Author: Shervin Farridnejad

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The Srōš Drōn – Yasna 3 to 8

Redard, Céline. 2021. The Srōš Drōn – Yasna 3 to 8. A Critical Edition with Ritual Commentaries and Glossary (Corpus Avesticum 3). Leiden: Brill.

This book is a multi-faceted study of the Srōš Drōn, comprising chapters 3 to 8 of the Yasna ceremony, the core ritual of the Zoroastrian religion. It provides a critical edition produced with the electronic tools of the project The Multimedia Yasna, and a study of the performative aspects of the Srōš Drōn both through the lens of the ritual directions and in comparison with the Drōn Yašt ceremony.
By analysing the Srōš Drōn both as a text attested in manuscripts and as a ritual performance, Céline Redard applies a new approach to unlock the meaning of these chapters of the Yasna.

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Commagene in its Local, Regional and Global Hellenistic Context

Blömer, Michael, Stefan Riedel, Miguel John Versluys & Engelbert Winter (eds.). 2021. Common dwelling place of all the gods: Commagene in its local, regional and global Hellenistic context (Oriens et Occidens Band 34). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

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A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire

Jacobs, Bruno & Robert Rollinger (eds.). 2021. A companion to the Achaemenid Persian empire. 2 vols. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

The Achaemenid Empire is often addressed as the first World Empire. However, its roots are in Near Eastern traditions, some of which have been the subject of recent intensive reevaluation. This book takes a unique and innovative approach to the subject, considering those predecessors to whom the Achaemenid Empire was indebted for its structure, ideology, and self-expression, by examining both written and archaeological sources. It addresses the empire’s legacy, and its contemporary, later, and even modern reception.

A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire takes into account all relevant historical sources, including archaeological ones. It places particular emphasis on looking at the Achaemenid Empire from its different centers, paying just as much attention to the widely neglected eastern parts as to the commonly covered western parts of the empire. The book considers, not only its political history, but also its social, economic, and religious history, institutions, and art and science, in an effort to draw a complete picture of the empire and to foster an appreciation for its lasting reputation.

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Christian and Zoroastrian Doctrine of Apokatastasis

Panaino, Antonio. 2021. The “River of Fire” and the “River of Molten Metal”. A historico-theological rafting through the rapids of the Christian and Mazdean apokatastatic falls. Vol. 86. Wien: Verlag der Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

This book is dedicated to the Mazdean theological representation of the end of historical time. While the subject is usually treated in the framework of the category of apocalypticism, scholarly debate has rarely dealt with the more appropriate theme of the apokatastasis (the complete regeneration of the world with the annihilation of Hell and the salvation of the whole humanity). The doctrine of Ohrmazd’s universal mercy was an innovation in the religious scenario of ancient Iran, but its connections with some Christian theologies of Late Antiquity still need to be investigated within a comparative analysis of the Iranian motif of the “river of molten metal”, which will purify the wicked ones and destroy Hell.

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Zoroastrian High Rituals with Persian Instructions

Dastūr Nāmdār & Dastūr Rostam. Yasna, Visperad, Yašt-e Rapitvan bā ādāb-e dīnī [Yasna, Visperad and Yašt ī Rapiθwin together with Ritual Instructions]. Edited by Kūroš Bolandī. Tehran: Fravahar, 1400 š [2021].

This volume is an edition of the Persian manual for the performance of the Yasna, Visperad, Yašt ī Rapiθwin and some other rituals, written and compiled by Dastūr Nāmdār and Dastūr Rostam, which was published in 1262 AY. The present edition gives the Persian text together with some explanations and a glossary. The importance of this priestly manual lies in the fact that it presents the last stage of the performance of the Zoroastrian high rituals by Iranian priests, before their performance were abandoned, and thus an essential source for the study of the Zoroastrian rituals in Iran.

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Articles

Quatrefoils of Early China and Their Achaemenid Parallels

Kim, Minku. 2021. The Pinnacle Ornament of Flowers: Quatrefoils of Early China and Their Achaemenid Parallels. In Guolong Lai (ed.), Occult Arts, Art History, and Cultural Exchange in Early China: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Li Ling on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press.

Roof tile-ends (wadang) with double quatrefoils. From the site of Shuzhuanglou 梳粧樓, Warring- States Zhao 趙 city of Dabeicheng 大北城, Handan 邯鄲 (Hebei). Fourth to third century BCE.

The quatrefoil is an ornamental design formed by a cruciferous arrangement of four leafor petal-like projections radiating from a mutual hub. The form was widely circulated across the ancient Western world, most distinctively in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Iranian plateau, with a variety of related schemes, including the dual quatrefoil (also known as the petal-and-calyx alternation), as well as those more commonly called the rosettes or lotus flowers. In China, quatrefoils began to be regularly seen during the late Springs and Autumns period, most notably on the assemblage of Jin bronzes. The usage of quatrefoils gradually intensified in the following periods, reaching an apogee during the Han empire, with a range of variants applied to numerous articles of material culture. With the quatrefoils being a design largely unknown prior to the mid-Eastern Zhou period, this essay argues that a foreign stimulus, most notably from the then emerging Achaemenid empire, provided a primary catalyst for the subsequent adaptations of this type of ornament in China.

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Religion, Culture, and Politics in Pre-Islamic Iran

Lincoln, Bruce. 2021. Religion, culture, and politics in pre-Islamic Iran: collected essays (Ancient Iran Series 14). Leiden; Boston: Brill.

In Religion, Culture, and Politics in Pre-Islamic Iran, Bruce Lincoln offers a vast overview on different aspects of the Indo-Iranian, Zoroastrian and Pre-Islamic mythologies, religions and cultural issues. The book is organized in four sections according to the body of evidence they engage most directly: Avestan, Old Persian, Pahlavi, and Iranian materials in comparison with other data, including studies of myths, especially those with cosmogonic implications, ritual practices, cosmological constructions of space and time, points of intersection between religion, ethics, law, and politics, ideological aspects of scientific and medical theorizing, social organization and gender relations, and other diverse topics.

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Exilarchal Propaganda and Zoroastrians in Tenth- to Eleventh-Century Baghdad

Gross, Simcha. 2021. The curious case of the Jewish Sasanian Queen Šīšīnduxt: Exilarchal propaganda and Zoroastrians in tenth- to eleventh-century Baghdad. Journal of the American Oriental Society 141(2). 365–380.

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

The Provincial Capitals of Ērānšahr, a medieval Zoroastrian Middle Persian text, recounts how the daughter of the Jewish exilarch married the Sasanian king Yazdgird I and gave birth to Wahrām Gōr, his successor. While the historicity of the text has been largely undermined, scant attention has been given to its authorship and purpose. This article proposes that the story’s creators were members of the exilarch’s household in the tenth through eleventh century who internalized the broader concern with (invented) Sasanian pedigree during the period known as the Iranian intermezzo in an effort to appeal to Iranian Jews and other elites alike. Studying this text and its origins provides evidence of contact between Jews and Zoroastrians during this period and offers a new suggestion about the cultural context of the Zoroastrians who produced The Provincial Capitals.

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Books

A Relative Chronology of Persian

Korn, Agnes. 2021. Contributions to a relative chronology of Persian: The non-change of postconsonantal y and w in Middle Persian in context. Indo-European Linguistics 1–43.

Old Persian shows a change of postconsonantal y, w to iy, uw, respectively. However, if one applies (pre-)Middle Persian sound changes to the Old Persian forms, the result is at variance with certain Middle Persian forms. If one were to assume a syncope reversing the Old Persian change of y, w to iy, uw, this would also affect old cases of iy, uw and likewise yield incorrect results for Middle Persian. The Old Persian change can thus not have operated in the prehistory of Middle Persian, and there is a dialectal difference between attested Old Persian and the later stages of the language, which is to be added to those already noted. The paper also discusses some sound changes that are connected to the Old Persian change in one way or the other. Cases in point are the processes called Epenthesis and Umlaut in previous scholarship, which this article suggests to interpret as occurring in different contexts and in different periods. The former is limited to Vry, which yields Vir and feeds into a monophthongisation that, as shown by some late Old Persian word forms, occurred within Achaemenid times, giving ēr and īr from ary and əry. Epenthesis did not occur in the prehistory of Parthian, whereas the monophthongisation did. The Appendix presents a tentative sequence of the processes discussed in this article, which is intended as a contribution to the relative chronology of Persian historical phonology.

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From Avestan to Armenian

Jouravel, Anna & Audrey Mathys (eds.). 2021. Wort- und Formenvielfalt. Festschrift fur Christoph Koch zum 80. Geburtstag (Studies on Language and Culture in Central and Eastern Europe 37). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

This Festschrift in honour of Christoph Koch, Professor of Comparative and Indo-Germanic Linguistics at the Free University of Berlin on the occation of his 80th birthday, contains some contributions relevant for Iranian Studies:

After an exhaustive analysis of the attestation of the Avestan letter ń in the Iranian manuscripts of the Long Liturgy, it is concluded that this letter appears only before i̯, but not before i or e with the exception of the group °niuuV, where ń is also regular. Concerning the use of the epenthesis or not, it is concluded that the epenthesis is regular before ń, except when ń appears after initial a (e.g. ańiia– vs. maińiiu– ). The comparison of acc.sg. ainīm to ańiiō and rest of the forms of the paradigm leads us to the conclusion that two successive waves of epenthesis have to be assumed: the first one affected only syllables before i̯ and was prior to the transformation of n > ń. The second one affected the syllables before i or final e and is posterior to the evolution n > ń.

  • Durkin-Meisterernst, Desmond: “Does a two-dimensional system fit into a one-dimensional system? Considering the Armenian alphabet.”

This article describes how the Armenian alphabet combined the Syriac/Aramaic and Greek alphabets to build an alphabet for Classical Armenian. It shows how the system of six affricates was built into this in a two-dimensional way.

  • Forssman, Bernhard: “Jungavestisch ərəduuafšnī-, Sanskrit ūrdhvastanī-“.

The archaic Young Avestan compound ərəduuafšnī– ‘with erected breasts’ has the genetic equivalent ūrdhvastanī– in Sanskrit, formally modernised and attested only in the more recent language, but nevertheless of early origin, as can be inferred from the Vedic antonym lambastanī– ‘with pendulous breasts’.