Author: Arash Zeini

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Books

The “Sūdgar Nask” of “Dēnkard” Book 9

Vevaina, Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw. 2023. The Sūdgar Nask of Dēnkard Book 9. Text, Translation and Critical Apparatus (Iranica 31). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

The Sūdgar Nask of Dēnkard Book 9 is one of the most enigmatic and yet fundamental texts of Zoroastrianism. It is a commentary on the ‘Old Avesta’ of the 2nd millennium BCE produced in Pahlavi (Zoroastrian Middle Persian) in the Sasanian (224–651 CE) and early Islamic centuries. This commentary purportedly based on earlier Pahlavi translations and commentaries of lost Young Avestan tractates commenting in turn on the ‘Old Avesta’ is a value-laden, ideologically motivated discourse that displays a rich panoply of tradition-constituted forms of allegoresis. This terse yet highly allusive text mobilizes complex forms of citation, allusion, and intertextuality from the inherited Avestan world of myth and ritual in order to engage with and react to the profound changes occurring in the relationships between theology, religious praxis, national identity, and imperial politics in Iranian society. Despite its value and importance for developing our nascent understanding of Zoroastrian hermeneutics and the self-conception of the Zoroastrian priesthood in Late Antiquity, this primary source has attracted scant scholarly attention due to the extreme difficulty of its subject matter and the lack of a reliable translation. This volume represents the first critical edition and translation of this formidable text which will contribute to the philological, theological, and historiographical study of Zoroastrianism in a pivotal moment in its rich and illustrious history.

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Books

Navigating Language in the Early Islamic World

Borrut, Antoine, Manuela Ceballos and Alison Vacca (eds.). 2024. Navigating language in the early Islamic world: Multilingualism and language change in the first centuries of Islam (Interdisciplinary Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 2). Turnhout: Brepols.

Traditional accounts of Arabicization have often favoured linear narratives of language change instead of delving into the diversity of peoples, processes, and languages that informed the fate of Arabic in the early Islamic world. Using a wide range of case studies from the caliphal centres at Damascus and Baghdad to the provinces of Arabia, Egypt, Armenia, and Central Asia, Navigating Language reconsiders these prevailing narratives by analysing language change in different regions of the early Islamic world through the lens of multilingualism and language change. This volume complicates the story of Arabic by building on the work of scholars in Late Antiquity who have abundantly demonstrated the benefits of embracing multilingualism as a heuristic framework. The three main themes include imperial strategies of language use, the participation of local elites in the process of language change, and the encounters between languages on the page, in the markets, and at work. This volume brings together historians and art historians working on the interplay of Arabic and other languages during the early Islamic period to provide a critical resource and reference tool for students and scholars of the cultural and social history of language in the Near East and beyond.

Summary
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Books

The Religion of the Rigveda

Oberlies, Thomas. 2024. The religion of the Rigveda. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

This comprehensive new presentation of the religion of the Rigveda is the result of a thorough-going endeavour to extrapolate historical circumstances from that literary text and present them chiefly from the perspective of the adherents to this religion. For them society, social life, and religion were inextricably bound. This helps to explain the meanings of rights and rituals. Which rituals are to be performed at what times is influenced by the way of life of these Vedic tribes which alternates between peaceful settling and predatory raids. The ‘priests’ who carry out the rituals embody the gods of the Rigvedic pantheon.

In telling the story of these rituals, Thomas Oberlies highlights particular connections — such as the association of the war god Indra with the priest who recites the hymns which invite the gods — that help us solve many of the riddles which the text of the Rigveda still poses to this day. The Religion of the Rigveda includes a wealth of quotations from primary sources which form the basis of this approach to a religion that would later become Hinduism. A comprehensive index of subjects makes the book eminently accessible for use in further studies.

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Articles

Lād: A Bactrian loanword

Halfmann, Jakob. 2023. Lād “law”: A Bactrian loanword in the Nuristani languages. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 86(3). 505–510.

This article proposes a new etymology for the Nuristani word family of Katë lod ~ lot, Nuristani Kalasha lād, etc. It is argued that these are best understood as early borrowings from Bactrian λαδο “law”.

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Articles

Foucault, Kant, and Antiquity

Porter, James I. 2024. Foucault, Kant, and antiquity. Representations 165(1). 120–143.

Michel Foucault’s return to classical antiquity at the end of his career coincides with a turn away from institutional critique and a return to Kant. This is no coincidence. Foucault’s Introduction to Kant’s “Anthropology” (1961) completely anticipates his approach to ancient subject formations, which reflects Kant’s theory of the liberal, self-enterprising, and enlightened subject as this is outlined in Foucault’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (1984) and elsewhere. Foucault’s final studies surface isolated, private, and autonomous subjects who are at once premodern, proto-Christian, and uncannily modern. Fashioned by ascetic and aesthetic models of self-care, they testify to “a genealogy of the modern subject.”

This article is also available from the author’s academia page.

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Online resources

New issue of Indiran

The latest issue of Indiran, the newsletter of the Ancient India & Iran Trust, is now online.

Established in 1978, the Ancient India & Iran Trust occupies a unique position as an independent charity concerned with the study of early South Asia, Iran and Central Asia, promoting both scholarly research and popular interest in the area.

From About Us

An archive of past issues of Indiran, is available here.

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BiblioIranica

Happy New Year

We wish all readers of BiblioIranica a happy new year. May you experience joy and happiness in 2024. And if you do, consider yourself lucky and privileged!

In 2023, our social media activities entered an age of confusion and darkness when Twitter/X and Jetpack decided that collaboration wasn’t part of their cosmic alignment. As if that was not enough, Jetpack started to charge for the ‘sharing’ feature. The one thing social media are supposed to foster, ended: collaboration. No hard feelings. I expected a social media meltdown, which is why we have always maintained the website as the main source. We anticipate a reduction in traffic to BiblioIranica in 2024, but hope that our readers will subscribe to our e-mail service and visit the site even if we no longer post on Twitter/X. We need your love and support.
Let us look at some statistics for 2023:

  • We made 115 announcements
  • We had 55,634 views across the site
  • These were generated by 35,843 unique visitors
  • We were most popular in USA, Germany and India
  • On 7 November 2013, we silently celebrated 10 years of posting on in the service of Iranian Studies. There will be another occasion to celebrate with our followers, when the website of BiblioIranica becomes 10.

This post is by me, Arash. I would like to think that I am speaking on behalf of my friends Shervin and Yazdan, without whose support we would have not made it this far.

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Articles

A scribal school of forgers

Fattori, Marco. 2022. A scribal school of forgers in “Hamadān”. Rivista degli Studi Orientali XCV(3). 27–44.

In this article it is argued that the Old Persian inscriptions labelled AmH, AsH, D2Ha, D2Hb, A2Hc and A1I are all modern forgeries, whose production was inspired by the discovery of the genuine inscription DHa, published in 1926. First, an overview of the known information concerning the alleged finding of these objects is offered, pointing out that all the previous attempts to provide a historically plausible reconstruction of their original location and function are unconvincing or selfcontradictory. Subsequently, it is shown that all these inscriptions share some palaeographic features which are otherwise unattested in the corpus of authentic Old Persian inscriptions. Instead, these features only appear in some modern manuals available to the public in the years when these objects were reportedly found, which constitutes crucial evidence against their authenticity.

The original publication can be accessed via this DOI.

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Books

The making of Syriac Jerusalem & Soul and body diseases

Two books that have been published in 2023 and will be of interest to the readers of our site:

Popa, Catalin-Stefan. 2023. The making of Syriac Jerusalem: Representations of the Holy City in Syriac literature of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World). London and New York: Routledge.

This book discusses hagiographic, historiographical, hymnological, and theological sources that contributed to the formation of the sacred picture of the physical as well as metaphysical Jerusalem in the literature of two Eastern Christian denominations, East and West Syrians.

Popa, Catalin-Stefan (ed.). 2023. Soul and body diseases, remedies and healing in Middle Eastern religious cultures and traditions (Studies on the Children of Abraham 10) Leiden: Brill.

Aiming to develop a less studied literary genre, this book provides a well-rounded picture of spiritual and physical diseases and their remedies as they were ingrained in the imagination and practices of Middle Eastern Abrahamic cultures, with a special emphasis of Christian communities (Greeks/Byzantines, Syrians, Armenians, Georgians, Ethiopians). The volume traces traditions dealing with the onset of a disease in the body and soul, the search for remedy, the maintenance of healing, and the engagement of these processes with faith—either through their affirmation in the public sphere or remaining within the personal framework, as in monastic traditions. A recurring presence in religious literature and the history of the intellectual world, the confrontation between disease and healing may well still be current for our modern understanding of the paths to seeking and maintaining the health of one’s body and soul, without excluding the factor of faith as a core principle.

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Articles

A new Middle Persian document from Hastijan

Asefi, Nima. 2023. A new Middle Persian document from Hastijan belonging to the Farroxzād family. Berkeley Working Papers in Middle Iranian Philology 1(3), 1–14.

This study publishes a first edition of a newly-discovered Middle Persian document located in a private collection but stemming from the area of Hastijan, Iran. It is related to the ‘Pahlavi Archive’, the majority of which is held in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, and the contents concern the family of a certain Farroxzād, mentioned in several other documents in the archive.

Abstract