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An Agenda for the Study of the Jesus Letter IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Garry W. Trompf
The ancient correspondence allegedly between the Toparch Abgar V of Edessa and Jesus of Nazareth is usually treated in modern scholarship as legendary, though possession of it was important for the legitimation of Armenia as the first Christian kingdom in ca. 314 A.D. (prior to Constantine’s ‘Christian’ rule of a united Roman Empire from 324, and well before Theodosius I’s Edict of Thessalonica in
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America’s Turkish Lobby against Armenian Genocide Recognition IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Erin Currie, Emil S. Aslan
While much ink has been spilled on the Armenian-American Lobby’s efforts to achieve the formal recognition of the tragic events in Anatolia of 1915–1918 as a Genocide, little is known about how the Turkish Lobby sought to prevent such recognition. This article is the first in the literature to offer a systematic account of how the Turkish Lobby advocated in the United States to prevent the recognition
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Armenia and Iran IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Carlo G. Cereti
This paper focuses on the worship of Anāhitā in Western Asia examining some of the ideas put forward by James R. Russel in his volume on Zoroastrianism in Armenia in the light of more recent discussions about the role played by the goddess in Armenian religion before the conversion of the country to Christianity. While the evidence from more ancient periods has also been briefly presented, specific
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The Armenians Themselves Burnt Their Own Houses and Desecrated Their Own Churches IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Aldo Ferrari
Luigi Villari’s book Fire and Sword in the Caucasus, published in London in 1906, is widely quoted by the scholars who study the history of South Caucasus at the time of the first Russian Revolution in 1905. After a short introduction about the interesting figure of this author, the first part of the article will take into consideration Villari’s peculiar attitude toward the Armenians. The larger part
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‘Big’ and ‘Small’ in the Toponymy of the Swāt Valley IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Matteo De Chiara
In this article I focus on thirty toponyms from the Swāt Valley, Pakistan, that incorporate the concepts of ‘big’ and ‘small’. In this context, ‘big’ is represented by three different adjectives, loy, luth, and mahā, while for ‘small’ we find two different suffixes, -ṛay and -g/k/xay, as well as the adjectives woṛ and waṛukay. Among other things, I also propose a new analysis of one of the toponyms
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A Corpus-Based Study of Alignment in Literary Gorani (Based on the Manuscript 11092 of Dīwān-i Mawlawī) IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Saeed Karami, Saloumeh Gholami
This paper examines alignment in Literary Gorani by analysing an unknown Gorani manuscript titled ‘Dīwān-i Mawlawī’ (Manuscript 11092), which is housed at the Āstān-e Qods-e Raḍavī library. The paper has two main objectives. Following Haig (2017) regarding the extent of the micro-variation of ergativity within Iranian languages, the paper explores strategies of interrelated subsystems such as case
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Horace and the Parthians IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Evgeniy Smykov
This paper aims to explore the Parthian theme in Horace’s poems throughout its development. First, it delves into the works featuring the ethnonym Parthus, which, unlike the synonymous Medus, notably aligns with the events contemporaneous to the poet. It becomes evident that Horace’s early works reflect the Parthian invasion of 41/40 B.C. and the anxiety surrounding the possibility of a recurrence
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Iranian Lexical Material in the Caucasus IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Jost Gippert
The present article examines the peculiar shape that the Middle Iranian word for ‘praise’, āfrīn, has achieved as a loanword in the language of the Caucasian “Albanians” where it appears as afre- in the complex verb afre-pesown ‘praise, bless’. Based on a thorough investigation of the morphology of formations with the light verb -pesown in Caucasian Albanian, it is proven that a recent proposal, which
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On the Participation of Armenians in the Mongol Ilkhanate’s Invasion of Syria (1259–1260) IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Aram Hovhannisyan
This study examines the participation of Cilician Armenians in the Mongol Ilkhanate’s Syrian invasions in 1259–1260. Drawing upon data from mediaeval sources and various perspectives in scholarly literature, this paper addresses the following key questions: 1. Where were the troops of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia and their allied countries consolidated? 2. To what extent did the troops of the Armenian
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A Prologue to Armenian Toponymy IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Garnik S. Asatrian, Gohar G. Hakobian
The study of Armenian toponyms constitutes a relatively underexplored and insufficiently addressed domain within the field of Armenian Studies. Unfortunately, the seminal works by Joseph Marquart (1901) and, especially, Heinrich Hübschmann (1904), supplemented later with insightful publications by Kapancyan (1940; 1956), hitherto remain the sole substantial contributions to the realm of Armenian toponymy
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Scythians and ξεινικὰ νόμαια IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Alexander Sinitsyn
Herodotus’ logos about Scythians and ξεινικὰ νόμαια—amusing and ominous, as is typical of him, yet insightful—consists of two stories about the sad lots of Anacharsis and Scyles; the story begins with a statement that Scythians shun practicing customs of other peoples, particularly those of Hellas; it ends as an adage asserting the initial statement: that is the way Scythians guard their customs (4
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Sefer Yeṣirah’s Dating, Geographic Provenance and the Open Question of Its Composer’s Religious Affiliation and Identity IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Samuel Zinner
In 2018, Weiss has ended centuries of speculation about the enigmatic Hebrew Sefer Yeṣirah’s dating and geographical provenance, demonstrating with a high level of confidence (specifically on the basis of Sefer Yeṣirah’s Syriac grammarian loanwords) a seventh-century C.E. Syrian origin. Weiss and others have also shown that Sefer Yeṣirah’s closest parallels are in Syriac Christian grammarian and theological
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Seventy-Two and The One Nation IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Peter Nicolaus, Artur Rodziewicz
The current article sheds light on the symbolism of the number 72 in Yezidism and briefly outlines its roots in ancient Mesopotamian religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Furthermore, it highlights the link between 72 nations and 72 genocides in Yezidi perception.
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Three Ritual Steps between India and Iran IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Antonio Panaino
The use of triadic patterns is a well-known modality occurring in some Indo-Iranian mythological contexts. This fact has been considered as a phenomenon too generic, and its presence just noted as an unimportant evidence. But, in reality, this procedure, despite its potentially perplexing background, produces some symbolic implications, whose frequent occurrence should be better observed. For instance
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An Unknown Source on Proselytism among the Udis IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Victoria Arakelova, Hayk Hakobyan
This paper presents the English translation with commentaries of some interesting passages from the unpublished manuscript by Abgar Payazat, an Armenian-Udi intellectual of the beginning of the 20th century. He particularly describes episodes of proselytism among the Udis from the Armenian Apostolic Church to the Russian Orthodoxy. The manuscript itself, is an attempt of compiling a grammar of the
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Written Torah and Oral Torah in the Study of Hasidism IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-12-01 Daniel Reiser
The traditional academic approach to the study of the Hasidic movement in Judaism has tended to be based primarily on texts. Although book learning is important to Hasidim, the heart of the movement is living experience, in particular oral teaching of the Hasidic understanding and application of Torah by the Rebbe, most often in the Yiddish vernacular. Failure adequately to take account of this “oral
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The City of Brass and Alexander’s Narrow Grave IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Alex MacFarlane
The 17th-century manuscript M7709 (held in the Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia) includes an Armenian copy of the History of the City of Brass, to which an unknown scribe has added short poems about Alexander the Great. The final article of three that together present the Alexander poems of M7709 in full, with English translation, for the first time, this article focuses on the last fourteen: the deaths
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The Iranian Sound Change *w- > *γw- in the Indo-Iranian Borderlands and a New Etymology for Gāndhārī and Sanskrit guśura(ka)- IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Niels Schoubben
It is generally accepted that the etymology of the Gāndhārī and Sanskrit official title guśura(ka)- has to be sought within the Iranian sphere, but the details remain debatable. In this article, I first give an overview of recently discovered evidence for an early sound change of *w- > *γw- in some Iranian dialects from the Indo-Iranian borderlands. On this basis, I then propose to derive guśura(ka)-
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Lankarān IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Garnik Asatrian
This is an attempt to interpret the origin of the well-known South Caspian Iranian toponym, Lankarān (Lankōn in Talishi), the name of the capital of Talish (Tōlǝš), or Talishistan (Tōlǝšistōn), the ethnic homeland of the Talishis, covering today the southernmost part of Azerbaijan Republic, bordering Iran. In Azerbaijani Turkish, the historical habitat of this Iranian people is officially named Cǝnub
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Martyrdom of the Sukiaseans (Mytho-Ritual Aspect) IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Tamerlan K. Salbiev
It is a common belief that conflict, underlying the events described in the Martyrdom of Sukiaseans was based on apostasy. Yet, it is very likely that the fatal controversy between the Alan king and the Alan hermits, who converted to Christianity, his subjects, was caused by more complex set of factors without which it is impossible to adequately understand neither the essence of the conflict, nor
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Reconsidering the Turkish–Islamic Synthesis IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Nail Elhan, Başar Şirin
Turkish–Islamic Synthesis has been an influential doctrine since the 1970s in Turkey. It emerged as a national/cultural reaction against the rising influence of the leftist and radical Islamist movements and has been discussed within these contexts. This study will expand the scope of the concept and offer Iran/Shi‘ism as a threat to Turkey’s national/religious integrity within the context of Turkish–Islamic
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Some Remarks on the Urartian Toponym Dara(ni) and Its Possible Identification with the Site of Solak-1/Varsak in Kotayk Region, Armenia IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-08-16 Roberto Dan, Artur Petrosyan
The aim of this paper is to reconsider some aspects of archaeology and historical geography related to the Urartian presence in the territory of modern-day Armenia in the light of the recent discovery of the important Iron Age site of Solak-1/Varsak. In particular, the possibility is put forward in this text that the ancient city of Dara(ni), mentioned in the Elar inscription made by Argišti I (CTU
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Early Safavid Campaigns in the Caucasus IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Ali Anooshahr
The chronicle of Qasim Beg Hayati of Tabriz, written during the reign of Shah Tahmasp (d. 1576), provides new information on early Safavid history that is absent from the other Persian historical literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In particular, Hayati shows how important the Caucasus was for the rise of Shaykh Junayd (d. 1460) and Shaykh Haydar Safavi (d. 1488). Using plunder and
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The ‘House of Song’, the *‘House of Clay’, Arm. gerezman, and Caucaso-Albanica IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Martin Schwartz
This paper begins with an examination of the phrase /garah dmāna-/, the most common designation for Paradise in the Gathas, for which the traditional translation ‘House of Song’ is upheld. Its dualistic opposite /drujah dmāna-/ ‘House of Wrongness’ for Hell leads to the question of why for Paradise one doesn’t have the expected opposite *‘House of Rightness’ instead of ‘House of Song’. The answer proceeds
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On a Painted Burial Jar from Tigranakert of Artsakh IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Armine Gabrielyan
The article is devoted to one of the jar burials discovered in 2018 during excavations of the Eastern tomb field of Tigranakert of Artsakh. That is a gorgeous painted karas with ornamental and figurative bands of various motifs painted in red on a light background. The central and widest part of the vessel bears a depiction of a deer hunting scene happening on both sides of a dense tree with scattered
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Traditionalism and Demodernisation IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Sergei Andreyev
With the beginning of a partial modernisation in Afghanistan in the late 19th century there emerged a pattern of opposition to this process. Often described as traditionalism it aimed not only at the maintaining of the status quo but had a demodernising twist seeking the establishment of an alternative socio-political order pursuing demodernisation dressed in traditionalist Islamic or tribal rhetoric
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Ubykh Personal Names IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Viacheslav A. Chirikba
The paper presents a survey of the system of Ubykh personal names. The traditional structure of Ubykh names was binary, consisting of a surname and a postposed personal name. Alternative structures included a preposed family name plus two or more personal names, or a surname, plus a patronymic, plus a personal name. Besides a few native Ubykh names, the majority of names are “Oriental” (Turkish/Turkic
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Urartian Stelae in Late Antique and Early Medieval Armenia IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-06-21 Felipe Rojas
This article concerns how Armenian communities throughout the 1st millennium A.D. reinterpreted and redeployed cuneiform inscriptions originally carved in the Iron Age as meaningful traces of the local past. It focuses on the deliberate re-use by early Armenian Christians of Iron-Age stelae bearing Urartian cuneiform inscriptions in the region around Lake Van. Scholars have noted such re-use in passing
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1908 Tabriz Uprising through French Writings IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-04-15 Charles Ganier
As one of the crucial moments of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the siege of Tabriz is logically one of the most commented episodes of the period both in Iranian and foreign historiographies. Among these, the French perception of this episode of the late Qajar era is less known than the British and Russian ones, and of course than Iranian sources. This article puts in comparison two testimonies:
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Concepts of hewād ‘Homeland’ and millat ‘Nation’ in Modern Pashto-Language Schoolbooks IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-04-15 Mateusz M.P. Kłagisz, Marta Drozdowska
The article discusses two basic socio-cultural and socio-political concepts of ‘homeland’ and ‘nation’ as they are presented in Pashto-language schoolbooks printed in 2009 and in 2012. To complete the discussion some examples found in the Dari-language 1960s schoolbooks have been added as well. The analysis shows intertextual relations at both the language and meaning level that create the key message
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The Demonic ‘Sub-Humanity’ of the Bears in the Mazdean Framework and Other Remarks IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-04-15 Antonio Panaino
Ancient Iranians knew well “bears”, in spite of the fact that they are not frequently mentioned in the oldest literature of the Zoroastrians. Despite the classification of bears as wild and demonic beasts, their common name was not particularly affected by strong and unexpected changes due to linguistic taboos, at least in the earlier phases. The present article investigates the position of bears within
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Manifestation of the Yezidi Identity IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-04-15 Birgül Açıkyıldız
This article aims to examine the relationship between cemeteries and Yezidi identity by focusing on the Goristana Hesen Begê (Hesen Beg Cemetery), which belongs to the villages of Geliyê Sora (Güneli), Mezre (Çilesiz), Xanik/Berhokê (Mağaracık), and Efşe (Kaleli), and is located in Nusaybin in southeastern Turkey. It will analyse the tombstones’ architectural features and symbols and question how the
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Metal Quivers from Hasanlu IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-04-15 Megan Cifarelli, Manuel Castelluccia
During the remarkable excavations at Hasanlu, in northwestern Iran, thousands of metal objects were discovered, but few have been systematically studied. The goal of this study is to present a catalogue of the metal quivers found by the Joint Expedition to Hasanlu (1956–1977), led by Robert H. Dyson of the University of Pennsylvania Museum. After a brief introduction concerning the site and the evidence
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On Peace Activists and Skilled Survivors IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-04-15 Katja Mielke
This article examines multiple entanglements of Afghan exiles’ biographies in West Germany with Cold War- and contemporary history. The life stories of six men who have been residing in Germany since the 1970s but were physically and cognitively highly mobile in their engagement for change in Afghanistan highlight the role of human agency in transnational history-making. The analysis shows that during
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Pashto Radical Simple Verbs and the Linguistic Border IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2023-04-15 Matteo De Chiara, Daniel Septfonds
This article intends to focus on the concept of linguistic border in the verbal system of contemporary Pashto, an Iranian language mainly spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. A careful, systematic, and detailed analysis of used radical simple verbs in different Pashto dialects draws attention to a certain degree of variation in one third of these verbs, which are switching from one category to another
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The City of Brass and Alexander’s Narrow Grave: Translation and Commentary of Kafas added to Manuscript M7709 (Part 2) IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Alex MacFarlane
The 17th-century manuscript M7709 (held in the Matenadaran, Yerevan, Armenia) includes an Armenian copy of the History of the City of Brass, to which an unknown scribe has added short poems about Alexander the Great. This is the second of three articles that together present the Alexander poems of M7709 in full, with English translation, for the first time (see Part I in Iran and the Caucasus 25.4:
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The Elamite Version of A2Ha and the Verb vidiyā- in Old Persian IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Marco Fattori
This article presents an edition of the Elamite version of the inscription A2Ha, which has always been considered too badly preserved to be read. Starting from the newly established text, some remarks will be made on the interpretation of the final word of the inscription (melkanra) and on its Old Persian counterpart (vidītu), which is found in the partially identical text A2Sa.
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Hell’s Kitchen: The Banquet in the Hereafter and the Reflexion of Zoroastrian Eschatological Motifs in the Qurʾān IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Sebastian Bitsch
This article discusses potential Zoroastrian prefigurations concerning the Qurʾānic imagination of tormenting and distasteful food in hell. Although research on paradise and hell in the Qurʾān and the Islamic tradition has recently undergone a significant revival, recognizing potential allusions to Jewish, Christian, and—to a lesser extent—ancient Arabic traditions, Zoroastrian texts continue to be
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On Criticism of S. L. Nikolayev/S. A. Starostin, A North Caucasian Etymological Dictionary IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-12-06 John D. Bengtson, Corinna Leschber
It has been noticed that the most comprehensive etymological dictionary of North Caucasian languages (NCED) has repeatedly been disparaged, and even totally ignored, due to alleged deficiencies of the lexicon. One also finds that some critics who dismiss this dictionary do not enumerate the shortcomings of the book themselves, but simply cite two reviews, one by J. Nichols and another by the late W
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The Southern Boundaries of the Southern Caucasus IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Arsen K. Shahinyan
The article is an attempt to show the historical and geographical expanse of the South Caucasus and the adjacent regions, particularly to give a more accurate outline of its southern borders.
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The Survival of Ossetians in Turkey IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Richard Foltz
The migration of North Caucasian peoples into Ottoman Anatolia during the early 1860s included some five thousand Muslim Ossetes who settled first in the Sarıkamış district and later moved further west. While today the descendants of these migrants may number as many as 60,000, most now live in the major urban centres of Istanbul and Ankara and have largely become assimilated into modern Turkish society
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The Talishis on Opposite Banks of the Araxes River: Identity Issues IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Victoria Arakelova
The Talishis are the fourth largest ethnic group in the South Caucasus and the largest nonstate people in the Caucasian-Iranian region. The problems of their ethnic history, culture, and identity are among the topical issues of Caucaso-Caspica. The Talishis are a divided people living on opposite banks of the Araxes River, in the current Azerbaijan Republic and the Islamic Republic of Iran. This historical
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An Eastern Iranian Lunar Deity and Her Epithet IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Julian Kreidl
In this paper, it is argued that in certain areas of pre-Islamic Eastern Iran the common lunar deity was not the male *māh- like in most regions of Western Iran, Bactria, and Sogdiana, but instead the feminine *māsti- with a prominent epithet, which may go back to *uxšma-kā-/*uxšma-kī- ‘the waxing one’ or, alternatively, *us-šma-kā-/*us-šma-kī- ‘the one who shines up’. In some parts of Badakhshan,
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Escape from the Land of the Dead: Nart Sagas, Divine Comedy, and the Journey Through the Afterlife IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Paolo Ognibene
Journeys in the afterlife are present within the literatures of many peoples, including the Ossetians. In the Tales of the Narts, the hero Soslan enters the Land of the Dead by force, and equally by force he manages to get out of it, and so he tells us what he has seen. This tale has many elements in common with and others profoundly different from Dante’s Comedy and Ardā Vīrāz nāmag.
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Illegal Trafficking of Ammunition Along the Iran–Caucasian Border in the Early 20th Century IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Soli Shahvar, Anatoly Mishaev
In the early years of the 20th century, unprecedent waves of Iranian subjects poured into Russia, especially to the Southern Caucasus region, in search of better income and better life. Most of them experienced extremely difficult life, which passed in search of food for themselves and their families. However, among the vast majority of the Iranian émigrés, there were those few who were able to succeed
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The Mazdean Image of the Bird and its ‘Earthly’ Egg in Light of Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, ch. 47, and its Later Continuations IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Antonio Panaino
The Avestan text of Yašt 13,2-3 preserves an archaic simile in which the earth is described as an egg brooded by a bird. This beautiful image cannot be framed within any proto- Iranian cosmological myth, so that we cannot presume a priori the existence of an ancestral description of the earth and the sky as globular or spherical. Of course, images such as the one of Yašt 13,2-3 might inspire later
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“Other” Strategies in the Eastern Caucasus (Part II): Typology IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Yury Lander, Timur Maisak
The paper describes expressions with the meaning ‘other’ in East Caucasian (Nakh-Daghestanian) languages. It is shown that four main strategies can be distinguished: i) the ‘one’-based strategy: ‘other’ includes the numeral ‘one’; ii) the demonstrative-based strategy: ‘other’ includes a demonstrative pronoun; iii) the mixed demonstrative-based + ‘one’- based strategy: ‘other’ includes both a demonstrative
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The Survival of an Ancient Term in Talishi IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Garnik Asatrian
This is an attempt of tracing an ancient PIr. cultural lexeme in the language of the Talishis, an Iranian people inhabiting the south-western shores of the Caspian Sea, historically known as Talysh or Talyshistan. The term—a unique living remnant of the Old Iranian vocabulary in the whole Western New Iranian expanse (its only cognate in New Persian survived in Classical literature)—belongs to the sphere
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Symmetry in Armenian Mediaeval Ornaments IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-08-12 Mehmet Erbudak, Armen Kyurkchyan
The Armenian mediaeval culture is a treasure of ornaments. Sacral architecture, stone and wood carvings, decorations on paper and fabric, all contain planar periodic patterns. For the first time we classify the available ornaments according to their symmetry properties with the tools of mathematical group theory. We determine the unit cells of patterns, axes of rotation, mirror and glide reflections
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In the Spirit of Zarathustra: Intertextual Legitimation in Pahlavi Literature IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Matthias Weinreich
The present study investigates the intertextual relationship between the Pahlavi “Story of Jōišt ī Friyān” and the biography of Zarathustra, as recorded in pre-modern Zoroastrian sources. The first part of the study contains the presentation and analysis of intertextual fragments within the Pahlavi tale, which can be discerned as referencing the Zoroastrian prophet’s life and deeds, forging an associative
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The Oil Policy and Independence of the Kurdistan Regional Government IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Ebrahim Abbassi, Seyed Javad Salehi, Mohammad Salehi
The oil policy of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) is mainly focused on achieving full political independence besides pursuing other interests. The Kurdistan region of Iraq contains approximately one third of the total proven energy resources of the country. This raises the question of why Kurdistan’s oil policy could not be used as a leverage for its independence in the Middle East? The main
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On an Enigmatic Deity with a Dragon on a Chorasmian Silver Bowl from Dagestan IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Matteo Compareti
At least five specimens constituting the small group of Chorasmian silver vessels present an image of the Mesopotamian goddess Nana who was very popular in pre-Islamic Central Asia. One silver bowl found in Dagestan at present kept in the State Hermitage Museum is embellished with the image of a deity sitting on a dragon whose identity is not clear. Scholars considered this deity to be a woman because
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Pluralized Collectives in Young Avestan: A Morphosyntactic Explanation of the Replacement of the YAv. nom.-acc.pl.n. Endings and by -āiš, and -īš IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Alwin Kloekhorst
This article studies Young Avestan forms in -āiš (formally instr.pl.m./n. of a-stems), (formally nom.-acc.pl.f. of ā-stems) and -īš (formally nom.pl.f. of ī-stems) that are used in contexts where neuter nom.-acc.pl. / collective forms in (a-stems) and (consonantstems) are expected. It is argued that these forms in -āiš, , and -īš are secondarily created pluralizations of original neuter collectives
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Some Remarks on the Term Abxāz in Classical Persian Literature and Historiography IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-07-10 Amir Zeyghami
This article is devoted to the analysis of the occurrences of the term Abxāz in Classical Persian literature and Iranian historiography. Under the term Abxāz, generally, Persian poets and writers implied the whole territory of Georgia and not only proper Abkhazia located on the eastern coast of the Black Sea. New points have been made about the word tamūk in Luγat-i furs by Asadī Ṭūsī, as well as the
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The Jewish–Tat Relations and the Issue of Mountain Jews Identity (Part II) IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-06-17 Przemysław Adamczewski
This is the second part of the contribution published in Iran and the Caucasus, vol. 25(1) (2021): 29–47.
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Armeno-Iranica, Indo-Europaeica, and Gathica IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-03-17 Martin Schwartz
I shall review the various etymological proposals for Armenian skay/hskay ‘giant’/ To be refuted is the pervasive hypothesis that the collocation Paroyr Skayordi represents the name of a Scyth (Assyrian Partatua, Greak Προτοθύης) who is supposedly ‘son (ordi) of a Saka (skay)’, whereby skay ‘giant’ is taken from Saka- ‘Scyth’. Then it will be discussed whether and how skay comes from Middle Persian
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A Copper Statuette from South-Eastern Iran (3rd Millennium B.C.) IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-03-17 Nasir Eskandari, Mojgan Shafiee, Ali Akbar Mesgar, Federico Zorzi, Massimo Vidale
We present a copper alloy statuette confiscated by the Iranian security forces in the surroundings of Jiroft (Kerman, Iran) with other artifacts of the 3rd millennium B.C. Its iconography is discussed with synthetic reviews of selected snake-related iconographic themes in coeval ancient Mesopotamia, Iran, and southern Central Asia. Two micro-fragments, analyzed by ESEM, revealed the alloy and an unusual
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The Ethno-Religious Contradictions as Threats to the North Caucasus Stability and Integration IRAN and the CAUCASUS Pub Date : 2022-03-17 Maxim Popov
Latent ethno-religious conflicts remain the most destructive of contemporary threats to the North Caucasus integration and stability. The fundamental issue that requires a constructive solution in order to ensure security in this region is the promotion of ethnic peace and tolerance. This research aims to analyse how deep-rooted ethno-religious contradictions can affect regional stability and conflict