Arash Zeini

Author: Arash Zeini

  • Afghanistan Digital Library

    The immediate objective of the Afghanistan Digital Library is to retrieve and restore the first sixty years of Afghanistan’s published cultural heritage. The project is collecting, cataloging, digitizing, and making available over the Internet as many Afghan publications from the period 1871–1930 as it is possible to identify and locate.

  • A cultural history of Aramaic

    Gzella, Holger. 2015. A cultural history of Aramaic: From the beginnings to the advent of Islam. Leiden/Boston: Brill.

    Aramaic is a constant thread running through the various civilizations of the Near East, ancient and modern, from 1000 BCE to the present, and has been the language of small principalities, world empires, and a fair share of the Jewish-Christian tradition. Holger Gzella describes its cultural and linguistic history as a continuous evolution from its beginnings to the advent of Islam. For the first time the individual phases of the language, their socio-historical underpinnings, and the textual sources are discussed comprehensively in light of the latest linguistic and historical research and with ample attention to scribal traditions, multilingualism, and language as a marker of cultural self-awareness. Many new observations on Aramaic are thereby integrated into a coherent historical framework

  • open.marginalis

    open.marginalis, a curated aggregation of medieval marginalia, explores tumblr as a platform for digital scholarship.

  • A hoard from the time of Yazdgard III in Kirmān

    coinAn important article by Heidemann, Riederer and Weber on a hoard of coins from the final years of the empire. I personally find the dipinti on the coins very interesting. Heidemann’s discussion of the hoard, his conclusions and Dieter Weber’s decipherment of the graffito are fascinating:

    Heidemann, Stefan, Hosef Riederer and Dieter Weber. 2014. A hoard from the time of Yazdgard III in Kirmān. Iran 52. 79–124.

    The analysis of a hoard from the time of the collapse of the Sasanian Empire offers new insights into the administrative situation within the realm of Yazdgard III during his presence in Kirmān. Interpreting die chains using old or newly engraved dies with the then anachronistic name of the previous shāhānshāh Khusrō II, and finding an unlikely variety of mint abbreviations and dates within one workshop, allows us to infer the processing of huge amounts of silver in an unregulated way, compared with the orderly mint administration before the battle of al-Qādisiyya. A rigorous numismatic conclusion makes the change to a centralised minting in Kirmān likely where coins, rather than the dies, were sent to the districts. The key dates of the hoard coincide with the battle of Nihāvand 642 and the beginning of the invasion of Kirmān. Many of the coins bear dipinti with legible Pahlavī inscriptions, highlighting a cultural way of marking coins at the end of the Sasanian Empire.

    Read the article here.

  • Early equids at Susa

    Potts, Daniel. 2014. On some early equids at Susa. In B. Cerasetti (ed.), ‘My life is like the summer rose’ Maurizio Tosi e l’Archeologia come modo di vivere. Papers in honour of Maurizio Tosi for his 70th birthday (BAR International Series 2690), 643–647. Oxford: Archaeopress.

    Read the article here.

  • Eschatological seers

    Agostini, Domenico. 2014. Eschatological seers and otherworldly travellers in Zoroastrianism. Journal Asiatique 302(1). 47–73.

  • Sogdian bibliography

    Benkato, Adam. 2015. Sogdian Bibliography.

    This provisional bibliography restricts itself to works focused mostly on the Sogdian language and its linguistic analysis or editions of texts. Comments, corrections, and further entries are most welcome.

     

  • Abraham and Nimrod

    Kiel, Yishai. 2015. Abraham and Nimrod in the shadow of Zarathustra. Journal of Religion 95(1). 35–50.

  • Comparative Oriental manuscript studies

    Bausi, Alessandro & Pier Giorgio Borbone, Françoise Briquel-Chatonnet, Paola Buzi, Jost Gippert, Caroline Macé, Marilena Maniaci, Zisis Melissakis, Laura Parodi, Witold Witakowski (eds.). 2015. Comparative Oriental manuscript studies: An introduction. COMSt.

    The present introductory handbook on comparative oriental manuscript studies is the main achievement of the Research Networking Programme ‘Comparative Oriental Manuscript Studies’ (COMSt), funded by the European Science Foundation from June 2009 to May 2014. Within the framework of the five-year programme, several hundred scholars from ‘central’ as well as ‘marginal’ fields related to manuscript study and research had the opportunity ofexchanging ideas and discussing diverse approaches, looking for common ground and a better understanding of the others’ reasons and methodology in manuscript studies: from codicology to palaeography, from textual criticism andscholarly editing to cataloguing as well as conservation and preservation issues, and always taking into account theincreasing importance of digital scholarship and the natural sciences.

    Alberto Cantera and Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst discuss in this volume Zoroastrian manuscripts and the Turfan fragments.

  • A new king of Susa and Anshan

    An important article by Daneshmand and Abdoli about a previously unidentified Elamite king:

    Daneshmand, Parsa & Meysam Abdoli. 2015. A new king of Susa and Anshan. Cuneiform Digital Library Bulletin 2015:1.

  • Iran and the Caucasus

    Volume 18, issue 4 of Iran and the Caucasus:

    Iran and the Caucasus 18(4).

    (more…)

  • The martyrs of Mount Ber’ain

    The martyrs of Mount Ber’ain

    Brock, Sebastian. 2014. The Martyrs of Mount Ber’ain (Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac: Text and Translation 4). Gorgias Press. With an introduction by Paul C. Dilley.

    The Martyrs of Mount Ber’ain is the poignant tale of an Iranian nobleman’s three children, Adarparwa, Mihrnarse, and Mahdukht, who embrace Christianity after the youngest brother’s near-death vision of God. This decision estranges them from their disbelieving father and ultimately results in death at the hands of King Shapur II. Gabriel “the Cow,” abbot of the monastery of Beth ‘Abe, composed the account of these events in the middle of the seventh century.

    The Martyrs of Mount Ber’ain provides important evidence for enduring concerns of Christian self-definition in the framework of the Sasanian Empire, especially as represented by the Zoroastrian priesthood. The three children, Adarparwa, Mihrnarse, and Mahdukht, work to forget their education by the Magi, with whom they soon find themselves engaged in battle; and yet some key features of the narrative, especially Mihrnarse’s vision, reflect shared idioms between Christians and their Zoroastrian rivals. This rivalry was committed to writing and commemorated even after the Arab conquest, and one of these three sibling-martyrs, the sister Sultana Mahdukht, is still memorialized in both Iraq and the United States.

    Overview

  • The blessed Simeon bar Sabba’e

    Smith, Kyle. 2014. The martyrdom and history of blessed Simeon bar Sabba’e (Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac: Text and Translation 3). Gorgias Press.

    Around the year 339 CE, Simeon bar Sabbae (the bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon on the Tigris) was killed by the Persian king Shapur II. Simeon was arrested for refusing to collect taxes from his flock, and he was beheaded for disobeying the king’s order to worship the sun. The bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon was no minor figure. In fact, Simeon’s martyr acts proclaim that he was the leader of the Christians of Persia and the protomartyr of Shapur’s forty-year persecution. Curiously, however, two very different versions of Simeon’s death exist. Each is presented here with an accompanying translation and notes.

    Simeon’s Martyrdom and History are fundamental sources for chronicling the history of Christianity in Sasanian Persia. Together, these texts testify to the centrality of martyrdom literature in late ancient Syriac Christianity, and they show how Persian Christians forged their own political and religious identities amidst the ongoing Christianization of the Roman Empire.

  • The story of Mar Pinhas

    McCollum, Adam Carter. 2013. The story of Mar Pinhas (Persian Martyr Acts in Syriac: Text and Translation 2). Gorgias Press.

  • The Sasanian world through Georgian eyes

    Rapp, Stephen. 2014. The Sasanian world through Georgian eyes. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate.

    Georgian literary sources for Late Antiquity are commonly held to be later productions devoid of historical value. As a result, scholarship outside the Republic of Georgia has privileged Graeco-Roman and even Armenian narratives. However, when investigated within the dual contexts of a regional literary canon and the active participation of Caucasia’s diverse peoples in the Iranian Commonwealth, early Georgian texts emerge as a rich repository of late antique attitudes and outlooks. Georgian hagiographical and historiographical compositions open a unique window onto a northern part of the Sasanian world that, while sharing striking affinities with the Iranian heartland, was home to vibrant, cosmopolitan cultures that developed along their own trajectories.

    The author’s website is here.