Pourdavoud Lecture Series: Adam Benkato

From Šalām to Drōd: A History of Middle Iranian Epistolary Traditions

This lecture will explore the letters written in late antique Iran and Central Asia in Middle Persian, Bactrian, and Sogdian. Regions in which these languages were used shared an inheritance from the Achaemenid empire—not just a script but also conventions of writing from orthography to epistolary expressions. Comparing these with the Aramaic chancery documents of the Achaemenids reveals a trajectory of epistolary traditions stretching over a millennium and thousands of miles.

About the Speaker

Adam Benkato is an Associate Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, and holder of the Bita Daryabari Presidential Chair in Iranian Studies. Prior to coming to California, he worked in Germany at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Free University Berlin. His research investigates a wide variety of textual and audio sources through the lenses of material philology, sociolinguistics, and archive studies. He works particularly closely on sources in the Old and Middle Iranian languages, with attention to matters of philology, codicology, and religious and cultural history, and on modern Arabic, with regards to dialectology and sociolinguistics in northern Africa. His published works include Āzandnāmē: An edition and literary-critical study of the Manichaean-Sogdian Parable-Book (2017) and Studies on the Sogdian Epistolary Tradition (2018). His favorite Iranian language is Sogdian.