Results by title

105 books match the query 'Iran' and 6 start with e

cover of Elamite and Achaemenid Settlement on the Deh Luran Plain: Towns and Villages of the Early Empires in Southwestern Iran

Elamite and Achaemenid Settlement on the Deh Luran Plain

Towns and Villages of the Early Empires in Southwestern Iran

Edited by Henry T. Wright and James A. Neely

University of Michigan Press, 2010

The Deh Luran Plain, nestled in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains close to the modern border between Iraq and Iran, had a long and rich prehistory, beginning with the local development of villages dependent upon rainfall farming and herding in the 8th millennium BC. This volume continues the account of the plain from the later 3rd millennium BC to the middle of the 1st millennium BC. It contains detailed site maps and descriptions, aerial and satellite images of major sites, statistics and drawings of ceramics, and discussions of the historical sources.
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cover of Electronic Iran: The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution

Electronic Iran

The Cultural Politics of an Online Evolution

Akhavan, Niki

Rutgers University Press, 2013

Electronic Iran introduces the concept of the Iranian Internet, a framework that captures interlinked, transnational networks of virtual and offline spaces.

Taking her cues from early Internet ethnographies that stress the importance of treating the Internet as both a site and product of cultural production, accounts in media studies that highlight the continuities between old and new media, and a range of works that have made critical interventions in the field of Iranian studies, Niki Akhavan traces key developments and confronts conventional wisdom about digital media in general, and contemporary Iranian culture and politics in particular.

Akhavan focuses largely on the years between 1998 and 2012 to reveal a diverse and combative virtual landscape where both geographically and ideologically dispersed individuals and groups deployed Internet technologies to variously construct, defend, and challenge narratives of Iranian national identity, society, and politics. While it tempers celebratory claims that have dominated assessments of the Iranian Internet, Electronic Iran is ultimately optimistic in its outlook. As it exposes and assesses overlooked aspects of the Iranian Internet, the book sketches a more complete map of its dynamic landscape, and suggests that the transformative powers of digital media can only be developed and understood if attention is paid to both the specificities of new technologies as well as the local and transnational contexts in which they appear.

Download open access ebook here.

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cover of Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity

Empires in Collision in Late Antiquity

G. W. Bowersock

Brandeis University Press, 2012

In this book, based on lectures delivered at the Historical Society of Israel, the famed historian G. W. Bowersock presents a searching examination of political developments in the Arabian Peninsula on the eve of the rise of Islam. Recounting the growth of Christian Ethiopia and the conflict with Jewish Arabia, he describes the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of a late resurgent Sassanian (Persian) Empire. He concludes by underscoring the importance of the Byzantine Empire’s defeat of the Sassanian forces, which destabilized the region and thus provided the opportunity for the rise and military success of Islam in the seventh century. Using close readings of surviving texts, Bowersock sheds new light on the complex causal relationships among the Byzantine, Ethiopian, Persian, and emerging Islamic forces.
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cover of Entangled Worlds: Ancient Iran and the Classical Mediterranean

Entangled Worlds

Ancient Iran and the Classical Mediterranean

M. Rahim Shayegan

J. Paul Getty Trust, The, 0

An exploration of the far-reaching exchanges between ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome, offering a bold new perspective on their interconnected cultural legacy.

For more than a millennium, ancient Persia and the classical Mediterranean were deeply intertwined—not merely through conflict but also through diplomacy, trade, and cultural exchange. From the rise of the Achaemenid Empire in the sixth century BCE to the fall of Rome in 476 CE and the twilight of Sasanian Persia in 651 CE, political, religious, and artistic exchanges shaped—and were shaped by—the dynamic interactions between ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome. These encounters fostered a complex web of cultural connectivity, challenging the notion of antiquity as a series of isolated civilizations and revealing its deep, enduring entanglements.

Bringing the disciplines of classics, Iranian studies, and global history into dialogue, this volume examines how successive Iranian empires—Achaemenid, Seleucid, Arsacid (Parthian), and Sasanian—engaged with their western (and occasionally eastern) neighbors. Essays on diplomacy, religion, art, and intellectual life offer fresh perspectives on ancient historiography, cross-cultural mythmaking, material and visual culture, and the political and religious dynamics of empire. Featuring more than 100 illustrations, Entangled Worlds is a compelling resource for scholars, students, and general readers interested in the shared legacies of the ancient world.

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cover of Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran

Exile and the Nation

The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran

By Afshin Marashi

University of Texas Press, 2020

Honorable Mention, Hamid Naficy Iranian Studies Book Award from the Association of Iranian Studies

In the aftermath of the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Iran, Zoroastrians departed for India. Known as the Parsis, they slowly lost contact with their ancestral land until the nineteenth century, when steam-powered sea travel, the increased circulation of Zoroastrian-themed books, and the philanthropic efforts of Parsi benefactors sparked a new era of interaction between the two groups.

Tracing the cultural and intellectual exchange between Iranian nationalists and the Parsi community during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Exile and the Nation shows how this interchange led to the collective reimagining of Parsi and Iranian national identity—and the influence of antiquity on modern Iranian nationalism, which previously rested solely on European forms of thought. Iranian nationalism, Afshin Marashi argues, was also the byproduct of the complex history resulting from the demise of the early modern Persianate cultural system, as well as one of the many cultural heterodoxies produced within the Indian Ocean world. Crossing the boundaries of numerous fields of study, this book reframes Iranian nationalism within the context of the connected, transnational, and global history of the modern era.

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cover of Exiled Memories: Stories of Iranian Diaspora

Exiled Memories

Stories of Iranian Diaspora

Zohreh T. Sullivan

Temple University Press, 2001

"I feel I am the wandering Jew who has no place to which she belongs. I thought I could settle down, but can't imagine staying. Whenever I bought a bar of soap and two came in the package, I thought there would be no need to buy a package of two because I would never last through the second. Why? Because I knew I was returning to Iran -- tomorrow. So too, I would buy the smallest size of toothpastes and jars of oil. Putting down roots here is an impossibility."

These are the words of one Iranian emigre, driven from Tehran by the revolution of 1979. They are echoed time and again in this powerful portrayal of loss and survival. Impelled by these word and her own concerns about nationality and identity, Zohreh Sullivan has gathered together here the voices of sixty exiles and emigres. The speakers come from various ethnic and religious backgrounds and range in age from thirteen to eighty-eight. Although most are from the middle class, they work in a variety of occupations in the United States. But whatever their differences, here they engage in remembering the past, producing a discourse about their lives, and negotiating the troubled transitions from one culture to another.

Unlike man  other Iranian oral history projects, Exiled Memories looks at the reconstruction of memory and identity through diasporic narratives, through a focus on the Americas rather than on Iran. The narratives included here reveal the complex ways in which events and places transform identities, how overnight radical s become conservatives, friends become enemies, the strong become weak. Indeed, the narratives themselves serve this function -- serving to transfer or transform power and establish credibility. They reveal a diverse group of people in the process of knitting the story of themselves with the story of the collective after it  has been torn apart.
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