Religious Identities in Sasanian Persia

Catalog description

Sasanian Persia is rapidly emerging as a locus of study among scholars of Syriac Christianity, Rabbinic Judaism, and Ancient Iran. This course synthesizes recent advances in scholarship within these individual fields and experiments with alternative modes of contextualization. Primary sources include the Talmud, the Hekhalot corpus, Syriac martyrdom narratives, Manichaean literature, and Mandaean texts. We will also interrogate broader methodological questions, including comparative projects between “Roman” and “Persian” contexts, models of scholarly representation, and the limits of agonistic/assimilative frameworks. Reading knowledge of one of the following languages required: Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek, Coptic, Arabic, or Middle Persian.