Zarghamee, Reza. 2025. A contribution to the discourse regarding a Teispid-Achaemenid dynastic divide. The Ancient History Bulletin 39(3/4). 86–124. Editorial remark: Unfortunately, we are unable link to the individual articles, published by the bulletin. which seems to be due to the green open access policy the journal follows. This paper evaluates the recent scholarly trend of characterizing Cyrus II and Darius I as belonging to two distinct dynasties: the former being a Teispid and the latter an Achaemenid.

Volume 12 of Dabir (2025) is now available both online and in print, featuring two issues: Salman Aliyari Babolghani: The Imperfect with the t-Type Prefix in New Iranian and Its Connection to the Old Iranian Augmented Imperfect Optative Majid Daneshgar: Reading Ismāʿīlī Islam in Aceh: Shāh Shams Sabziwārī’s Poems Copied in the 15th-Century Indonesia Meysam Mohammadi: Middle Persian, Early New Persian and Fahlawī Quotations in Tārīx-e Qom…

Volumes 14-15 (2023-2024) of Anabasis. Studia Classica et Orientalia, edited by Marek Jan Olbrycht, is out now. Several papers and reviews of the issue relate to ancient Iran: Michał Podrazik: Cyrus the Younger in Syria and Mesopotamia, Abrokomas, and the Great King’s Defensive Strategy (401 BC) Heckel: Alexander and the Amazon Queen Harry Falk: Zariaspa and the “Kunduz” Hoards…

Garrison, Mark B. 2025. The Late Babylonian worship scene at Persepolis. In: Benjamin Sass & Laura Battini (eds.), Mortals, Deities and Divine Symbols: Rethinking Ancient Images from the Levant to Mesopotamia. Studies Offered to Tallay Ornan (Archaeopress Ancient Near Eastern Archaeology 12), 477-536. Bicester: Archaeopress. This analysis concerns several types of worship scenes found in the glyptic imagery preserved as impressions on clay administrative tablets from Persepolis.

Matin, Emad. 2025. Reaching the Persian Gulf from the Kur River Basin: Patterns of an Intermittent Connectivity. East and West 65 (1). The paper at hand explores the connectivity between Central Fars and the Persian Gulf over a long period of time from protohistory to the Early Islamic era. In doing so, it focuses on the three areas of the Kur River Basin, Dashtestan and the Bushehr Peninsula and reviews the rise and fall of settlements in these areas—within the limits of the existing bibliography.

Nikkhah Bahrami, Gita. 2025. Untersuchungen zu mittelbabylonischen Texten aus Haft-Tappe (dubsar 27). Münster: Zaphon. G. Nikkhah Bahrami’s study offers a comprehensive edition and cultural-historical and economic-historical investigation of the texts in Middle-Babylonian Akkadian found at Haft-Tappe in the province Khuzestan in southwestern Iran. Following a brief introduction (I.), paleography, syllabary, orthography, and other philological questions concerning the texts are discussed (II.).

Hyland, John O. 2025. Persia’s Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, and Spectacle on the Achaemenid Frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Persia’s Greek Campaigns offers a bold reassessment of the wars between the Achaemenid Persian kings and the Greek city-states (c. 499–449 bce). These conflicts, and especially Xerxes’s invasion of Greece (480–479 bce), are remembered as foundational events in Greek history, but the “Persian version” remains neglected.

Raja, Rubina & Eivind Heldaas Seland. eds. 2025. Palmyra, the Roman Empire, and the Third Century Crisis: Zooming in and Scaling up from the Evidence. Stuttgart: Steiner. The third century is often seen as a period of crisis in the Roman world, marked by political upheaval, violence, war, religious strife, hyperinflation, climatic instability, pandemics, and border incursions. These troubled times, however, coincided with the peak of Palmyra's prosperity.

Macuch, Maria. 2025. Sasanian law in its social context (Iranica 34). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Sasanian law has remained largely an unknown entity outside the specific field of Iranian Studies due to the immense difficulties involved in understanding the relevant legal sources. Sasanian Law in its Social Context by Maria Macuch is the first attempt to reconstruct the legal system of Sasanian Iran (224–651 CE), systematically and in detail, covering all areas of law as far as they can be reconstructed on the basis of the available material.

Barena, Gad. 2025. ʾAhyh ʾAšr ʾAhyh: The Achaemenid-Zoroastrian Background of the Burning Bush Pericope. Revista Pistis & Praxis 17(3), 384–402. Various types of impact, assimilation, and engagement of certain redactional layers of the Hebrew Bible with Achaemenid-era Zoroastrianism have long been noted by biblical scholars and by researchers of ancient Iranian cultic practices. Both disciplines, however, are facing similar challenges regarding the problem of the transmission history of their sacred texts, which is complex, perplexing, and vigorously debated.

In the various issues of volume 88 of Near Eastern Archaeology, several articles address topics in Iranian archaeology. The following list compiles all Iran-related contributions: Morteza Khanipour and Masashi Abe: From Seasonal Hunting Base to Permanent Settlement. Insights from the High-altitude Hormangan Site Reza Naseri and Morteza Khanipour: Burial Practices of the Bronze Age. An Archaeological Study of the Deh Dumen Cemetery in Southern Zagros, Iran…

Indo-Iranian Journal volume 68, issue 3 (November 2025) has been published (as always h/t @yaleclassicslib.bsky.social‬). Sims-Williams has an open access article on Bactrian: Sims-Williams, Nicholas. 2025. Bactrian in two scripts: Greek and Kushan. Indo-Iranian Journal. Brill 68(3). 185–214.

Bernard, Chams Benoît. 2025. Like dust on the Silk Road: On the earliest Iranian and BMAC loanwords in Tocharian (Leiden Studies in Indo-European 27). Leiden: Brill. This volume is open access. Follow the link above. "How did the Tocharians reach China?" "Who did they meet on the way?” are some of the most intriguing questions in Indo-European studies. This book is zooming in on a specific part of the question: on their way to China, Tocharians were in contact with an Iranian people living in the south Siberian Steppes, and with a people related to the Oxus Civilization (BMAC).

Purwins, Nils. 2025. Der Aufbau des Sasanidenreiches: Administration und Eliten im Vergleich zum Römischen Reich (Ancient Iran Series 18). Leiden: Brill. The work provides in two volumes the first comprehensive overall concept of the administrative and social structure of the Sasanian Empire (5th-7th century). In more than 1.000 contemporary leather documents, seals, ostraca, inscriptions and texts, which are brought together here for the first time, the subjects of the king of kings report in words and pictures on their lives in the various provinces of the empire, on the organisation of the military, civil and religious administration and on the circles of power at the court of their ruler.

Hackl, Johannes. 2025. The Unfinished Story of the Babylonian Version of the Bīsotūn (Behistun) Inscription (DB Bab.). Iraq. Published online 2025:1-20. doi:10.1017/irq.2025.10033 This article revisits the editorial history of the Babylonian (Akkadian) version of the Bīsotūn (Behistun) Inscription (DB) to establish the extent of the surviving text in light of a re-examination of the inscription at Mount Bīsotūn (Behistun).

The Society of Scholars of Zoroastrianism presents The Academic Research Segment. The Academic Research Edition of the Society of Scholars of Zoroastrianism presents 'a deep dive into the newest discoveries in the world of Zoroastrianism'. This is an online event taking place on 15 November 2025 from 3:30 to 6:30pm GMT. Please visit this link for further details. The participants are:

Toft, Lasse Løvlund, Mattias Sommer Bostrup & René Falkenberg (eds.). 2025. On the Matter. Studies on Manichaeism and Church History Presented to Nils Arne Pedersen at Sixty-Five (Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum – Analecta Manichaica 4). Turnhout: Brepols Publishers. The anthology consists of twenty-nine studies on Manichaean texts in Coptic, Syriac, Chinese, and Iranian languages, as well as on broader Church History including texts from the Nag Hammadi Codices, Coptic and Syriac heresiology and Early Modern religious polemics.

The Pahlavi Papyri in their Historical Context is the second round of the Pahlavi Papyri Workshop to be held in Innsbruck: Tuesday, 25 November – Wednesday, 26 November 2025. The workshop is organized by Bernhard Palme, Robert Rollinger and Touraj Daryaee. Address: Seminar rooms 04K100/04M100 (4th floor) and 14 (1st floor), Ágnes-Heller-Haus, Innrain 52a, 6020 Innsbruck To see the program, click here.

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.