This article examines the research potential of archaeological collections gathered in 1949–1951 in southern Afghanistan and currently stored in the United States. Included in these materials is an unpublished archaeological survey from the area south of the modern-day city of Kandahar, as well as assemblages from test excavations at the sites of Deh Morasi Ghundai and Said Qala, which have not been

The essay examines four files from the U.S. National Archives dealing with information management in Afghanistan at the onset of the Cold War. The files describe the structure of information dissemination by the U.S. in Kabul, providing considerable detail about the materials distributed, their varying appeal to local communities and constituencies, and their function in the larger ideological competition

The Rawshani movement is the first well-documented example of supra-tribal unification and subsequent successful integration of the movement’s leaders into the alien state structures. But by no means is it an isolated phenomenon in Pashtun history. Similar pattern of religion-motivated supra-tribal unification, which should be considered as a product of historical relationships of power, remerged inter

The Sikhs in Afghanistan are the descendants of one of the non-Muslim communities that have lived in Afghanistan for centuries. Threatened by political insecurity, terrorist attacks and economic problems that have marked the country for several decades, they began in the 1980s a migratory process that has not stopped since then and has considerably reduced their number today. In this article, I will

It is a well-known fact that Pashto belongs to those Eastern Iranian languages, which show lambdacism. While similarities exist with Bactrian and Munji-Yidgha, the situation in Pashto is not exactly the same, and is in any case far more complicated. Especially interesting in this respect is the development of Old Iranian *t, which is sometimes shifted to l in Pashto proper and y in Waneci, sometimes

The complicated process of the Pashtun tribes’ conversion to Islam is indirectly reflected in tribal genealogies, which bear traces of artificial Islamification. Recorded in the early 17th century, these genealogies are poorly consistent with apocryphal Hadiths and hagiographies intended to prove that Pashtuns had steadily adhered to Sunni Islam since the times of the Prophet Muḥammad. The politicised

The paper is a part of a wider research on the Ismaili identity, peculiarities of the Ismailis’ self-identification in various parts of the world under different historical circumstances. The ambiguous status of the Ismailis in Afghanistan turned to be particularly problematic by the end of the 19th century when the Pashtuns became dominant in the traditionally Ismaili-inhabited areas. In a hostile

In the fourth book of Herodotus’ Histories, in one of the two legends on the origin of the Scythians, we read the name of the progenitor of this people and his descendants. In the following paragraphs, Herodotus recalls names of other Scythian kings. These data cannot be useful in the traditional sense that genealogies have: they do not contribute in any way to date events or to put order in their

The purpose of this short note is to clarify the meaning, the original inflection and the etymology of the Indo-Iranian word *mastr̥ghan- / *mastr̥ǰhan- ‘brain, skull’.

The aim of this article is to present mainly those aspects of the interviews that concerned the relationship of Mountain Jews to the Tats. In addition, issues regarding the language, identity, and relations of Mountain Jews with other ethnic groups are discussed. The article is based on interviews that were conducted as part of a research project “Between the Caucasus and Jerusalem: Mountain Jews in

This study explores the reconstruction of Iranian national identity during the Mohammad Reza Shah era (1953 to 1979). Drawing on materials collected from the memoirs and statements of the Shah and the key actors of the era and using Historical Sociology in International Relations as its theoretical backbone, it aims to unravel the constitutive role of the international on the formation of Iranian state

In the world of Realpolitik, Israel and Azerbaijan seem to have closer relations than just pragmatic ones. This article intends to shed light on the strategic and regional interests of Israel and Azerbaijan, while considering Iran’s efforts to maintain an alliance with Azerbaijan. From the Israeli side, these relations have multi-dimensional components that enable Israel to keep an eye on Iran without

An analysis of a group of the administrative texts from the Persepolis Fortification Archive gives the impression that the Fahliyān region in northwestern Fārs was probably the heart of the territory in which the Patischorian tribe and Gobryas family were centered in the Achaemenid period. This article attempts to examine hypothetically the connection between archaeological remains discovered in the

The paper is devoted to the etymology of the Classical New Persian term for mushroom, samārō/ūγ, with some notes about other mycological terms in this language.

This article is devoted to the Iranian copper coins of the 17th-18th centuries with the countermark “saber” (shamshīr) that were recently found in Armenia. Numismatic analysis shows that their production was carried out by Davit Bek, the leader of the Armenian army in Kapan in 1722-1728, after 1725 or 1726, when he received the right of anonymous coinage from Shah Ṭahmāsp II. The symbolism of the image

The present study aims to emphasize an empirical perspective on the global scope of the COVID-19 event. The focus is that of an investigator concerned with Iran’s security and specific services used to process civil interactions. Game Theory dynamics affect uncertainty, proxy wars and the complex geopolitics of the Middle East. This often requires key players to focus on security by any means at their

This article proposes a general re-evaluation of the archaeological site of Shahr Yeri, the most striking feature of which is the presence of over five hundred of what we may call statue-stelae. Despite the fact that the site and the statue-stelae have been known since at least 1978 and are of great archaeological interest, they have been relatively little studied in the past. The goal of this paper

The article presents some historical evidence about the veneration of individual trees, primarily the juniper and the oak-trees, traditionally considered to be sacred in the Zaza culture, as well as generally groves and forests. Unfortunately, the once vast and rich forestal covering of the Zazas’ main habitat in Dersim (Tunceli), which was a proverbial phenomenon still in the beginning of the 20th

This paper deals with a chapter of Amānat Rāy’s Persian verse translation of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, completed in Delhi in 1732-33, and a section of the Ṭūr-i maʿrifat by his poetic and philosophical mentor Mīrzā ʿAbd al-Qādir Bīdil (1644-1720), a mathnawī describing the monsoon in a hilly region of present day Rajasthan. The aim of our brief analysis is to introduce a debate on the poetics of physis

The Bundahišn (meaning primal or primordial creation) is one of the most important Zoroastrian texts. Redacted in the 9th century, though containing earlier, Sasanian material, the Bundahišn deals with a wide variety of topics ranging from spiritual and material creation to the resurrection of the body and the restoration of the world. This article will address a number of previously underexplored

This paper presents a description of evidentiality marking in the Rikvani dialect of Andi. As a language spoken in the Caucasus, Andi is situated in the center of a large area within Eurasia where evidentiality is frequently expressed with a perfect or resultative form of the verb (general indirective), and special particles marking hearsay (and sometimes also inference). Both are attested in Andi

This article presents the evolution of the concepts of jihād from the minimalist and maximalist approaches. In the present article one can find two conceptions: the conception of liminality and the conception of re-Islamisation. Liminality is a form of structural crisis that appears as a result of the split within the Islamic spiritual elite and Muslim community itself. The period of liminality is

The article explores some aspects of modern childbirth rituals and practices among the city dwellers of Dagestan, focusing on their syncretic nature and the mixture of traditional and new customs. Proper Islamic religious ceremonies occupy a significant place in the childbirth rituals, among them being mawlid, on the occasion of the birth, name-giving of a new-born, circumcision, visiting ziyarats

The present article resumes the history of the first edition of the Caucasian Albanian palimpsests with a special focus on the contributions by Wolfgang Schulze, without whom nothing that has been achieved would have been achieved. Thematised are the different types of photographs that were used (ultraviolet and multispectral images), with an outlook on the new technology of transmissive light imaging

Iran-Russia relations are highly affected by the shared interest of the two countries in confronting the influence of the United States in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Caucasus. However, the development of the relationship between the two countries has been hampered by the ongoing legacy of historical antagonism between them, casting doubt and pessimism upon the prospect of more constructive

It is a well-known fact that the stage of etymological research forms a quite slippery floor in particular when dealing with possible loans from tongues beyond the domain of one’s specialization. The present article is concerned with a case where a narrow, i.e. an internal caucasological view on the etymology of a word delivers already a quite plausible and convincing result, which, however, in a wider

So far, more than forty Sasanian bas-reliefs have been discovered in numerous archaeological sites. Among them, eleven bas-reliefs in seven archaeological sites represent women on them. In this article, the eleven bas-reliefs and the women’s images and their characteristics in different scenes have been analyzed and studied. It can be concluded that women on these bas-reliefs have been represented

Vsevolod Miller in the third part of his Ossetic Studies considered the names of the metals both in Iron and Digoron, with particular reference to those of Finno-Ugric origin, in order to determine the way followed by the Alans to reach the Northern Caucasus in the first century A.D. In this paper Miller's theory is examined in the light of the historical linguistic data currently available.

On the meaning of Ved. (dual) kukṣí, a denomination for pair body parts frequently equated to bodies of water in Vedic texts, different assumptions have been made by scholars. In particular, Stephanie Jamison suggested interpreting it as “the two cheeks”, Henk Bodewitz as “the two sides of the body”. The present paper supports Bodewitz’ claim that Ved. kukṣí- was used to refer to any of the sides of

The paper presents a comparative analysis of the Pahlavi “Story of Jōišt ī Friyān”, comparing it with three other tales, which span several hundred years and belong to several cultural traditions. By isolating structural and content-related features from the narrative core of these tales and setting them into relation with each other, the present author attempts to answer the following questions. Are

The Rekom Shrine located in the Tsey Valley of North Ossetia-Alania is one of the most important sites in the Ossetian popular religion, which in modern times is often referred to as the Uatsdin. The shrine is dedicated to Uastyrdzhi, an Ossetian cultic figure associated with the Christian St. George. Rekom is the site of a major festival held in mid-June, called Rekomy Bærægbon (Рекомы бæрæгбон),

From the very beginning of Iranian disciplinary studies, the material concerning Zarathustra’s biography has been analysed in depth, firstly to identify the homeland of the Prophet and then to discuss the historical reality of this authoritative figure. Despite the divergences of opinion, emphasis has always been placed on the reconstruction of the figure of Zarathustra and much less on the socio-cultural

This explorative study uses descriptive process tracing to outline the evolution of Chechen terrorism from 1994-2017. Analysis begins with simple descriptive statistics that characterize data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD) and identify those years in which significant changes occurred in the processes, environmental context, and overall security conditions in Chechnya. A detailed narrative

The Arabic historiographical tradition is considered to be one of the most important textual sources for the reconstruction of Sāsānian history. Historians such as al-Ṭabarī, al- Masʿūdī or al-Thaʿālibī explicitly claimed to have used older material of Persian origin. The basis of their accounts seem to have been translations, excerpts and adaptations of translations, which commonly are traced back

The article is an attempt to interpret the toponym Bardeskan/Bardaskan, which is the name of a city and a šahrestān (“county”) located in the south of the Khorasan-e Razavi province in Iran, on the northern edge of the Great Salt desert (Kavīr-e namak). Parallelly, the author discusses also the origin of a number of other place-names from the same area.

More than a century years ago Talât Pasha declared famously that in the Eastern Provinces “The Armenian question does not exist anymore”. Today, far from being resolved, the former binary coding (Armenian/Turkish) is even further complicated by a third element— the ongoing Kurdish question (doza Kurdistanê). While most research and journalistic works frame the Armenian issue and the Kurdish issue as

This article discusses the publications of two documentation projects of the Gorani varieties of Gawraǰū and Zarda. It offers a number of alternative interpretations, corrections and additions to the grammatical description of two understudied and highly endangered West Iranic varieties, which are under strong influence of neighbouring Kurdish dialects.

The paper deals with the etymology of NP pōlād “steel” suggested by Ernst Herzfeld more than seventy years ago, but overlooked both by his contemporaries and by the following generations of scholars. Some slight emendations are proposed to Herzfeld’s reconstruction of the stages of borrowing from Middle Indian into Old Persian, without, however, diminishing his role as trailblazer.

This paper focuses on the theory and practice of jihād in the Mamlūk Sultanate, especially during the Circassian period (1382-1517). Some ideas of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406), Ibn Kathīr (d. 1373), Ibn al-Naḥḥās (d. 1411), as well as scholars of the pre-Mamlūk epoch are taken in consideration. The authors explore the issue of understanding jihād as the responsibility of the community

The paper presents the publication of several inscriptions in the Arabic Kufic script carved on stone in the period of the 10th-13th centuries and discovered in the Avar ethnic area of Dagestan. All of them, except the first one, are published for the first time. This epigraphic material indicates that the process of the gradual spread of Islam started in Dagestan already at the end of the 10th century

The paper is an attempt to analyse the emergence of virtual “alliances” based on imagined kinship between some ethnic groups and peoples of the Irano-Caucaso-Anatolian region. It focuses on several illustrative examples, particularly the case of the Talysh-Zaza rapprochement, which has been developed recently as a result of popular interpretation of the postulated theory of the Caspian-Aturpatakan

This article, focused on the Persian Gobryas, the head of Patischorian tribe and a member of the mysterious circle bringing Darius I (the Great) to the throne called the “Seven” by Herodotus, aims to argue that the concept of seven families was originally derived from the tribal structure of the Achaemenid society rather than from traditions found in classical writers. Mainly based on the administrative

The main effort of the Azerbaijani government regarding the historical conflict between the Shiites and the Sunnis in the state, is to keep the status quo between these factions. However, the Arab Spring’s regional impact and the emergence of ISIS (ISIL and IS) led to waves of religious radicalisation, especially in the Sunnite part of Azerbaijan, which is more Turkic aligned, yet far territorially

Traditionally, functioning of major classes of lexical items is described as follows. Nouns prototypically function as arguments, but can also serve as predicates and attributes; verbs are normally used as predicates, but can also appear for arguments and attributes; and adjectives are categorically attributes, while secondary they can be used as predicates. The question arises, whether adjectives

This study analyzes the post-September 11 Taliban’s discourse, exploring particularly the sujet of the battle of Maiwand (July 27, 1880) in the Taliban’s tarani (pl. of tarana “chant, song”). After providing a brief history of the post-September 11 conflict in Afghanistan, the paper examines Afghanistan’s experience of colonialism in the 19th century by discussing the Anglo-Afghan wars, with a focus

This article recounts the story of how the Circassians have been able to raise awareness of their deportation in the 1860s during the Caucasian Wars. After a brief methodology the authors provide an overview of the Circassian history. The second section analyses the period when the Circassian population came under Russian rule after the 1860s. The third part focuses on three broad approaches or strategies

This is the second part of the article dedicated to the discussion of some methodological problems related to the history of Khinalug, published in the current volume of Iran and the Caucasus (see Schulze 2018). Whereas the first part analyses some basic data on Khinalug in its genetic problem and addressed some questions of loans and cognates, the second one turns to grammatical issues. Khinalug,

The Prophet Noah is not a predominant figure within the Yezidi mythology, and so it should come as no particular surprise that he is often absent from the Yezidi sacred hymns. This peculiarity seems easily explained by the Yezidi cosmogonic myth, which places the emergence of Yezidis as a separate and wholly distinct occurrence from the genesis of the rest of humanity. Hence, a mythical catastrophe

The article is devoted to the Persian concept of āberū , which in contemporary Persian expresses the meanings of ‘good reputation’, ‘good social image’, and ‘honour’ that a man possesses in the eyes of others. This concept, fundamental to the Persian culture, can be studied from multiple perspectives—linguistic, sociological, religious, or ethical. However, the present article’s main objective is to

The present article deals with the methodological treatment of the problems connected with the interpretation of a series of astral omina concerning the political life of the Pontus king Mithridates VI Eupator (about 120-63 B.C.), as referred to by Classical authors like Pompeus Trogus ( via the Epitomae of Justinus, XXXVII, 2, 1-3) or Seneca ( Naturales Quaestiones VII, 15, 2). If some scholars have

During the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age the lands around the Lake Sevan basin witnessed the emergence of a distinctive local culture, marked by characteristic burial practices, abundant metalwork and varied pottery production generally called the “Lcasen Culture”. It was named after the numerous finds from the village of Lcasen, but its features are spread throughout the lake basin also seen in neighbouring

The structural tensions that exist in the religious dynamics between Shi‘its and Sunnis in Azerbaijan Republic has led the country’s government to establish a new institution to monitor and supervise the religious issues. This article not only aims to surface the tensions between the “State Committee for Religious Affairs” and the informal religious institutions, but also to show if the secular image

The rare Pahlavi word “sling”, which, in particular, renders Avestan fradaxsanā - “id.” in V 14.9, 17.9, 17.10 and P 20, has until now defied etymological explanation. As early as 1889, Paul Horn compared Pahlavi “sling” with New Indian gophan “id.”, but this proposal was neglected by scholars, as was often the case with Horn’s ideas. In the present paper, Horn’s suggestion is rehabilitated with some

The perception of Turkey as a model of attractive country in the region has started to change in the recent years. In the first decade of the JDP rule Turkey was seen as an emerging power with its strong economy, improving democracy and inspiring foreign policy. However, the developments since the Arab Uprisings in the neighbourhood, Gezi movement at home, end of the Kurdish peace process, as well

The *- d - > - l - and *- s - > - l - changes in New Iranian are usually regarded as Eastern Iranian phonetic features. However, a thorough study of the Western New Iranian lexicon, particularly that of the dialects located geographically at a great distance from Eastern Iranian linguistic domain, unveiled a considerable number of lexemes, definitely genuine forms, with the same characteristics. The

The role of Iranian merchants in the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean basin from antiquity up to the 16th century is often underestimated. From scholarly histories to popular culture the “Muslim sailor” is typically portrayed as being an Arab. In fact, from pre-Islamic times the principal actors in Indian Ocean trade were predominantly Persian, as attested by the archaeological data, local written

This paper presents “social moves” as a new strategy de facto states can use in their interactions with the international community, with or without the possibility of a formal recognition of sovereignty. Special attention is paid to Abkhazia’s continuing desire for an independent state compared to South Ossetia’s desire for Russian absorption in light of both regions’ ethnic histories and turbulent

Among the attested personal names in the Hayasa onomastics, there are some of the probable Aryan origin. Three of them are associated with the religion ( Akni, S ( a ) ummatar, taksanna ) and one, with the ruling elite of the kingdom ( Mariya ). If this is correct, it can be assumed that the Aryans could constitute a considerable part of the population of Hayasa.

This paper overviews the American missionary activity in Iran from the Southern Baptist Convention’s Foreign Mission Board. Much of the research is based on the Board of Trustee minutes of the Foreign Mission Board, as well as archival material from the International Mission Board, the new name for the Foreign Mission Board that includes personal correspondences, letters, communications, statistics

The paper describes several interesting details from the rich repository of folk beliefs, cults, rites and ceremonies of obviously pre-Islamic nature, recorded among the Gidatlis. The latter are a sub-ethnic group of the Avars living in the Shamil region of Dagestan.