Foltz, Richard. 2016. Richard Frye and the history of the Tajiks (Ancient Iran Series 4).
This series is published by the Jordan Center for Persian Studies, University of California, Irvine.
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Tag: History
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From Oxus to Euphrates
Daryaee, Touraj & Khodadad Rezakhani. 2016. From Oxus to Euphrates: The world of late antique Iran (Ancient Iran Series 1). H & S Media.
For a long time, Sasanian studies were mainly cultivated by linguists and historians of religion, and the only standard work on the history of the Sasanian Empire was Arthur Christensen’s L’Iran sous les Sassanides (Copenhagen 1936; second revised and expanded edition 1944). Only in recent years, Christensen’s authority was challenged: Several new syntheses eventually allowed Late antique scholars to better understand the history and the structure of the great rival of the Roman Empire. However, we still lacked a handy, student-friendly introduction to Sasanians studies. Now, Daryaee and Rezakhani provide us with this very welcome booklet, which I highly recommend to students, to an educated audience, but also to Classical scholars (it’s never too late). Giusta Traina, Sorbonne University
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Iranian Reception of Islam
Crone, Patricia. 2016. The Iranian reception of Islam: The non-traditionalist strands (Islamic History and Civilization 130). Collected Studies in Three Volumes. Vol. 2 edited by Hanna Siurua. Leiden; Boston: Brill.
Patricia Crone’s Collected Studies in Three Volumes brings together a number of her published, unpublished, and revised writings on Near Eastern and Islamic history, arranged around three distinct but interconnected themes. Volume 2, The Iranian Reception of Islam: The Non-Traditionalist Strands, examines the reception of pre-Islamic legacies in Islam, above all that of the Iranians. Volume 1, The Qurʾānic Pagans and Related Matters, pursues the reconstruction of the religious environment in which Islam arose and develops an intertextual approach to studying the Qurʾānic religious milieu. Volume 3, Islam, the Ancient Near East and Varieties of Godlessness, places the rise of Islam in the context of the ancient Near East and investigates sceptical and subversive ideas in the Islamic world.
ToC:
- 1. Kavād’s heresy and Mazdak’s revolt
- 2. Zoroastrian communism
- 3. Khurramīs
- 4. Muqannaʿ
- 5. Abū Tammām on the Mubayyiḍa
- 6. The Muqannaʿ narrative in the Tārīkhnāma: Part I, Introduction, edition and translation
- 7. The Muqannaʿ narrative in the Tārīkhnāma: Part II, Commentary and analysis
- 8. Al-Jāḥiẓ on aṣḥāb al-jahālāt and the Jahmiyya
- 9. Buddhism as ancient Iranian paganism
- 10. A new text on Ismailism at the Samanid court
- 11. What was al-Fārābī’s ‘imamic’ constitution?
- 12. Al-Fārābī’s imperfect constitutions
- 13. Pre-existence in Iran: Zoroastrians, ex-Christian Muʿtazilites, and Jews on the human acquisition of bodies
- List of Patricia Crone’s publications
Patricia Crone (1945-2015), Ph.D. (1974), School of Oriental and African Studies, was Professor Emerita at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Her numerous publications include Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam (1987); Pre-Industrial Societies (1989); Medieval Islamic Political Thought (2004); and The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran (2012).
Hanna Siurua (BA, School of Oriental and African Studies; MA, University of Sussex) is a professional editor based in Chicago. She specialises in Islamic and Middle Eastern studies and has edited numerous books and articles in these as well as other fields.
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An historiographical Study of Sasanian Iran
Jackson Bonner, Michael Richard. 2016. Al-Dinawari’s Kitab al-Akhbar al-Tiwal. An historiographical Study of Sasanian Iran (Res Orientales 23). Peeters Publishers.
This book is a study of the pre-Islamic passages of Abu Hanifa Ahmad ibn Dawud ibn Wanand Dinawari’s Kitab al-Akhbar al-Tiwal. It is intended for scholars of Late Antiquity. Special emphasis is placed on Dinawari’s exposition of the rule of the Sasanian dynasty and questions relating to the mysterious Khudaynama tradition which are intimately connected with it. Beginning with a discussion of Dinawari and his work, the book moves into a discussion of indigenous Iranian historiography. Speculation on the sources of Kitab al-Akhbar al-Tiwal follows, and the historiographical investigation of the most substantial portion of Kitab al-Akhbar al-Tiwal‘s notices on the Sasanian dynasty comes next. The findings of the book are set out in a narrative of Sasanian history at the end.
This book was written with one main question in mind: what does Dinawari’s Kitab al-Akhbar al-Tiwal have to say about pre-Islamic Iranian history? A host of other questions arose immediately: who was Dinawari; when did he live; what did he do; how was his work perceived by others; where did Dinawari get his information and how did he present it; is Dinawari’s information reliable?
About the Author: Michael Bonner was an undergraduate classicist who took an MPhil and DPhil in Sasanian history at the University of Oxford. He is a former policy adviser within the Canadian government, and now works as a communications consultant in Toronto. He also teaches Latin and English part-time at the Ontario Academy of Technology. His personal website is www.mrjb.ca.
Szántó, Iván (ed.). 2015. From Aṣl to Zā’id: Essays in honour of Éva M. Jeremiás (Acta et Studia XIII). Pilis-csaba: The Avicenna Institute of Middle Eastern Studies.Covering a wide range of subjects within the general field of Iranian studies, this collection of essays consists of contributions by twenty scholars. Most articles concentrate on Persian linguistics.
A number of further essays discuss Persian literature, historiography; religion, science ; and art. The volume contains numerous illustrations, mostly in colour, and it includes a comprehensive bibliography of Éva M. Jeremiás up to 2015.
Table of Contents:
- C. EDMUND BOSWORTH: The poet ‘Asjadī and early Ghaznavid history
- MÁRIA GÓSY: Similarities and differences in the early acquisition of grammar by Persian and Hungarian children
- ELA FILIPPONE: The so-called Old Persian ‘potential construction’ (being Text production strategies and translation strategies in the Achaemenid documentation, III)
- BERT G. FRAGNER: Orientalismus in Abenteuererzählungen aus der frühen Sowjetunion
- CARINA JAHANI: Complex predicates and the issue of transitivity: The case of Southern Balochi
- ANNA KRASNOWOLSKA: The Sarmatian myth and Poland’s nineteenth-century Orientalism
- PAUL LUFT: Authenticity and identity of Qājār poetry on stone and paper
- MARIA MACUCH: Precision orientated legal language in the Sasanian law of inheritance
- ÁGNES NÉMETH: How do young Iranians speak?
- PAOLA ORSATTI: Spoken features in classical Persian texts: subordinate conditional clauses without a conjunction
- ANTONIO CLEMENTE DOMENICO PANAINO: Jesus’ trimorphisms and tetramorphisms in the meeting with the Magi
- ADRIANO V. ROSSI: Diglossia in Persian
- CHRISTINE VAN RUYMBEKE: Sir William Jones and the Anwār-i Suhaylī. Containing a fortuitous but nevertheless essential note on the Orient Pearls
- ‘ALI ASHRAF SADEGHI: Rare forms of personal endings in some Classical Persian texts
- NICHOLAS AND URSULA SIMS-WILLIAMS: Rustam and his zīn-i palang
- IVÁN SZÁNTÓ: Bahāʼ al-Dīn al-‘Amilī and the visual arts
- KATALIN TORMA: Georgius Gentius and the early reception of the Gulistān in Hungary
- ZIVA VESEL: Les figures astrologiques dans les traités persans
- SIBYLLE WENTKER: A visit of the Shah. Vienna and the false Rūznāma of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shah
About the Editor:
Iván Szántó (PhD 2009) is a scholar of Art History with special focus on Iranian Art and staff member of The Institute of Iranian studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).
Maksymiuk, Katarzyna. 2015. The Pahlav-Mehrān family faithful allies of Xusrō I Anōšīrvān. Метаморфозы истории 6, 163-179.
The article describes the role of the members of the Parthian Mehrān played from the second half of the 5th century on Sasanian courts. It must be assumed that the Sasanian kings ruled their coun-try with the help of Parthian aristocracy. The reforms of the 6th cen-tury could not be directed against the status of the Parthian noblemen in Iran, because neither Kawād nor Xusrō could carry them without the assistance of Parthian wuzurgān.
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Cartographical thinking in late antiquity
Judging by the publisher’s description, Scott Johnson focuses on the Christian Roman Empire and its literary languages/sources in his latest book, Literary Territories. The volume will also be of interest to scholars of Iranian Studies taking a comparative approach to literary production in late antiquity. It sounds very promising: “The authors and texts discussed in the chapters that follow took advantage of the discourse of geography at the same time that the image of the book, the codex, became a discourse of its own for debates over knowledge and authority”. The book has been published despite the publisher’s 2016 schedule.
Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald. 2016. Literary territories: Cartographical thinking in late antiquity. Oxford University Press
Literary Territories introduces readers to a wide range of literature from 200-900 CE in which geography is a defining principle of literary art. From accounts of Holy Land pilgrimage, to Roman mapmaking, to the systematization of Ptolemy’s scientific works, Literary Territories argues that forms of literature that were conceived and produced in very different environments and for different purposes in Late Antiquity nevertheless shared an aesthetic sensibility which treated the classical “inhabited world,” the oikoumene, as a literary metaphor for the collection and organization of knowledge. This type of “cartographical thinking” stresses the world of knowledge that is encapsulated in the literary archive. The archival aesthetic coincided with an explosion of late antique travel and Christian pilgrimage which in itself suggests important unifying themes between visual and textual conceptions of space. Indeed, by the end of Late Antiquity the geographical mode appears in nearly every type of writing in multiple Christian languages (Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and others). The diffusion of cartographical thinking throughout the real-world oikoumene, now the Christian Roman Empire, was a fundamental intellectual trajectory of Late Antiquity.
About the author:
Scott Fitzgerald Johnson is a Dumbarton Oaks Teaching Fellow in Byzantine Greek at Georgetown University.
Howe, Timothy & Lee Brice (eds.). 2016. Brill’s companion to insurgency and terrorism in the ancient Mediterranean (Brill’s Companions in Classical Studies). Brill.
In Brill’s Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean, Tim Howe and Lee Brice challenge the view that these forms of conflict are specifically modern phenomena by offering an historical perspective that exposes readers to the ways insurgency movements and terror tactics were common elements of conflict in antiquity. Assembling original research on insurgency and terrorism in various regions including, the Ancient Near East, Greece, Central Asia, Persia, Egypt, Judea, and the Roman Empire, they provide a deep historical context for understanding these terms, demonstrate the usefulness of insurgency and terrorism as concepts for analysing ancient Mediterranean behavior, and point the way toward future research.
About the authors:
Lee L. Brice, Ph.D. (2003), UNC-Chapel Hill, is Professor of History at Western Illinois University. He has published volumes and articles/chapters on the military history of the ancient world and is series editor of Warfare in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Brill).
Timothy Howe studied History, Classical and Archaeology at The Pennsylvania State University. PhD. 2000. He has been at St. Olaf College since 2003, where he is currently Associate Professor of History & Ancient Studies. Since 2013 he has excavated at the Hellenistic/Roman site of Antiochia ad Cragum in Southern Turkey, where he is currently Associate Field Director. Main interests include Greek and Roman agriculture and warfare, Mediterranean archaeology and Alexander the Great. He has written two monographs (Pastoral Politics: Animals, Agriculture and Society in Ancient Greece, Regina 2008 and All Things Alexander the Great, Greenwood 2016).
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On Parthian and Sasanian Empires
Sarkhosh Curtis, Vesta, Elizabeth Pendleton, Michael Alram & Touraj Daryaee (eds.). 2016. The Parthian and early Sasanian Empires: Adaptation and expansion (The British Institute of Persian Studies Archaeological Monographs Series V). Oxbow Books: Oxford.
Although much of the primary information about the Parthian period comes from coins, there has been much new research undertaken over the past few decades into wider aspects of both the Parthian and Sasanian Empires including the Arsacid Parthians, and their material culture. Despite a change of ruling dynasty, the two empires were closely connected and cannot be regarded as totally separate entities. The continuation of Parthian influence particularly into the early Sasanian period cannot be disputed. An historic lack of detailed information arose partly through the relative lack of excavated archaeological sites dating to the Parthian period in Iran and western scholars’ lack of knowledge of recent excavations and their results that are usually published in Persian, coupled with the inevitable difficulties for academic research engendered by the recent political situation in the region. Although an attempt has been made by several scholars in the west to place this important Iranian dynasty in its proper cultural context, the traditional GrecoRoman influenced approach is still prevalent. The present volume presents 15 papers covering various aspects of Parthian and early Sasanian history, material culture, linguistics and religion which demonstrate a rich surviving heritage and provide many new insights into ideology, royal genealogy, social organisation, military tactics, linguistic developments and trading contacts.
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Meetings between ancient empires
The ever active and innovative Jordan Center for Persian Studies of the University of California, Irvine, has announced a new book series, of which the second volume is known to us:
Rose, Jenny. 2015. From Behistun to Bamiyan: Meetings between ancient empires (Jordan Center for Persian Studies 2).
We will update this space as soon as we have further information about the series.