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Investigates Arsacid and early Sasanian political ideologies through their interplay with Roman policy in the East.
One of the Ancient Near East's most important inscriptions is the Bisotun inscription of the Achaemenid king Darius I (6th century BCE), which reports on a suspicious fratricide and coup. Shayegan shows how the Bisotun's narrative influenced the Iranian epic, epigraphic, and historiographical traditions into the Sasanian and early Islamic periods.
Cyrus the Great re-contextualizes Cyrus's epoch in light of recent scholarship. Themes include: Mesopotamian antecedents of his religious policy, the idiosyncratic genesis of Persian imperial art; Babylonian exile and the Bible; Hellenistic and Arsacid genealogical constructs; and his enigmatic evanescence in Sasanian and Muslim traditions.
Scholars of rabbinics and Iranists are increasingly turning to the orbit of Iranian civilization in order to explore the extent to which the Babylonian Talmud was exposed to the theological and liturgical discourse of the Zoroastrian religion, as well as Sasanian legal practices. Here possibly for the first time, scholars within these fields are brought together in concert to examine the interaction between Jewish and Iranian cultures in terms of legal exegesis, literature, and religious thought. The implications of this groundbreaking effort are vastly significant for Jewish and Iranian Studies. With contributions by: Yaakov Elman, David Goodblatt, Geoffrey Herman, Richard Kalmin, Maria Macuch, Jason Sion Mokhtarian, Shai Secunda, Shaul Shaked, Prods Oktor SkjAervo, Yuhan Sohrab-Dinshaw Vevaina
Iran's heritage is as varied as it is complex, and the archaeological, philological, and linguistic scholarship of the region has not been the focus of a comprehensive study for many decades. The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran provides up-to-date, authoritative essays on a wide range of topics extending from the earliest Paleolithic settlements in the Pleistocene era to the Arab conquest in the 7th century AD. The volume, authored by specialists based both inside and outside of Iran, is divided into sections covering prehistory, the Chalcolithic, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age, the Achaemenid period, the Seleucid and Arsacid periods, the Sasanian period, and the Arab conquest. In addition, mo...
In Early Arsakid Parthia (ca. 250-165 B.C.): At the Crossroads of Iranian, Hellenistic, and Central Asian History, Marek Jan Olbrycht depicts the early Arsakid Parthian state in northeastern Iran and Turkmenistan within the broader historical context of Western and Central Asia in the post-Achaemenid/Hellenistic period.
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The Manichaean communities in Turfan (in modern-day Xinjiang, China) produced numerous texts in many languages, including Sogdian, an eastern Middle Iranian language. The present work is an edition and literary-critical study of the longest continuous Manichaean text in Sogdian, known as the Azandname, or Parable-Book. The Parable-Book preserves parts of three parables which illuminate various aspects of Manichaean teaching by means of a narrative followed by an explanation. A new and expanded edition of the Sogdian text, with English translation and philological commentary, forms the first part of this study. Along with sermons, hymns, and confessionals, parables were one of the major genre...
In the aftermath of Alexander the Great’s conquests in the late fourth century B.C., Greek garrisons and settlements were established across Central Asia, through Bactria (modern-day Afghanistan) and into India. Over the next three hundred years, these settlements evolved into multiethnic, multilingual communities as much Greek as they were indigenous. To explore the lives and identities of the inhabitants of the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms, Rachel Mairs marshals a variety of evidence, from archaeology, to coins, to documentary and historical texts. Looking particularly at the great city of Ai Khanoum, the only extensively excavated Hellenistic period urban site in Central Asia, Mairs explores how these ancient people lived, communicated, and understood themselves. Significant and original, The Hellenistic Far East will highlight Bactrian studies as an important part of our understanding of the ancient world.
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 Sassanian 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 knowled...