This workshop will be held on Saturday 10th May – Sunday 11th May, 2014 at the Ancient India and Iran Trust, 23 Brooklands Avenue, Cambridge CB2 8BG, in association with the Balkh Art and Cultural Heritage project, University of Oxford. During the last couple of years, researchers connected with the Oxford Balkh project (www.balkhheritage.org) have been researching the history of Balkh in the early Islamic era on the basis of archaeological and textual sources. At the same time, other scholars and teams have been studying an ever-increasing quantity of manuscripts, …

25 April: Geoffrey Greatrex (Ottawa) on ‘Procopius’ Persian Tales: entertainment, history or morality fable?’ Geoffrey Greatrex will consider the opening chapters of the Byzantine historian Procopius of Caesarea’s Persian Wars, in which he introduces his theme, the wars fought between the Romans and Sasanian Persians in the sixth century A.D. He recounts a series of intriguing stories about the Persian court and Persian history in the fifth and early sixth centuries. The puzzle remains as to how seriously these tales should be taken… – 9 May: Nina Mirnig The Religious …

March 19th’s Financial Times included a letter to the editor from AIIT trustee Professor Almut Hintze, in response to the previous day’s front page story ‘Bicep 2’s ‘ripples’ add muscle to Big Bang‘–reporting the breakthrough discovery of measurable gravitational waves from the Big Bang: ‘Zoroastrian text that preempted science’s latest discovery’ From Prof Almut Hintze. Sir, “At the beginning of time Ohrmazd created the world out of his own substance, which is eternal light.” This passage from a Zoroastrian Middle Persian text on cosmology, the Bundahishn, compiled in the 10th …

Thursday 13 March Presentation of the Royal Asiatic Society Medal 2014 to Dr Bridget Allchin with a lecture in her honour: From Oxus to Mysore: the Story of the Allchin Partnership in South Asian Archaeology by Professor Robin Coningham (University of Durham) Royal Asiatic Society, 14 Stephenson Way, London NW1 2HD T: 0207 388 4539 The lecture will start at 6pm and will be followed by a small reception. All welcome. http://www.royalasiaticsociety.org/site/?q=node/464

Eleanor Sims Heinrich Friedrich von Diez’s “Little Collection of Paintings Illustrating Firdausi’s Shahnama” The Prussian Royal Library, the Königliche Bibliothek, in Berlin was greatly enriched in 1817 with the bequest made by the former Prussian ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Heinrich Friedrich von Diez: virtually his entire Orientalist library, nearly 17,000 books, manuscripts, albums, unpublished dissertations and an extensive coin-collection.  Largely overlooked, until planning for the Firdausi Millennial was well under way in Berlin, was that Diez had also bequeathed to the Prussian Library a small “collection of Eastern paintings, …