During more than half a century, from 1972 onwards, Nicholas Sims-Williams has published many important articles on the older Iranian languages, especially Eastern Middle Iranian (Sogdian, Bactrian and Khotanese). Virtually all of his articles on Sogdian and Khotanese are collected in the present volume, together with three entirely new papers entitled “Is there a ‘predicative instrumental’ in Sogdian?”, “Yaghnobi and the Sogdian ‘Rhythmic Law’” and “The locative singular in Old Khotanese”. The...

The more than 300,000 documents discovered in a storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo in the late 19th century, now housed in the collections in St. Petersburg, Cambridge, and Paris, are known as the Cairo Genizah. These documents, which span a wide array of subjects, are invaluable sources for understanding the history of medieval Judaism, as well as for the social and economic landscape of the Mediterranean from the 10th to the 13th centuries. Among them are thousands of private...

This Reader is the first of its kind. Tracing the evolution of literary modernity across national borders, it brings together texts from three different spheres of Persian Studies. “Literary Modernity in the Persophone Realm” explores theoretical literary discussions as they unfolded in Iran, Afghanistan and Central Asia from the early 20th century to the Second World War. The compilation presents contextualized primary sources by writers, poets and critics of the time, including both famous...

This is the first book-length palaeographic study of about a thousand fragments in Syriac and Sogdian languages discovered between 1902 and 1914 in the Turfan area on the ancient Northern Silk Roads. This manuscript material, probably dating between the late 8th and 13th /14th centuries, is of utmost relevance for the history of an area that represents a crossroads region of various communities, languages and religions, not least the East Syriac Christian community. Palaeographic factors such...

Ausgehend von einer bibliographischen Rekonstruktion untersucht das Buch die Hofbibliothek der Qongrat-Dynastie von Choresm. Die Bibliothek wurde bei der Eroberung des Khanats Chiwa durch russische Truppen im Jahr 1873 als Kriegstrophäe beschlagnahmt und in die russische Hauptstadt St. Petersburg verbracht. Das Buch besteht aus zwei Teilen: Der erste Teil befasst sich mit dem Wesen und der Funktionsweise dieser Hofbibliothek, dem politischen, sozialen und kulturellen Hintergründen der...

The Persian world history “Ḥabīb al-siyar” is one of the most copied historiographical works in Islamic intellectual history. Written by the Iranian historian Khvāndamīr in Herat during the rule of the Shiʿi Safavids in the 1520s, the book was subsequently adapted to the religious and political expectations of his later patrons, the Sunni Mughals in India, and circulated through hundreds of copies spread across the entire eastern Islamic world. In „Ein Bestseller der islamischen Vormoderne“...

It is by now widely acknowledged that between late antiquity and the first centuries of Islam, Syriac-speaking Christian communities were more than just scattered minority communities with little impact in geographical areas strongly shaped by the Iranian element. “Iranianate and Syriac Christianity” bridges across different specialized disciplines, first and foremost Iranian Studies and Syriac Studies and the History of Christianity, and assembles a range of authoritative voices on the...

This book is dedicated to the Mazdean theological representation of the end of historical time. While the subject is usually treated in the framework of the category of apocalypticism, scholarly debate has rarely dealt with the more appropriate theme of the apokatastasis (the complete regeneration of the world with the annihilation of Hell and the salvation of the whole humanity). The doctrine of Ohrmazd’s universal mercy was an innovation in the religious scenario of ancient Iran, but its...

This monograph provides the edition, Russian translation and commentary of public inscriptions in Persian, Turkish and Arabic from the 11th to the early 20th century in the historical Central Asian landscape of Khorazm. The publication deals for the first time with the entire corpus of the known preserved epigraphic material of Khiva, of which only about half had been previously published. In contrast to earlier works on the epigraphy of Khorazm, this publication consistently presents the...

The book "Gulag Miracles: Sufis and Stalinist Repression in Kazakhstan", represents the first detailed study of Muslim religious responses to totalitarian repression during the first half of the 20th century, and is therefore of interest to specialists in Islamic Studies, Religious Studies, Russian and Soviet History, Central Asian and Turkic Studies, and Sufi Studies. Based on Kazakh-language hagiographies produced by Sufi communities, the monograph examines how these communities interpreted...

More than 150 documents in Bactrian, the chief administrative language of pre-Islamic Afghanistan, have come to light during the last twenty-five years. These documents include letters, legal contracts, economic documents and a few Buddhist texts; many of them bear dates in the so-called “Bactrian era”, which is also known from a few inscriptions, such as the Tochi valley inscriptions in Pakistan, but whose starting-point is controversial. The Bactrian documents have the potential to transform...