مرتضی عرب زاده سربنانی

The Scythian Empire is a controversial book with a charming title that can attract the attention of any scholar. Christopher I. Beckwith presents claims in this book that accepting each one of them leads us to rethink many previous customary historical beliefs. Some of his theories are novel but most of them are rehabilitation of older obsolete ideas. The book wraps a wide range of specialized topics in the fields of history, archeology, and linguistics; but deals with most of them on a superficial level. Since the Scythians were an Iranian ethnic group, this work is especially recommended for scholars of Iranian history, as unfortunately, the significance of the Scythians in shaping Iranian history has not been recognized as other ancient Iranians such as the Persians. In a broader sense, this work can be also useful for scholars interested in the Iranian world and its relations with neighboring civilizations, Eurasia, Central Asia, and China.   

Diodorus Siculus, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Polyaenus, and Arrian are the primary historians who have written about the Battle of the Persian Gates but their accounts differ in some details. Much research has been done on the cause of differences between these historians, their method of historiography as well as their sources; but in this article, the main focus has been on the identity and political status of Ariobarzanes, the general who led the Persians in the aforementioned battle. As this essay argues, the clarification of this issue hinges on a large extent understanding Ariobarzanes’ end at the Persian Gates. Of course, due to discrepancies between classical sources and the absence of any Iranian evidence in this regard, this is not an easy task, but this article tries to find the most reasonable answer by identifying the most accurate classical account, and then presents essential historical results to be drawn from it. It should be noted that so far, various researchers, have speculated on the identity of Ariobarzanes with skepticism, but in this article, with detailed criticism of classical resources, the identity and political status of Ariobarzanes are clarified.

Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity: Neighbors and Rivals is more than just a history of wars; it opens new windows and challenges some of the most common views regarding Roman-Persian relations. By emphasizing Iranian sources, Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter avoid reconstructing historical events from a Roman point of view and instead present a balanced outlook free of common anti-oriental prejudices. Their work covers a wide range of topics and explains how the Romans and Persians despite many wars attempted to secure their national interests via channels of negotiations and complex diplomacy. The Roman-Persian rivalry seems “modern” in many respects and this character of their relation is nicely demonstrated in this book.  

The subject of incestuous marriage has been one of the most controversial issues and debates in Iranian history. Not many historians have paid attention to this matter and it seems that even studying this topic is taboo, especially among Iranian scholars. On the other hand, the problem has gotten more complicated since the Islamic revolution, as some zealous islamists use this to humiliate the pre-Islamic history of Iran. Subsequently, Iranian nationalists and patriots have denied the existence of any incest in ancient Persia. In such a political environment, very few Iranian scholars have come up with valuable historical research, free of any prejudices. Yet their research is still scant compared to their Western colleagues. That is why Paul John Frandsen’s Incestuous and Close-Kin Marriage in Ancient Egypt and Persia should be taken seriously, as it evaluates many previous opinions about incest in ancient Iran with a critical approach, highlights their flaws, adopts a new method, and proposes new hypotheses.  As the name of the book suggests, this work is about ancient Persia (Iran) and Egypt and explains that no direct link can be seen between incestuous marriage in these two ancient civilizations. This review concerns the part of the book dealing with Persia.

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.

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.