The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia from the Pre-Islamic to the Islamic Period.

• Author: Bladel, Kevin Van

The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia from the Pre-Islamic to the Islamic Period. Edited by D. G. TOR and MINORU INABA. Notre Dame, IN: UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS, 2022. Pp. xiv + 349. $90.

This volume of collected studies includes papers developed from presentations delivered at a conference hosted in London in 2017 by the University of Notre Dame and Kyoto University. After an introductory chapter by Tor, explaining the project to address historical transitions in "Iranian linguistic and cultural world of the first millennium CE," there are twelve chapters divided into three groups of four.

The first quartet concerns "Iranian Central Asia in Late Antiquity." Frantz Grenet's chapter, "Types of Town Planning in Ancient Iranian Cities: New Considerations," illustrated with nineteen figures, surveys the characteristics of town planning in Iran and Central Asia from Achaemenian to medieval times. He identifies two types of early settlements: unfortified, loosely distributed buildings on the one hand and smaller, fortified settlements on the other. Grenet follows the evolution of these types until the fifth and sixth centuries CE, when "the era of oversize imperial cities [was] over." Nicholas Sims-Williams contributes the chapter "The Proto-Sogdian Inscriptions of Kultobe: New Fragments and New Reconstructions." With photographic images of the inscriptions, this consists of revisions to the author's earlier interpretations of these earliest known Sogdian texts, very important for Iranian philology. The inscriptions consist of mostly fragmentary copies of the same few texts, attesting to the formation of an early Central Asian state, of which new pieces continue to come to light as excavations in Kazakhstan are ongoing. In Etsuko Kageyama's chapter, "Xian Temples of the Sogdian Colonies in China: A Study Based on the Archaeological Material," comparison of decorations on a Sogdian temple with decorations in the reliefs carved on sarcophagi of Sogdians in Tang China reveals close resemblance, leading to the conclusion that Sogdians brought these decorative styles with them from Sogdia to China. In "Three Scenarios for the Historical Background of the Xi'an Sino-Pahlavi Inscription: Post-Sasanian Zoroastrian Traders?" Yutaka Yoshida revisits the bilingual Middle Persian-Chinese funerary inscription dated to 874 CE, discovered in 1955 just outside of ancient Chang'an. He provides a conspectus of previous readings along with his own...