Co-Sponsored Conference: The Achaemenid Persian Empire and its Non-Western Borderlands

The Pourdavoud Institute is pleased to share the program of "The Achaemenid Persian Empire and its Non-Western Borderlands: A Change of Paradigm," a conference hosted by the University of Innsbruck. This conference, of which the Institute is a co-sponsor, will take place on Novermber 20-23, 2025 in Innsbruck, Austria. Organized by Robert Rollinger, it is also co-sponsored by the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Austrian Science Fund.

The conference will once again center on the Achaemenid Empire and those borderlands that research has only sporadically looked at so far: the Central Asian east, India and the Indian Ocean in the south-east, as well as the steppe regions in the north and north-east. The focus here is on interactions not only in spatial but also in temporal dimensions and thus on the systematic recording of innovations, breaks and continuities.

The University of Innsbruck is also hosting two other conferences in November. The first conference is "Imperial Dynamics, Borderlands and Resistance: Entangled Worlds of Afro-Eurasia" on November 17-20, 2025. The second is "The Pahlavi Papyri in their Historical Context" on November 25-26, 2025.