Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Tag: Middle Persian

  • Ardwahišt Yašt

    Yast_3_KönigKönig, Götz. 2016. Yašt 3. Der avestische Text und seine mittel- und neupersische Übersetzungen. Einleitung, Text, Kommentar. (Estudios Iranios Y Turanios. Supplementa 1). Girona: Sociedad de estudios iranios y turanios (SEIT).
    The third Yašt (“hymn”) in the collection of the 21 (22) YAv Yašts is dedicated to (the deity, prayer and the divine correspondence of the fire) Aša Vahišta “Best Order”. The text formulates an (eschatologically significant) ritual context and a magical (= medical) charm. Due to the ritual and medical importance of Yt 3, various translations into Middle and New Persian can be found. They provide insights into the interpretation of the text by the later Zoroastrians.
    Ardwahišt Yašt is the third in the series of Avestan hymns addressed to individual divinities. It is devoted to one of the greatest of the Zoroastrian Aməša Spəntas, Aša Vahišta. The Ardwahišt Yašt is itself accordingly recited in rituals to cure the sick.

    See the table of contents here.

     Götz König is a scholar of Zoroastrianism and a philologist working on ancient and Middle Iranian languages. He is currently a deputy professor at the Institute of Iranian Studies, Free University of Berlin, Germany. He has made important contributions to the study of Old, Middle and New Iranian Zoroastrian literature. His two monographs, “Die Erzählung von Tahmuras und Gamšid” (Wiesbaden 2008) and “Geschlechtsmoral und Gleichgeschlechtlichkeit im Zoroastrismus” (Wiesbaden 2010), have to be highlighted. They convey an impression of his refined philological technique which is at the service of a history of Iranian culture.

  • Turks and Iranians: Interactions in Language and History

    Csató, Éva, Lars Johanson, András Róna-Tas & Bo Utas (eds.). 2016. Turks and Iranians: Interactions in language and history (Turcologica 105). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

    The contributions by an international group of leading scholars discuss the historical and cultural relations of old and modern Turkic and Iranian languages. A main topic is how contacts of spoken and written languages from pre-Islamic times until various periods of the Islamic era have influenced the emergence and development of Iranian and Turkic varieties. The purpose is to contribute to a better understanding of the interrelations between cultural-historical contacts and linguistic processes, and to stress the necessity of cooperation between experts of Turkic and Iranian studies.

    -See the Table of the Contents here

  • A tribute to Éric Pirart

    The second issue of the Estudios Iranios y Turanios, which was launched last year by the Sociedad de Estudios Iranios y Turanios, has been published. This issue of the journal, entitled Homenaje a Éric Pirart en su 65º aniversario, collects a number of philological discussions in honour of Éric Pirart’s 65th birthday.

    The ToC is here.

  • Journal of the American Oriental Society

    The latest issue of the Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 135(3), has several articles and reviews of interest to scholars of ancient Iran. We have already announced Michael Shenkar’s Rethinking Sasanian Iconoclasm in a previous post. Among the reviews three stand out for their direct relevance for Iranian Studies:

    The full JSTOR Table of Contents is available here.

  • Twelve Zoroastrian Treatises

    Folio 4, codex K 29, written in Pahlavi with an interlinear translation in Persian. Photograph after Asmussen, 1968, p. 293. © Encyclopædia Iranica

    Gheiby, Bijan. 2015. Twelve ancient treatises. Translation and Commentary. Bielefeld: Nemudar.

     The volume presents in 386 pages a collection of twelve Zoroastrian treatises together with their Persian translations and editorial explanations and commentaries. The edited texts are as follows:
    • Ayādgār ī Zarērān “Memorial of Zarēr”
    • Wizarišn ī čatrang  “Explanation of Chess”
    • Mādayān ī yōšt ī Friyān “The Book of Yōšt of the Friyān”
    • Māh ī Frawardīn rōz ī Hordād “The Sixth (Hōrdad) Day of the Mounth Frawardīn”
    • Abar Madan ī Wahrām ī Warzāwand “On the Coming of the Miraculous Wahrām”
    • Sūr saxwan “Banquet Speech”
    • Xweškārīh ī redagān “The Duty of Children”
    • Čim ī kustīg “Reasons for the Sacred Girdle”
    • Čim ī drōn “Reasons for the Sacred Portion”
    • Āfrīn ī [payγāmbar] Zardušt “A Blessing of Zarathustra”
    • Tohmag ošmārisn ī  Zardušt
    • Farox-nāma
    About the Author:
    Bijan Gheiby was born in Teheran in 1954. He studied media in Tehran and in Long Beach as well as Iranian Studies in Hamburg and Göttingen, where he received his doctorate. He is an independent researcher of Zoroastrianism and ancient Iranian Studies.

     

    In Original:

    غیبی، بیژن. ۲۰۱۵. دوازده متن باستانی. انتشارات نمودار: بیلفلد.

    Ġeybi, Bižan. 2015. dawāzdah matn-e bāstāni. Nemudar: Bielefeld.

  • Syriac into Middle Iranian

    Detail from the Manuscript Chaldean Cathedral of Mardin (CCM) 13, f. 120r

    Barbati, Chiara. 2015. Syriac into Middle Iranian: A Translation Studies Approach to Sogdian and Pahlavi Manuscripts within the Church of the East. Open Linguistics 1(1). 444–457.

    Based on a corpus coming from the Turfan oasis (in present-day Xinjiang, People’s Republic of China) and consisting of Christian Middle Iranian literature in several languages (Middle Persian, Syriac and Sogdian) and scripts (East Syriac, Pahlavi and secular Sogdian), the present paper is aimed at identifying and outlining the translation techniques for the transmission of religious knowledge, based on a literary tradition as well as on a manuscript tradition, from one context to another. The religious knowledge is that which belongs to the “Church of the East” and which is written in its official liturgical language, i.e. Syriac in East Syriac script. The general context is that of the missionary activities of the “Church of the East” along the Silk road between late Antiquity and early Middle Age. The particular context is that of the converted Iranian communities.
    About the Author:
    Chiara Barbati (PhD 2009) is a scholar of Ancient and Middle Iranian languages in the Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna (ÖAW).

  • Studies on the Pre-Islamic Iranian World

    Krasnowolska, Anna & Renata Rusek-Kowalska (eds.). 2015. Studies on the Iranian World I. Before Islam. Krakow: Jagiellonian University Press.
    This volume is the proceedings of the Seventh Conference of Iranian Studies of the Societas Iranologica Europaea (ECIS7), organized by Societas Iranologica Europaea (SIE), which took place in Cracow, September 7-10, 2011. The first of the two volumes of the ECIS7 proceedings is dedicated to the pre-Islamic Iranian studies.
    Table of Contents
    Linguistics:
    • Maria Carmela Benvenuto, Flavia Pompeo: “The Old Persian Genetive. A Study of a Syncretic Case
    • Saloumeh Gholami: “Nominal Compound Strategies in Middle Iranian Languages”
    • Paolo Ognibene: “Alan Place-names in Western Europe”
    • Christiane Reck: “Work in Progress: The Catalogue of the Buddhist Sogdian Fragments of the Berlin Turgan Collection”
    • Arash Zeini: “Preliminary Remarks on Middle Persian <nc> in the Pahlavi Documents”
    Literature:
    • Elham Afzalian: “Autoritäten im Mādayān–ī Hazār Dādestān”
    • Iris Colditz: “Two Snake-Brothers on their Way — Mani’s Scripture as a Source of Manichaean Central Asian Parabels?”
    • Seyyedeh Fatemeh Musavi: “Fictional Structure of the Middle Persian Ayādgār ī Zarērān“
    Religion:
    • Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst: “Aspects of Hymnology in Manichaean Community in Turfan”
    • Raffaella Frascarelli: “Arǝdvī Sūrā Anāhitā: Considerations on the Greek ἀρχἡ”
    • Judith Josephson: “Ohrmazd’s Plan for Creation according to Book Three of the Denkard”
    • Götz König: “The Pahlavi Translation of Yašt 3″
    • Kianosh Rezania: “On the Old Iranian Social Space and its Relation to the Time Ordering System”
    History:
    Archaeology:
    • Alireza Askari Chaversi: “In Search of the Elusive Town of Persepolis”
    • Jukian Bogdani, Luca Colliva, Sven Stefano Tilia: “The Citadel of Erbil. The Italian Archaeological and Topographic Activities”
    • Carlo G. Cereti, Gianfilippo Terribili, Alessandro Tilia: “Pāikūlī in its Geographical Context”
    • Niccolò Manassero: “New Sealings from Old Nisa”
    • Vito Messina, Jafar Mehr Kian: “The Hong-e Azhdar Parthian Rock Relief Reconsidered”
     About the Editors:

    Anna Krasnowolska is a professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Jagiellonian University.

    Renata Rusek-Kowalska is an assistant professor at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Jagiellonian University.

  • Ergativity in Old and Middle Iranian languages

    Jügel, Thomas. 2015. Die Entwicklung der Ergativkonstruktion im Alt- und Mitteliranischen. Eine korpusbasierte Untersuchung zu Kasus, Kongruenz und Satzbau (Iranica 21). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

    Ergativity is a grammatical phenomenon that has been discussed controversially in linguistics in general and in the Iranian Studies in particular. The scientific debate is characterized by a lack of consideration of the Old and Middle Iranian data. In many cases, the selected examples, which their position in the respective language system is  still unclear, are associated with theory-driven assumptions about a hypothetical model of development, which is to be plausible, but not verifiable.

    The present study provides a solution through the complete analyzing of the Avestan , Old Persian, Bactrian and Parthian documents as well as an extensive study of Middle Persian evidences (approximately 12,500 Middle Persian cases). In addition to the relevant ergativity aspects such case, congruence, word order,  and reflexivity both the development of syntactic structures (e.g. relative clauses) as well as the verbal and nominal system (e.g. the temporal aspect system or the function of enclitic personal pronouns) are discussed .

    Results are illustrated with relevant evidences  (over 1,400 examples alone in the main part), whose validity is constantly checked and  based critically on detailed philological discussion. The material part also serves as a vademecum, which can be used in parallel with the reading of the main part, as well as a separate reference book that systematically illustrates the history of the object in ergative languages.

    The volume presents the most exhaustive investigation on ergativity in within the Old and Middle Iranian languages.

    The detaild Table of Content of this book and the English Summery are availabe. (more…)

  • Pahlavi Epistolary Formulae

    Chunakova, Olga Mikhailovna. 2015. Pahlavi Epistolary Formulae. Written Monuments of the Orient 1(1). 32–37.

    The paper focuses on the Pahlavi text dealing with the correct way to write letters published in: JAMASP-ASANA (ed.) 1913, 132–140. The text contains a series of formulae to be used in letters to various persons. The reading and interpretation of the formulae were translated differently by previous scholars. The key to the understanding of these formulae is the opposition of two terms—xwadāy and bandag—meaning the addressee and the sender of a letter. The constructions with an attribute compound and its synonym, and a determinative compound and its synonym following these two terms refer to the addressee and the sender respectively.

    The artcile is available to download here.

    Olga Mikhailovna Chunakova is Head of the Section of Middle Eastern Studies at the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, Russian Academy of Sciences.

  • Ancient Iranian and Zoroastrian Astral Mythology, Astronomy and Astrology

    Panaino, Antonio. 2014. Sidera Viva. Studi Iranici di Storia della Mitologia Astrale, dell’Astronomia e dell’Astrologia Antica. (Ed.) Andrea Gariboldi, Paolo Ognibene & Velizar Sadovski. . 2 vols. Milano: Mimesis.
    This comprehensive two-volume set is a collection of the wide range of articles and short writings written by Antonio Panaino during last decades. The articles are already appeared in academic journals and collected volumes, often not easily accessible to a wider audience. These studies are all dedicated to the different areas of research developed by the author, in particular on the history of ancient Iranian as well as Zoroastrian astral mythology, astronomy and astrology, from the earliest period of Indo-Iranian and Iranian history through the late antiquity up to the High Middle Ages as well as early Islamic era.
    About the Author:
    Antonio Panaino is professor of ancient Iranian philology and hitory of religion at the University of Bologna.