American Oriental Series – serie

In this volume, Kioumars Ghereghlou presents an edition, with preface and indexes, of a previously unpublished sixteenth-century Persian chronicle. Written by Qāsim Beg Ḥayātī, a court scribe to Shah Ṭahmāsp (r. 1524–76), it covers Safavid history beginning with the early part of the fourteenth century and closing with an account of Shah Ismāʿīl’s (r. 1501–24) rise to power and military campaigns in Iran. Dedicated to the Safavid princess Mihīn Begum (d. 1562), whom Ghereghlou credits as Ḥayātī’s coauthor, the chronicle is composed of two parts. Part one deals with the predynastic phase of Safavid history and ends with an account of Shaykh Ṣafī’s life and career. Part two tells the story of the Ṣafaviyya Sufi order, from the ascension of Shaykh Ṣadr al-Dīn Mūsā b. Shaykh Ṣafi (d. 1377) to the early years of Shah Ismāʿīl’s reign. Punctuating this account are two “tailpieces” (tadhʾīl), one on the history of the Safavid shrine in Ardabīl in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the other on the shrine’s superintendents who held this post in the early part of the sixteenth century. This edition makes available for the first time a chronicle that had long been thought lost. Rich in new details about the Ṣafaviyya Sufi order (ṭarīqa) in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is an important historical source for scholars interested in this period of Persian history. The text of the chronicle is presented in Persian, transcribed from the original manuscript. The editorial preface and bibliography are in English. The book includes four plates, in colour, showing sample sections of the original manuscript.

This book discusses the relationship between the idea of Holy War in early Islamic societies and the competition for resources and legitimacy among Muslims who lived on the Arab-Byzantine frontier, providing a fresh perspective on the history of that region during the late Umayyad and early Abbasid periods.

Ritual and Politics in Ancient Mesopotamia is a compilation of three essays by Julian Reade, Walther Sallaberger, and Philippe Talon, introduced and edited by Barbara Nevling Porter. The essays stem from a workshop organized by Porter as part of the 47th Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale held in Helsinki in July 2001, under the same title as the book. Porter emphasizes in the introduction that the book aims at joining a discussion of ritual with that of politics, indicating that most Assyriologists so far “have instead examined the religious significance of rituals, as acts of worship, acts of communication with gods, or symbolic expressions of theological concepts.” Porter points out, however, that “this is now beginning to change,” with a number of relatively recent doctoral dissertations exploring this interface as well as the works of a number of senior scholars contributing to the growing discussion.

This monograph examines a number of motifs central to the expression of the ideal of sovereignty as it is articulated in Vedic liturgical poetry.  It argues that, because the qualities and privileges of a sovereign leader were coveted even by those for whom there was no possibility of attaining royal station, the language proper to the domain of kingship was gradually generalised and used to express aspirations towards a freedom and self-determination that became progressively more mystical in nature.

This book is the first historical analysis of those parts of Islamic legal theory that deal with the language of revelation, and a milestone in reconstructing the missing history of legal theory in the ninth and tenth centuries. It offers a fresh interpretation of al-Shafii’s seminal thought, and traces the development of four different responses to his hermeneutic, culminating in the works of Ibn Hazm, Abd al-Jabbar, al-Baqillani, and Abu Yala Ibn al-Farra. It reveals startling connections between rationalism and literalism, and documents how the remarkable diversity that characterized even traditionalist schools of law was eclipsed in the fifth/eleventh century by a pragmatic hermeneutic that gave jurists the interpretive power and flexibility they needed to claim revealed status for their legal doctrines. More than a detailed and richly documented history, this book opens new avenues for the comparative study of legal and hermeneutical theories, and offers new insights into unstated premises that shape and restrict Muslim legal discourse today. The book is of interest to all occupied with classical Islam, the development of Islamic law, and comparative hermeneutical research.

Yang Xiong (53 BC-AD 18), the Han philosophical master remarks at one point in his Exemplary Figures, “Books are as sexy as women.” Modern readers may frown at a comparison they regard as less than apt. Yang was supremely aware, however, of longstanding traditions, ascribed both to the sages and to the Classics, contrasting the unusual strength of the basic drives for food and sex with the general weakness of the acquired inclinations toward moral behaviour. To say that “books are as sexy as women” was to make bold to add to those traditions, adopting the manner of a sage; also to elevate the value of certain texts, at least, to the level morality itself, insofar as they represented acquired tastes leading to the most desirable aspects of civilized life.

What historical continuity, if any, existed between the practice of crucifixion in the early Islamic polity and crucifixion as practiced by the Byzantines in the Late Roman empire and by the Sasanids in Persia? Crucifixion and Death as Spectacle explores how the first caliphal dynasty of early Islam, the Umayyads, employed crucifixion in its sundry forms to punish brigands and heretics and to humiliate rebels and enemies, and how, while doing so, the Umayyads drew upon a late antique legacy of punitive practices associated with crucifixion in the Late Roman and Sasanid Persian worlds. Like their Roman and Persian predecessors, the Umayyads wielded crucifixion, and thus the symbolism of violence against the body, to attest to their impunity as caliphs and the legitimacy of their rule. Yet, as this study also argues, this is only one side of the story. Dissidents and political rivals mobilized stories of crucified rebels and martyrs, as told and memorialized by Christians and Muslims alike, against the Umayyads in order to contest and subvert the sublimation of crucifixion as an indubitable symbol of the caliphs’ use of legitimate violence, and succeeded in propagating alternative religious and political ideologies of their own.

Tell el-Amarna tablets, Sumerian language -- Texts, Akkadian language -- Texts, Egyptian language -- Texts, 11.43 Old Testament in relation to other cultures, Akkadian language, Egyptian language, Sumerian language, Apiroe

The Vasanta Vilasa is a poem of the spring festival in Old Gujarātī accompanied by Sanskrit and Prakrit stanzas and illustrated with miniature paintings. Here it is critically edited and translated, with an introduction and a description of the paintings.

This study reconstructs Mesopotamian geography based primarily on the third-millennium lists of geographical place names found at Abu Salabikh in Mesopotamian and at Ebla in Syria. Frayne has extracted much relevant data from tablets of approximately the same period and later, as well as modern names for sites which help identify the toponyms in the lists. These sources do not help elucidate the geography of Genesis 10, but biblical scholars will find interest in the Mesopotamian lists that were copied in Ebla scribal schools using Sumerian logograms.

Wang An-Kuo's Jade Rewards and Millet Dream centers on the life, political thought, and poetry of Wang An'guo (1028–1074), an intellectual and official during the Northern Song Dynasty who famously fell out with the radical reformer Wang Anshi.