Persian and Iranian Studies

Was there an active Jewish-Christian polemic in fourth-century Persia? Aphrahat’s Demonstrations, a fourth-century adversus Judaeos text, clearly indicates that fourth-century Persian Christians were interested in the debate. Is there evidence of this polemic in the rabbinic literature? Despite the lack of a comparable Jewish or rabbinic adversus Christianos literature, there is evidence, both from Aphrahat and the Rabbis that this polemic was not one sided.

A list of 159 manuscripts in the Royal Asiatic Society's collections is presented in this volume; each entry is equipped with title, translation, description of the book and of its contents, script, donor, and date.

At the court of a fictitious King of Persia, first the Christians debate the pagans, with a rabbi as referee, and then the Christians debate the Jews, with a pagan referee. Standard edition, long unavaiable, with commentary and indices.

Pali and New Persian are without influence on one another, yet they show a striking similarity in their development. All coincidences between the two languages are due to the operation of the laws of development which govern the Indo-Iranian languages.

The proceedings of a conference on Spain’s relations with the Islamic East during the 14 and 15th centuries

A critical study of how Iranian nationalism, itself largely influenced by Orientalist scholarship first undertaken by the European Orientalists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, has shaped modern conceptions of Iran and Iranian identity, as well as narratives of Iranian history, leading to the adoption of a broad nationalist construction of identity to suit Iranian political and ideological circumstances. This book argues that such a broad-brushed approach and the term “Iranian” could not have applied to the large multiethnic, multilingual, and multicultural populations in the vast territory of Iran over so many distinct historical periods.

The Short Chronicle is an eyewitness report on the demise of the Sasanian and Byzantines Empires and the beginning of the Islamic period. It uses official Sasanian sources and Syriac church documents and mentions for the first time new Arab cities, including Mosul, Kufa, and Baṣra.

As part of the Gorgias Handbook Series, this book provides a political and military history of the Sasanian Empire in Late Antiquity (220s to 651 CE). The book takes the form of a narrative, which situates Sasanian Iran as a continental power between Rome and the world of the steppe nomad.

This volume presents five vivid tales of Christian martyrs from the fifth century. These accounts thematize the conflict between the martyrs' identity as Persian subjects loyal to the Zoroastrian king and their devotion to Christianity.

In 1934 the New York Public Library (NYPL) purchased a sizable collection of 250 volumes of Arabic manuscripts through the fund for Semitic literature that had been provided by Jacob Heinrich Schiff. Ms New York Public Library, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Arabic Manuscripts Collection, Volume 51985A, a facsimile of which is included in the present publication, belongs to the Shīʿī material among the collection. It is a multitext volume of 269 leaves which in its present form comprises seven individual works. It is hoped that the present facsimile edition will enable and encourage scholars to delve into the materials it contains.