Friday Lectures – Easter Term 2014, 23 May: Touraj Daryaee (UCI), ‘The Sasanian Empire as a Garden: The Walls and Rivers of the Sasanian Empire’ This lecture looks at the physical and ideological boundaries which the Sasanians created for the idea of Iranshahr. In this late antique construct, inside the empire, protected by walls and rivers was imagined as a garden where order and beauty was in existence. Outside of the walls and the rivers it was seen as place of wilderness and disorder. This binary division was at the centre …
Lecture Reminder : Friday 9th May
Don’t Forget: This Friday’s lecture at AIIT is by Nina Mirnig on The Religious Centre of Pashupatinah: Early Nepalese Shaiva Inscriptions in Context. Refreshments from 5pm, lecture begins at 5.30pm – all welcome!
Bactria and the Transition to Islam Workshop
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, …
Ancient India & Iran Trust Easter Term Lectures
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 …
Zoroastrian Text Preempted Science’s Latest Discovery: Professor Hintze’s Letter to the Financial Times
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 …