Tag: Empires

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Yahwism under the Achaemenid Empire

Barnea, Gad & Reinhard G. Kratz (eds.). 2024. Yahwism under the Achaemenid Empire: Professor Shaul Shaked in memoriam (Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 548). Berlin: De Gruyter.

The Achaemenid period (550–330 BCE) is rightly seen as one of the most formative periods in Judaism. It is the period in which large portions of the Bible were edited and redacted and others were authored—yet no dedicated interdisciplinary study has been undertaken to present a consistent picture of this decisive time period.
This book is dedicated to the study of the touchpoints between Yahwistic communities throughout the Achaemenid empire and the Iranian attributes of the empire that ruled over them for about two centuries. Its approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It brings together scholars of Achaemenid history, literature and religion, Iranian linguistics, historians of the Ancient Near East, archeologists, biblical scholars and Semiticists. The goal is to better understand the interchange of ideas, expressions and concepts as well as the experience of historical events between Yahwists and the empire that ruled over them for over two centuries. The book will open up a holisitic perspective on this important era to scholars of a wide variety of fields in the study of Judaism in the Ancient Near East.

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Land and Power in the Sasanian Empire

A workshop organised by Tommy Benfey (Tübingen) and Richard Payne (Chicago).

Middle Persian ostracon dealing with bread rations from Chāl Ṭarkhān-Eshqābād, photograph courtesy of ISAC Museum, Chicago
Friday, October 25, 2024
Land and Power in the Sasanian EmpireDownload

The workshop is co-sponsored by the University of Chicago and the University of Tübingen.


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The succession of world empires

Oellig, Marie. 2023. Die Sukzession von Weltreichen: Zu den antiken Wurzeln einer geschichtsmächtigen Idee (Oriens et Occidens 38). Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.

Aufstieg und Niedergang großer Reiche haben die Menschen über Jahrtausende hinweg beschäftigt und fasziniert. So wurden im antiken Mesopotamien bereits um 2000 v. Chr. Vorstellungen von Weltherrschaft entwickelt und Reflexionen über die Entstehung und den Verfall von Macht angestellt. Als besonders wirkmächtig erwies sich ein Konzept, das seit dem fünften Jahrhundert v. Chr. in der griechischen Historiographie greifbar wird: die Sukzession der ‘Weltreiche’ Assyrien, Medien und Persien. Dieses Modell wurde in der Folge durch das makedonische Alexanderreich sowie das Imperium Romanum erweitert und fand schließlich Eingang in das Alte Testament. Über das Buch Daniel, das das Ende des vierten Weltreiches – später als das römische gedeutet – mit der Apokalypse in Verbindung bringt, wirkte die Sukzessionstheorie maßgeblich auf das Geschichtsdenken des Mittelalters (Translatio Imperii) ein und blieb bis in die frühe Neuzeit hinein ein zentrales Prinzip historischer Periodisierung.

Marie Oellig untersucht die Entstehung und die Genese des Konzepts im Altertum auf breiter Quellengrundlage und kann mithilfe eines interdisziplinären Ansatzes elementare Verbindungslinien zwischen ‘orientalischen’ und ‘griechischen’ Vorstellungswelten aufzeigen.

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Empires to be remembered

Gehler, Michael & Robert Rollinger (eds.). 2022. Empires to be remembered. Ancient Worlds through Modern Times. Wiesbaden: Springer.

By applying a comparative approach the volume focuses on a select group of „empires“ which are generally not in the focus of empires studies. They are studied in detail and analyzed due to a strict concept that takes into account real history and reception history as well. Reception history becomes more and more an important element in empire studies although this topic is still often more or less underdeveloped. The volume singles out a series of such “forgotten empires”. It aims to provide a methodologically clearly structured as well as a uniform and consistent approach. It develops a general set of questions that help to compare and distinguish these entities. This way the volume intends to examine and to illuminate empires that are generally ignored by modern scholarship.

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Elite responses to the rise of Achaemenid Persia

Medenieks, Selga (ed.). 2018. Elite responses to the rise of Achaemenid Persia. Special issue of Hermathena 204 & 205.

This issue of Hermathena was published in December 2020 and currently has no website. The digital version of the journal will soon be available on JSTOR. Until such time, orders and inquiries can be directed to: hermathena@tcd.ie. ~AZ

Table of Contents

HERMATHENA (2018) 204-205

Elite responses to the rise of Achaemenid Persia
Edited by Dr Selga Medenieks
(Department of Classics, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland)

Acknowledgements
Selga Medenieks 5

Articles
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The Limits of Empire in Ancient Afghanistan

Payne, Richard & Rhyne King (eds.). 2020. The limits of empire in ancient Afghanistan: Rule and resistance in the Hindu Kush, circa 600 BCE–600 CE (Classica et Orientalia 24). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

The territory of modern Afghanistan provided a center – and sometimes the center – for a succession of empires, from the Achaemenid Persians in the 6th century BCE until the Sasanian Iranians in the 7th century CE. And yet these regions most frequently appear as comprising a “crossroads” in accounts of their premodern history.

This volume explores how successive imperial regimes established enduring forms of domination spanning the highlands of the Hindu Kush, essentially ungovernable territories in the absence of the technologies of the modern state. The modern term “Afghanistan” likely has its origins in an ancient word for highland regions and peoples resistant to outside rule. The volume’s contributors approach the challenge of explaining the success of imperial projects within a highland political ecology from a variety of disciplinary perspectives with their respective evidentiary corpora, notably history, anthropology, archaeology, numismatics, and philology. The Limits of Empire models the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration necessary to produce persuasive accounts of an ancient Afghanistan whose surviving material and literary evidence remains comparatively limited. It shows how Afghan-centered imperial projects co-opted local elites, communicated in the idioms of local cultures, and created administrative archipelagoes rather than continuous territories. Above all, the volume makes plain the interest and utility in placing Afghanistan at the center, rather than the periphery, of the history of ancient empires in West Asia.

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Anabasis. Studia Classica et Orientalia – Volume 9

Volume nine (2018) of Anabasis. Studia Classica et Orientalia, edited by Marek Jan Olbrycht, is out now. Several papers and reviews of the issue relate to ancient Iran:

Table of Contents:

ISSUE 1: MACEDONES, PERSIA ET ULTIMA ORIENTIS

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Empires of the sea

Wijk, Roy van. 2019. Contested hegemonies: Thebes, Athens and Persia in the Aegean of the 360s. In Rolf Strootman, Floris van den Eijnde & Roy van Wijk (eds.), Empires of the sea: Maritime power networks in world history (Cultural Interactions in the Mediterranean 4), 81–112. Leiden: Brill.

Empires of the Sea brings together studies of maritime empires from the Bronze Age to the Eighteenth Century. The volume aims to establish maritime empires as a category for the (comparative) study of premodern empires, and from a partly ‘non-western’ perspective. The book includes contributions on Mycenaean sea power, Classical Athens, the ancient Thebans, Ptolemaic Egypt, The Genoese Empire, power networks of the Vikings, the medieval Danish Empire, the Baltic empire of Ancien Régime Sweden, the early modern Indian Ocean, the Melaka Empire, the (non-European aspects of the) Portuguese Empire and Dutch East India Company, and the Pirates of Caribbean.

Source: Empires of the sea | Brill
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Labour in the Achaemenid heartland

Tamerus, Mark. 2018. Labour in the Achaemenid heartland. In Agnès Garcia-Ventura (ed.), What’s in a name? Terminology related to the work force and job categories in the ancient Near East, 467-493,
Münster: Ugarit Verlag .

This contribution is concerned with labour in the heartland of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (from the end of the sixth until the mid-fifth century BC). Drawing on earlier studies that have touched upon aspects of the organisation and management of labour in the imperial core, special focus is laid upon the diachronic and synchronic contexts of Persepolitan labour and labourers.

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Art History and Achaemenid History

Bull’s head on the northern portico of the Throne Hall of Xerxes (5th century BC), Persepolis, Iran

Draycott, Catherine. 2019. Art History and Achaemenid History: or, what you can get out of the back end of a bull. In C. M. Draycott, R. Raja, K. Welch, and W. Wootton (eds.), Visual Histories of the Classical World. Essays in Honour of R.R.R. Smith , 16-33, Turnhout: Brepols Publishers.


In a recent review of a book entitled Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, Daniel T. Potts raises the question of whether, regardless of the fact that one can speak of a discipline of Ancient Near Eastern Art History, one should.  He explains that he is not concerned with denying the necessity of studying art or imagery as a part of Ancient Near Eastern History, but that it is insufficient for ‘a deep understanding of the ancient Near East’.  This worry picks up an ongoing tension between ‘ancient historians’ and ‘art historians’ (or archaeologists who work with imagery) that seemingly survives the pictorial turn and the use of ‘visual culture’ as a term emphasizing the whole visual sphere as historical source material, and revolves around the extent to which the ‘larger historical picture’ is sufficiently seen as an end goal. As Potts notes, dress and ornamentation, the ‘wigs, powder, perfume and silk’ of the French Revolution period, for example, can be considered epiphenomena.  On the other hand, ‘Warfare, fiercely contested battles for hegemony and struggles over access to irrigation water and arable land all formed part of the crucible in which Early Dynastic society and its hyper-competitive city state system were forged.’  Serious stuff, not to mention masculine, giving one pause to consider in the context of this book how the fate and trajectory of ‘art history’ within various sub-disciplines might depend on historically gendered scholarship cultures….