Christian communities flourished during late antiquity in a Zoroastrian political system, as the Iranian Empire integrated culturally and geographically disparate territories from Arabia to Afghanistan into its institutions and networks. Whereas previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted participants in this empire, Richard Payne demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions.
Richard Payne is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago
Books as Material and Symbolic Artifacts in Religious Book Cultures
Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum: 28 & 29 May 2015
The Käte Hamburger Kolleg Workshop on Books as Material and Symbolic Artifacts in Religious Book Cultures will analyze the connections between books and manuscripts as material artifacts and the formation of religious book cultures before the printing era. It will also explore the ways in which, in religious book production, the medium, in its forms of “human and institutional interactions,” influences the transmission of the religious message, allowing for the material format to receive further alterations from the religious message itself. Finally, this workshop will investigate interactions between modern religious groups and the very academic books which describe them.
Costantino Moretti (Paris): “Non-Textual Uses in Buddhist Medieval China”
Grégoire Espesset (Bochum): “Petitioning in Pre-Modern Taoist Liturgy”
Vladimir Glomb (Bochum): “Sagehood for Young Boys: Confucian Primers in Traditional Korea”
Shervin Farridnejad (Berlin): “The Zoroastrian “Holy Book”: The Understanding and Construction of the Avesta as a Book in Zoroastrian Tradition and Oriental Studies”
Kianoosh Rezania (Bochum): “The Zoroastrian “Pahlavi Book”: The Genesis of the Dēnkard in the Early Abbasid Period”
Marie Efthymiou (Aix-Marseille): “Suras Collections in Central Asia: From Manuscripts Used in Daily Devotions to Teaching Subject in Quranic Schools”
Friday, 29 May 2015
Ksenia Pimenova (Bochum): “Ethnographers, Their Books, and Their Shamans: The Scripturalization of Post-Soviet Tuvan Shamanism”
Mareile Haase (Bochum): “The Zagreb Mummy Wrappings: An Etruscan Linen Book from Egypt”
AnneMarie Luijendijk (Princeton): “Put them in an earthenware jar, in order that they may last for a long time (Jer. 32:14): On Saving and Discarding Sacred Books”
Flavia Ruani (Ghent): “Books of Protection, Books of Perdition: Book Imagery in Ephrem the Syrian’s Heresiology”
Eduard Iricinschi (Bochum): “No one in Rome really has time to attend readings (Pliny, Letters, 3.18.4): The Anxiety of Publishing Books in Late Antiquity”
Kaiser Justinian. Mosaiken in Ravenna, St. Vitalis (Ausschnitt). Image Credit: The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei. DVD-ROM, 2002. ISBN 3936122202 lizensiert unter the GNU Free Documentation License: www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.html.
International workshop organized by project C03 “Interaction and Change in Oriental Legal Systems. The Transfer of Normative Knowledge as Exemplified by Zoroastrian and Islamic Law (Seventh to Eleventh Centuries)” (Head: M. Macuch)
Legal systems are characterized by sophisticated technical languages that make use of a multitude of juridical terms to describe mostly complex circumstances. Whereas legal terms on the one hand have a stabilizing function and serve the jurists for the categorization and evaluation of cases – what is especially true for the tradition-oriented systems of the Late Antiquity like the Roman-Byzantine, Zoroastrian, Islamic, Jewish or Christian canonical laws – they show on the other hand constant changes in their historical development with regard to content and meaning. Besides such endogenous factors in the change of meaning, also exogenous sources as the adoption of a term from an alien law system and its recontextualization are conceivable. In both cases it results in intended or unintended shifts of meaning that may have an impact on other terms or elements of the system, depending on the relevance of the term. It is in particular this modification of Late Antique legal systems caused by changes of legal terms that is subject of the workshop. It targets on an exemplary more detailed description and analysis of the further development of particular legal terms within the systems as well as in their interrelation.
To register, please contact Dr. Iris Colditz: icolditz[at]campus.fu-berlin.de.
Program
9:15–9:30 a.m
Maria Macuch (Berlin):
Welcome and Introduction
Panel 1: Rechtsbegriffe und -institutionen in transkulturellem Kontext
9:30–10:15 a.m
Johannes Pahlitzsch (Mainz):
„Die Entstehung des christlichen waqf“
10:15–11:00 a.m
Richard Payne (Chicago):
„Christianizing Stūrīh: Law, Reproduction, and Elite Formation in the Iranian Empire“
11:00–11:30 a.m
coffee break
11:30 a.m. –12:15 p.m.
János Jany (Budapest):
„Transmitters of Legal Knowledge: Dadestan, Fatwa, Responsum“
12:15–1:45 p.m.
lunch break
Panel 2: Wandel von Rechtsbegriffen und Argumentationsformen im jüdischen und römischen Recht
1:45–2:30 p.m.
Ronen Reichman (Heidelberg):
„‚Was die Schrift lehrt, geht aber doch aus einem Vernunftsargument hervor!‘: Über die Entwicklung eines (rechtspositivistischen [?]) Argumentationsmusters in der rabbinischen Literatur“
2:30–3:15 p.m.
Anna Seelentag (Frankfurt/M.):
„Tutela und cura – Zur Annäherung zweier Rechtsbegriffe im römischen Recht“
3:15–3:45 p.m.
coffee break
3:45–4:30 p.m.
Johannes Platschek (München):
„Arra in römischen Rechtstexten“
4:30–5:15 p.m.
Thomas Rüfner (Trier):
„Ius, iudex, iurisdictio: Die Terminologie des römischen Prozessrechts in der Spätantike“
The paper focuses on the Sasanian Empire’s impact on its surrounding world and explores the question of why its cultural achievements had such a long-lasting influence far beyond the borders of the Iranian lands, even after the decline of the dynasty. This relates to the role of the Sasanians in international trade and their political aim of controlling the land and maritime trade networks that connected Iran with the Mediterranean world, Central Asia, China, India, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Lecture by François de Blois, University College London, at the Ancient India and Iran Trust, Cambridge, Friday 06March, 5.30pm.
François de Blois has published widely on Semitic and Iranian languages and on the history of religions in the Near East in pre-modern times. Notably, he contributed to the multi-volume work Persian Literature, which had been initiated by C.A. Storey and published by the Royal Asiatic Society. He served as Professor of Iranian Studies at Hamburg University from 2002 to 2003. Currently he is a research fellow at University College London where he is engaged in a major project on al-Biruni’s Chronology and other Arabic texts on non-Islamic calendars. He is also a teaching fellow for Aramaic and Middle Iranian languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has been a frequent contributor to the Encyclopaedia of Islam.
All welcome. Refreshments from 5pm.
Ancient India & Iran Trust
23 Brooklands Avenue, Cambridge CB2 8BG
An important article by Heidemann, Riederer and Weber on a hoard of coins from the final years of the empire. I personally find the dipinti on the coins very interesting. Heidemann’s discussion of the hoard, his conclusions and Dieter Weber’s decipherment of the graffito are fascinating:
The analysis of a hoard from the time of the collapse of the Sasanian Empire offers new insights into the administrative situation within the realm of Yazdgard III during his presence in Kirmān. Interpreting die chains using old or newly engraved dies with the then anachronistic name of the previous shāhānshāh Khusrō II, and finding an unlikely variety of mint abbreviations and dates within one workshop, allows us to infer the processing of huge amounts of silver in an unregulated way, compared with the orderly mint administration before the battle of al-Qādisiyya. A rigorous numismatic conclusion makes the change to a centralised minting in Kirmān likely where coins, rather than the dies, were sent to the districts. The key dates of the hoard coincide with the battle of Nihāvand 642 and the beginning of the invasion of Kirmān. Many of the coins bear dipinti with legible Pahlavī inscriptions, highlighting a cultural way of marking coins at the end of the Sasanian Empire.
Georgian literary sources for Late Antiquity are commonly held to be later productions devoid of historical value. As a result, scholarship outside the Republic of Georgia has privileged Graeco-Roman and even Armenian narratives. However, when investigated within the dual contexts of a regional literary canon and the active participation of Caucasia’s diverse peoples in the Iranian Commonwealth, early Georgian texts emerge as a rich repository of late antique attitudes and outlooks. Georgian hagiographical and historiographical compositions open a unique window onto a northern part of the Sasanian world that, while sharing striking affinities with the Iranian heartland, was home to vibrant, cosmopolitan cultures that developed along their own trajectories.
Dijkstra, Jitse & Greg Fisher (eds.). 2014. Inside and Out: Interactions between Rome and the peoples on the Arabian and Egyptian frontiers in late antiquity (Late Antique History and Religion 8). Leuven: Peeters Publishers.
In recent years, exciting new discoveries of inscriptions and archaeological remains on the Arabian Peninsula have led to a re-evaluation of the peoples on the Arabian frontier, which through their extensive contacts with Rome and Persia are now seen as dynamic participants in the Late Antique world. The present volume contributes to this recent trend by focusing on the contrast between the ‘outside’ sources on the peoples of the frontier – the Roman view – and the ‘inside’ sources, that is, the precious material produced by the Arabs themselves, and by approaching these sources within an anthropological framework of how peripheral peoples face larger powers. For the first time, the situation on the Arabian frontier is also compared with that on the southern Egyptian frontier, where similar sources have been found of peoples such as the Blemmyes and Noubades. Thus, the volume offers a richly-documented examination of the frontier interactions in these two vibrant and critically-important areas of the Late Antique East.
For more information, see the publisher’s website.
Gardner, Iain, Jason BeDuhn & Paul Dilley. 2014. Mani at the court of the Persian kings. Leiden: Brill.
In Mani at the Court of the Persian Kings the authors explore evidence arising from their project to edit the Chester Beatty Kephalaia codex. This new text presents Mani at the heart of Sasanian Iran in dialogue with its sages and nobles, acting as a cultural mediator between East and West and interpreter of Christian, Iranian, and Indian traditions. Nine chapters study Mani’s appropriation of the ‘law of Zarades’ and of Iranian epic; suggest a new understanding of his last days; and analyse his formative role in the history of late antique religions.
The proceedings of the workshop The Archaeology of Sasanian Politics, organized by Richard Payne and Mehrnoush Soroush at ISAW, have now been published:
Payne, Richard & Mehrnoush Soroush (eds.). 2014. The archaeology of Sasanian politics. Journal of Ancient History 2(2).
For this issue of the journal, see here. Richard’s introductory notes to the volume are available as a free PDF. Karim Alizadeh’s Borderland projects of Sasanian Empire: Intersection of domestic and foreign policies can be found here.
Payne, Richard. 2015. A state of mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian political culture in late antiquity. University of California Press.
Alram, Michael. 2015. 
Sasanian royalist ideology and Zoroastrian millennialism
An important article by Heidemann, Riederer and Weber on a hoard of coins from the final years of the empire. I personally find the dipinti on the coins very interesting. Heidemann’s discussion of the hoard, his conclusions and Dieter Weber’s decipherment of the graffito are fascinating:
Rapp, Stephen. 2014. 
Dijkstra, Jitse & Greg Fisher (eds.). 2014. Inside and Out: Interactions between Rome and the peoples on the Arabian and Egyptian frontiers in late antiquity (Late Antique History and Religion 8). Leuven: Peeters Publishers.
Gardner, Iain, Jason BeDuhn & Paul Dilley. 2014. Mani at the court of the Persian kings. Leiden: Brill.