Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Tag: Late Antiquity

  • From Oxus to Euphrates

    Daryaee, Touraj & Khodadad Rezakhani. 2016. From Oxus to Euphrates: The world of late antique Iran (Ancient Iran Series 1). H & S Media.

    For a long time, Sasanian studies were mainly cultivated by linguists and historians of religion, and the only standard work on the history of the Sasanian Empire was Arthur Christensen’s L’Iran sous les Sassanides (Copenhagen 1936; second revised and expanded edition 1944). Only in recent years, Christensen’s authority was challenged: Several new syntheses eventually allowed Late antique scholars to better understand the history and the structure of the great rival of the Roman Empire. However, we still lacked a handy, student-friendly introduction to Sasanians studies. Now, Daryaee and Rezakhani provide us with this very welcome booklet, which I highly recommend to students, to an educated audience, but also to Classical scholars (it’s never too late). Giusta Traina, Sorbonne University

  • Iranian Reception of Islam

    Crone, Patricia. 2016. The Iranian reception of Islam: The non-traditionalist strands (Islamic History and Civilization 130). Collected Studies in Three Volumes. Vol. 2 edited by Hanna Siurua. Leiden; Boston: Brill.

    Patricia Crone’s Collected Studies in Three Volumes brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 2, The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands, examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians. Volume 1, The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters, pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qurʾānic religious milieu. Volume 3, Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness, places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world.

    ToC:

    • 1. Kavād’s heresy and Mazdak’s revolt
    • 2. Zoroastrian communism
    • 3. Khurramīs
    • 4. Muqannaʿ
    • 5. Abū Tammām on the Mubayyiḍa
    • 6. The Muqannaʿ narrative in the Tārīkhnāma: Part I, Introduction, edition and translation
    • 7. The Muqannaʿ narrative in the Tārīkhnāma: Part II, Commentary and analysis
    • 8. Al-Jāḥiẓ on aṣḥāb al-jahālāt and the Jahmiyya
    • 9. Buddhism as ancient Iranian paganism
    • 10. A new text on Ismailism at the Samanid court
    • 11. What was al-Fārābī’s ‘imamic’ constitution?
    • 12. Al-Fārābī’s imperfect constitutions
    • 13. Pre-existence in Iran: Zoroastrians, ex-Christian Muʿtazilites, and Jews on the human acquisition of bodies
    • List of Patricia Crone’s publications

    Patricia Crone (1945-2015), Ph.D. (1974), School of Oriental and African Studies, was Professor Emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her numerous publications include Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987); Pre-Industrial Societies (1989); Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2004); and The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran (2012).

    Hanna Siurua (BA, School of Oriental and African Studies; MA, University of Sussex) is a professional editor based in Chicago. She specialises in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies and has edited numerous books and articles in these as well as other fields.

  • Syriac Historiography

    Image from http://www.syri.ac/chronicles

    Wood, Philip. Forthcoming. Syriac historiography VI: Historiography in the Syriac-speaking world, 300–1000. In D. King (ed.), Routledge Companion to the Syriac World. Routledge.

    Survey of historical writing by and about Syriac-speaking peoples. It aims to lay equal stress on West Syrian and East Syrian contributions. And it emphasises the fact that both groups wrote as subjects of larger imperial systems (Roman, Persian, Arab), of which they were just a part.

    This is a draft article posted with the author's permission.

  • Cartographical thinking in late antiquity

    Judging by the publisher’s description, Scott Johnson focuses on the Christian Roman Empire and its literary languages/sources in his latest book, Literary Territories. The volume will also be of interest to scholars of Iranian Studies taking a comparative approach to literary production in late antiquity. It sounds very promising: “The authors and texts discussed in the chapters that follow took advantage of the discourse of geography at the same time that the image of the book, the codex, became a discourse of its own for debates over knowledge and authority”. The book has been published despite the publisher’s 2016 schedule.

    Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald. 2016. Literary territories: Cartographical thinking in late antiquity. Oxford University Press

    Literary Territories introduces readers to a wide range of literature from 200-900 CE in which geography is a defining principle of literary art. From accounts of Holy Land pilgrimage, to Roman mapmaking, to the systematization of Ptolemy’s scientific works, Literary Territories argues that forms of literature that were conceived and produced in very different environments and for different purposes in Late Antiquity nevertheless shared an aesthetic sensibility which treated the classical “inhabited world,” the oikoumene, as a literary metaphor for the collection and organization of knowledge. This type of “cartographical thinking” stresses the world of knowledge that is encapsulated in the literary archive. The archival aesthetic coincided with an explosion of late antique travel and Christian pilgrimage which in itself suggests important unifying themes between visual and textual conceptions of space. Indeed, by the end of Late Antiquity the geographical mode appears in nearly every type of writing in multiple Christian languages (Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and others). The diffusion of cartographical thinking throughout the real-world oikoumene, now the Christian Roman Empire, was a fundamental intellectual trajectory of Late Antiquity.

    About the author:
    Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is a Dumbarton Oaks Teaching Fellow in Byzantine Greek at Georgetown University.

  • A new look at the Roman Empire of the fourth century

    Dijkstra, Roald ,  Sanne van Poppel & Daniëlle Slootjes (eds.). 2015. East and West in the Roman Empire of the fourth century. An end to unity? Brill.

    East and West in the Roman Empire of the Fourth Century examines the (dis)unity of the Roman Empire in the fourth century from different angles, in order to offer a broad perspective on the topic and avoid an overvaluation of the political division of the empire in 395.
    After a methodological key-paper on the concepts of unity, the other contributors elaborate on these notions from various geo-political perspectives: the role of the army and taxation, geographical perspectives, the unity of the Church and the perception of the divisio regni of 364. Four case-studies follow, illuminating the role of concordia apostolorum, antique sports, eunuchs and the poet Prudentius on the late antique view of the Empire. Despite developments to the contrary, it appears that the Roman Empire remained (to be viewed as) a unity in all strata of society.

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  • Review: The Sasanian world through Georgian eyes

    McCollum, Adam Carter. 2015. Review of Stephen H. Rapp Jr: The Sasanian world through Georgian eyes. Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in late antique Georgian literature. SEHEPUNKTE 15(9).

    The bibliographic information for the book under review is:

    Rapp, Stephen. 2014. The Sasanian world through Georgian eyes. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

  • Continuity and Change in Late Antique Iran: An Economic View of the Sasanians

    Rezakhani, Khodadad. 2015. Continuity and Change in Late Antique Iran: An Economic View of the Sasanians. International Journal of the Society of Iranian Archaeologists. 1 (2), 95-108.

    Ancient economy has commonly been studied in the context of commerce and trade, less attention being paid to the production side of the economy. Additionally, artificial periodizations based on political change, including the division of Near Eastern history to the pre-Islam and Islamic periods, has prevented historians from considering issues such as economic growth in the long term. The present paper, focusing on the production side of the Sasanian economy, tries to establish certain principles and introduce possible criteria to study the economic history of the Sasanians. Regions of Khuzistan and Tokharistan/Bactria provide useful examples and comparisons for illustrating some of the points.

  • Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran

    Mokhtarian, Jason Sion. 2015. Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran. Berkeley. University of California Press.

    Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests examines the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon. What impact did the Persian Zoroastrian Empire, as both a real historical force and an imaginary interlocutor, have on rabbinic identity and authority as expressed in the Talmud? Drawing from the field of comparative religion, Jason Sion Mokhtarian addresses this question by bringing into mutual fruition Talmudic studies and ancient Iranology, two historically distinct disciplines. Whereas most research on the Talmud assumes that the rabbis were an insular group isolated from the cultural horizon outside their academies, this book contextualizes the rabbis and the Talmud within a broader sociocultural orbit by drawing from a wide range of sources from Sasanian Iran, including Middle Persian Zoroastrian literature, archaeological data such as seals and inscriptions, and the Aramaic magical bowl spells. Mokhtarian also includes a detailed examination of the Talmud’s dozens of texts that portray three Persian “others”: the Persians, the Sasanian kings, and the Zoroastrian priests. This book skillfully engages and demonstrates the rich penetration of Persian imperial society and culture on the jews

    TOC:

    -List of Abbreviations
    -Note on Translations, Transcriptions, and Manuscripts
    -Acknowledgments
    -Introduction
    -1. The Sources and Methods of Talmudic and Iranian Studies
    -2. Comparing Sasanian Religions
    -3. Rabbinic Portrayals of Persians as Others
    -4. Rabbis and Sasanian Kings in Dialogue
    -5. Rabbis and Zoroastrian Priests in Judicial Settings
    -6. Rabbis, Sorcerers, and Priests
    -Conclusion: Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests in Sasanian Iran
    -Notes
    -Bibliography
    -Index

     

    Jason Sion Mokhtarian is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

  • Studies on Aramaic Magic Bowls and Related Subjects

    Aramaic Studies, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2015. Special issue: “Studies on Aramaic Magic Bowls and Related Subjects”.

    The special issue of the Journal of Aramaic Studies, guest-edited by Siam Bhayro is devoted to the Aramaic magic bowls.

     

     

    Table of Contents

    Peter T. Lanfer: Why Biblical Scholars Should Study Aramaic Bowl Spells

    Ortal-Paz Saar: A Study in Conceptual Parallels: Graeco-Roman Binding Spells and Babylonian Incantation Bowls

    Siam Bhayro: On Early Jewish Literature and the Aramaic Magic Bowls

    Avigail Manekin Bamberger: Jewish Legal Formulae in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls

    Marco Moriggi: Jewish Divorce Formulae in Syriac Incantation Bowls

    Harriet Walker: Possible Psychological Roles of the Aramaic Incantation Bowls: Therapeutic Functions of Belief in Demons and the Practice of Incantations

  • Military Operations of Rome and Sasanian Iran

    Katarzyna Maksymiuk 2015Maksymiuk, Katarzyna. Geography of Roman-Iranian Wars. Military Operations of Rome and Sasanian Iran. Siedlce: Instytut Historii i Stosunków Międzynarodowych Uniwersytetu Przyrodniczo-Humanistycznego w Siedlcach, 2015.
    Until the second half of the second century AD the border between Rome and Iran was marked by the Euphrates, with Mesopotamia regarded as an integral part of the Parthian state. In 224 AD the power in Iran was taken over by the Sasanians, who sought to regain influence over the territory previously ruled by the Parthians. The change of the dynasty in Iran was perceived as a threat to the position of Rome in the Near East. It has result a series of conflicts resumed shortly after the overthrow of Parthian rule and Ardašīr I’s foundation of the Sassanid Empire, known as Roman–Sasanian Wars.
    This book is an expanded english translation of the in 2012 published original Geografia wojen rzymsko-irańskich. Działania Rzymu i Iranu w okresie sasanidzkim in Polish. The present work is primarily addressed to students and scholars of history. It presents a valuable collection of designing maps depicting topography of Roman-Iranian armed conflicts. The maps have been created on the basis of source texts reporting wars waged by Rome against the Sasanian Iran and only the towns and provinces which were mentioned by ancient writers while reporting specific conflicts have been marked. Moreover, the present work contains only maps of military operations in which Roman and Iranian armies directly participated.

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