The Bulletin of the Asia Institute is under new editorial management at the Yarshater Center for the Study of Iranian Literary Traditions, UCLA. Volume 32, the newest issue, is available in open access from its new home: The Yarshater Center for the Study of Iranian Literary Traditions at UCLA is privileged to continue the publication of the Bulletin of the Asia Institute beginning with Volume 32, newly available as of Summer 2026. About Previous issues of this reputable journal, going back to volume 21 (2012), are available here.

The Medes. 25 Years Afterwards International MeetingAccademia Galileiana di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Padova, Italy29 September – 2 October 2026 Twenty-five years after the 2001 meeting dedicated to the Medes and their place in the history of the Ancient Near East, an international group of scholars will gather once again in Padova for “The Medes. 25 Years Afterwards.”

Nabel, Jake. 2026. Fake Prostration in Late Antique Literature and the Ambiguities of Domination. Studies in Late Antiquity 10 (3). 265-293. Ancient Greek literature transmits two episodes in which a petitioner before a king performs a fake act of prostration. The deceiver creates the appearance of a submissive bow, but he actually executes a dierent gesture unrelated to court protocol—or so he tells himself.

Moore, James D. 2026. Aspects of Judean Life. Elephantine in Its Persian Imperial and Administrative Context. Pennsylvania: Eisenbrauns. Aspects of Judean Life focuses on Elephantine during the fifth century BCE, developing a comprehensive model of Achaemenid Persian imperial governance in Egypt and situating the Judean colony within that framework. It reconsiders the colony at Elephantine not as a band of foreign mercenaries living private lives but as colonial state dependents embedded within Achaemenid systems of land-for-service taxation and imperial administration. Far from isolated, the Judeans emerge as active participants in—and beneficiaries of—the structures of empire.

Volume 32 (2024-2025) of the Bulletin of the Asia Institute (New Series) has been published. Table of contents: Robert Rollinger and Josef Wiesehöfer: Designating the King in the Womb of His Mother: From Assyrian through Sasanian Times M. Rahim Shayegan: Rethinking the Achaemenid World Order: Space, Religion, and Communicative Strategies Fabrizio Sinisi: On the Early History of the Image of Mithra in the Indo-Iranian Borderlands…

Reinard, Patrick, Christian Rollinger, Pascal Warnking, Julian Degen & Mateo González Vázquez (eds.). 2026. Kybernetes. Studien zur Seefahrts-, Wirtschafts- und Militärgeschichte der Antike. Festschrift für Christoph Schäfer zum 65. Geburtstag (Muziris 6). Münster: Zaphon. Among other interesting contributions, the following articles may interest the readers of Bibliographia Iranica: Julian Degen: Some Notes on Ship Types and Maritime Mobility in Strabo's Geography and the Periploi Clemens Steinwender: Überlegungen zur Bedeutung der Schifffahrt im sasanidischen Imperium Robert Rollinger: The Aegean Worlds and the Achaemenid-Persian Empire: Imperial Borderlands and the ‘Persian Wars’

Rollinger, Robert & Degen, Julian (eds.). 2026. Contextualizing Imperial Borderlands. 9th Century BCE – 9th Century CE and Beyond (Afro-Eurasian Transformations ‒ Ancient Worlds and Beyond 1). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. The first volume of the new series Afro-Eurasian Transformations ‒ Ancient Worlds and Beyond comprises a collection of papers whose overarching topic pertains to the study of territories situated beyond direct imperial control.

Huseini, Said Reza. 2026. Local government reflected in Bactrian documents. Afghanistan 9(1). 85–103. Drawing on an analysis of Bactrian documents produced between the early fourth and the late eighth century, the article shows that local government was the foundation of political structure in Bactria. By focusing on three areas of Guzgan, Rob and Kadagstan, the article demonstrates that these areas had their own rulers who managed them through local administration staffed by local people, who handled social, economic, political and military issues.

Hintze, Almut & JamaspAsa, Kaikhusroo Minocher. 2026. The Pahlavi codex MK: Facsimile edition (Iranica 36). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. The manuscript MK of the family collection of Dastur Dr Kaikhusroo M. JamaspAsa, is the oldest extant Pahlavi codex. Written in 1322 by the Zoroastrian priest and scribe Mihraban Kayhusraw, it offers 38 texts, most of which form part of the genre of Andarz, or Wisdom, literature, while others, such as the Book of Deeds of King Ardashir, the founder of the Sasanian royal dynasty, belong to Middle Persian court literature.

Sheridan, Daniel . 2026. Sogdian Christians. Networks, Books, Homilies, and Medicine. Turnhout: Brepols. After centuries of obscurity, the Sogdian people have once again been recognized as the premier long-distance traders of the famed Eurasian trade routes of late antique and early medieval Eurasia, popularly referred to as the “Silk Roads.” Similarily, a previous Christian association with Sogdians and their language had also been all but forgotten until the archeological finds at the turn of the twentieth century.

Naderi, Sona and Zohreh Zehbari. 2026. Technological Traditions in Late Antiquity Dashtestan Ceramics: A Multiscale Analytical Approach. Primitive Tider (Special Issue 2026: Espens Festskrift): 147-162. This paper presents a multiscale analysis of ceramic technology from the Dashtestan region of southern Iran, focusing on the Late Antique period (approximately 3rd–9th centuries CE). Rather than treating pottery types as fixed cultural markers, the study investigates the organization, transmission, and evolution of ceramic production practices across the period and the regional landscape.

Benfey, Thomas. 2026. Reassembling knowledge: Science, medicine, and philosophy in Sasanian and early Islamic Iraq and Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. The scholars of the Sasanian empire—the last antique superpower whose extensive territories encompassed much of Mesopotamia, the Iranian plateau, and the Caucasus—played a pivotal role in world intellectual history. They developed a distinctive synthesis of Indian and Greco-Roman learning, which would have a formative impact on Islamic civilization in the wake of the empire's fall to Arab armies in the 7th century CE.

Ziemba, Kacper & Frederik Poulsen (eds.). 2026. Judeans in the Land of the Nile: Papers on Achaemenid Egypt, Elephantine, and the Hebrew Bible Presented in Copenhagen, August 19–20, 2024 (Ägypten und Altes Testament 136). Münster: Zaphon. The significance of Egypt for the history of the Judeans in the 1st millennium BCE is difficult to overestimate. The geographical proximity of the land of the Nile and Judah meant that their political and cultural fates were intertwined.

Among the papers published in the journal Iran over the past two years, the following deal with various aspects of ancient Iran: Mozhgan Jayez & Roghayeh Rahimi Sorkhani: The flaked stone assemblage of Soha Chay Tepe and the chalcolithic chipped stone industries of the Zagros Region Zohreh Zehbari: The men who wrought the metals: On Achaemenid-era metalworkers based on the Persepolis tablets…

The Journal of Iranian Linguistics (JIL) is a platform uniting scholars worldwide to explore Iranian linguistic diversity. With a commitment to interdisciplinary discourse, JIL covers syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics, semantics, sociolinguistics, language policy, and language acquisition. The user-friendly website, part of Yerevan State University's journal system, ensures easy access to high-quality, diverse research. Join us in propelling Iranian linguistics to new heights!

Boivin, Odette. 2026. The Temple of Ištar-of-Akkad in Babylon from the Neo-Assyrian until the Persian Period. The Archival Texts (Abhandlungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 33). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. The Temple of Ištar-of-Akkad in Babylon from the Neo-Assyrian until the Persian Period is the third volume of the ADOG sub-series named Babil and dedicated to the study of Babylon. It contains the edition of 86 texts uncovered during the excavations directed by Robert Koldewey and carried out between 1899 and 1917 by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft in Babylon.

Cefalo, Generoso & Alessandro Magnani (eds.). Le regalità ibride in Oriente da Alessandro ai Sasanidi. Urbino: Uniurb University Press. Il volume propone una riflessione sulle forme della sovranità sviluppatesi nello spazio eurasiatico tra l’età di Alessandro Magno e l’ascesa dell’impero sasanide. Attraverso un approccio interdisciplinare che integra fonti letterarie, epigrafiche, numismatiche, iconografiche e archeologiche, i contributi indagano i processi di interazione, adattamento e rielaborazione che caratterizzarono la costruzione dell’autorità regia in contesti multiculturali.

François Desset, Kambiz Tabibzadeh, Gian Pietro Basello and Gianni Marchesi with the collaboration of Laurent Colonna d'Istria. 2026. Linear Elamite Inscriptions and Related Cuneiform Texts I: Linear Elamite Texts from Susa (OrientLab Series Maior 10). Bologna: Ante Quem. The present volume is the first of a three-volume series devoted to the publication of the Linear Elamite corpus and related cuneiform texts.

Maras, Sabrina. 2026. David Stronach and British Archaeology in the Middle East. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Drawn from interviews conducted between 2007 and 2020, this account of the life of renowned archaeologist and former director of the British Institute of Persian Studies, David Brian Stronach, reveals a lost period in international archaeology within Iran, when BIPS was founded and acted as a unique intellectual hub for archaeologists, expats, scholars and foreigners…

The new volume of Ancient West & East (2025) is out and it contains several relevant studies pertaining to ancient Iran: Julian DEGEN: Argead Macedonia in the Western Borderland of the Achaemenid Empire Roberto DAN: The Hişet Fortress in (V)ostan/Gevaş An Urartian, Orontid, Arsacid and Mediaeval Site on the Southern Shore of Lake Van Arvin MAGHSOUDLOU: A Palace Built into a Mountain Exploring the Modes of Audience Interaction and Reception at the Great Ayvan of Taq-e Bustan in Late Antiquity

Kelley, Kathryn. 2026. Proto-Elamite. Writing and Society in Early Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Proto-Elamite is one of the world's earliest scripts and it remains only very partly deciphered. Excavations have uncovered c. 1,700 clay tablets from Iran, dating c. 3300–2900 BCE. The tablets use a complex system involving hundreds of symbols to count commodities, people, and institutions. Despite holding a privileged place in the history of writing, the study of proto-Elamite falls outside modern disciplinary boundaries and has received very limited scholarly attention since its discovery over a century ago.

Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan (AMIT): Vol. 50, 2018 , ed. by German Archaeological Institute (DAI), Tehran Branch of the Eurasia Department, is now pubished. Table of Contents: Articles: Morteza Zamani Dadaneh, Sirvan Mohammadi Ghasrian and Steve Renette: Late Neolithic to Early Chalcolithic Settlements on the Marivan Plain of western Iran Elena Rova, Davit Kvavadze, Flavia Amato, Elisabetta Boaretto, Giovanni Boschian, Giovanni Siracusano and Laura Tonetto: Tsiteli Gorebi 5, a New Early Chalcolithic Site in Eastern Georgia, Results of the 2018-2019 Excavations by the “Georgian-Italian Lagodekhi Archaeological Project”

Bayani, Mohamad. 2025. Creating is cutting: A conceptual metaphor in Avestan and Pahlavi texts. Bulletin of SOAS 88(2). 243–265. This paper investigates the development of the creation theme in Zoroastrian sources through the lens of the conceptual metaphor “creation is cutting”. It analyses three terms: Avestan taš- and ϑβǝrǝs-, and Middle Persian brēhēnīdan. Each term is examined in non-metaphorical, non-creational metaphorical, and creational metaphorical contexts.

Taasob, Razieh. 2026. Reassessing the Lifespan of the Heraios Coinage: Insights into the First Kushan Ruler’s Enigmatic Tetradrachms. In: Merle Eisenberg, Lee Mordechai & David Yoon (eds.), Coins and Money in the Middle Ages Studies in Honor of Alan Stahl (Numismatic Studies 50), 123-141. New York: The American Numismatic Society. The attribution and chronology of Heraios coinage, often linked to the early Kushan ruler Kujula Kadphises, have long been points of scholarly debate.

Ruffing, Kai. 2026. Griechische Perser, Persische Griechen, oder: Wenn ein König träumt. In: R. Breitwieser, A. Hofeneder, R. Matuszewski (eds.), Im Garten der Klio. Festschrift für Monika Frass (Philippika 193), 240-255. Wiesbaden :Harrassowitz.

Repanšek, Luka. 2026. Another Look at the Word-Final Syllable in Old Persian. Indo-Iranian Journal 69: 257-287. The article offers a long-overdue reconciliatory reassessment of the much-discussed Old Persian cuneiform sequences ⟨‑Ca-a⟩, ⟨‑Ca/i-i-ya⟩, and ⟨‑Ca/u-u-va⟩ in word-final position, and of their phonetic and phonographic interpretation. It argues that the view according to which ⟨‑Ca-a⟩ cannot represent final vowel lengthening rests on assumptions that cannot be independently substantiated from the orthographic evidence.

Amar, Itzhak. 2026. Psalm 45 and the Achaemenid View of the Ideal King. Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 38: 1-18.

Baumer, Christoph, Mirko Novák & Susanne Rutishauser (eds.). 2026. Mobility and Archaeogenetics in Central Asia. People – Goods – Ideas. 3rd International Conference on Central Asian Archaeology in Bern, 11th–13th January 2024 (Schriften zur vorderasiatischen Archäologie 24). Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz. Central Asia is a huge region characterized by a rich variety of ecologies, climates, geographical environments, social systems, languages and cultures. Within this region multiple cultural exchanges took place.

Baumer, Christoph, Mirko Novák & Susanne Rutishauser (eds.). 2026. Cultures in Contact: Central Asia as Focus of Trade, Cultural Exchange and Knowledge Transmission (Schriften zur vorderasiatischen Archäologie 19). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Central Asia is a vast region separating and at the same time connecting the civilizations of the Near East, East Asia and the Indian subcontinent with each other and with the neighboring nomadic cultures.

Huseynov, Rustam N. & Akif A. Guliyev. 2026. Sasanian Silver Coins from Atbatan Necropolis Near Demirchi (Shamakhi District, Azerbaijan). Azerbaijan Journal of Archaeology and Anthropology 2 (1): 99-105. This article presents a small group of Sasanian silver drachms discovered during archaeological excavations at Atbatan necropolis near the village of Demirchi in the Shamakhi region of Azerbaijan. The coins were recovered from burial contexts in association with human skeletal remains and accompanying grave goods, providing important archaeological evidence for the circulation of late Sasanian silver coinage in the Shirvan area.

Paul, Ludwig. Pfeffer, Pfirsich, Paradies: Kleines Lexikon deutscher Wörter persischer Herkunft. München: C.H.Beck. Wie ist der Algorithmus aus dem Persischen ins Deutsche gelangt? Warum bezeichnet Diwan sowohl ein Sofa als auch eine Gedichtsammlung? Und was hat unser Schal mit einem indischen Sari zu tun oder die Tulpe mit dem Turban? Ludwig Paul erklärt in rund 140 kurzweiligen Artikeln, wie Wörter aus dem Persischen ins Deutsche gewandert sind.

Zubani, Alessia. 2026. Recovering a Sasanian Royal Book in Early Islam: The Kitāb Ṣuwar mulūk Banī Sāsān and Its Arabic Transmission. Essays in Long Late Antiquity 1 (1): 73-95. This paper explores the recovery and translation of a Sasanian royal book during the early Islamic period, focusing on the Umayyad and early Abbasid eras. It examines the missing Kitāb Ṣuwar mulūk Banī Sāsān (“Book of the Portraits of the Sasanian Kings”), a work that depicted portraits of all Sasanian rulers, their reigns, and deeds.

Abbas Alizadeh, with contributions by Hossein Davoudi, Kevin Lidour, Marjan Mashkour, Valentin Radu, Mohammad Reza Rokni, Noshad Rokni, and Shiva Sheikhi. 2026. Lowland Susiana in the Fourth Millennium BCE: Excavations at KS-04, KS-59, and KS-108 (ISACP 2). Chicago: Chicago University Press. During two seasons in 2004–2006, the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures excavated three major prehistoric population centers in northern Susiana, in the modern-day province of Khuzestan, Iran: KS-04 (Chogha Do Sar), KS-59 (Abu Fanduweh), and KS-108 (Beladieh).

Catanzariti, Antonietta & Touraj Daryaee (eds.). 2026. The Sasanians in Context: Art, History, and Archaeology. Washington, D.C.: SmithsonianScholarly Press. Between the third and seventh centuries CE, the Sasanian Empire became one of the most dominant powers in the ancient world—extending geographically from West to Central Asia—and was the last major power in the region before the Arab conquest in the seventh century.

Gardner, Iain. 2026. The Letters of Mani. A Lost Scripture of the Late Antique World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Includes new English translations of all the available texts concerning Mani's Letters Utilizes the latest research to recover all that can be known about one of the scriptures of Manichaeism A holistic and interdisciplinary approach Features much new or little-known material

Maghsoudlou, Arvin. 2025. A Palace Built into a Mountain: Exploring the Modes of Audience Interaction and Reception at the Great Ayvan of Taq-e Bustan in Late Antiquity. Ancient West & East 24: 43-67. This study revisits the structure, imagery and scale of the Great Ayvan of Taq-e Bustan, employing a phenomenological approach to explore how it interacted with its potential Late Antique audiences.

Holliday, Shabnam J. (ed.). 2026. Sovereignty in Iran: Challenges to Eurocentrism from Ancient Iran to the Islamic Republic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. This book is a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary collaborative project examining sovereignties as a plural concept through the case of Iran. In so doing it challenges Eurocentric assumptions in the Humanities and Social Sciences and covers sovereignty from ancient Iran to the Islamic Republic including the Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

Heindio Uesugi has done it again. Under the supervisory editorship of Adam Alvah Catt, Uesugi has now published an addendum to the second part of his Old Avestan dictionary: a translation and glossed version of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti. Uesugi, Heindio (ed.). 2026. Old Avestan dictionary. Addendum to Part II: Text and translation: Yasna Haptaŋhāiti. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.

One of the world’s oldest living religions, and historically one of the most significant, Zoroastrianism is unfamiliar to many today. Oxford academic Arash Zeini discusses five books about this…

Heindio Uesugi has done it again. Under the supervisory editorship of Adam Alvah Catt, Uesugi has now published an addendum to the second part of his Old Avestan dictionary: a translation and glossed version of the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti. Uesugi, Heindio (ed.). 2026. Old Avestan dictionary. Addendum to Part II: Text and translation: Yasna Haptaŋhāiti. Tokyo: Research Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa.

Sims-Williams, Nicholas. 2026. Two unpublished Bactrian documents in the al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait. Bulletin of SOAS FirstView. 1–8. Bactrian, the principal written language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, was little known until the early 1990s, when more than 150 contracts, economic documents and letters, together with a few Buddhist texts, were acquired by collectors. Most of these were published by Nicholas Sims-Williams between 2001 and 2012 in three volumes entitled Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan.

The latest volume of East and West contains several interesting articles, some of which deal with aspects of (ancient) Iran. F. Grenet, F. Ory, A Preliminary Note on a Painting from Kuh-e Khwāja in the New Delhi National Museum E. Matin, Reaching the Persian Gulf from the Kur River Basin: Patterns of an Intermittent Connectivity S. Belelli, Contact Change and Dialect Convergence in the Kurdish of Khanaqin…

Pashootanizadeh, Azadeh. 2026. The Sasanian Silk Road: Socioeconomic structures of the Zoroastrian silk trade. TEXTILE. 1–14. This study examines the cultural economy of silk during the Sasanian period and its influence on the cultural landscape of fire temples. The prosperity of the Silk Road expanded professions and social groups associated with the silk trade, allowing the Sasanian period to be divided into two phases.

The first issue of Studia Iranica 53 is out. Here is the table of contents: BELELLI, Sara: Laki Nominal Morphology in Historical and Comparative Perspective BORJIAN, Habib: Southern Kurdish in the Anti-Alborz: A Case of Language Isolation PREUD'HOMME, Nicolas: The Fall of Safavid Power According to an Anonymous Manuscript from Post-Revolutionary France

Stolper, Matthew W. 2025. The Chronological Boundaries of the Persepolis Fortification Archive. In Petra Goedegebuure & Joost Hazenbos (eds.), Ḫattannaš: A Festschrift in Honor of Theo van den Hout, 387-415. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. The Festschrift offered to Theo van den Hout contains several important and stimulating studies. The entire volume is available in open access via the hyperlink above.

King, Rhyne & Alice Collett. 2026. The Idea of “India” and “Gandāra” in the Earliest Iranian and Greek Sources. Journal of the American Society for Premodern Asia 146 (2): 241-262. Hinduš, the Old Persian name for a region of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BCE), ultimately underlies the English word India. The history of the word Hinduš and its cognates has attracted considerable research, yet the precise referent of Hinduš in its Achaemenid context remains imperfectly understood.

Volume 27 of the journal Parthica (2025) contains several contributions of relevance to Iranian Studies and beyond: R. DAN: An Urartian or Orontid foundation? A reassessment of the archaeological data related to the establishment of the fortified complex at Yervandashat, Armenia D. ANDREUCCI: Automated segmentation of historical archaeological photographs: A CNN-based approach applied to the Tachara palace of Persepolis G. LINDSTRÖM: The Denavar Vase: Parthian patronage, Greek aesthetics, and Roman luxury…

Ghobrial, John-Paul, Michael Reynolds, Christian C. Sahner & Jack Tannous (eds.). 2026. Christians in Middle Eastern history: Strangers no more (Edinburgh Studies in Middle Eastern Christianity). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. The dazzling array of languages and religions in the Middle East, from Late Antiquity to the present, has long made the region a source of fascination. But the specific features of pluralism in the Middle East have also made writing its history a difficult enterprise, as scholarly specialisation has often meant that this or that religious group becomes invisible.

Zehbari, Zohreh. 2025. The men who wrought the metals: On Achaemenid-era metalworkers based on the Persepolis tablets. Iran, 1–18. While varied attempts have been made to study Achaemenid metal artefacts, we still know little about the craftsmen who wrought the metals. Metalworkers manufactured various products for different social classes and for different contexts, and must have played a notable role in the society of the Achaemenid period.