Sims-Williams, Nicholas. 2025. Chotano-Sogdica. Linguistic Studies on Sogdian and Khotanese (Grammatica Iranica, 4). Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press. Über ein halbes Jahrhundert lang, seit 1972, hat Nicholas Sims-Williams viele wichtige Artikel über die älteren iranischen Sprachen veröffentlicht, insbesondere über das östliche Mitteliranisch (Sogdisch, Baktrisch und Khotanisch). Nahezu alle seine Artikel über Sogdisch und Khotanisch sind im vorliegenden Band zusammengefasst, zusammen mit drei völlig neuen Artikeln mit den Titeln „Is there a ‘predicative instrumental’ in Sogdian?“, „Yaghnobi and the Sogdian ‘Rhythmic Law’“ und „The locative singular in Old Khotanese“.

Nayebossadrian, Zhaleh. 2025. The Zoroastrian funeral ritual for living souls. Culture and Religion. 1-14. This study presents a comprehensive investigation into a Zoroastrian funerary rite, ‘Zīnda-ruwān-yaštan’, performed during their lifetime for the well-being of their living soul. The research draws on Zoroastrian scriptures and ethnographic sources to trace the origins and eventual decline of the ‘Zīnda-ruwāni’ ritual through a combination of historical, textual, and epigraphic analysis.

Salaris, Davide. 2025. ‘Royal’ road, ‘royal’ needs: a GIS-based approach to Achaemenid court logistics between royal capitals of Susa and Persepolis. Antiquity. Published online 2025:1-8. This article redefines the concept of the Achaemenid ‘Royal’ Road using GIS-based route modelling to reconstruct possible roads between Susa and Persepolis. By integrating logistical and environmental parameters, it shows how royal mobility required a specialised infrastructure—distinct from ancillary roads—tailored to the operational scale of the Achaemenid court.

Volume 26 of the journal Parthica (2024) contains several contributions of relevance to Iranian Studies. R. PALERMO - E. FRANCO - M. LA PORTA - C. RASMUSSEN: Exploring the Hellenistic period in North Mesopotamia landscape studies and excavations at Gird-I Matrab (Iraqi Kurdistan), p. 9 C. LIPPOLIS - V. MESSINA - G. PATRUCCO - A. SPANO: Rapid digital documentation of endangered archaeological contexts.

Nolan, Daniel. 2025. Zoroastrianism and contemporary philosophy (Elements in Global Philosophy of Religion). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zoroastrianism is a religion with a long history, but it has been comparatively neglected by contemporary philosophers. This Element aims to bring aspects of its long intellectual history into conversation with contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Section 1 provides an introduction to Zoroastrianism and its history, some of the important texts, and some contemporary philosophy engaged with Zoroastrian themes.

Leuchter, Mark A.. 2025. An Empire Far and Wide: The Achaemenid Dynastic Myth and Jewish Scribes in the Late Persian Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press. This book offers a new approach to evidence to examine Persian imperial ideology and surveys literary products of ancient Jewish scribes to analyze the influence of Persian imperialism on the development of Yehudite scribal ideology and presents an argument for the existence of Judaism in the Persian period.

We are grateful to the staff at Yale Classics Library (@yaleclassicslib.bsky.social), who have been wonderful collaborators, sharing publication information with us: Volume 29, issue 3, of Iran and the Caucasus has now been published. The following articles relate to the disciplinary focus of BiblioIranica: Did Arrian Ever Fight the Alans? Author: Fatima FoltzPages: 233–246 Who Hides under the Name “Šahrbarāz, Malik al-Bāb” by aṭ-Ṭabarī under 22 A.H.

The latest issue (175.2) of the legendary Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft (ZDMG) has been published and is accessible here. Research articles Die ZDMG und ihre „Kinder“. Über die Rolle wissenschaftlicher Zeitschriften in der Geschichte der OrientalistikThomas L. GertzenPage 273 - 292 Beyond Rage and Fear. Negative Emotions in Middle Babylonian LettersJacob Jan de Ridder…

Abedi, Milad & Johannes Thomann. 2024. The Emergence of Arabic Scientific Terminology at the Eastern Contact Zone: Calque and Loanword in Early ʿAbbāsid Time (750–800 CE). Asiatische Studien - Études Asiatiques 78 (4): 705-717. Superstratum languages often become substratum languages after military defeats. This was the case with Middle Persian in the Islamic Empire. There were different phases of interference between Middle Persian and Arabic.

Eghdami, Mohammad Reza, Majid Gholamzadeh Roudbordeh & Meysam Navaeiyan. 2025. Weaponry and a healed wound from the Parthian era (247 BCE to 224 CE): Insights from the Liyarsangbon cemetery, Guilan, Iran. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology Early View. 1–9. The current research examines the health and medical treatment implications associated with an iron arrowhead found among the skeletal remains of an individual unearthed from the Parthian cemetery at Liyarsangbon, Iran.

Cereti, Carlo Giovanni, Pierfrancesco Callieri & Vito Messina (eds.). 2025. Eranshahr. Man, Landscape, and Society in Arsacid and Sasanian Iran (Collana Convegni 75). Rome: Sapienza Università Editrice. This fourth volume of the Atlas of the Ancient Near East (OCAVOA) collects 15 contributions by members of the three Units composing the PRIN 2017 ‘Eranshahr: Man Landscape and Society in Arsacid and Sasanian Iran.

Bousdroukis, Apostolos. 2025. D'Alexandre à Kanishka : Interactions culturelles dans les fondations des successeurs d'Alexandre, du Proche-Orient à la vallée de l'Indus, aux époques hellénistique, romaine et arsacide : Volume I & Volume II (MDAFA 35). Athens: École française d'Athènes. From the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indus Valley, the successors of Alexander the Great founded, as early as the 4th century BCE, an impressive network of cities inspired by Macedonian urban models.

Alibaigi, Sajjad. 2025. A Clue to a Puzzle: The Assyrian Provincial Seal of Surkh Dom-i Luri, a pattern for Darius I's Seal. Arta 2025.004. This short article examines the iconographic origins of the famous seal of Darius I, for which an Egyptian provenance has been proposed and now in the British Museum (BM 89132). Although the influence of the glyptic art of the first millennium BC on Achaemenid seal-carving is well evident, scholars have paid less attention to this influence on the cylinder seal of Darius I.

Vaissière, Étienne de La. 2025. A military origin for New Persian? Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. Akadémiai Kiadó 78(3). 471–489. The question of the transition from Middle Persian to New Persian has been hotly debated. This article attempts to answer two questions: who spoke New Persian before it was put into writing in the middle of the 9th c.? This social group is identified with the soldiers of the armies of Abū Muslim, i.e.

Colburn, Henry P. 2025. The first Hyrcanian tiger? A unique figurine from Yarim Tepe, Iran. Anthropozoologica 60(10). 131–142. The article is also available here. Tigers (Panthera tigris Linnaeus, 1758) are rare in ancient art outside of India and Central Asia. In the Mediterranean world they were associated with the East, and all the danger and exoticism that it entailed, especially with the region of Hyrcania (modern Gorgan), on the southeastern coast of the Caspian Sea.

Brody, Lisa & Anne H. Chen (eds.). 2025. Dura-Europos: Past, Present, Future. Turnhout. Brepols. This volume brings together an international and interdisciplinary host of scholars to reflect on the complicated legacies of exploration at the archaeological site of Dura-Europos, situated on the western bank of the Euphrates River near modern Salihiyeh (Syria). A chance discovery after World War I kicked off a series of excavations that would span the next century and whose finds are today housed in collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Louvre, and the National Museum in Damascus.

Stadel, Seth M. 2025. The legal constructions of Christian slavery in Fars at the end of Late Antiquity. Journal of Late Antiquity 18(2). 401–422. In the seventh and eighth centuries, the Church of the East community in Fars (southwest Iran) slowly developed a distinctive identity in response to the political, religious, and cultural changes that transformed the region in the wake of the Arab conquest of Iran in the early to mid-seventh century.

Fattori, Marco & Marco F. Ferrari. 2025. Zeus Pharnauas and Persian Mazdaism in Cappadocia. Iran 1–16. This article deals with the spread of Iranian religion in the western regions of the Achaemenid Empire by means of a combined analysis of historical and linguistic data. The core of the discussion is about the word Φαρνάουας, which appears as an epithet of Zeus in a Greek inscription from Roman Cappadocia.

Barnea, Gad. 2025. Some Achaemenid Zoroastrian echoes in early Yahwistic sources. Iran. 1–10. In her magnum opus, A History of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce perceptively noted that often, in the history of this Iranian religion, “developments within Iran itself have to be deduced from the ripples which they caused abroad”. This is certainly true of the history of Achaemenid-era Zoroastrianism, the characteristics (and in some circles even the existence) of which, continue to be a matter of debate even as more and more information regarding its possible features continues to emerge.

Panaino, Antonio. 2025. Ahreman’s ascent and the direction of his primordial aggression. With an excursus about the cosmic egg (Publications d’Études Indo-Iraniennes 4). Strasbourg: Université de Strasbourg. This study analyses the problem of the trajectory taken by Ahreman during his aggression against the Good Creation. In the Pahlavi texts, this attack moves from the bottom of the universe to the top, passing throughout the intermediate void.

Sims-Williams, Nicholas, with contributions by Jonathan A. Silk. 2025. An Old Khotanese Reader: The Tale of Bhadra (Beiträge zur Iranistik 53). Wiesbaden: Reichert. This reader contains the complete text of the Buddhist ‘Tale of Bhadra’, the second chapter of the Old Khotanese Book of Zambasta, accompanied by a translation, commentary and glossary. All morphological forms occurring in the text are identified in the glossary and in the introduction, which also includes a survey by Jonathan A.

Niechciał, Paulina. 2025. Zoroastrian Women in the United States of America: Practicing Lived Zoroastrianism in a Diaspora (The Vastness of Culture). Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press. This book examines how ancient Zoroastrianism is practiced in the US diaspora and how it has evolved dynamically. As it developed in the patriarchal cultures of Iran and India, to move beyond the dominant male perspective, this book focuses on women.

International Conference Dedicated to the 30th Anniversary of Iran and the Caucasus 19-21 September, 2026Armenia The Editorial Board of Iran and the Caucasus, in collaboration with De Gruyter Brill, is pleased to announce an international conference marking the 30th anniversary of the journal’s founding. Since its inception in 1997, Iran and the Caucasus has emerged as a leading interdisciplinary platform for scholarly engagement with the diverse historical, linguistic, literary, folkloric, textual, religious, archaeological, economic, and political dimensions of Irano-Caucasica—an expansive geo-cultural region extending from Asia Minor to the Indian subcontinent, encompassing Central Asia, Afghanistan and other territories historically situated within Greater Iran’s political orbit, inhabited by Iranian peoples, or profoundly influenced by Iranian cultural traditions including Northern Pakistan and the North Caucasus.

Dastur, Arish. 2025. Imbued with the essence of the Gods: The intersection between Zoroastrian theology and the Old Avestan possessive adjectives derived from personal pronouns. Bulletin of SOAS, FirstView 1–34. The Gāϑās of Zaraϑuštra provide us with the Old Avestan attestations of the adjectives mauuaṇt-, ϑβāuuaṇt- and xšmāuuaṇt-/yūšmāuuaṇt-. The adjective mauuaṇt- occurs twice in the Gāϑās, while…

Afshin-Vafaie, Mohammad & Pejman Firoozbakhsh (eds.). 2024. Studia Persica in Memory of Dr. Mahmoud Afshar Yazdi, volume 23. Tehran: Dr. Mahmoud Afshar Endowment Foundation. The volume contains several interesting papers on different aspects of Iranian Studies. Here is the table of contents: S. ALIYARI BABOLGHANI: Old Persian <θ> /θ₁, θ₂/: Phonetic Value(s) and Phonological Development(s) into Middle Persian D. DURAND-GUÉDY: The State of the Rum Saljuqs as Reflected in the Honorific Titles (alqāb) of its Servants: Edition and Commentary of the khiṭāb Section of Ms.