14362

WiSe 21/22: Remains and Traditions: Sources for the Ancient Iranian History from the ‘Avestan Society’ to the Early Islamic Period

Shervin Farridnejad

Comments

The course aims to give a survey of the relevant testimonies and sources of the Iranian history, beginning with the sources for the history of the “Avestan people,” in second- to first-millennium BCE (Central Asian), following by focusing on three great Iranian dynasties from the Rise of the Achaemenid Empire, through the Arsacids (Parthians) and the Sasanians (with the brief interlude of the Macedonian domination of Iran) up to the Early Islamic Period. The structure of this course is based on the scientific advances by recent inscriptional and archaeological discoveries, and above all from new evaluations and interpretations of many familiar traditions. The students will be able to deepen and intensify their basic knowledge of Iranian sources and manuscripts about the royal and imperial ideologies, religious conditions as well as the social, administrative and economic systems through exemplary work on the most important sources of each historical period. The aim is to guide the students to deal with problems of source interpretation using philological and hermeneutical methods of text analysis and interpretation. Furthermore, they will master specific techniques of scientific work to analyse critically both primary sources and secondary literature, relevant for the pre-Islamic Iranian history, taking social and gender history research approaches into account. The course makes extensive use of both original-language texts and translations, thus no special knowledge of Iranian languages is required. close

Suggested reading

Bonner, Michael Richard Jackson. The Last Empire of Iran. Gorgias Handbooks. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press LLC, 2020. Daryaee, Touraj, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Ellerbrock, Uwe. The Parthians: The Forgotten Empire. Peoples of the Ancient World. New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis, 2021. Fisher, William B., ed. The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 1: The Land of Iran. London: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Gershevitch, Ilya, ed. The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 2: The Median and Achaemenian Periods. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Hackl, Ursula, Bruno Jacobs, and Dieter Weber, eds. Quellen zur Geschichte des Partherreiches: Textsammlung mit Übersetzungen und Kommentaren. 3 vols. Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus / Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments 83–85. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Kuhrt, Amélie. The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period. 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 2007. Potts, Daniel T., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Iran. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Yarshater, Ehsan, ed. The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 3: Seleucid, Parthian and Sasanian Periods. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. close