Cahiers de Studia Iranica 61). Leuven: Peeters.
Charles-Martin Kieffer died the 4th of February, 2015. Exceptional man of fieldwork, his fundamental contribution to Iranian studies in the linguistic field was the description of two dying languages: the Omuri of Baraki Barak and Paraci. Dialectologist – his participation to the Atlas Linguistique de l’Afghanistan was capital – but overall ethnologist, he was always careful to linguistic facts as well as to the sociolinguistic realities. It is attested mainly by the data collected in more than twenty years (1957-1980) on the taboes and language obligations existing in the countryside. After leaving – but not abandoning – the Afghan field, his curiosity remained unchanged towards the linguistic situation (residual languages) in Alsace.
The 16 articles here collected in his homage deal with linguistic and anthropologic researches and cover the (Indo-)Iranian area – extended for one of them to the Turkophone sphere.
Houben, Jan. 2018. Linguistic paradox and diglossia: The emergence of Sanskrit and Sanskritic language in ancient India. Open Linguistics 4(1). 1–18.
What is it about?
“We know that Middle Indian (Middle Indo-Aryan) makes its appearance in epigraphy prior to Sanskrit: this is the great linguistic paradox of India.” In these words Louis Renou (1956: 84) referred to a problem in Sanskrit studies for which so far no satisfactory solution had been found. I will here propose that the perceived “paradox” derives from the lack of acknowledgement of certain parameters in the linguistic situation of Ancient India which were insufficiently appreciated in Renou’s time, but which are at present open to systematic exploration with the help of by now well established sociolinguistic concepts, notably the concept of “diglossia”. Three issues will here be addressed in the light of references to ancient and classical Indian texts, Sanskrit and Sanskritic. A simple genetic model is indadequate, especially when the ‘linguistic area’ applies also to what can be reconstructed for earlier periods. The so-called Sanskrit “Hybrids” in the first millennium CE, including the Prakrits and Epics, are rather to be regarded as emerging “Ausbau” languages of Indo-Aryan with hardly any significant mutual “Abstand” before they will be succesfully “roofed,” in the second half of the first millennium CE, by “classical” Sanskrit.
Why is it important?
The history of (classical) Sanskrit, of Prakrit, of the so-called “hybrid” Sanskrits, of Vedic poetry and prose, and of the related Avestan and old Persian languages is of central importance for the cultural history of ancient India, ancient Iran and Asia.
Issue 05 of DABIR (Digital Archive of Brief notes & Iran Review)Issue 05 of DABIR (Digital Archive of Brief notes & Iran Review), an open access on-line journal for published by the Jordan Center for Persian Studies, is out now.
Issue 3 of Vol. 51 (2018) of the journal Iranian Studies has now been published.
If you are interested in studying with us at the Institute of Iranian Studies (@IranistikFuB), Freie Universität Berlin, please consider applying through the below programme. If you are an educator, please share widely and encourage your students to apply:
The Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies (BerGSAS) with funding of the Einstein Centre Chronoi “Time and Awareness of Time in Ancient Societies” is offering at Freie Universität Berlin and at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin 8 doctoral fellowships for the winter term 2018/19, starting on January 1st, 2019.
Receiving a fellowship is connected with the admission to the Berlin Graduate School of Ancient Studies (BerGSAS) and participation in one of the graduate school’s five doctoral programs. Each program is based on a structured curriculum.
Source: 8 Ausschreibungen – Berliner Antike-Kolleg
In this issue of L’Histoire, entitled Les mondes d’Alix and dedicated to the graphic novel series Les voyages d’Alix, specialists of antique history explore various aspects relating to the world and time of the novels. The historian Giusto Traina writes on the Parthians.
Traina, Giusto. 2018. Les Parthes aux marges de l’empire. L’Histoire 6. 66–71.