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Pottery Making and Communities During the 5th Millennium BCE in Fars

Miki, Takehiro. 2022. Pottery making and communities during the 5th millennium BCE in Fars province, Southwestern Iran. Oxford: Archaeopress.

This book explores pottery making and communities during the Bakun period (c. 5000 – 4000 BCE) in the Kur River Basin, Fars province, southwestern Iran, through the analysis of ceramic materials collected at Tall-e Jari A, Tall-e Gap, and Tall-e Bakun A & B. Firstly, it reconsiders the stratigraphy and radiocarbon dates of the four sites by reviewing the descriptions of excavation trenches, then presents a new chronological relationship between the sites. The book sets out diachronic changes in the the Bakun pottery quantitatively, namely the increase of black-on-buff ware and the gradual shift of vessel forms. It also presents analyses of pottery-making techniques, painting skills, petrography, and geochemistry and clarifies minor changes in the chaînes opératoires and major changes in painting skill. Finally, the book discusses the organisation of pottery production from a relational perspective. It concludes that the more fixed community of pottery making imposed longer apprenticeship periods and that social inequality also increased.

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A History of Alexander the Great in World Culture

Stoneman, Richard (ed.). 2022. A history of Alexander the Great in world culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Alexander III of Macedon (356-323 BC) has for over 2000 years been one of the best recognized names from antiquity. He set about creating his own legend in his lifetime, and subsequent writers and political actors developed it. He acquired the surname ‘Great’ by the Roman period, and the Alexander Romance transmitted his legendary biography to every language of medieval Europe and the Middle East. As well as an adventurer who sought the secret of immortality and discussed the purpose of life with the naked sages of India, he became a model for military achievement as well as a religious prophet bringing Christianity (in the Crusades) and Islam (in the Qur’an and beyond) to the regions he conquered. This innovative and fascinating volume explores these and many other facets of his reception in various cultures around the world, right up to the present and his role in gay activism.

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Narrating power and authority in late antique and medieval hagiography

Dabiri, Ghazzal (ed.). 2021. Narrating power and authority in late antique and medieval hagiography across East and West. Turnhout: Brepols.

This collection of essays explores the multifaceted representation of power and authority in a variety of late antique and medieval hagiographical narratives (Lives, Martyr Acts, oneiric and miraculous accounts). The narratives under analysis, written in some of the major languages of the Islamicate world and the Christian East and Christian West — Arabic, Armenian, Georgian, Greek, Latin, Middle Persian, Ottoman Turkish, and Persian — prominently feature a diverse range of historical and fictional figures from a wide cross-section of society — from female lay saints in Italy and Zoroastrians in Sasanian and Islamic Iran to apostles and bishops and emperors and caliphs. Each chapter investigates how power and authority were narrated from above (courts/saints) and below (saints/laity) and, by extension, navigated in various communities. As each chapter delves into the specific literary and social scene of a particular time, place, or hagiographer, the volume as a whole offers a broad view; it brings to the fore important shared literary and social historical aspects such as the possible itineraries of popular narratives and motifs across Eurasia and commonly held notions in the religio-political thought worlds of hagiographers and their communities. Through close readings and varied analyses, this collection contributes to the burgeoning interest in reading hagiography as literature while it offers new perspectives on the social and religious history of late antique and medieval communities.

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Sasanian Studies: Late Antique Iranian World

Farridnejad, Shervin & Touraj Daryaee (eds.). 2022. Sasanian studies: Late antique Iranian world | Sasanidische Studien: Spätantike iranische Welt. Vol. 1. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag.

The first issue of the Sasanian Studies: Late Antique Iranian World is now published. The Sasanian Studies is a refereed journal that publishes papers on any aspect of the Sasanian Empire and ist neighboring late antiquity civilizations. The journal welcomes essays on archaeology, art history, epigraphy, history, numismatics, religion and any other disciplines which focuses on the Sasanian world. This annual publication focuses especially on recent discoveries in the field, historiographical studies, as well as editions and translations of texts and inscriptions. We aim to facilitate dialogue and contact among scholars of Sasanian Studies around the world.

Table of Contents (PDF):

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Faster than the Arrow of Ārash: the Long Journey of the Narratives in Iran

Norozi, Nahid (ed.). 2021. Come la freccia di Ārash: il lungo viaggio della narrazione in Iran : forme e motivi dalle origini all’epoca contemporanea (atti del V CoBIran, 22-23 ottobre 2020) (Indo-iranica et orientalia). Milano: Mimesis Edizioni.

The narrative in the multi-millennial Iranian culture has taken many forms in prose and verse and, just as the famous arrow of the Iranian hero-archer Ārash – which according to the myth covered an unusual space flying from the Alborz mountains south of the Caspian Sea to Marv in Central Asia – comes to us miraculously traveling beyond all boundaries in space and time, because the word is “faster in traveling than the arrow of Ārash”. The present volume contains the articles, presented at the “V Convegno Bolognese diIranistica (V CoBIran)” dedicated to “Forms and motives of narration in Iran, from the origins to the contemporary era”.

Table of Contents

1. Aliasghar Mohammadkhani: “Excursus sulla narratologia in Iran”

2. Antonio Clemente Domenico Panaino: “Ǝrəxša’s Death or Self-sacrifice: The Ancient Iranian Saga of the Archer”

3. Ezio Albrile: “Guerre tra Angeli e Demoni. Le origini dello gnosticismo tra Babilonia e Iran”

4. Paolo Ognibene: “L’iscrizione di Dario a Bīsutūn: al di l. dell’interpretazione storico-filologica”

5. Andrea Piras: “La luna di Mani e la luna di al-Moqannaʿ: miracoli carismatici e loro usi politici”

6. Gianfilippo Terribili: “Fabbricazione storiografica e definizione identitaria. La genesi della malvagia religione secondo i teologi zoroastriani (DkIII 227, 229, 288)”

7. Matteo Compareti: “Tipologie eroiche nell’arte narrativa sogdiana e nell’epica persiana: il caso di Rustam e di Isfandyār”

8. Simone Cristoforetti: “La storia del villaggio distrutto e poi riedificato nello Shāhnāma: un brano di polemistica antimazdakita?”

9. Francesco Omar Zamboni: ‘”Avicenna e l’allegoria filosofica – “Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān”’

10. Nahid Norozi: “Il “Vis e Rāmin” di Gorgāni e il “Bahman-nāme” di Irānshāh: aspetti intertestuali anche in relazione con il “Khosrow e Shirin” di Neẓāmi”

11. Carlo Saccone: “Forme della narrazione dell’Altro nelle lettere persiane, da Ferdowsi a Sa‘di e Nasimi”

12. Hasan Zolfagari: “Analisi narratologica del racconto “La Fata Verde e la Fata Gialla”

13. Fabio Tiddia: “Il motivo “qalandar” nella letteratura mistica persiana”

14. Maurizio Silvio Pistoso: “Guerre del Golfo in salsa safavide. I poemetti persiani dell’enigmatico “Qadri”

15. Stefano Pellò: “Atmosfere indo-persiane: cumulonembi, bolle e avatāra monsonici in Mīrzā ‘Abd al-Qādir Bīdil (1644-1720) e nella sua scuola”

16. Bianca Maria Filippini: “La “spaventosa Tehr.n”: alcune riflessioni sulla rappresentazione della citt. come metafora delle derive della modernit. in Iran”

17. Adone Brandalise: “Sguardo e narrazione nel cinema iraniano”

18. Faezeh Mardani: “Recente letteratura persiana sulla “guerra imposta” con particolare riferimento a tre romanzi tradotti in italiano”

19. Anna Vanzan: “La fortuna di un testo. In margine alle traduzioni de Il Pesciolino Nero di Samad Behrangi”

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Individuals and Institutions in the Ancient Near East

Gabbay, Uri & Shai Gordin (eds.). 2021. Individuals and Institutions in the Ancient Near East: A Tribute to Ran Zadok (Studies in Ancient Near Eastern Records 27). Berlin: De Gruyter.

This volume honors Ran Zadok’s work by focusing on his sustained interest in Mesopotamian social history. It brings together a rich array of scholarship on ancient names, deities, individuals, and institutions, from Persepolis to the Levant. Building on Zadok’s intellectual concerns, this book includes contributions that expand our understanding of the diverse tapestry of the peoples who inhabited the Ancient Near East.

Among the other interesting contributions, those in the first section of the volume (“The Persian Period”) stand in the discipline of studies related to the history of ancient Iran:

  • Matthew W. Stolper: Numbered Tablets in the Persepolis Fortification Archive
  • Caroline Waerzeggers: The Day Before Cyrus Entered Babylon
  • Stefan Zawadzki: Contribution to the Persian Nobility in Babylonia

See the full table of contents in publisher’s website.

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Iranianate and Syriac Christianity

Barbati, Chiara & Vittorio Berti (eds.). 2021. Iranianate and Syriac Christianity (5th‒11th Centuries) in late antiquity and the early Islamic period (Veröffentlichungen zur Iranistik 87). Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

It is by now widely acknowledged that between late antiquity and the first centuries of Islam, Syriac-speaking Christian communities were more than just scattered minority communities with little impact in geographical areas strongly shaped by the Iranian element. “Iranianate and Syriac Christianity” bridges across different specialized disciplines, first and foremost Iranian Studies and Syriac Studies and the History of Christianity, and assembles a range of authoritative voices on the subject. The 14 contributions are arranged in two sections: Mission, Conversion and Power and Languages, Texts and Concepts, representing a wide range of approaches and reflecting the complexity of the religious, political and cultural history of the Christian communities in the Eurasian area up to the year 1000 and beyond.

Abstract from the website
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Aspects of the memory of the Persian Wars

Proietti, Giorgia. 2021. Prima di Erodoto: Aspetti della memoria delle Guerre persiane (Hermes 120). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

This book concerns the memory of the Persian Wars in Athens, in relation to the Panhellenic scenario, from the immediate post Marathon to the so-called ‘First Peloponnesian War’ (461–446). It analyzes all the pre-historiographic forms of memory (poetry, inscriptions, monuments, topography, theater, rites, cults, festivals, public discourse) through which the Persian Wars were remembered and represented before Herodotus told them in historiographic form.

Filling a gap in current research, the book starts from the awareness that the Persian Wars as told in the Stories of Herodotus do not exactly correspond to factual history, but are instead the result of a multiform and stratified process of memorialization, which decade after decade has reshaped events in the light of present needs. Combining a philological approach to literary, epigraphic and archaeological documentation with a theoretical and methodological landscape influenced by cultural anthropology and memory studies, it reconstructs the images and meanings associated with each layer of this process, thus offering a sort of stratigraphy of the memory of the Persian Wars before Herodotus.

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Handbook of Ancient Afro-Eurasian Economies

Reden, Sitta von (ed.). 2021. Handbook of ancient Afro-Eurasian economies. Volume 2: Local, Regional, and Imperial Economies. Berlin: De Gruyter.

The second volume of the Handbook describes different extractive economies in the world regions that have been outlined in the first volume. A wide range of economic actors – from kings and armies to cities and producers – are discussed within different imperial settings as well as the tools, which enabled and constrained economic outcomes. A central focus are nodes of consumption that are visible in the archaeological and textual records of royal capitals, cities, religious centers, and armies that were stationed, in some cases permanently, in imperial frontier zones. Complementary to the multipolar concentrations of consumption are the fiscal-tributary structures of the empires vis-à-vis other institutions that had the capacity to extract, mobilize, and concentrate resources and wealth. Larger volumes of state-issued coinage in various metals show the new role of coinage in taxation, local economic activities, and social practices, even where textual evidence is absent. Given the overwhelming importance of agriculture, the volume also analyses forms of agrarian development, especially around cities and in imperial frontier zones. Special consideration is given to road- and water-management systems for which there is now sufficient archaeological and documentary evidence to enable cross-disciplinary comparative research.

This is an open-access volume. For information on the first volume, see here.

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The Persian revival

Grigor, Talinn. 2021. The Persian revival: The imperialism of the copy in Iranian and Parsi architecture. University Park, PA : Penn State University Press.

One of the most heated scholarly controversies of the early twentieth century, the Orient-or-Rome debate turned on whether art historians should trace the origin of all Western—and especially Gothic—architecture to Roman ingenuity or to the Indo-Germanic Geist. Focusing on the discourses around this debate, Talinn Grigor considers the Persian Revival movement in light of imperial strategies of power and identity in British India and in Qajar-Pahlavi Iran.

The Persian Revival examines Europe’s discovery of ancient Iran, first in literature and then in art history. Tracing Western visual discourse about ancient Iran from 1699 on, Grigor parses the invention and use of a revivalist architectural style from the Afsharid and Zand successors to the Safavid throne and the rise of the Parsi industrialists as cosmopolitan subjects of British India. Drawing on a wide range of Persian revival narratives bound to architectural history, Grigor foregrounds the complexities and magnitude of artistic appropriations of Western art history in order to grapple with colonial ambivalence and imperial aspirations. She argues that while Western imperialism was instrumental in shaping high art as mercantile-bourgeois ethos, it was also a project that destabilized the hegemony of a Eurocentric historiography of taste.

An important reconsideration of the Persian Revival, this book will be of vital interest to art and architectural historians and intellectual historians, particularly those working in the areas of international modernism, Iranian studies, and historiography.

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