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The Sin of the Woman

Sadeghi, Fatemeh. 2020. The Sin of the Woman: Interrelations of Religious Judgments in Zoroastrianism and Islam (Islamkundliche Untersuchungen, 336). Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag.

Since the 1920s, the so-called “return to the roots”, has become a hegemonic discourse in Iran. Whereas the Pahlavi regimes (1925–1979) propagated the myth of the lost idyll of pre-Islamic Iran representing themselves as the true inheritors of those monarchies, the Islamists adopted a respective approach in regard to Islam. As a result, a similar fairytale was made about the early Islamic community. Such claims, as it were, are not so much about the past as they are about the present. So is this study. By delving into the past, it questions the widespread nostalgic notions considering the pre-Islamic era as a lost utopia, wherein women were free from the restrictions “imposed by Islam”. In point of fact such past is a fabrication. In the majority of cases, therefore, the revival projects invent traditions to legitimize current political agendas.

Table of Contents:

A Note on Persian and Arabic Transliteration and Translation
Preface
Introduction
Chapter I:
Women in the Sasanian Zoroastrianism
Chapter II:
Zoroastrian Dadestan: From Sasanian Era to Islam
Chapter III:
Purification
Chapter IV:
Islam and Menstruation
Chapter V:
Sexual Relations in Zoroastrianism and Islam
Epilogue
Bibliography
Glossary

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The Zoroastrian Vision, Straight in the Eyes

Azarnouche, Samra & Olivia Ramble. 2020. La Vision zoroastrienne, les yeux dans les yeux Commentaire sur la Dēn selon Dēnkard III.225. Revue de l’his toire des reli gions 237(3). 331–395.

Sassanian Seal MOT 6.1, Collection M. I. Mochiri, after Gnoli 1993: 80.

In the Zoroastrian tradition, the Dēn (Avestan daēnā “vision”) is a polysemic notion that denotes either an auroral psychopompic deity, or the religious doctrine, or again the sacred word of the Avesta. Passage 225 of the Dēnkard III, commented here for the first time, combines these different concepts, thereby not only bringing direct proof for the continuity of the word’s original meaning—“vision”—between the Avestan textual layer and the Middle Persian (Pahlavi) exegetic layer, but also testifying to the development of metaphysical speculation (with a neo-platonic backdrop) concerning the transcendental vision acquired by the magi. Material sources (iconographic as well as epigraphic) also contribute to highlighting the notion that the Dēn is the divine entity that one looks at straight in the eyes.

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Imperial Celebrations of 1971

Steele, Robert. 2020. The Shah’s imperial celebrations of 1971: Nationalism, culture and politics in late Pahlavi Iran. London: I.B. Tauris.

In October 1971 Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, held a celebration to commemorate the 2500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great. Dozens of heads of state descended on Persepolis for these Celebrations, where they were regaled to sumptuous banquets and entertainment. Critical journalists in Western Europe and North America lambasted the Shah for holding such a decadent event while many of his people lived in poverty. Due to the overwhelmingly negative press at the time, the event is still today widely remembered as a catastrophic failure.It is even said by many to have sparked the unrest that eventually led to the revolution and the Shah’s downfall in 1979.
In this first comprehensive academic study of the 2500th Anniversary Celebrations, Robert Steele looks beyond the pomp and splendour to examine the events’ origins, the goals the organisers set out to achieve with them and the extent to which these goals were accomplished. The book seeks to place the Celebrations in the context of the Shah’s rise, rather than his fall, uncovering the unparalleled international cultural and scholarly operation that was spurred by the Iranian regime for the occasion, exploring the effects the event had on Iran’s tourism industry and questioning narratives of the event’s cost.

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Egyptian objects from the Achaemenid period in Iran

Qahéri, Sépideh. 2020. Objets égyptiens et égyptianisants d’époque achéménide conservés en Iran (Persika, 20). Leuven: Peeters.

Par son rayonnement politico-économique, l’Égypte saïte constitue le plus grand pouvoir des royaumes méditerranéens des 7e-6e siècles av. J.-C. et une source d’inspiration dans la composition multiethnique de l’Empire achéménide. Au-delà des sources écrites, notre compréhension de la réelle position de l’Égypte dans le développement culturel du pouvoir perse est notamment tributaire de l’étude approfondie des témoignages archéologiques révélant l’activité ou l’installation des communautés égyptiennes au centre de l’Empire. Les anciennes fouilles menées dans les principales capitales achéménides (en Perse et Élam) ont mis au jour d’importants vestiges, qui demeuraient jusqu’à ce jour peu connus, voire ignorés pour certains. Les objets égyptiens et égyptianisants issus de ces sites appartiennent majoritairement au contexte royal et attestent l’appropriation des modèles pharaoniques dans la conception de la culture palatiale perse. Ils confirment en somme la contribution de divers corps de métiers égyptiens au fonctionnement de la vie de cour des Grands Rois mais aussi à l’essor architectural de leurs résidences. Le présent catalogue réunit pour la première fois une partie de ces découvertes: celles réparties dans les collections iraniennes. Il offre ainsi une source de référence pour de futures recherches sur les aegyptiaca de Perse conservés à l’extérieur de l’Iran mais aussi pour toutes les études portant sur les relations égypto-perses sous l’Empire achéménide.

La première partie de cet ouvrage est consacrée à la présentation des principaux sites archéologiques d’où proviennent les objets étudiés et à l’historique des fouilles. Dans une deuxième partie les données textuelles connues sur la présence égyptienne en Perse sont décrites. La troisième partie aborde les principaux musées iraniens conservant les pièces égyptiennes et égyptianisantes. Le catalogue des objets représente la quatrième et la plus grande partie du volume et propose un classement raisonné des découvertes sous quatre groupes typologiques.

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The Edict of Cyrus and Notions of Restoration in Ezra-Nehemiah and Chronicles

Gilhooley, Andrew M. 2020. The edict of Cyrus and notions of restoration in Ezra-Nehemiah and chronicles. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press.

The Edict of Cyrus, both opening Ezra-Nehemiah (Ezra 1:1-4) and closing Chronicles (2 Chron. 36:22-23), serves a different role in each book. In Ezra–Nehemiah, it is a command resulting in a restoration event that has failed, whereas in Chronicles it is a command anticipating a successful future restoration event. In the context of canon, these different uses of the edict are theologically significant, especially in formulating ideas of hope for the future in Chronicles.

While Chronicles is aware that a historical restoration transpired sometime in the past (1 Chron. 3:19-24; 9:2-44), it shares the sentiment of Ezra–Nehemiah, that the return was something of a failure. Through compositional analysis, Gilhooley argues that the edict closing Chronicles portrays the true, or rather, complete restoration not as a past event to be reflected upon but rather one to be anticipated sometime in the future—at a time when Israel was expected to see the establishment of a new glorified temple, political independence, release from servitude, and the blessings of new creation and of new cultic order.

Reading Chronicles as the last book of the Old Testament in accordance with various Jewish witnesses, we find that the edict is transformed into a programmatic conclusion to the canon. Accordingly, the eschatological return to Zion and reconstruction of the temple appear to be dominating concerns of the canonical editors. These verses that bring to an end both Chronicles and the Old Testament as a whole may also be read in dialogue with canon-conscious structural markers elsewhere and, therefore, could be formative in constructing a canonical theology.

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Jews and Syriac Christians

Butts, Aaron Michael & Simcha Gross (eds.). 2020. Jews and Syriac Christians: Intersections across the first millennium (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 180). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Der vorliegende Band enthält sechzehn Studien, die ein breites Spektrum an Themen untersuchen – von Fragen zum
Ursprung bis zur Entwicklung kommunaler Grenzen, von zwischenmenschlichen Interaktionen bis zu gemeinsamen
historischen Bedingungen, die Juden und syrische Christen im ersten Jahrtausend n. Chr. betraf.

Mohr Siebeck

The publisher offers links to a flyer and a table of contents. ~AZ

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Iranian Studies in Honour of Adriano V. Rossi

Badalkhan, Sabir, Gian Pietro Basello and Matteo de Chiara (eds.). 2019. Iranian studies in honour of Adriano V. Rossi. Napoli: UniorPress.

Iranian Studies in Honour of Adriano V. Rossi collects more than fifty essays by foremost scholars and young researchers from South Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the USA. The topics range from Iranian philology and linguistics to history and archaeology. This two-part Festschrift is offered to Adriano V. Rossi by the Department of Asian, African and Mediterranean Studies of “L’Orientale” University of Naples (Italy) and is introduced with a foreword by Elda Morlicchio (Rector) and Michele Bernardini (Head of the Depart ment).

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Societies at War

Ruffing, Kai, Kerstin Dross-Krüpe, Sebastian Fink & Robert Rollinger (Eds.). 2020. Societies at war: Proceedings of the 10th symposium of the Melammu project held in Kassel September 26-28 2016 & Proceedings of the 8th symposium of the Melammu project held in Kiel November 11-15 2014 (MELAMMU, 10). Vienna: Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

War and war-related issues have attracted an increasing attention within current historical and archaeological research, not least in response to recent global political events. Another reason for this growing interest is probably a general trend towards Modern Military History that has drawn academic attention to war-related issues through all cultures and epochs, going beyond Clausewitz’s argument of war as a continuation of politics by other means. The present vol-ume is committed to this broad approach by examining and comparing phenomena related to ancient warfare from the perspective of Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Classical Studies. Due to unforeseeable circumstances, which prevented the organizers from editing their own proceedings, some papers of the 8th Symposium of the Melammu Project, held at Kiel on the subject “Iranian Worlds”, have been added to this volume in their own section.

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Dynastic Deeds

Poggio, Alessandro. 2020. Dynastic Deeds: Hunt scenes in the funerary imagery of the Achaemenid Eastern Mediterranean. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports.

This study adopts a transregional approach that focuses on connectivity dynamics in order to present a wider picture of artistic, cultural and political phenomena in the Mediterranean. It examines dynastic funerary art at the end of the fifth century and in the fourth century BC by focusing – through a wide range of evidence – on what funerary images can reveal about the societies that produced them. It analyses renowned dynastic tombs from south-western Anatolia (present-day Turkey) such as the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus and the Nereid Monument of Xanthos, but also from Phoenicia (present-day Lebanon). A common element among the similarities displayed by these tombs is the nearly constant presence of the multiple-quarry hunt iconography, which consists of prey from different species depicted in one figurative programme. The Eastern Mediterranean under Persian Achaemenid rule is portrayed as an interconnected cultural and political area with specific features instead of merely being an area between the Greek and Persian worlds. << Less

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Moses and Garšāsp

Ehsani Chombeli, Azadeh. 2020. Moses and Garšāsp, Ardašīr and Herod: Narratives of the Babylonian Talmud in their Iranian context (Zoroastrian Studies Series 5). Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers.

This book offers a comparative study between a number of Talmudic and Middle Persian narratives. The present work seeks first and foremost to examine Talmudic narratives in their Iranian context, and secondly to examine the Talmudic background of Iranian narratives where applicable.
The first and second chapters will offer an analysis of the alteration of historical and Biblical figures in the Bavli (the Babylonian Talmud) based on the influence of Iranian mythical and historical figures, while the third chapter will provide an account of how Iranists can learn from Talmudic studies. Here we suggest that a Talmudic narrative may have encouraged Zoroastrian priests to compose an extensive work of religious literature, namely the Ardā Wīrāz-nāmag, an idea which will be further explored in the appendix.

Azadeh Ehsani has a PhD in religion from Concordia University in Montreal, Canada (2018) and an MA in ancient languages and culture of Iran with a focus on Middle Persian (Pahlavi) from Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies University in Tehran, Iran (2005).