Szántó, Iván & Yuka Kadoi (eds.). 2019. The reshaping of Persian art: Art histories of Islamic Iran and Centra Asia (Acta et Studia XV). Piliscsaba: The Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies.
How to order:
Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies
Contact: Oroszi Gyöngyi
Tel.: + 36 (06) 26 375 329 / 414
E-mail: oroszi@avicenna-kkki.hu
Transoxania, Khurasan, and ?ukharistan – which comprise large parts of today’s Central Asia – have long been an important frontier zone. In the late antique and early medieval periods, the region was both an eastern political boundary for Persian and Islamic empires and a cultural borderseparating communities of sedentary farmers from pastoral-nomads.
Given its peripheral location, the history of the ‘eastern frontier’ in this period has often been shown through the lens of expanding empires. However, in this book, Robert Haug argues for a pre-modern Central Asia with a discrete identity, a region that is not just a transitory space or the far-flung corner of empires, but its own historical entity. From this locally specific perspective, the book takes the reader on a 900-year tour of the area, from Sasanian control, through the Umayyads and Abbasids, to the quasi-independent dynasties of the Tahirids and the Samanids. Drawing on an impressive array of literary, numismatic and archaeological sources, Haug reveals the unique and varied challenges the eastern frontier presented to imperial powers that strove to integrate the area into their greater systems. This is essential reading for all scholars working on early Islamic, Iranian and Central Asian history, as well as those with an interest in the dynamics of frontier regions.
Nokandeh, Jebrael & Abdolreza Dashtizadeh (eds.). 2019. The Persian Gulf: An archaeological perspective. Tehran: National Museum of Iran, Qeshm Free Zone.
For a partial Table of Contents, see Potts (2019) in the above publication.
Hutter, Manfred. 2019. Iranische Religionen: Zoroastrismus, Yezidentum, Bahāʾītum. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Das Studienbuch ist aus Erfahrungen des Unterrichts zu den im Untertitel genannten Religionen erwachsen, wobei der methodische Zugang religionshistorisch (bis zur Gegenwart) und religionsvergleichend ist. Daher werden die drei Religionen der Zoroastrier, Yeziden und Baha’i in einer weitgehend parallelen Struktur beschrieben, um so das gemeinsame “iranische Erbe” sichtbar zu machen, ohne die jeweiligen Eigenheiten der drei Religionen zu nivellieren oder zu harmonisieren. Behandelt werden (bei jeder der drei Religionen) u.a. identitätsstiftende Faktoren für die Religion und die Religion als identitätsmarker, ferner “klassische” Themen zu Welt- und Menschenbild inklusive ethische Herausforderungen sowie das weite Feld der (rituellen) Praxis. Genauso kommen jeweils Organisationsstrukturen sowie die einbettung der Religion in den gesellschaftlichen und religionspolitischen Diskurs im iranischen Raum im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert sowie die Verbreitung im deutschsprachigen Raum seit zwei bis drei Generationen zur Sprache. Kap. 6 geht auch auf die Religionspolitik der Islamischen Republik Iran ein.
de Blois, Lukas & Robert J. van der Spek. 2019. An introduction to the ancient world (3rd Edition). London and New York: Routledge.
An Introduction to the Ancient World offers a thorough survey of the history of the ancient Near East, Greece and Rome. Covering the social, political, economic and cultural processes that have influenced later western and Near Eastern civilisations, this volume considers subjects such as the administrative structures, economies and religions of the ancient Near East, Athenian democracy, the development of classical Greek literature, the interaction of cultures in the Hellenistic world, the political and administrative system of the Roman Republic and empire, and the coming of Christianity, all within the broad outline of political history.
This third edition is thoroughly updated and some chapters are completely rewritten to cover recent historical research.
Rollinger, Robert & Kai Ruffing (eds.). 2018. Das Weltreich der Perser – Rezeption, Aneignung und Verargumentierung von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
The above book is supposed to be published by Harrassowitz. However, my pre scheduled notice got published before the actual publication. I am leaving the entry in place to maintain consistency across our other media. The below article, part of the above volume, is available from the author's Academia page.
In this volume:
Börm, Henning. 2018. Barbaren als Tyrannen. Das Perserbild in der klassizistischen griechischen Historiographie. In Robert Rollinger & K. Ruffing (eds.), Das Weltreich der Perser – Rezeption, Aneignung und Verargumentierung von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
Azzoni, Annalisa, Christina Chandler, Erin Daly, Mark B. Garrison, Jan Johnson & Brian Muhs. 2019. From The Persepolis Fortification Archive Project, 7: A Demotic Tablet or Two in the Persepolis Fortification Archive. ARTA 2019. 003.
This article publishes two tablets in the Persepolis Fortification archive, one of which is certainly inscribed in Demotic, and possibly the other as well. They join a small number of tablets written in Old Persian, Neo-Babylonian, Greek, and Phrygian, alongside the vast majority of tablets written in Elamite or Aramaic or left uninscribed.
Avetisyan, Pavel S., Roberto Dan & Yervand H. Grekyan (eds.). 2019. Over the Mountains and Far Away: Studies in Near Eastern history and archaeology presented to Mirjo Salvini on the occasion of his 80th birthday. Archaeopress.
The publication of Over the Mountains and Far Away: Studies in Near Eastern history and archaeology presented to Mirjo Salvini on the occasion of his 80th birthday was initiated by the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, National Academy of Sciences of Armenia, the International Association of Mediterranean and Oriental Studies (Rome, Italy) and the Association for Near Eastern and Caucasian Studies (Yerevan, Armenia) as a tribute to the career of Professor Mirjo Salvini on the occasion his 80th birthday. It is composed of 62 papers written by his colleagues and students from Italy, Germany, France, Spain, Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Great Britain, Russian Federation, Israel, Turkey, Islamic Republic of Iran, Georgia, United States and Armenia. The contributions presented here cover numerous topics, a wide geographical area and a long chronological period. However, most of the contributions deal with research in the fields of Urartian and Hittite Studies, the topics that attracted Prof. Salvini during his long and fruitful career most.
For the table of contents click here.
Zeeuw, Hans de. 2019. Tanbûr long-necked lutes along the Silk Road and beyond. Oxford: Archaeopress.
Tanbûr Long-Necked Lutes Along the Silk Road and beyond explores the origin, history, construction, and playing techniques of tanbûrs, a musical instrument widely used over vast territories and over many centuries. The diffusion of the tanbûr into the musical cultures along the Silk Road resulted in a variety of tanbûrs with two or more, occasionally doubled or tripled courses, a varying number and variously tuned frets, each having its own characteristic sound, playing technique, and repertory. Since the last century, tanbûrs spread beyond the Silk Road while new versions continue to appear due to changing musical and tonal demands made on them. Similar or identical instruments are also known by other names, such as saz or bağlama, dotâr or dutâr, setâr, dömbra, and dambura.
Cameron, Hamish. 2019. Making Mesopotamia: Geography and Empire in a Romano-Iranian Borderland (Impact of Empire, 32). Leiden: Brill.
In Making Mesopotamia: Geography and Empire in a Romano-Iranian Borderland, Hamish Cameron examines the representation of the Mesopotamian Borderland in the geographical writing of Strabo, Pliny the Elder, Claudius Ptolemy, the anonymous Expositio Totius Mundi, and Ammianus Marcellinus. This inter-imperial borderland between the Roman Empire and the Arsacid and Sasanid Empires provided fertile ground for Roman geographical writers to articulate their ideas about space, boundaries, and imperial power. By examining these geographical descriptions, Hamish Cameron shows how each author constructed an image of Mesopotamia in keeping with the goals and context of their own work, while collectively creating a vision of Mesopotamia as a borderland space of movement, inter-imperial tension, and global engagement.