McCollum, Adam Carter. 2015. Review of Stephen H. Rapp Jr: The Sasanian world through Georgian eyes. Caucasia and the Iranian Commonwealth in late antique Georgian literature. SEHEPUNKTE 15(9).
The bibliographic information for the book under review is:
Rapp, Stephen. 2014. The Sasanian world through Georgian eyes. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.
Rezakhani, Khodadad. 2015. Continuity and Change in Late Antique Iran: An Economic View of the Sasanians. International Journal of the Society of Iranian Archaeologists. 1 (2), 95-108.
Ancient economy has commonly been studied in the context of commerce and trade, less attention being paid to the production side of the economy. Additionally, artificial periodizations based on political change, including the division of Near Eastern history to the pre-Islam and Islamic periods, has prevented historians from considering issues such as economic growth in the long term. The present paper, focusing on the production side of the Sasanian economy, tries to establish certain principles and introduce possible criteria to study the economic history of the Sasanians. Regions of Khuzistan and Tokharistan/Bactria provide useful examples and comparisons for illustrating some of the points.
Mokhtarian, Jason Sion. 2015. Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests: The Culture of the Talmud in Ancient Iran. Berkeley. University of California Press.
Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests examines the impact of the Persian Sasanian context on the Babylonian Talmud, perhaps the most important corpus in the Jewish sacred canon. What impact did the Persian Zoroastrian Empire, as both a real historical force and an imaginary interlocutor, have on rabbinic identity and authority as expressed in the Talmud? Drawing from the field of comparative religion, Jason Sion Mokhtarian addresses this question by bringing into mutual fruition Talmudic studies and ancient Iranology, two historically distinct disciplines. Whereas most research on the Talmud assumes that the rabbis were an insular group isolated from the cultural horizon outside their academies, this book contextualizes the rabbis and the Talmud within a broader sociocultural orbit by drawing from a wide range of sources from Sasanian Iran, including Middle Persian Zoroastrian literature, archaeological data such as seals and inscriptions, and the Aramaic magical bowl spells. Mokhtarian also includes a detailed examination of the Talmud’s dozens of texts that portray three Persian “others”: the Persians, the Sasanian kings, and the Zoroastrian priests. This book skillfully engages and demonstrates the rich penetration of Persian imperial society and culture on the jews
TOC:
-List of Abbreviations
-Note on Translations, Transcriptions, and Manuscripts
-Acknowledgments
-Introduction
-1. The Sources and Methods of Talmudic and Iranian Studies
-2. Comparing Sasanian Religions
-3. Rabbinic Portrayals of Persians as Others
-4. Rabbis and Sasanian Kings in Dialogue
-5. Rabbis and Zoroastrian Priests in Judicial Settings
-6. Rabbis, Sorcerers, and Priests
-Conclusion: Rabbis, Sorcerers, Kings, and Priests in Sasanian Iran
-Notes
-Bibliography
-Index
Jason Sion Mokhtarian is Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Aramaic Studies, Volume 13, Issue 1, 2015. Special issue: “Studies on Aramaic Magic Bowls and Related Subjects”.
The special issue of the Journal of Aramaic Studies, guest-edited by Siam Bhayro is devoted to the Aramaic magic bowls.
Table of Contents
Peter T. Lanfer: Why Biblical Scholars Should Study Aramaic Bowl Spells
Ortal-Paz Saar: A Study in Conceptual Parallels: Graeco-Roman Binding Spells and Babylonian Incantation Bowls
Siam Bhayro: On Early Jewish Literature and the Aramaic Magic Bowls
Avigail Manekin Bamberger: Jewish Legal Formulae in the Aramaic Incantation Bowls
Marco Moriggi: Jewish Divorce Formulae in Syriac Incantation Bowls
Harriet Walker: Possible Psychological Roles of the Aramaic Incantation Bowls: Therapeutic Functions of Belief in Demons and the Practice of Incantations
Maksymiuk, 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.
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
Books as Material and Symbolic Artifacts in Religious Book Cultures
Käte Hamburger Kolleg, Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr University Bochum: 28 & 29 May 2015
The Käte Hamburger Kolleg Workshop on Books as Material and Symbolic Artifacts in Religious Book Cultures will analyze the connections between books and manuscripts as material artifacts and the formation of religious book cultures before the printing era. It will also explore the ways in which, in religious book production, the medium, in its forms of “human and institutional interactions,” influences the transmission of the religious message, allowing for the material format to receive further alterations from the religious message itself. Finally, this workshop will investigate interactions between modern religious groups and the very academic books which describe them.
Programm of The KHK Workshop on Books as Religious Artifacts (May 28-29, 2015)
Thursday, 28 May 2015
Friday, 29 May 2015
International workshop organized by project C03 “Interaction and Change in Oriental Legal Systems. The Transfer of Normative Knowledge as Exemplified by Zoroastrian and Islamic Law (Seventh to Eleventh Centuries)” (Head: M. Macuch)
May 22, 2015, 09:00 AM c.t. – 06:30 PM
SFB-Villa, Sitzungsraum, Schwendenerstraße 8, 14195 Berlin-Dahlem
Legal systems are characterized by sophisticated technical languages that make use of a multitude of juridical terms to describe mostly complex circumstances. Whereas legal terms on the one hand have a stabilizing function and serve the jurists for the categorization and evaluation of cases – what is especially true for the tradition-oriented systems of the Late Antiquity like the Roman-Byzantine, Zoroastrian, Islamic, Jewish or Christian canonical laws – they show on the other hand constant changes in their historical development with regard to content and meaning. Besides such endogenous factors in the change of meaning, also exogenous sources as the adoption of a term from an alien law system and its recontextualization are conceivable. In both cases it results in intended or unintended shifts of meaning that may have an impact on other terms or elements of the system, depending on the relevance of the term. It is in particular this modification of Late Antique legal systems caused by changes of legal terms that is subject of the workshop. It targets on an exemplary more detailed description and analysis of the further development of particular legal terms within the systems as well as in their interrelation.
To register, please contact Dr. Iris Colditz: icolditz[at]campus.fu-berlin.de.
| 9:15–9:30 a.m | Maria Macuch (Berlin): Welcome and Introduction |
Panel 1: Rechtsbegriffe und -institutionen in transkulturellem Kontext |
|
| 9:30–10:15 a.m | Johannes Pahlitzsch (Mainz): „Die Entstehung des christlichen waqf“ |
| 10:15–11:00 a.m | Richard Payne (Chicago): „Christianizing Stūrīh: Law, Reproduction, and Elite Formation in the Iranian Empire“ |
| 11:00–11:30 a.m | coffee break |
| 11:30 a.m. –12:15 p.m. | János Jany (Budapest): „Transmitters of Legal Knowledge: Dadestan, Fatwa, Responsum“ |
| 12:15–1:45 p.m. | lunch break |
Panel 2: Wandel von Rechtsbegriffen und Argumentationsformen im jüdischen und römischen Recht |
|
| 1:45–2:30 p.m. | Ronen Reichman (Heidelberg): „‚Was die Schrift lehrt, geht aber doch aus einem Vernunftsargument hervor!‘: Über die Entwicklung eines (rechtspositivistischen [?]) Argumentationsmusters in der rabbinischen Literatur“ |
| 2:30–3:15 p.m. | Anna Seelentag (Frankfurt/M.): „Tutela und cura – Zur Annäherung zweier Rechtsbegriffe im römischen Recht“ |
| 3:15–3:45 p.m. | coffee break |
| 3:45–4:30 p.m. | Johannes Platschek (München): „Arra in römischen Rechtstexten“ |
| 4:30–5:15 p.m. | Thomas Rüfner (Trier): „Ius, iudex, iurisdictio: Die Terminologie des römischen Prozessrechts in der Spätantike“ |
| 5:15–5:30 p.m. | coffee break |
| 5:30–6:30 p.m. | Final Discussion |
Alram, Michael. 2015. The cultural impact of Sasanian Persia along the Silk Road – Aspects of continuity. e-Sasanika 14.
The paper focuses on the Sasanian Empire’s impact on its surrounding world and explores the question of why its cultural achievements had such a long-lasting influence far beyond the borders of the Iranian lands, even after the decline of the dynasty. This relates to the role of the Sasanians in international trade and their political aim of controlling the land and maritime trade networks that connected Iran with the Mediterranean world, Central Asia, China, India, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Direct link to the article is Alram Sasanian Persia.
Sasanian royalist ideology and Zoroastrian millennialismLecture by François de Blois, University College London, at the Ancient India and Iran Trust, Cambridge, Friday 06March, 5.30pm.
François de Blois has published widely on Semitic and Iranian languages and on the history of religions in the Near East in pre-modern times. Notably, he contributed to the multi-volume work Persian Literature, which had been initiated by C.A. Storey and published by the Royal Asiatic Society. He served as Professor of Iranian Studies at Hamburg University from 2002 to 2003. Currently he is a research fellow at University College London where he is engaged in a major project on al-Biruni’s Chronology and other Arabic texts on non-Islamic calendars. He is also a teaching fellow for Aramaic and Middle Iranian languages at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He has been a frequent contributor to the Encyclopaedia of Islam.
All welcome. Refreshments from 5pm.
Ancient India & Iran Trust
23 Brooklands Avenue, Cambridge CB2 8BG