Rezakhani, Khodadad. 2016. The present in the mind’s past: Imagining the ancients in the Iranian popularization of pre-Islamic history. In Sonja Brentjes, Taner Edis & Lutz Richter-Bernburg (eds.), 1001 distortions. How (not) to narrate history of science, medicine, and technology in non-Western cultures (Bibliotheca Academica – Reihe Orientalistik 25), 97–106. Herausgeber: Würzburg: Ergon.
Did disability ever exist in ancient Persia? This provocative question is justified by the scarcity of the documentary evidence the historians face when dealing with the pre-Islamic societies of the Iranian world. As a matter of fact, the tradition of theses populations have always been pre-eminently oral. The rock inscription of Darius I at Behistun, which represents the first text written in the Old Persian language, was only composed in the 6th century BCE, when the nearby Mesopotamian world could boast a diverse textual tradition dating back three millennia. […] Given the nature of the evidence, it is easy to feel discouraged about the possibility of having a clear and definite picture of the condition of the disabled in the Persian world. Nevertheless, we can try to explore the issue by surveying the available documents and comparing and contrasting them with external evidence from the classical world.
Omar Coloru, is an associate member of the laboratory ArScAN HAROC (Nanterre). His main research interests include Hellenistic history, history of Iran and pre-Islamic Central Asia, and the relations between the Greco-Roman and the Iranian worlds.
Table of contents:
Patricia Crone: “Pre-existence in Iran: “Zoroastrians, ex-Christians Mu‘tazilites, and Jews on the human acquisition of bodies”
Oktor Skjærvø & Yaakov Elman: “Concepts of pollution in late Sasanian Iran. Does pollution need stairs, and dose it fill space?”
Maria Macuch: “The case against Mār Abā, the Catholicos, in the light of Sasanian law”
Sara Kuehn: “The dragon fighter: The influence of Zoroastrian ideas on Judaeo-Christian and Islamic iconography”
Geoffrey Herman: “Like a slave before his master: A Persian gesture of deference in Sasanian, Jewish, and Christian sources”
Michał Gawlikowski: “Zoroastrian echoes in the Mithraeum at Hawarte, Syria”
Vicente Dobroruka: “Zoroastrian apocalyptic and Hellenistic political propaganda”
Dan D.Y. Shapira: “Pahlavi Fire, Bundahishn 18”
Matteo Compareti: “The representation of Zoroastrian divinities in late Sasanian art and their description according to Avestan literature”
Bahman Moradian: “The day of Mihr, the month of Mihr and the ceremony of Mihrized in Yazd”
Ezio Albrile: “Hypnotica Iranica: Zoroastrian ecstasy in the West”
Andrew D. Magnusson: “On the origins of the prophet Muhammad’s charter to the family of Salman Al-Farisi”
Predrag Bukovec: “The soul’s judgement in Mandaeism: Iranian influences on Mandaean afterlife”
Daphna Arbel: “On human’s elevation, hubris, and fall from glory. Traditions of Yima/Jamshid and Enochmetatron – an indirect cultural dialogue?”
Vicente Dobroruka: “The order of metals in Daniel 2 and in Persian apocalyptic”
Myriam Wissa: “Pre-Islamic topos in Dhu’l-Nūn Al-Misrī’s teaching: A re-assessment of the Egyptian roots of the knowledge of the name of god and their interaction with Zoroastrianism in the Achaemenid period ”
David H. Sick: “The choice of Xerxes: A Zoroastrian interpretation of Herodotus 7.12-18”
Seleukid Royal Women is introduced by our guest contributor Khodadad Rezakhani, a Humboldt Fellow at the Institute of Iranian Studies, Free University of Berlin.
Coskun, Altay & Alex McAuley (eds.). 2016. Seleukid royal women: Creation, representation and distortion of Hellenistic queenship in the Seleukid Empire (Historia, Einzelschriften 240). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Khodadad writes:
‘The study of any period of ancient history of Iran away from political history is a welcomed change in scholarship. The arrival of this volume, edited by two of the most prominent scholars of the Hellenistic period and in a framing that embraces the multi-cultural nature of the Seleukid kingship is a most exciting development that needs to be celebrated. It should also be considered as a blue-print for future studies of similar calibre and scope in other periods of the history of the region. Hopefully, the proliferation of such studies would bring the history of “in-between” (to quote the prologue) more to the attention of the general audiences, as well as the scholars, of the ancient world. Perhaps the volume could have benefited from more in-depth studies of the majority of the (non-Greek speaking) areas of the Seleukid domains, a lacuna which is perhaps more a fault of the experts of these non-Greek speaking in-betweens than the erudite editors of the volume’.
Redard, Céline (ed.). 2016. Des contrées avestiques à Mahabad, via Bisotun. Etudes offertes en hommage à Pierre Lecoq. (Civilisations Du Proche-Orient Série III. Religion et Culture 2). Paris: Recherches et Publications.
Kellens, Jean. 2015. Les origines du dualisme mazdéen. In Jourdan Fabienne & Anca Vasiliu (eds.), Dualismes: Doctrines religieuses et traditions philosophiques (χώρα Hors-série/2015), 21–29.
The discussions about the origin of mazdean dualism are concentrated upon the interpretation of the Gathic stanza Y30.3 which opposes two mental powers called mainiiu and usually translated by «spirit». The divergence of the understandings led to a controversy on the nature of this dualistic opposition : is it philosophical, cosmic or religious? Do these various distinctions remain relevant now we know that this stanza is not a piece of a sermon, but of a liturgical recitative?
Matthew Canepa, University of Minnesota (Minneapolis), will deliver a series of four lectures at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris.
Anabasis. Studia Classica et Orientalia vol. 6 (2015).
The sixth issue of ANABASIS: Studia Classica et Orientalia is published by department of Ancient History and Oriental Studies, Institute of History at Rzeszów University.
A panel discussion in Persian
Panelists:
Touraj Daryaee, University of California, Irvine
Hossein Kamaly, Columbia University
Ali Mousavi, University of California, Los Angeles
Parvaneh Pourshariati, New York City College of Technology (CUNY) & New York University
Moderator: Nayereh Tohidi, Professor and Director of Middle Eastern & Islamic Studies, CSUN
Sunday, May 8, 2016
4:00 PM
Khatchadourian, Lori. 2016. Imperial Matter: Ancient Persia and the Archaeology of Empires. Oakland: University of California Press.
What is the role of the material world in shaping the tensions and paradoxes of imperial sovereignty? Scholars have long shed light on the complex processes of conquest, extraction, and colonialism under imperial rule. But imperialism has usually been cast as an exclusively human drama, one in which the world of matter does not play an active role. Lori Khatchadourian argues instead that things—from everyday objects to monumental buildings—profoundly shape social and political life under empire. Out of the archaeology of ancient Persia and the South Caucasus, Imperial Matter advances powerful new analytical approaches to the study of imperialism writ large and should be read by scholars working on empire across the humanities and social sciences.
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos.
About the Autor LORI KHATCHADOURIAN is Assistant Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Cornell University.