This volume brings together articles that present, comment on and interpret primary sources from the Sasanian and post-Sasanian periods. Few of the objects come from official excavations, unlike the clay sealings unearthed at Takt-e Solayman or Arabo-Sasanian copper coins from excavations at Susa, Qasr-i Abu Nasr, Naqs-i Rustam and Istakhr. Rare are the objects discovered accidentally, such as the Middle Persian document believed to have been found at Tang-e Boraq. The other objects came to us through the antiquities market: silver dishes, Arabo-Sasanian copper coins, seals and documents in Middle Persian. This volume completes the publication of the documents and bullae of the Tabarestan Archive.
This companion provides an overview of current work in the areas of Persian Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). It covers a great number of topics and describes most innovative works of distinct academics researching the Persian language. The target group are researchers from computer science, linguistics, translation, psychology, philosophy, and mathematics who are interested in this topic.
The proceedings of the 12th Melammu Symposium is out. Among other interesting subjects, several papers contribute to aspects of ancient Iranian history and culture:
Josef Wiesehöfer: Ancient History and the Ancient Near East: Comments of an Ancient Historian
Daniel Beckman: On a Possible Assyrian Source of the Achaemenid Demand for “Earth and Water”
Eckart Otto: The Intellectual Heritage from the Neo-Assyrian Empire to the Achaemenids in the Western Reception History of the Book of Deuteronomy in the 16th and 17th Century
Rolf Strootman: Memories of Persian Kingship in the Hellenistic World
Tonia M. Sharlach: Over the Mountains: The Movement of Goods and People between Mesopotamia and Elam in the 21st Century BCE
Esther is the most visual book of the Hebrew Bible and largely crafted in the Fourth Century BCE by an author who was clearly au fait with the rarefied world of the Achaemenid court. It therefore provides an unusual melange of information which can enlighten scholars of Ancient Iranian Studies whilst offering Biblical scholars access into the Persian world from which the text emerged.
In this book, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones unlocks the text of Esther by reading it against the rich iconographic world of ancient Persia and of the Near East. Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther is a cultural and iconographic exploration of an important, but often undervalued, biblical book, and Llewellyn-Jones presents the book of Esther as a rich source for the study of life and thought in the Persian Empire. The author reveals answers to important questions, such as the role of the King’s courtiers in influencing policy, the way concubines at court were recruited, the structure of the harem in shifting the power of royal women, the function of feasting and drinking in the articulation of courtly power, and the meaning of gift-giving and patronage at the Achaemenid court.
Table of Contents Introduction Why Iconography? The Book of Esther: A New English Translation Exegesis i: The Persian Empire ii: Jews in a Persian world iii: The Book of Records: Persian perceptions of their past iv: Persian Kingship v: Susa and the palaces of Persia vi: Laws and Governance; tax and tribute vii: Banquets: drinking and feasting viii: Gardens – Paradeisoi ix: Couches and cups ; thrones and sceptres x: Courtiers xi: Vashti and her women xii: Elite women at the Persian court xiii: Royal concubinage xiv: Beauty and sexuality xv: Eunuchs xvi: The royal gate xvii: Royal protocol: audiences and formality xviii: The royal robe and gift-giving xix: Persian horses xx: Signet rings and seals xxi: Communications xxii: Peace and rebellion xxiii: Punishments and execution Epilogue: Visualising Esther in the post-Persian world (5,000 words)
Der Griechenland-Feldzug des persischen Großkönigs Xerxes I. ist bislang nicht aus einer konsequent östlichen Perspektive untersucht worden. Die Inschrift des Xerxes aus Persepolis XPl bietet methodisch dafür eine Grundlage als Leitfaden einer achaimenidischen Programmatik. Die Neubewertung des Griechenlandfeldzuges anhand dieser Inschrift ist weder ein Korrektiv der bestehenden Forschung noch ein Versuch, den Feldzug ereignis- oder militärgeschichtlich umfänglich zu rekonstruieren. Vielmehr nutzt Hilmar Klinkott sie als Schlüssel für das Verständnis ganz anderer, großköniglicher Akzente, Zielsetzungen und Bewertungen, die damit auch das Gesamtbild des Feldzuges prägen. Denn anders als aus griechischer Sicht war das Unternehmen für Xerxes unter gewissen Aspekten durchaus ein Erfolg.
Documents open up another an approach complementary to the overwhelming richness of literary tradition as preserved in manuscripts. This volume combines studies on Greek, Sogdian and Arabic documents (letters, legal agreements, and amulets) with studies on Arabic and Judeo-Arabic manuscripts (poetry, science and divination).
From the website
Following article in the volume is of particular interest to scholars of Sogdian:
While the typology, syntax, and morphology of Iranian languages have been widely explored, the sociolinguistic aspects remain largely understudied. The present companion addresses this essential yet overlooked area of research in two ways: (i) The book explores multilingualism within Iran and its neighbouring countries. (ii) It also investigates Iranian heritage languages within the diasporic context of the West.
The scope of languages covered is vast: In addition to discussing Iranian minority languages such as Tati and Balochi, the book explores non-Iranian minority languages such as Azeri, Tukmen, Armenian and Mandaic. Furthermore, the companion investigates Iranian heritage languages such as Wakhi, Pashto, and Persian within their diasporic and global contexts.
This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
In this book, Monika Amsler explores the historical contexts in which the Babylonian Talmud was formed in an effort to determine whether it was the result of oral transmission. Scholars have posited that the rulings and stories we find in the Talmud were passed on from one generation to the next, each generation adding their opinions and interpretations of a given subject. Yet such an oral formation process is unheard of in late antiquity. Moreover, the model exoticizes the Talmud and disregards the intellectual world of Sassanid Persia. Rather than taking the Talmud’s discursive structure as a sign for orality, Amsler interrogates the intellectual and material prerequisites of composers of such complex works, and their education and methods of large-scale data management. She also traces and highlights the marks that their working methods inevitably left in the text. Detailing how intellectual innovation was generated, Amsler’s book also sheds new light on the content of the Talmud.
Panaino, Antonio, Andrea Piras and Paolo Ognibene (eds). 2023. Studi iranici ravennati IV (Indo-iranica et orientalia, Lazur 25). Milan: Mimesis.
This volume collects a number of scientific articles dealing with history, linguistics, philology, archaeology, ethnology and anthropology of the ancient and modern Iranian peoples.
Khotanese, a language belonging to the Iranian branch of Indo-European, which was spoken in the first millennium CE, has a rich literature including the Book of Zambasta, a poetic exposition of Mahāyāna Buddhism in 24 chapters. This poem makes use of three metres, whose nature has been a matter of controversy for more than a century. While its first editor, Ernst Leumann (1859–1931), regarded Khotanese metre as essentially quantitative (moraic) and derived it from a Proto-Indo-European metrical system supposedly reflected also in the Greek hexameter and the Middle High German Nibelungenlied, other scholars have understood it in very different ways: as a purely stress-based metre related to that of poetry in some other Iranian languages; as an adaptation of Indian metrics; or as representing a transitional stage from a quantitative to a stress-based system. The present work offers a closely-argued new analysis, demonstrating that the metre is indeed based on the quantitative (moraic) principle, but with an obligatory ictus in the cadences which leads to the systematic lightening of certain unstressed syllables. The results shed light on the equally controversial issue of Khotanese accentuation and many other aspects of the language and its history. The book includes the complete text of the poem with interlinear scansion. Additional fully searchable text-files available online make it possible for any reader to check the arguments and results.
