The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran This book talk will provide an overview of Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran (University of Texas Press, 2020). In the aftermath of the 7th century Islamic conquest of Iran, large numbers of Zoroastrians departed...
Book Talk: Rome, Parthia, and the Politics of Peace This volume offers an informed survey of the problematic relationship between the ancient empires of Rome and Parthia from c. 96/95 BCE to 224 CE. Schlude explores the rhythms of this relationship and invites its readers to reconsider the past and our relationship with it. Some...
Book Launch: Domenico Ingenito’s Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry (Brill, 2020) A conversation with Paul Losensky (Indiana University) and Jane Mikkelson (University of Virginia) Wednesday, January 27, 2021 10:00 AM (Pacific Time) To RSVP, please click here. Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics...
Reconsidering the Emergence of the Parthian State: The Crisis of the 240s-230s BCE in the Hellenistic Middle East Nikolaus Overtoom's study of the rise of the Parthian Empire, Reign of Arrows: The Rise of the Parthian Empire in the Hellenistic Middle East, brings a new perspective to this important development in the history of the...
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 origin of the Manichaean religion stands at the intersection of multiple cultural worlds: Iranian, Semitic, & Greco-Roman. Its literary and artistic remains enrich our understanding of those cultures and the exchange that went on among them in late antiquity. The scholars assembled for this workshop offer the latest insights obtained from the painstaking work of extracting...
The origin of the Manichaean religion stands at the intersection of multiple cultural worlds: Iranian, Semitic, & Greco-Roman. Its literary and artistic remains enrich our understanding of those cultures and the exchange that went on among them in late antiquity. The scholars assembled for this workshop offer the latest insights obtained from the painstaking work of extracting...
The UCLA Pourdavoud Center is pleased to announce the public launch of our new major research project, the UCLA Archaeological Gazetteer of Iran. This project is a free-access, web-based encyclopedia of archaeological sites, places, and monuments in the greater Iranian World. The Pourdavoud Center envisions the Gazetteer to become a major vehicle for archaeological research...
Udjahorresnet’s Egypt: The Crossroads of Conquest and Identity under Achaemenid Rule The concept for this workshop was inspired by the open access volume, Udjahorresnet and His World (JAEI 26, 2020), which contextualizes the life of Udjahorresnet, an elite politician and chief physician of Egypt’s 26th and 27th Dynasties in the 6th century BCE. His career...
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...
