Matin, Emad. 2025. Reaching the Persian Gulf from the Kur River Basin: Patterns of an Intermittent Connectivity. East and West 65 (1). The paper at hand explores the connectivity between Central Fars and the Persian Gulf over a long period of time from protohistory to the Early Islamic era. In doing so, it focuses on the three areas of the Kur River Basin, Dashtestan and the Bushehr Peninsula and reviews the rise and fall of settlements in these areas—within the limits of the existing bibliography.

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Nikkhah Bahrami, Gita. 2025. Untersuchungen zu mittelbabylonischen Texten aus Haft-Tappe (dubsar 27). Münster: Zaphon. G. Nikkhah Bahrami’s study offers a comprehensive edition and cultural-historical and economic-historical investigation of the texts in Middle-Babylonian Akkadian found at Haft-Tappe in the province Khuzestan in southwestern Iran. Following a brief introduction (I.), paleography, syllabary, orthography, and other philological questions concerning the texts are discussed (II.).

Hyland, John O. 2025. Persia’s Greek Campaigns: Kingship, War, and Spectacle on the Achaemenid Frontier. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Persia’s Greek Campaigns offers a bold reassessment of the wars between the Achaemenid Persian kings and the Greek city-states (c. 499–449 bce). These conflicts, and especially Xerxes’s invasion of Greece (480–479 bce), are remembered as foundational events in Greek history, but the “Persian version” remains neglected.

It’s a golden age for popular books about philosophy, as the challenges of modern life encourage people to seek wisdom from those whose job—at least in principle—is to seek it. Whether it’s new reflec...

Raja, Rubina & Eivind Heldaas Seland. eds. 2025. Palmyra, the Roman Empire, and the Third Century Crisis: Zooming in and Scaling up from the Evidence. Stuttgart: Steiner. The third century is often seen as a period of crisis in the Roman world, marked by political upheaval, violence, war, religious strife, hyperinflation, climatic instability, pandemics, and border incursions. These troubled times, however, coincided with the peak of Palmyra's prosperity.

Macuch, Maria. 2025. Sasanian law in its social context (Iranica 34). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Sasanian law has remained largely an unknown entity outside the specific field of Iranian Studies due to the immense difficulties involved in understanding the relevant legal sources. Sasanian Law in its Social Context by Maria Macuch is the first attempt to reconstruct the legal system of Sasanian Iran (224–651 CE), systematically and in detail, covering all areas of law as far as they can be reconstructed on the basis of the available material.

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Barena, Gad. 2025. ʾAhyh ʾAšr ʾAhyh: The Achaemenid-Zoroastrian Background of the Burning Bush Pericope. Revista Pistis & Praxis 17(3), 384–402. Various types of impact, assimilation, and engagement of certain redactional layers of the Hebrew Bible with Achaemenid-era Zoroastrianism have long been noted by biblical scholars and by researchers of ancient Iranian cultic practices. Both disciplines, however, are facing similar challenges regarding the problem of the transmission history of their sacred texts, which is complex, perplexing, and vigorously debated.

As scholars studying Zoroastrianism, we must ask this question more often: What is the subject of our academic gaze, and whose is the subject of our study? We must ask, not to confront, but to chal…

An incisive exploration of Nietzsche as a bold, visionary poet-philosopher.   Today, Nietzsche is justly celebrated for his rich, philosophical naturalism, but Keith Ansell-Pearson warns that we must ...

As scholars studying Zoroastrianism, we must ask this question more often: What is the subject of our academic gaze, and whose is the subject of our study? We must ask, not to confront, but to chal…

In the various issues of volume 88 of Near Eastern Archaeology, several articles address topics in Iranian archaeology. The following list compiles all Iran-related contributions: Morteza Khanipour and Masashi Abe: From Seasonal Hunting Base to Permanent Settlement. Insights from the High-altitude Hormangan Site Reza Naseri and Morteza Khanipour: Burial Practices of the Bronze Age. An Archaeological Study of the Deh Dumen Cemetery in Southern Zagros, Iran…

Paganism might be the perfect religion for post-Covid Britain, where not only places of worship but also in-person voluntary groups of all kinds are suffering from a crisis of commitment and participa...