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Political memory in and after the Persian Empire

Silverman, Jason M. & Caroline Waerzeggers. 2015. Political memory in and after the Persian Empire (Ancient Near East Monographs 13). Atlanta: SBL Press.

Various disciplines that deal with Achaemenid rule offer starkly different assessments of Persian kingship. While Assyriologists treat Cyrus’s heirs as legitimate successors of the Babylonian kings, biblical scholars often speak of a kingless era; in which the priesthood took over the function of the Davidic monarch. Egyptologists see their land as uniquely independently minded despite conquests, while Hellenistic scholarship tends to evaluate the interface between Hellenism and native traditions without reference to the previous two centuries of Persian rule. This volume brings together in dialogue a broad array of scholars with the goal of seeking a broader context for assessing Persian kingship through the anthropological concept of political memory.

A PDF of the volume is available here.

Jason M. Silverman is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki. He is the editor of Opening Heaven’s Floodgates: The Genesis Flood Narrative, Its Contexts and Reception (Gorgias Press) and the author of Persepolis and Jerusalem: Iranian Influence on the Apocalyptic Hermeneutic (T&T Clark).

Caroline Waerzeggers is Associate Professor at Leiden University. She is the author of Marduk-remanni: Local Networks and Imperial Politics in Achaemenid Babylonia (Peeters) and The Ezida Temple of Borsippa: Priesthood, Cult, Archives (Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten).

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Ancient Near Eastern Art

This slightly older publication has just come to my attention:

Kawami, Trudy & John Olbrantz (eds.). 2013. Source: Breath of heaven, breath of earth. Distributed by University of Washington Press for Hallie Ford Museum.

Breath of Heaven, Breath of Earth: Ancient Near Eastern Art from American Collections encompasses the geographic regions of Mesopotamia, Syria and the Levant, and Anatolia and Iran, and explores several broad themes found in the art of the ancient Near East: gods and goddesses, men and women, and both real and supernatural animals. These art objects reveal a wealth of information about the people and cultures that produced them: their mythology, religious beliefs, concept of kingship, social structure, and daily life.

About the authors:

Trudy Kawami is director of research at the Arthur M. Sackler Foundation in New York.

John Olbrantz is the Maribeth Collins Director of the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.

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Insurgency and terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean

Howe, Timothy & Lee Brice (eds.). 2016. Brill’s companion to insurgency and terrorism in the ancient Mediterranean (Brill’s Companions in Classical Studies). Brill.

In Brill’s Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean, Tim Howe and Lee Brice challenge the view that these forms of conflict are specifically modern phenomena by offering an historical perspective that exposes readers to the ways insurgency movements and terror tactics were common elements of conflict in antiquity. Assembling original research on insurgency and terrorism in various regions including, the Ancient Near East, Greece, Central Asia, Persia, Egypt, Judea, and the Roman Empire, they provide a deep historical context for understanding these terms, demonstrate the usefulness of insurgency and terrorism as concepts for analysing ancient Mediterranean behavior, and point the way toward future research.

About the authors:

Lee L. Brice, Ph.D. (2003), UNC-Chapel Hill, is Professor of History at Western Illinois University. He has published volumes and articles/chapters on the military history of the ancient world and is series editor of Warfare in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Brill).

Timothy Howe studied History, Classical and Archaeology at The Pennsylvania State University. PhD. 2000. He has been at St. Olaf College since 2003, where he is currently Associate Professor of History & Ancient Studies. Since 2013 he has excavated at the Hellenistic/Roman site of Antiochia ad Cragum in Southern Turkey, where he is currently Associate Field Director. Main interests include Greek and Roman agriculture and warfare, Mediterranean archaeology and Alexander the Great. He has written two monographs (Pastoral Politics: Animals, Agriculture and Society in Ancient Greece, Regina 2008 and All Things Alexander the Great, Greenwood 2016).

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Sogdian Art and Archaelogy in China

Wertmann, Patrick. 2015. Sogdians in China. Archaeological and art historical analyses of tombs and texts from the 3rd to the 10th century AD. Deutschen Archäologischen Institut, Eurasien-Abteilung, Außenstelle Peking. (Archaeology in China and East Asia 5). Philipp von Zabern.

Sogdians, originating from present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, dominated one of history’s greatest trade empires, extending from Constantinople to Korea between the 6th and 8th centuries AD. They established settlements in China and were granted positions of the highest rank at the imperial court. In recent years, richly equipped tombs attributed to members of the Sogdian diaspora were discovered in north and west China. The burial objects and inscriptions in these tombs offer surprising insights into the lives of these Central Asians. Patrick Wertmann followed the routes of the Sogdian traders and documented for his dissertation their traces in 54 museums and collections in eight countries, particularly in China. This fifth volume of the series Archaeology in China and East Asia offers the most comprehensive overview of Sogdian artefacts thus far assembled, with numerous colour photographs by the author.

The book has 347 pages with 116 full-page plates and 15 tables.

 About the Author:
Patrick Wertmann (PhD 2013) .is a specialist in East Asian art history and now working in the Sino-German cooperation project “Silk Road Fashion” of the Beijing Branch Office, Eurasia Department, German Archaeological Institute.
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Arts of the Hellenized East

Carter, Martha, Prudence Harper & Pieter Meyers (eds.). 2015. Arts of the Hellenized East: Precious metalwork and gems of the pre-Islamic era. Thames & Hudson.

The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait, houses one of the world’s most spectacular collections of ancient silver vessels and other objects made of precious metals. Dating from the centuries following Alexander the Great’s conquest of Iran and Bactria in the middle of the 4th century BCE up to the advent of the Islamic era, the beautiful bowls, drinking vessels, platters and other objects in this catalogue suggest that some of the best Hellenistic silverwork was not made in the Greek heartlands, but in this eastern outpost of the Seleucid empire. Martha L. Carter connects these far-flung regions from northern Greece to the Hindu Kush, tracing the common cultural threads that link their diverse geography and people. The last part of the catalogue, by Prudence O. Harper, deals with an important group of Sasanian silver vessels and gems, and some other rarities produced in the succeeding centuries for Hunnish and Turkic patrons. The catalogue is accompanied by an essay on the technology of ancient silver production by Pieter Meyers, who has performed a number of scientific tests on the objects, including a new metallurgical analysis that may help to identify their geographical origins.

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The Seleucids and Iran

Plischke, Sonja. 2014. Die Seleukiden und Iran: die seleukidische Herrschaftspolitik in den östlichen Satrapien. (Classica et Orientalia 9). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.
This revised doctoral thesis surveys the eastern provinces of the Seleucid Empire. Much work has been done in the last decades, especially on the documents from Babylon, which allows for certain periods a much more certain chronology than was possible earlier. Plischke makes good use of this material and provides in general a sound survey of the sources and the voluminous secondary literature on the Seleucid kingdom, although her main focus is on Iran. She begins with a survey of recent research and follows it up with a rather long-winded listing of the literary, epigraphic and numismatic sources, which offers nothing new and could have been more sharply focussed – does a reader of this highly complex work really need to be told that Polybios is “generally regarded as reliable” or that Livy wrote his History of Rome in the Augustan period? The preliminary chapter also offers a cursory account of well-known events from Kyros II until the death of Roxane and Alexander IV. This makes a reader wonder whether the book is intended for a professional or a general readership. (R. Malcolm Errington, BMCR)*
Continue reading “The Seleucids and Iran”
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From Samarkand to Istanbul

Schiltz, Véronique (ed.). 2015. De Samarcande à Istanbul: étapes orientales. (Hommages à Pierre Chuvin 2). Paris: CNRS Éditions.
 Pierre Chuvin, the renomate scholar of hellenistic studies has devoted his academic life to the study of the Central Asian World in its most diverse aspects.
He founded and directed the French Institute for the Study of Central Asia (1993-1998), before taking the responsibility as the head of the French Institute of Anatolian Studies (2003-2008). Succeeding first collection of tributes dedicated to the world of Greek mythos to logos, this volume brings together contributions devoted to East Central Asian and Turkish studies. Their diversity is a reflection of the tireless curiosity, to whom they are dedicated. From Mausoleums of Samarkand to the Sublime Porte, from antiquity to modern times, from mythology to medicine, as well as the Poetry are very many aspects of a culture of extreme wealth, which are shown here.
Continue reading “From Samarkand to Istanbul”
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Waterways of Iraq and Iran in the early Islamic period

Verkinderen, Peter. 2015. Waterways of Iraq and Iran in the early Islamic period: changing rivers and landscapes of the Mesopotamian plain. I.B. Tauris.
The waterways of ancient Iraq were crucial to its prosperity. While they were maintained, Iraq and neighbouring Khuzistan, in southwest Iran, were the richest and most productive agricultural areas of the Middle East, supporting the Sasanian, Umayyad and Abbasid empires. When the waterways changed or fell into decay, both the prosperity and the political role of Iraq largely disappeared. Understanding the course of the rivers and how they changed is therefore pivotal to understanding the history of the region. Peter Verkinderen’s important book provides the first major re-examination of the waterways of early Islamic Iraq in almost seventy years. Presenting a much fuller and more accurate picture than has previously been possible through analysis of modern satellite images, this is a work of the utmost importance, unlikely to be superseded for many years to come.
About the Author:
Peter Verkinderen (PhD) is research associate of Islamic Studies in the ERC Project “The Early Islamic Empire at Work – The View from the Regions Toward the Center”, at the University of Hamburg.
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Seven Epic Poems

Ghafouri, Reza. 2015. Haft Manẓūmeh-ye Ḥamāsī (Seven Epic Poems). Bīzhan Nāmeh, Kuk Kūhzād Nāmeh, Babr-e Bayān, Patyāreh, Tahmīneh Nāmeh-ye Kūtāh, Tahmīneh Nāmeh-ye Boland, and Razm Nāmeh-ye Shakāvandkūh. Tehran: Miras-e Maktoob.

The present volume is a collection of seven epic poems, including Bīzhan Nāmeh, Kuk Kūhzād Nāmeh, Dāstān-e Babr-e Bayān, Dāstān-e Patyāreh, Tahmīneh Nāmeh-ye Kūtāh, Tahmīneh Nāmeh-ye Boland, and Razm Nāmeh-ye Shakāvandkūh.

No biographical data have survived on the composers of the above poems in literary or historical sources. The late Zabihullah Safa and Jalal Khaleghi attribute the Kuk Kūhzād Nāmeh, Dāstān-e Babr-e Bayān, Dāstān-e Patyāreh and Razm Nāmeh-ye Shakāvandkūh to the 5th/6th centuries Hijrī. The Bīzhan Nāmeh was composed by ‘Atā’ī, who most probably lived in 10th century Hijrī. Linguistic features indicate that the Tahmīneh Nāmeh-ye Kūtāh and Tahmīneh Nāmeh-ye Boland could have not been composed earlier than the 9th/10th centuries Hijrī.

A Persian report on this volume is available here.

In Original:

هفت منظومۀ حماسی (بیژن‌نامه، کک کوه‌زادنامه، ببر بیان، پتیاره، تهمینه نامۀ کوتاه، تهمینه نامۀ بلند، رزم نامۀ شکاوند کوه)، تصحیح و تحقیق رضا غفوری، ۱۳۹۴، تهران: میراث مکتوب.

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Mani’s pictures

Gulácsi, Zsuzsanna. 2015. Mani’s pictures: The didactic images of the Manichaeans from Sasanian Mesopotamia to Uygur Central Asia and Tang-Ming China (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 90). Brill.

The founder of Manichaeism, Mani (216-274/277 CE), not only wrote down his teachings to prevent their adulteration, but also created a set of paintings—the Book of Pictures—to be used in the context of oral instruction. That pictorial handscroll and its later editions became canonical art for Mani’s followers for a millennium afterwards. This richly illustrated study systematically explores the artistic culture of religious instruction of the Manichaeans based on textual and artistic evidence. It discusses the doctrinal themes (soteriology, prophetology, theology, and cosmology) depicted in Mani’s canonical pictures. Moreover, it identifies 10th-century fragments of canonical picture books, as well as select didactic images adapted to other, non-canonical art objects (murals, hanging scrolls, mortuary banners, and illuminated liturgical manuscripts) in Uygur Central Asia and Tang-Ming China.

ToC:
 
  • Part 1 – Textual Sources on Manichaean Didactic Art
  • Introduction to Part 1
  • Primary and Secondary Records in Coptic, Syriac, Greek, and Arabic Texts (3rd–10th Centuries)
  • Primary Records in Parthian and Middle Persian Texts (3rd–9th Centuries)
  • Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Records in Uygur and Chinese Texts (8th–13th Centuries)
  • Tertiary Records in Post-Manichaean Arabic, Persian, and Chagatai Texts (11th–17th Centuries)
  • Part 2 – Physical Remains of Manichaean Didactic Art
  • Introduction to Part 2
  • Format and Preservation
  • Subject Repertoire and Iconography

Zsuzsanna Gulácsi, Ph.D. (1998, Indiana University) is a Professor of Asian Religious Art at Northern Arizona University and the author of Mediaeval Manichaean Book Art (Brill, 2005), Manichaean Art in Berlin Collections (Brepols 2001), and dozens of articles on Manichaean art.