In This Issue

New & Improved Sasanika
New Sasanika Team Members
Sasanika Lectures at UCI
New Publications

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Sasanika Lectures at UCI

In the past year Sasanika has invited a number of scholars to the University of California, Irvine for lectures and workshops on the Sasanian period. All of these lectures are now recorded and available on the website for the public.

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New Publications: Recent Books & Journals on the Sasanians & Related Topics

A number of new publications on different aspects of the Sasanian period have come out by scholars including S. Secunda, S. Azarnouche, M. Rahim Shayegan and G. W. Bowersocki. A new Sasanika book by N. Miri has also been published.

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“Ardashir: The Armenian Files”
Giusto Traina
Paris-Sorbonne University
Tuesday, May 28th
“New Perspective on “The Land of Heroes and Giants”: The Georgian Sources for Sasanian Studies”
Stephen Rapp:
Sam Houston State University
Thursday, February 21, 2013

This presentation surveys the Georgian literary sources for the history of the Sasanian Empire and the larger Iranian Commonwealth. Chief among these written works are Georgian hagiographical and historographical works produced between the fifth and ninth centuries. The texts are considered on multiple levels, including their literal content, the vocabulary and sytanx, as well as their production and subsequent revision and transmission. While Georgian historiographical sources have often been dismissed as later monuments saturated that are more legend than history, I shall argue that they are, in fact, deep reservoirs of Iranic imagery and that the oldest compositions were deliberately patterned upon Xwaday-namag.
“The Talmud in Ancient Iran: The Rabbis and Persian Priests in a Judicial Context”
Jason Sion Mokhtarian
Professor of Religious and Jewish Studies
Indiana University Bloomington
Center for Persian Studies / co-sponsored by the Jewish Studies Program UC Irvine
March 11, 2013

“The Creation and Destruction of the Iranian Past”
Matthew P. Canepa
University of Minnesota
April 25, 2013

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S. Azarnouche, “Husraw i Kawadan ud Redag-e” Khosrow fils de Kawad et un page, Texte pehlevi édité et traduit, Cahiers de Studia Iranica, 49, 2013.Our knowledge about the education of the Sasanian nobility and their courtly manners is mainly provided by the Pahlavi text entitled Husraw i Kawadan ud Redag-e “Khosrow, son of Kawad, and a page”. In this volume, we present a new edition and commentary of the text, based on the manuscript MK, including for the first time a translation in French. This dialogical narrative tells the story of a young servant at the court of the Sasanian king Khosrow I (531-579 A.D.), who succeeded in regaining his hierarchic rank because of both his wisdom and his courage. This “manifesto” of aristocratic education appears in the form of numerous lexical lists, a form suitable for a detailed philological analysis.

M.R. Shayegan, Aspects of History and Epic in Ancient Iran: From Gaumāta to Wahnām, Hellenic Studies Series 52. Washington, D.C./Cambridge, Mass.: Center for Hellenic Studies – Harvard University Press, 2012.The purpose of the study is twofold. In the first part, it examines the content of one the most important inscriptions of the Ancient Near East: the Bisotun inscription of the Achaemenid king Darius I (6th century BCE), which in essence reports on a suspicious fratricide and subsequent coup-d’état. The study shows how the inscription’s narrative would decisively influence the Iranian epic, epigraphic, and historiographical traditions well into the Sasanian and early Islamic periods. Intriguingly, the author’s assessment of the impact of the Bisotun narrative on later literary traditions—in particular, on the inscription of the Sasanian king Narseh at Paikuli (3rd–4th centuries CE)—relies on the reception of the oral rendition of the Bisotun story captured by Greek historians.In the second part of the study, Shayegan investigates how this originally oral narrative, preserved by Herodotus and other Greek and Latin authors, could impact the “historiographical” writings and epic compositions of later Iranian empires, such as the Sasanians, over nine centuries later. Not only do Sasanian inscriptions, especially the inscription of king Narseh at Paikuli, make use of the same story pattern that one encounters in the accounts of Greek and Latin authors describing Bardiya’s murder, especially with regard to the theme of two evil usurpers (called here Warahrān and Wahnām), but also the epic tradition, as reflected in the “Book of the Kings” (Šāhnāme), and the medieval romances called the “Book of Darius” (Dārābnāme), and “Samak, the ʿayyār” (Samak-e ʿAyyār) shows that the story of Bardiya’s murder had penetrated epic composition and had become part of the epic canon.Finally, the study seeks to demonstrate that in Ancient, Late Antique, and Medieval Iran the interaction between epic and historiographical practices were varied and intricate. “Historical records” could be generated in conformity with the ideals of epic, or composed by being cast into the mold of the oral epic tradition, thereby losing their individual “historical” tenor to conform to the normative frame of the epic. An example in case is the (Indo)-Iranian epic theme of the Twins that decisively shaped the oral composition of the murder story of Bardiya and Gaumāta. However, the prestige of the oral rendition of the Bisotun must have been such that the theme of the two evil brothers was projected back (under new guise) into the oral epic tradition and replaced the older Iranian theme of the Twins, thus re-juvenating the thematic inventory of the epic tradition.

G. W. Bowersock, Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity (The Menahem Stern Jerusalem Lectures), Brandeis, 2012.In this book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel, the famed historian G. W. Bowersock presents a searching examination of political developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of the rise of Islam. Recounting the growth of Christian Ethiopia and the conflict with Jewish Arabia, he describes the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of a late resurgent Sassanian (Persian) Empire. He concludes by underscoring the importance of the Byzantine Empire’s defeat of the Sassanian forces, which destabilized the region and thus provided the opportunity for the rise and military success of Islam in the seventh century. Using close readings of surviving texts, Bowersock sheds new light on the complex causal relationships among the Byzantine, Ethiopian, Persian, and emerging Islamic forces.

N. Miri, Sasanian Pars. Historical Geography and Administrative Organization, Mazda Publishers, 2012.Pars was the birthplace of the Sasanian Dynasty. For more than four hundred years, this province held an important political, economic and religious status within the Empire in spite of westward shift of the capital to Ctesiphon during the earlier phase of the Sasanian reign.Istakhr was the main political and religious center in Pars during the Sasanian period. From Ardashir I to Yazdgerd III the Sasanian kings were crowned at the Ardashir fire temple in Istakhr. The presence of the royal treasury at Istakhr gives further evidence of the importance of the region to the Sasanians. During the Arab Muslim invasions, Istakhr resisted more than any other place in the province against the invaders, and its final fall brought the whole province under the control of the Muslim invaders. The religious significance of Pars is further manifested in a series of religious inscriptions produced by Kerdir, chief Mowbed of the Sasanians in the second half of the third century A.D. Literary references provide evidence of other, smaller towns within Pars that can be considered as smaller religious or ideological centers. Furthermore, one of the three major holy fire temples of the Sasanians, Azar Farnbagh (adur i farnbay), is believed to be the Kariyan fire temple in Ardashir Khurrah of Pars.Politically, Pars was of a greater importance during the early phases of the Sasanian period as attested by considerable number of the royal inscriptions and stone reliefs of the early Sasanian kings. Economically, among the five provinces of Pars, the coastal regions of Ardashir Khurrah and Shapur Khurrah province had a considerable economic and logistical importance within the Sasanian Empire.The present book brings together the data available about Pars during the Sasanian period, specifically from an administrative and historical geography point of view based on the available literary and material resources including Pahlavi or Middle Persian, non-Persian and Islamic sources, Sasanian royal and other Pahlavi inscriptions, rock reliefs, coins, seals and sealings as well as archaeological data collected during surveys and excavations. Having the sources identified and analyzed, the book turns to the detailed examination of the administrative organization and historical geography of Sasanian Fars by describing the status of Pars in the administrative structure of the Sasanian Empire followed by an examination of the internal administrative division of the province. Sasanian toponyms in Pars, recorded in the aforementioned sources, are presented and discussed in the format of an alphabetical catalog. Every available record of the given toponym is described followed by a brief section on its identification. Each part also includes illustrations, maps and tables. A separate section focuses on the mint towns within the province. The considerable number of Sasanian coins minted in Pars indicates the fact that the local mints produced a large quantity of coins, and that they were among the most active mints of all the Sasanian provinces. The role of Pars as a nexus of maritime trade between the East and West during the period may have necessitated such high levels of coin production within the province. Settlements, communication networks, trade and religious centers of Pars are also discussed in the two final parts of the book.