"It was one of history's great vanishing acts. As early as 3500 BCE, scribes in the mud-walled city-state of Sumer used a reed stylus to press tiny wedge-shaped symbols into clay. For three thousand years, the script chronicled the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the grand kingdoms of Mesopotamia - Assyria, Babylon, the mighty Achaemenid Empire - along with precious minutia about everyday life so long ago. But as the palaces of these once great kingdoms sank beneath the desert sands, the meaning of these characters was lost. London, 1857. Colossal sculptures of winged bulls and alabaster bas-reliefs depicting cities under siege and vassals bearing tributes to Biblical kings lined the halls of the British Museum. In the Victorian era's obsession with the triumph of human progress, the mysterious kingdoms of ancient Mesopotamia - the very cradle of civilization - had captured the public imagination. Yet Europe's best philologists struggled to decipher the strange characters. Cuneiform seemed to have thousands of symbols - with some scholars claiming each could be pronounced in up to eight, nine, even ten different ways. Others insisted they'd cracked the code and deciphered inscriptions that corresponded precisely to the Old Testament - proving the veracity of the Word of God. Was it all a hoax? A delusion? A rollicking adventure through the golden age of archaeology, The Writing on the Wall tracks the decades-long race to decipher the oldest script in the world. It's the story of a swashbuckling young archeologist, a suave British military officer, and a curmudgeonly Irish rector, all vying for glory - from the ruins of Persepolis to the opulence of Ottoman-era Baghdad - in a quest to unearth the relics of lost civilizations and unlock the secrets of humanity's past"--

The protests unleashed by Iran's disputed presidential election in June 2010 brought the Islamic Republic's vigorous cyber culture to the world's attention. Iran has an estimated 700,000 bloggers, and new i media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were thought to have played a key role in spreading news of the protests. The internet is often celebrated as an agent of social change in countries like Iran, but most literature on the subject has struggled to grasp what this new phenomenon actually means. In this work, the authors give a flavour of contemporary Internet culture in Iran and analyse how this new form of communication is affecting the social and political life of the country. Although they warn against stereotyping bloggers as dissidents, they argue that the internet is changing things in ways which neither the government nor the democracy movement could have anticipated. Blogistan offers both a new reading of Iranian politics and a new conceptual framework for understanding the politics of the internet, with implications for the wider Middle East, China and beyond. -- Book cover.

This book brings together select articles published in disparate journals and volumes over the past two decades. Some deal exclusively with either Armeniaca (ancient, medieval, and modern) or Iranica (pre-Islamic); in the case of the former, there is an emphasis on the sources and religious material of heroic epic and of folklore. A number of studies also deal with the visionaries of the Armenian tradition--Mashtots', Narekats'i, Ch'arents'. In the Iranian area, there are publications on Irano-Judaica and the culture of the Parsi Zoroastrians of India.

"Professor Waldman challenges the prevailing practice in Islamicate historiography by undertaking a multifaceted analysis of a single text--a major historical narrative and a pivotal work in the history of new Persian language and literature since the tenth century: the Ghaznavid period's Ta'rīkh-i Bayhaqī ... Dr. Waldman is able to identify a wide range of phenomena that suggest the close relationship between historical narratives like the one under study and other literary narratives. She demonstrates that theories of narrative developed by literary critics can and should be expanded to account for historical narrative, and explores the potential utility of one critical approach--speech act theory ... Dr. Waldman calls for a dramatic reversal in the traditional ways in which historical narratives have been used by historians--not in order to curtail their function, as some critics would do, to merely confirming what hard evidence suggests--but rather so as to allow them to provide their abundant and unique information about hitherto unappreciated dimensions in the history of language, communication, ideas, and culture"--From book jacket.