Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Tag: Parthian

  • Weaponry and a healed wound from the Parthian era

    Weaponry and a healed wound from the Parthian era

    Eghdami, Mohammad Reza, Majid Gholamzadeh Roudbordeh & Meysam Navaeiyan. 2025. Weaponry and a healed wound from the Parthian era (247 BCE to 224 CE): Insights from the Liyarsangbon cemetery, Guilan, Iran. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology Early View. 1–9.

    The current research examines the health and medical treatment implications associated with an iron arrowhead found among the skeletal remains of an individual unearthed from the Parthian cemetery at Liyarsangbon, Iran. This site is dated to the period between 247 bc and ad 224, as determined through relative dating methods. Non-invasive testing methods, including XRF and Quantometer analysis, established the elemental composition of grave artifacts, while CT Hounsfield scans assessed damage around the arrowhead within the bone. The soil exhibited a pH level of 8.67, signifying its alkaline nature. Among the metallic residues surrounding the subject of investigation, iron was identified as the predominant metal, with average concentrations of 89.93 (XRF) and 90.93 (Quantometer). A Hounsfield unit measurement of 4000 suggested a metallic object within the bone. This study focuses on the production of iron artifacts and examines their practical effectiveness. The intricate design of the arrowhead, characterized by its sharp precision, underscores the advanced level of craftsmanship within the toolmaking industry and reflects a high degree of expertise in metallurgy. Its ability to penetrate deeply into the lateral condyle of the right tibia serves as a testament to the skill and technological sophistication involved in its creation. Conversely, the inability to remove the embedded arrowhead from the bone reveals the constraints and shortcomings in the surgical practices of this particular society, shedding light on the limitations of medical techniques during that era.

    Abstract
  • Dura-Europos: Past, Present, Future

    Dura-Europos: Past, Present, Future

    Brody, Lisa & Anne H. Chen (eds.). 2025. Dura-Europos: Past, Present, Future. Turnhout. Brepols.

    This volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary host of scholars to reflect on the complicated legacies of exploration at the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, situated on the western bank of the Euphrates River near modern Salihiyeh (Syria). A chance discovery after World War I kicked off a series of excavations that would span the next century and whose finds are today housed in collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Louvre, and the National Museum in Damascus. Dura-Europos exemplifies a multiethnic frontier town at the crossroads of major trade routes. Its textual remains and remarkably-preserved Christian, Jewish, and polytheist religious sanctuaries provide key resources for the study of antiquity and attest to the cross-cultural interconnectivity that was demonstrably central to the ancient world but which has been too often obscured by Eurocentric historiographic traditions and siloed disciplinary divisions.

    Foreign-run, large-scale archaeological campaigns of the early twentieth century, like those at Dura-Europos, have created narratives of power and privilege that often exclude local communities. The significance of these imbalances is entangled with the destruction the site has experienced since the 2011 outbreak of conflict in Syria. As a step toward making knowledge descendant of early excavations more accessible, this volume includes Arabic summaries of each paper, following up on the simultaneous Arabic interpretation provided at the 2022 hybrid conference whose proceedings form the core of this publication. The papers address topics connected to essential themes in relation to Dura-Europos: long-distance trade relations and cross-border interactions in antiquity, including the exchange of technologies, people, and materials; Christianity, Judaism, and other religious practices, and their relations to one another; contemporary trafficking of looted artifacts; cultural heritage and the Islamic State; and the evolving role of museum collections, technologies, and archival materials for research.

  • The Arsacids of Rome

    The Arsacids of Rome

    Nabel, Jake. 2025. The Arsacids of Rome: Misunderstanding in Roman-Parthian relations. California: University of California Press.

    At the beginning of the common era, the two major imperial powers of the ancient Mediterranean and Near East were Rome and Parthia. In this book, Jake Nabel analyzes Roman-Parthian interstate politics by focusing on a group of princes from the Arsacid family—the ruling dynasty of Parthia—who were sent to live at the Roman court. Although Roman authors called these figures “hostages” and scholars have studied them as such, Nabel draws on Iranian and Armenian sources to argue that the Parthians would have seen them as the emperor’s foster children. These divergent perspectives allowed each empire to perceive itself as superior to the other, since the two sides interpreted the exchange of royal children through conflicting cultural frameworks. Moving beyond the paradigm of great powers in conflict, The Arsacids of Rome advances a new vision of interstate relations with misunderstanding at its center.

    A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.

  • War in the Ancient Iranian Empires

    Hyland, John O. & Khodadad Rezakhani (eds.). 2024. Brill’s companion to war in the ancient Iranian empires (Brill’s Companions to Classical Studies: Warfare in the Ancient Mediterranean World 9). Leiden: Brill.

    Brill’s Companion to War in the Ancient Iranian Empires examines military structures and methods from the Elamite period through the Achaemenid, Seleucid, Arsacid, and Sasanian empires. War played a critical role in Iranian state formation and dynastic transitions, imperial ideologies and administration, and relations with neighbouring states and peoples from Central Asia to the Mediterranean. Twenty chapters by leading experts offer fresh approaches to the study of ancient Iranian armies, strategy, diplomacy, and battlefield methods, and contextualise famous conflicts with Greek and Roman opponents.

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  • Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian Relations in Late Antiquity

    Kotyk, Jeffrey. 2024. Sino-Iranian and Sino-Arabian relations in Late Antiquity: China and the Parthians, Sasanians, and Arabs in the first millennium (Crossroads – History of Interactions across the Silk Routes 8). Leiden: Brill.

    What type of exchanges occurred between West and East Asia in the first millennium CE? What sort of connections existed between Persia and China? What did the Chinese know of early Islam?
    This study offers an overview of the cultural, diplomatic, commercial, and religious relationships that flourished between Iran and China, building on the pioneering work of Berthold Laufer’s Sino-Iranica (1919) while utilizing a diverse array of Classical Chinese sources to tell the story of Sino-Iran in a fresh light to highlight the significance of transcultural networks across Asia in late antiquity.

    Website Summary

  • The Oxford Handbook of Palmyra

    Raja, Rubina (ed.). 2024. The Oxford handbook of Palmyra. New York: Oxford University Press.

    The monumental remains of Palmyra (also known as Tadmor) have fascinated travelers and scholars for centuries. The Oxford Handbook of Palmyra gives a detailed analysis of the archaeology and history of this ancient oasis city in the Syrian Desert, spanning evidence from several millennia. With contributions from thirty archaeologists, epigraphists, historians, and philologists, this book covers the city’s archaeological findings and history from its earliest mentions in the pre-Roman era to the destruction of many of its monuments during the Syrian Civil War and the subsequent looting. The authors recap evidence and present significant new findings and analyses from fieldwork they or others undertook in Palmyra prior to the 2011 conflict and discuss the recent occupation by ISIS and calls to defend the site’s remains from current and future threats.

    Description

  • Graffiti in Middle Iranian

    Cereti, Carlo G. 2023. Graffiti in Middle Iranian: Some Preliminary Notes. In Ondřej Škrabal, Leah Mascia, Ann Lauren Osthof & Malena Ratzke (eds.), Graffiti Scratched, Scrawled, Sprayed: Towards a Cross-Cultural Understanding (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 35), 327–354. De Gruyter.

    Graffito from Kal Jangal (after Henning 1977, Plate XXVII)

    This article aims to present a limited selection of Middle Iranian graffiti while proposing a definition of the term ‘graffito’ in the Iranian area. Middle Iranian languages were spoken over a vast region that stretches from Mesopotamia to Central Asia. Traditionally, scholars in our field consider the Middle Iranian period to cover the fourth century BCE to the end of the first millennium CE. The number of known written artefacts dating from this period has progressively increased and today we possess a sizeable epigraphic corpus, of which languages such as Middle Persian, Parthian and Sogdian take the lion’s share. Here the author presents a selection of written artefacts that, on material and linguistic grounds, seem to better fit the idea of ‘graffito’, and briefly focuses on a few drawings scratched into palace walls in ancient Persepolis. Furthermore, the article aims at contributing to the growing debate on graffiti across different traditions, while remaining well aware that the definition of ‘graffiti’ in the Iranian area is still an open question and requires further discussion to establish a shared classification.

    The entire volume is available online as Open Access.

  • Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies, vol. 3

    Reden, Sitta von (ed.). 2023. Handbook of ancient Afro-Eurasian economies. Volume 3: Frontier-Zone Processes and Transimperial Exchange. Berlin: De Gruyter.

    The Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies offers in three volumes the first comprehensive discussion of economic development in the empires of the Afro-Eurasian world region to elucidate the conditions under which large quantities of goods and people moved across continents and between empires. Volume 3: Frontier-Zone Processes and Transimperial Exchange analyzes frontier zones as particular landscapes of encounter, economic development, and transimperial network formation. The chapters offer problematizing approaches to frontier zone processes as part of and in between empires, with the goal of better understanding how and why goods and resources moved across the Afro-Eurasian region. Key frontiers in mountains and steppes, along coasts, rivers, and deserts are investigated in depth, demonstrating how local landscapes, politics, and pathways explain network practices and participation in long-distance trade. The chapters seek to retrieve local knowledge ignored in popular Silk Road models and to show the potential of frontier-zone research for understanding the Afro-Eurasian region as a connected space.

  • Parthica (vol. 23)

    Volume 23 of the journal Parthica (2021) contains several contributions of relevance to Iranian Studies.

    • Ricordo di Antonio Invernizzi
    • Emad Matin: L’iconografia del mušḫuššu nel I millennio a.c.
    • Marco Ferrario: The golden bowl : material culture and empire in Achaemenid Bactria
    • Soheila Hadipour Moradi: A brief overview of Luristan in the Hellenistic period
    • Achim Lichtenberger, Mkrtich H. Zardaryan & Torben Schreiber: The wall decoration of a plastered building in Artaxata-Artashat in the Ararat plain of Armenia
    • Ashwini Lakshminarayanan: Dynamic encounters : use of a Hellenistic motif in the story of Aṅgulimāla in Gandhāran art.
    • Jacopo Bruno: Preliminary report on the Parthian-period pottery from the Italian-Turkmen excavations at Old Nisa, Turkmenistan (2007-2015, 2019)
    • Giulia Forgione: Clay-based sculptures : analysis of technical aspects and typologies

  • Parthica (vol. 22)

    Volume 22 of the journal Parthica (2020) contains several contributions of relevance to Iranian Studies.

    • Henri-Paul Francfort: Nisa Parthica rhyton nr. 76 : a note on images of hunt and deities in Central Asia : Saiga tatarica and steppe connection
    • Antonio Invernizzi: On the post-Achaemenid rock reliefs at Bisutun
    • Torben Schreiber: In the name of the King? : New considerations on the classification of seals from Hellenistic archive contexts
    • Alexander B. Nikitin & Vasif A. Gaibov: Sealings of the Parthian frontier
    • Vito Messina & Lucinda Dirven: Reproducing divine images in Hellenized Mesopotamia : the case of Nabu of Hierapolis at Hatra
    • Wathiq Al-Salihi: Architecture and layout of the ‘North Palace’ at Hatra