درخت حوزه‌های تخصصی

Adrienne Mayor’s The Poison King is a fascinating biography of Mithradates Eupator Dionysus, one of the most controversial monarchs of ancient history who has been especially neglected by scholars of Iranian history. This biography, like any other about ancient heroes, is full of tales, legends, stories, and historical narratives and its crafty author knows how to distinguish between fact and fiction. The book contains 15 chapters, in which, other than  the first, the remaining chapters are arranged based on Mithradates’ life, from his birth to his death.

Rick Abad Tepe is located north of the Zab River in Northwest of Iran, close to the border with Iraq. The excavation at this archeological site was carried out in the summer of 2019. The materials and evidence obtained from there showed Rick Abad belonged to the Bronze Age, with some monuments not documented yet from any site in the Zab Basin. The Tamarchin passage, west of Piranshahr, connects this region to northern Mesopotamia. This research tries to respond to the following questions: What was the status of Zab Basin settlements in the Bronze Age? How was the regional and extra-regional communication with the surrounding areas? As a matter of fact, seven levels belonging to the Bronze Age were identified in the course of the excavation. In the south of Lake Urmia, Kura-Araxes potteries were less visible; however, typical black-burnished ceramics similar to those of the Kura-Araxes tradition were recovered from some sites. Surprisingly, Painted Orange Ware (POW) and beveled-rim Bowl were seen in the early Bronze Age of the Zab Basin. Furthermore, the impression of the seal from Rick Abad is remarkable as well since this type of object had an administrative function and it is a sign of economic and social activities as well as regional and extra-regional relations. The location of this region between northwest of Iran and the north of Mesopotamia (Iraqi Kurdistan) somehow turned this basin into a meeting place of various cultures. Probably these sites played a key role in trade and commerce, although, they never attained an urban status.  

Most modern scholars consider the Book of Esther to be a kind of historical novel; hence, the historicity of many of its characters and events is highly debatable. While the present study does not intend to defend the historicity of the book, it does review it again by using sources that have received less attention in this regard. That the Book of Esther has a lot of Persian realia in it is not news, but most scholars have debated its historical value by comparing the book with classical sources. However, the present article aims to show how a significant part of the historical material of the Book of Esther is in line with evidence that if not all, but most of the classical sources are unaware of, and accepting this fact means that the author of the Masoretic Esther had direct or indirect access to sources associated with the Persian state. In order to prove this issue, using the descriptive-analytical method based on library studies, the primary focus of this article has been on sources other than the Greek ones, mainly Achaemenian royal inscriptions, and economic and legal documents found in different parts of the Persian Empire.

In recent years there has been a growing interest among historians, historical martial artists, reenactors, and those who are interested in Eastern culture as well as in Persian offensive and defensive weapons to have a more detailed study of armor. The change in the paradigm of defensive weapons throughout Western Asia (the last quarter of the 15th to the first quarter of the 16th century) has not yet been fully investigated. Reconstruction of mail-and-plate armor from a period between 1540-1650 CE is quite challenging as most museums or major private collections do not have a complete set. Based on a detailed study of existing sets of joshan armor and several technical assumptions related to the design of this type of armor, the present study tries to reconstruct a fully protective complex of a joshan armor that was worn by a noble Persian warrior. The purpose of the following article is to reproduce a Persian mail-and-plate armor from a period between 1540-1650 CE in its original size and design with its inherent properties and qualities. Different existing sets of this type of armor from museums are studied and compared to different miniatures and literary sources. Based on the collected information gained from theoretical and practical research, the article presents a historical armor design and provides advice on the practical reconstruction and production of such a set of armor. Armor masters were looking for the best combinations and ratio of plates and mail armor in one set. They were experimenting with the shapes and sizes of plates, the number of holes, diameters, geometry, and method of ring interconnections. Characteristic of the armor of this period is rather large plates and a small number of their rows (3-5 rows on the chest/back), a small overlap of the plates in a row, basically only the same standard plates are used, large mail rings (inner diameter about 10 mm).

It has been nearly 86 years since the Egyptian bronze ram-headed statuette, known as Harsaphes, was found outside the Treasury in the Garrison Street of Persepolis during the archaeological excavations by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. The iconographic features of this little-known statuette is associated it with an Egyptian deity, which makes its genre unique in the heartland of the Persian Empire. It should be noted that the four ram-headed deities: Heryshef, Khnum, Amun, and Banebdjedet, sometimes bear a striking resemblance in the formal Egyptian art. This paper re-opens the discussion on the statuette’s identity, and offers a detailed comparison between this statuette and other Egyptian ram-headed deities. The results from a comparative analysis are critical to the supposed attribution of Harsaphes to the statuette, and examine the likelihood of being all four ram-headed gods.