Narseh’s Diadem: Religion, Royalty, and Power under the Early Sasanians This talk focuses on the Sasanian king Narseh (293-302 CE), who celebrated his accession to the throne through the bilingual inscription (Middle Persian and Parthian) and commemorative monument built in Paikuli, the site currently studied by the archaeological mission of Sapienza-University of Rome: The Italian...
The Yasna Ritual in Performance Up to the present day Zoroastrian priests perform a millennia old ritual, the Yasna, in which the recitation of ancient Avestan texts accompanies the performance of ritual actions. Using new visual source material of images and film clips, this lecture discusses the performance of the Yasna and its significance for...
The Achaemenid Persian Empire: A Two-Volume Companion Often called the first world empire, the Achaemenid Empire is rooted in older Near Eastern traditions. A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire offers a perspective in which the history of the empire is embedded in the preceding and subsequent epochs. In this way, the traditions that shaped...
Official Sources and the Reconstruction of History: The Case of the Last Great War of Antiquity The last and longest war of classical antiquity was fought in the early 7th century, opening in 603 when Persian armies launched coordinated attacks across the Roman frontier. For twenty-five years, the conflict raged on an unprecedented scale, and...
Greek ‘Concubines’ and Achaemenid Dynastic Politics The civil war of 401 BC between Cyrus the Younger and his older brother King Artaxerxes II (r. 405/4-359/8 BC) is well known to Achaemenid historians, thanks especially to the famous account of Xenophon’s Anabasis. While the military aspects of this conflict have been much studied, this lecture focuses on the two Ionian Greek women...
From the Gorgan Wall to the Alan Gates/Dariali: The Northern Defenses of the Sasanian Empire A lecture by Eberhard W. Sauer Based on collaborative research with Jebrael Nokandeh, Hamid Omrani Rekavandi, Lana Chologauri and Davit Naskidashvili It was only in December 2005 that radiocarbon samples established beyond doubt a Sasanian-era construction date for the...
Current Trends in Avestan Studies This lecture discusses the major progress made in our understanding of the Avestan corpus/texts in the last years. Based on her recent publication co-written with Jean Kellens, L’introduction à l’Avesta, Céline Redard introduces the new vision of the Avesta, leading to the new editions currently undertaken. The important ritual aspect...
How Did the Ancient Iranians Coordinate Space? On the Old Iranian Absolute Frame of Reference For verbal expression and nonverbal cognitive processing of spatial relations between two objects, the speakers of a language use different frames of reference. (Psycho)linguistics classifies these into three main groups: intrinsic, relative, and absolute. This lecture aims to identify the...
The Birth of the Abestāg from the Spirit of Philology Scholars have often discussed Zoroastrianism as an ancient Iranian religion that reaches back thousands of years into the middle of the second millennium BCE. For a long time, the idea of monolithic continuity has dominated the scholarly discourse in the study of this religion. While...
Dislodging Disciplinary Silos at Dura-Europos Founded by the Seleucids, successively occupied by the Arsacids (Parthians) and Romans, and spectacularly conquered in a Sasanian siege, the borderland town of Dura-Europos (Syria) was home throughout its history to a fascinatingly diverse population. Since its initial excavation, the site has become justly famous thanks to unique circumstances of...
