Author: Arash Zeini

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Articles Journal

The archaeology of Sasanian politics

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.

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Articles

Guriania, Γουράνιοι and the Gūrān

Potts, Daniel. 2014. Guriania, Γουράνιοι and the Gūrān. In Salvatore Gaspa, Alessandro Greco, Daniele Morandi Bonacossi, Simonetta Ponchia & Robert Rollinger (eds.), From source to history: Studies on the Ancient Near Eastern worlds and beyond dedicated to Giovanni Battista Lanfranchi on the occasion of his 65th birthday on June 23, 2014 (Alter Orient und Altes Testament 412), 561–571. Münster: Ugarit-Verlag.

Find the article here.

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Online resources

Persian grammar guide

The San Diego State University (SDSU) has created an on-line grammar guide for Persian. ‘You can click through the Alphabet to learn the names and sounds of each letter in the Persian alphabet, then try your hand at spelling some of the basic words introduced throughout the project’.

The guide is available here.

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Articles

Zoroastrianism in Iranian history

This chapter by Michael Stausberg was published in 2012, but I post it here due to its relevance and the recent availability of a PDF:

Stausberg, Michael. 2012. From power to powerlessness: Zoroastrianism in Iranian history. In Anh Nga Longva & Anne Sofie Roald (eds.), Religious minorities in the Middle East: Domination, self-empowerment, accommodation, 171–193. Leiden, Boston: Brill.

Read the article here.

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Articles

Iranian Jewry in late antiquity

Pourshariati’s new article appears in Sarshar (2014). I have already  posted the bibliographic note for the volume, but want to highlight this article separately, as it relates to late antiquity:

Pourshariati, Parvaneh. 2014. New vistas on the history of Iranian Jewry in late antiquity, Part I: Patterns of Jewish settlement in Iran. In Houman Sarshar (ed.), The Jews of Iran, 1–32. London: I.B. Tauris.

Read the article here.

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Articles

The rise of Christianity in Iran

Payne, Richard. 2014. The Rise of Christianity in Iran. News and Notes 223. 2–7.

Read the article here.

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Articles

On the linguistic history of Kurdish

Jügel, Thomas. 2014. On the linguistic history of Kurdish. Kurdish Studies 2(2). 123–142.

Historical linguistic sources of Kurdish date back just a few hundred years, thus it is not possible to track the profound grammatical changes of Western Iranian languages in Kurdish. Through a comparison with attested languages of the Middle Iranian period, this paper provides a hypothetical chronology of grammatical changes. It allows us to tentatively localise the  approximate time when modern varieties separated with regard to the respective grammatical change. In order to represent the types of linguistic relationship involved, distinct models of language contact and language continua are set up.

Read the article here.

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Articles

A note on the Schøyen copper scroll

de la Vaissière, Étienne. 2012 [2007]. A note on the Schøyen copper scroll: Bactrian or Indian? Bulletin of the Asia Institute 21. 127–130.

Find the article here.

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Reviews

Review: The millennial sovereign

Truschke, Audrey. 2014. Review of Afzar Moin: The millennial sovereign: Sacred kingship and sainthood in Islam. New York: Columbia University Press. International Journal of Middle East Studies 46. 809–842.

The Millennial Sovereign recovers a shared world of sacred kingship that pervaded India, Iran, and Central Asia in early modernity. A. Azfar Moin argues that a Timurid-based social dispensation produced a particular type of sovereignty in which a ruler promoted his political claims largely through embodied spiritual practices.

Read the review here.

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Articles

The reinvention of Iran

Payne, Richard. 2014. The reinvention of Iran: The Sasanian Empire and the Huns. In Michael Maas (ed.), The Cambridge companion to the age of Attila, 282–299. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Find the article here.