Tag: Achaemenid Empire

Joannès, Francis. 2022. La chute de Babylone: 12 octobre 539 avant notre ere. Paris: Fallandier.

Le 12 octobre 539 avant notre ère, l’antique et splendide ville de Babylone tombe aux mains du roi perse Cyrus le Grand en à peine une nuit. Capitale déchue d’un empire qui s’étendait des rives de l’Euphrate à la Méditerranée et des monts du Taurus aux confins de l’Arabie, Babylone va devenir une cité de second rang pour le restant de son histoire.

Le nom et la localisation de Babylone, cité vieille de 4 000 ans, sont universellement connus. Mais qu’en est-il des événements souvent dramatiques qui jalonnent son histoire ? Sait-on que son magnifique empire n’était qu’un colosse aux pieds d’argile ? Et que le roi Nabonide, dernier souverain du pays « entre les fleuves », s’est révélé l’antithèse de son prédécesseur, le grand Nabuchodonosor ? Usurpateur, conquérant perdu dans les sables de l’Arabie, partisan du dieu de la Lune au détriment de Bêl-Marduk, le roi des dieux, chef du panthéon babylonien, Nabonide n’a sans doute pas bénéficié du soutien inconditionnel de ses sujets.

Francis Joannès, spécialiste de l’histoire de la Mésopotamie antique, mène l’enquête pour dénouer les fils de l’effondrement soudain de Babylone. Ce faisant, il nous décrit toute une civilisation, sa géographie, sa société et sa culture. Il fait revivre le roi Nabonide lui-même, tout comme ses sujets, notables urbains, hommes d’affaires, esclaves domestiques ou simples travailleurs au service des grands temples.

Degen, Julian. 2022. Alexander III. zwischen Ost und West: Indigene Traditionen und Herrschaftsinszenierung im makedonischen Weltimperium (Oriens et Occidens 39). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.

Die Faszination an Alexander III. (dem Großen) ist nach wie vor ungebrochen, obwohl mittlerweile zahlreiche biographische Darstellungen vorliegen. Ein kaum berücksichtigter Aspekt seiner Herrschaft ist das von ihm geschaffene Imperium, das sich über Makedonien, Griechenland und einen Großteil des Achaimenidenreichs erstreckte. Um das größte Imperium seiner Zeit zu schaffen, musste Alexander nicht nur auf dem Schlachtfeld erfolgreich sein, sondern sich gegenüber lokalen Vorstellungen von legitimer Herrschaft positionieren.

Julian Degen analysiert ein vielschichtiges und heterogenes Quellencorpus, das nicht nur aus der griechisch-römischen Alexanderhistoriographie besteht, sondern auch griechische Inschriften und altorientalische Texte umfasst. Durch die Einordnung dieser bislang vernachlässigten Quellen in den größeren Kontext des Imperiumsdiskurses des ersten vorchristlichen Jahrtausends kann Degen die teilweise nur schwer verständlichen Handlungen und Praktiken Alexanders vor neuen Hintergründen interpretieren. So betrachtet er Alexander nicht mehr als historisches “Einzelphänomen”, sondern stellt seine Herrschaft in den großen Zusammenhang imperialer Herrschaft, die durch ihn wesentlich dynamisiert und transformiert wurde.

Folmer, Margaretha (ed.). 2022. Elephantine revisited: New insights into the Judean community and its neighbors. Pennsylvania: Eisenbrauns.

The Judean community at Elephantine has long fascinated historians of the Persian period. This book, with its stellar assemblage of important scholarly voices, provides substantive new insights and approaches that will advance the study of this well-known but not entirely understood community from fifth-century BCE Egypt.

Since Bezalel Porten’s pioneering Archives from Elephantine, published in 1968, the discourse on the subject of the community of Elephantine during the Persian period has changed considerably, due to new data from excavations, the discovery and publication of previously unknown texts, and original scholarly insights and avenues of inquiry. Running the gamut from archaeological to linguistic investigations and encompassing legal, literary, religious, and other aspects of life in this Judean community, this volume stands at a crossroads of research that extends from Hebrew Bible studies to the history of early Jewish communities. It also features fourteen new Aramaic ostraca from Aswan. The volume will appeal to students and scholars of the Hebrew Bible and ancient Judaism, as well as to a wider audience of Egyptologists, Semitists, and specialists in ancient Near Eastern studies.

Kratz, Reinhard G & Bernd U. Schipper (eds.). 2022. Elephantine in Context: Studies on the History, Religion and Literature of the Judeans in Persian Period Egypt (Forschungen zum Alten Testament, 155). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

The Persian period has long been considered a »dark era« in Israel’s history. For this reason, research has mainly focused on how it is depicted in the Hebrew Bible. A spectacular discovery of archaeological relics and epigraphic sources was hence hardly noticed: the military colony located on the island of Elephantine in the Nile, on the border between Egypt and present-day Sudan. The basic approach of this volume, which documents a three-year Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft project, is to break with a research tradition focusing on the Judeans (Jews) mentioned in the Aramaic papyri from Elephantine and instead investigate the military colony in a broader historical context also documented by Demotic and Egyptian-hieratic evidence found at Elephantine. The studies presented focus on three main subject areas: society and administration, religion, and literature. They show that historically the island of Elephantine hosted a multicultural society with several interactions between the Egyptians and the other inhabitants, and that it was also an important administrative centre for the Persian authorities.

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.

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.