Tag: History

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Studies on Iran and the Caucasus

Bläsing, Uwe, Victoria Arakelova & Matthias Weinreich (eds.). 2015. Studies on Iran and the Caucasus: In honour of Garnik Asatrian. Leiden: Brill.

This unique collection of essays by leading international scholars gives a profound introduction into the great diversity and richness of facets forming the study of one of earth’s most exciting areas, the Iranian and Caucasian lands. Each of the 37 contributions sheds light on a very special topic, the range of which comprises historical, cultural, ethnographical, religious, political and last but not least literary and linguistic issues, beginning from the late antiquity up to current times. Especially during the last decennia these two regions gained greater interest worldwide due to several developments in politics and culture. This fact grants the book, intended as a festschrift for Prof. Garnik Asatrian, a special relevance.

Table of Contents:

History and texts
I. Early Mediaeval Period
  • Marco Bais: “Like a Flame Through the Reeds”: An Iranian Image in the Buzandaran Patmut‘iwnk‘
  • Jost Gippert: “The “Bun-Turks” in Ancient Georgia”
  • Dan Shapira: “On the Relative Value of Armenian Sources for the Khazar Studies: The Case of the Siege of Tbilisi”
  • Giusto Traina: “Some Remarks on the Inscription of Maris, Casit filius (Classical-Oriental Notes, 9)”
II. Late Mediaeval Period
  • Kaveh Farrokh: “The Military Campaigns of Shah Abbas I in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus (1603-1618)”
  • Aldo Ferrari: “Persia and Persians in Raffi’s Xamsayi Melikʻutiwnnerə”
  • Hirotake Maeda: “New Information on the History of the Caucasus in the Third Volume of Afzal al-tavarikh”
  • Irène Natchkebia: “Unrealized Project: Rousseaus’ Plan of Franco-Persian Trade in the Context of the Indian Expedition (1807)”
  • Roman Smbatian: “Nadir’s Religious Policy Towards Armenians”
Religion and Ethnography
  • Victoria Arakelova: “The Song Unveiling the Hidden”
  • Viacheslav A. Chirikba: “Between Christianity and Islam: Heathen Heritage in the Caucasus”
  • Matteo Compareti: “Armenian Pre-Christian Divinities: Some Evidence from the History of Art and Archaeological Investigation”
  • Peter Nicolaus: “The Taming of the Fairies”
  • Antonio Panaino: “The Classification of Astral Bodies in the Framework of a Historical Survey of Iranian Traditions”
  • Vahe S. Boyajian: “From Muscat to Sarhadd: Remarks on gwātī Healing Ritual within the Social Context”
Linguistics
  • Uwe Bläsing: “Georgische Gewächse auf türkischer Erde: Ein Beitrag zur Phytonomie in Nordostanatolien”
  • Johnny Cheung: “The Persian Verbal Suffixes -ān and -andeh (-andag)”
  • Claudia A. Ciancaglini: “Allomorphic Variability in the Middle Persian Continuants of the Old Iranian suffix *-ka-“
  • Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst: “Vowel Length in Middle Persian Verbal Endings”
  • Vladimir Livshits: “Some Khwarezmian Names”
  • Ela Filippone: “Kurdish bažn, Persian bašn and Other Iranian Cognates”
  • Adriano V. Rossi: “Once Again on Iranian *kund”
  • James R. Russell: “A Note on Armenian hrmštk-el”
  • Wolfgang Schulze: “Aspects of Udi-Iranian Language Contact”
  • Martin Schwarz: “Armenian varkaparazi and Its Iranian Background”
  • Donald Stilo: “The Poligenetic Origins of the Northern Talishi Language”
  • Matthias Weinreich: “Not only in the Caucasus: Ethno-linguistic Diversity on the Roof of the World”
Ritual and Folklore
  • Anna Krasnawolska: “Hedayat’s Nationalism and His Concepts of Folklore”
  • Mikhail Pelevin: “Early Specimens of Pashto Folklore”
  • Nagihan Haliloğlu: “Activist, Professional, Family Man: Masculinities in Marjane Satrapi’s Work”
  • Khachik Gevorgian: “On the Interpretation of the Term “Futuwwa” in Persian Fotovvatnamehs“
Historico-Political Issues
  • Çakır Ceyhan Suvari, Elif Kanca: “The Alevi Discourse in Turkey”
  • Pascal Kluge: “Turkey’s Border with Armenia: Obstacle and Chance for Turkish Politics”
  • Irina Morozova: “On the Causes of Socialism’s Deconstruction:
    Conventional Debates and Popular Rhetoric in Contemporary
    Kazakhstan and Mongolia”
  • Caspar ten Dam: “The Limitations of Military Psychology: Combat-stress and Violence-values among the Chechens and Albanians”
  • Garry W. Trompf: “The Ararat Factor: Moral Basics in Western Political Theory from Isaac Newton to John Stuart Mill”
  • Eberhard Werner: “Communication and the Oral-Aural Traditions of an East-Anatolian Ethnicity: What us Stories tell!”
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Articles

The Ladies of Veh Ardashir

Simpson, St.John. 2013. The Ladies of Veh Ardashir. Palazzo Madama, studi e notizie, 3(2): 10-15.

A short article exploring the evidence provided by a selection of the Sasanian “small finds” excavated at Veh Ardashir by the Centro Scavi di Torino. This research is part of the author’s core research on Sasanian and early medieval portable material culture and a detailed publication of all of these finds from this excavation is in preparation.

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Husraw I: Reconstruction of a Reign. Sources and Documents

Jullien, Christelle (ed). 2015. Husraw Ier: Reconstruction d’un règne. Sources et documents (Cahiers de Studia Iranica 53). Paris. Peeters.

The reign of Husraw I Anosirwan / Chosroes (531-579), the most remarkable one during the Sasanian dynasty, was pivotal in the history of Iran. During that period, far-reaching projects to restructure the state affected all strata of society, royal power was strengthened and the country experienced significant cultural development. No major scientific gathering was devoted to this subject, and here are published the proceedings of a symposium organized in Paris. Its aim was to bring together international scholars from various fields who work on often difficult-to-access or hitherto unpublished source material in several languages. The resulting interactions and intersecting perspectives help to piece together many facets of that reign, thus providing a rich contribution to the history of the East in the 6th century.

For more information, see the Table of Contents of this volume.

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Military Operations of Rome and Sasanian Iran

Katarzyna Maksymiuk 2015Maksymiuk, Katarzyna. Geography of Roman-Iranian Wars. Military Operations of Rome and Sasanian Iran. Siedlce: Instytut Historii i Stosunków Międzynarodowych Uniwersytetu Przyrodniczo-Humanistycznego w Siedlcach, 2015.
Until the second half of the second century AD the border between Rome and Iran was marked by the Euphrates, with Mesopotamia regarded as an integral part of the Parthian state. In 224 AD the power in Iran was taken over by the Sasanians, who sought to regain influence over the territory previously ruled by the Parthians. The change of the dynasty in Iran was perceived as a threat to the position of Rome in the Near East. It has result a series of conflicts resumed shortly after the overthrow of Parthian rule and Ardašīr I’s foundation of the Sassanid Empire, known as Roman–Sasanian Wars.
This book is an expanded english translation of the in 2012 published original Geografia wojen rzymsko-irańskich. Działania Rzymu i Iranu w okresie sasanidzkim in Polish. The present work is primarily addressed to students and scholars of history. It presents a valuable collection of designing maps depicting topography of Roman-Iranian armed conflicts. The maps have been created on the basis of source texts reporting wars waged by Rome against the Sasanian Iran and only the towns and provinces which were mentioned by ancient writers while reporting specific conflicts have been marked. Moreover, the present work contains only maps of military operations in which Roman and Iranian armies directly participated.
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Articles

Anti-sasanian movements

Sárközy, Miklós. 2015. Anti-sasanian movements in 6th century Persia – the case of Wistaxm and Windoē. In Csabai Zoltán, Szabó Ernő, Vilmos László & Vitári-Wéber Adrienn (eds.), Európé égisze alatt: Ünnepi tanulmányok Fekete Mária hatvanötödik születésnapjára kollégáitól, barátaitól és tanítványaitól Pécs, 281–296.

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Books

Xerxes: A Persian life

Stoneman, Richard. 2015. Xerxes: A Persian life. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Xerxes, Great King of the Persian Empire from 486–465 B.C., has gone down in history as an angry tyrant full of insane ambition. The stand of Leonidas and the 300 against his army at Thermopylae is a byword for courage, while the failure of Xerxes’ expedition has overshadowed all the other achievements of his twenty-two-year reign.In this lively and comprehensive new biography, Richard Stoneman shows how Xerxes, despite sympathetic treatment by the contemporary Greek writers Aeschylus and Herodotus, had his reputation destroyed by later Greek writers and by the propaganda of Alexander the Great. Stoneman draws on the latest research in Achaemenid studies and archaeology to present the ruler from the Persian perspective. This illuminating volume does not whitewash Xerxes’ failings but sets against them such triumphs as the architectural splendor of Persepolis and a consideration of Xerxes’ religious commitments. What emerges is a nuanced portrait of a man who ruled a vast and multicultural empire which the Greek communities of the West saw as the antithesis of their own values.

About the author:
Richard Stoneman is Honorary Visiting Professor, University of Exeter, and the author of numerous books. He lives in Devon, UK.

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A concise history of the Achaemenid Empire

Waters, Matthew W. 2014. Ancient Persia: A concise history of the Achaemenid Empire, 550-330 BCE. New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.

The Achaemenid Persian Empire, at its greatest territorial extent under Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE), held sway over territory stretching from the Indus River Valley to southeastern Europe and from the western Himalayas to northeast Africa. In this book, Matt Waters gives a detailed historical overview of the Achaemenid period while considering the manifold interpretive problems historians face in constructing and understanding its history. This book offers a Persian perspective even when relying on Greek textual sources and archaeological evidence. Waters situates the story of the Achaemenid Persians in the context of their predecessors in the mid-first millennium BCE and through their successors after the Macedonian conquest, constructing a compelling narrative of how the empire retained its vitality for more than two hundred years (c. 550–330 BCE) and left a massive imprint on Middle Eastern as well as Greek and European history.

For more information, see here the Preface to this volume and the ToC.

About the author:

Matt Waters is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire.

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The comprehensive history of Iran

Mousavi-Bojnourdi, Kazem (General Editor). 2015. The comprehensive history of Iran. 20. Vols. Tehran: The Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia.

The Comprehensive History of Iran, a multi-volume survey of Iranian history in Persian language is published by The Centre for the Great Islamic Encyclopaedia (CGIE). The twenty volumes cover the history and historical geography, politic, culture and arts of the greater Iran, including all territories inhabited by or staying under the cultural influence of peoples of Iranian descent , from prehistoric times up to the Qajar dynasty. Many aspects of the religious, philosophical, economic, scientific, and artistic elements in Iranian civilization are studied in this series.

For more information, see the official website and the list of the contributors and the detailed Table of Contents (all in Persian).

The series consists of 20 volumes:

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The policy of Darius and Xerxes

Vasilev, Miroslav Ivanov. 2015. The policy of Darius and Xerxes towards Thrace and Macedonia (Mnemosyne Supplements. History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity 379). Leiden: Brill.

The campaigns of the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes in Europe led to the subjugation of part of the southern Thrace and Greek cities situated between Byzantium and Strymon River, along with the subordination of Macedonia. While the relations between Persians and Greeks are well developed by numerous publications, including many monographs, the Policy Darius and Xerxes towards Thrace and Macedonia appears undeservedly neglected.

In The Policy of Darius and Xerxes towards Thrace and Macedonia Miroslav Vasilev analyses in detail the policy of the Persian kings towards their European possessions in the years 514–465 BC.

For more information and take a look inside the book see here.

 
Miroslav Ivanov Vasilev, PhD (2010), Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, is an independent researcher. He has published articles concerning early Macedonian history (before Philip II), includingThe military-political campaign of Sitalces against Perdiccas II and the Chalcidians (431–429 B.C.), Živa Antika, Skopje 2011.

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A state of mixture

Payne, Richard. 2015. A state of mixture: Christians, Zoroastrians, and Iranian political culture in late antiquity. University of California Press.

Christian communities flourished during late antiquity in a Zoroastrian political system, as the Iranian Empire integrated culturally and geographically disparate territories from Arabia to Afghanistan into its institutions and networks. Whereas previous studies have regarded Christians as marginal, insular, and often persecuted participants in this empire, Richard Payne demonstrates their integration into elite networks, adoption of Iranian political practices and imaginaries, and participation in imperial institutions.

Richard Payne is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Near Eastern History at the University of Chicago