Bibliographia Iranica

A predominantly bibliographic blog for Iranian Studies

Tag: Sasanian

  • Fake Prostration in Late Antique Literature and the Ambiguities of Domination

    Nabel, Jake. 2026. Fake Prostration in Late Antique Literature and the Ambiguities of Domination. Studies in Late Antiquity 10 (3). 265-293.

    Ancient Greek literature transmits two episodes in which a petitioner before a king performs a fake act of prostration. The deceiver creates the appearance of a submissive bow, but he actually executes a dierent gesture unrelated to court protocol—or so he tells himself. A parallel tradition in late antique Jewish literature deploys the same motif: A persecutorial ruler urges a Jewish martyr to perform a fake bow in order to create the illusion of idol worship. Jointly considering these three cases for the first time, this article interprets the collective fake bowing tradition as a late antique meditation on the the atrics of royal power and their ability to coopt resistance. This reading is guided by Lisa Wedeen’s Ambiguities of Domination, which advances a theory of how autocratic regimes employ public ceremonies as instruments of social control. Wedeen argues that author itarians stage spectacles that are widely regarded as preposterous nonsense by their producers and consumers, but that nevertheless prove eective disciplinary mechanisms by inculcating habits of submission. It is of no avail to privately dissent from the mean ing of such ceremonials, as their power comes from the choreography of compliance, not the manufacture of belief. Applied to the fake prostration scenes of late antique literature, Wedeen’s theory enjoins a critical view of the fake bow as a form of resistance to impe rial domination.



  • Bulletin of the Asia Institute 32

    Volume 32 (2024-2025) of the Bulletin of the Asia Institute (New Series) has been published.

    Table of contents:

    • Robert Rollinger and Josef Wiesehöfer: Designating the King in the Womb of His Mother: From Assyrian through Sasanian Times
    • M. Rahim Shayegan: Rethinking the Achaemenid World Order: Space, Religion, and Communicative Strategies
    • Fabrizio Sinisi: On the Early History of the Image of Mithra in the Indo-Iranian Borderlands
    • Anca Dan and Frantz Grenet: The Triumph of Dionysus and Heracles on a Gold Tray from Datong (Pingcheng, Capital of the Northern Wei Dynasty, 398–494 CE)
    • Samra Azarnouche: The “Ḵosrow Cup”: Looking anew into the Persian Grail
    • Frantz Grenet: Two Newly Identified Šāhnāme Stories in Panjakent Paintings
    • Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani: Iranian Rock Crystal
  • Studies on the maritime, economic, and military history of antiquity

    Studies on the maritime, economic, and military history of antiquity

    Reinard, Patrick, Christian Rollinger, Pascal Warnking, Julian Degen & Mateo González Vázquez (eds.). 2026. Kybernetes. Studien zur Seefahrts-, Wirtschafts- und Militärgeschichte der Antike. Festschrift für Christoph Schäfer zum 65. Geburtstag (Muziris 6). Münster: Zaphon.

    Among other interesting contributions, the following articles may interest the readers of Bibliographia Iranica:

    • Julian Degen: Some Notes on Ship Types and Maritime Mobility in Strabo’s Geography and the Periploi
    • Clemens Steinwender: Überlegungen zur Bedeutung der Schifffahrt im sasanidischen Imperium
    • Robert Rollinger: The Aegean Worlds and the Achaemenid-Persian Empire: Imperial Borderlands and the ‘Persian Wars’

  • Contextualizing Imperial Borderlands

    Contextualizing Imperial Borderlands

    Rollinger, Robert & Degen, Julian (eds.). 2026. Contextualizing Imperial Borderlands. 9th Century BCE – 9th Century CE and Beyond (Afro-Eurasian Transformations ‒ Ancient Worlds and Beyond 1). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

    The first volume of the new series Afro-Eurasian Transformations ‒ Ancient Worlds and Beyond comprises a collection of papers whose overarching topic pertains to the study of territories situated beyond direct imperial control. Nonetheless, more subtle and elusive traces of imperial impact can be detected in this geographical area.

    The purpose of this collection is to introduce this expanse as “imperial borderlands”. In addition, it includes a variety of contributions from experts in selected fields. With its broad temporal and geographical scope, ranging from the 1st millennium BC to the end of antiquity and beyond, covering the Afro-Eurasia worlds, the volume presents the first concentrated study on the phenomenon of imperial borderlands.

    For free open access to the volume, click here.

  • Reassembling knowledge

    Benfey, Thomas. 2026. Reassembling knowledge: Science, medicine, and philosophy in Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq and Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    The scholars of the Sasanian empire—the last antique superpower whose extensive territories encompassed much of Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, and the Caucasus—played a pivotal role in world intellectual history. They developed a distinctive synthesis of Indian and Greco-Roman learning, which would have a formative impact on Islamic civilization in the wake of the empire’s fall to Arab armies in the 7th century CE. Drawing on a wide range of texts in languages including Arabic, Middle Persian, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, Thomas Benfey closely examines these scholars, their contributions, and the shifting contexts in which they lived and worked. From the court of the sixth-century King of Kings Khusrō I to early Abbasid Baghdad, this book explores key developments in philosophy, medicine, and astral science and the institutional and historical contexts in which they took place. Benfey highlights the distinctive features of this decisive era, tracing intellectual continuity and change into the early Islamic period.

    Book description
  • Hybrid Kingships in the East from Alexander to the Sasanians

    Hybrid Kingships in the East from Alexander to the Sasanians

    Cefalo, Generoso & Alessandro Magnani (eds.). Le regalità ibride in Oriente da Alessandro ai Sasanidi. Urbino: Uniurb University Press.

    Il volume propone una riflessione sulle forme della sovranità sviluppatesi nello spazio eurasiatico tra l’età di Alessandro Magno e l’ascesa dell’impero sasanide. Attraverso un approccio interdisciplinare che integra fonti letterarie, epigrafiche, numismatiche, iconografiche e archeologiche, i contributi indagano i processi di interazione, adattamento e rielaborazione che caratterizzarono la costruzione dell’autorità regia in contesti multiculturali.

    Dall’eredità achemenide e macedone ai regni ellenistici dell’Asia centrale, dai sovrani indo-greci e seleucidi fino alle esperienze del mondo romano e sasanide, il volume analizza le strategie di legittimazione del potere e le molteplici forme di autorappresentazione dei monarchi. Ne emerge un quadro dinamico di “regalità ibride”, in cui tradizioni greche, iraniche, romane e locali si intrecciano dando vita a modelli politici e culturali originali, capaci di influenzare profondamente la storia del Mediterraneo e dell’Asia antica.

    This volume is open-access.

  • Sasanian Silver Coins from Atbatan Necropolis Near Demirchi (Shamakhi District, Azerbaijan)

    Huseynov, Rustam N. & Akif A. Guliyev. 2026. Sasanian silver coins from Atbatan necropolis Near Demirchi (Shamakhi district, Azerbaijan). Azerbaijan Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology 2 (1): 99-105.

    This article presents a small group of Sasanian silver drachms discovered during archaeological excavations at Atbatan necropolis near the village of Demirchi in the Shamakhi region of Azerbaijan. The coins were recovered from burial contexts in association with human skeletal remains and accompanying grave goods, providing important archaeological evidence for the circulation of late Sasanian silver coinage in the Shirvan area. The study focuses on the typological and chronological attribution of the coins based on iconography, mint signatures, regnal dates, and Pahlavi legends preserved on the specimens. The Demirchi finds contribute to the growing corpus of Sasanian numismatic material discovered in Azerbaijan and provide new data on Sasanian influence, trade networks, and population contacts in the Shirvan region during Late Antiquity – Early Middle Ages.

  • Recovering a Sasanian Royal Book in Early Islam

    Zubani, Alessia. 2026. Recovering a Sasanian Royal Book in Early Islam: The Kitāb Ṣuwar mulūk Banī Sāsān and Its Arabic Transmission. Essays in Long Late Antiquity 1 (1): 73-95.

    This paper explores the recovery and translation of a Sasanian royal book during the early Islamic period, focusing on the Umayyad and early Abbasid eras. It examines the missing Kitāb Ṣuwar mulūk Banī Sāsān (“Book of the Portraits of the Sasanian Kings”), a work that depicted portraits of all Sasanian rulers, their reigns, and deeds. Although it is lost, Arab and Persian historians who had access to Arabic translations commissioned by the Umayyad caliph Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik (r. 724–743) described it in detail.

    The history of this text, as preserved by these Arab and Persian historians, highlights the interest in Iranian political literary traditions during the Islamic period, while also providing valuable information about the work and its earliest observed Arabic manuscript copy. Analyzing this information with contemporary and slightly later manuscripts provides insights into the work’s history as part of a specific political literary tradition and as a material manuscript artifact.

  • The Sasanians in Context: Art, History, and Archaeology

    The Sasanians in Context: Art, History, and Archaeology

    Catanzariti, Antonietta & Touraj Daryaee (eds.). 2026. The Sasanians in Context: Art, History, and Archaeology. Washington, D.C.: SmithsonianScholarly Press.

    Between the third and seventh centuries CE, the Sasanian Empire became one of the most dominant powers in the ancient world—extending geographically from West to Central Asia—and was the last major power in the region before the Arab conquest in the seventh century. In November 2022, in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Asian Art convened “The Sasanians in Context: Art, History, and Archaeology,” a symposium of scholars discussing the latest research on the Sasanian Empire and its rich material culture—from impressive rock reliefs to elaborately designed metal vessels and finely carved seals—and exploring the empire’s legacy beyond its core regions. The symposium underscored how the field has evolved and revealed new areas for future research.

  • A Palace Built into a Mountain

    Maghsoudlou, Arvin. 2025. A Palace Built into a Mountain: Exploring the Modes of Audience Interaction and Reception at the Great Ayvan of Taq-e Bustan in Late Antiquity. Ancient West & East 24: 43-67.

    This study revisits the structure, imagery and scale of the Great Ayvan of Taq-e Bustan, employing a phenomenological approach to explore how it interacted with its potential Late Antique audiences. It argues that the monument departed from traditional Sasanian rock reliefs by blending features of landscape reliefs and palatial architecture into a hybrid programme, effectively engaging a diverse audience. The paper analyses how viewer interaction varied with proximity to the ayvan, with a particular focus on the complex and multisensory experience afforded to those granted access inside.