The purpose of this award is to advance the scholarship on Ancient Iranian Civilization and its cognate fields. Professor Ehsan Yarshater is an internationally recognized scholar who has made a major contribution to the field of Iranian Studies. The ISIS Council designated Professor Yarshater an honorary member in 1999.
The award will be presented at the 2012 Biennial conference in Istanbul, August 2012.
Ehsan Yarshater Book Award for Ancient Iranian Studies
Report of the Committee (2010)
1. Recommended monographs
The following books published in 2008 or 2009 were nominated by the members of the committee for the Ehsan Yarshater Book Award of the year 2010:
- Vladimir A. Livshits, Sogdijskaja Èpigrafika Srednej Azii i Semirech'ja. St. Petersburg 2008, 414 pp. ,112 illustrations [Sogdian epigraphy of Central Asia and Semireche] (Proposal by N. Sims-Williams and A. Naymark)
- Dieter Weber, Berliner Pahlavi-Dokumente. Zeugnisse spätsassanidischer Brief- und Rechtskultur aus frühislamischer Zeit. Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden 2008 (Iranica 15), xxxi, 286 pp., XLVI illustrations [Pahlavi Documents in Berlin. Evidence on the Art of Letter Writing and Late Sassanian Legal Culture in the Early Islamic Period] (Proposal by M. Macuch)
- Alan Williams, The Zoroastrian Myth of Migration from Iran and Settlement in the Indian Diaspora. Text, Translation and Analysis of the 16th Century Qeṣṣe-ye Sanjān ‛The Story of Sanjan’. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2009 (Numen Book Series, Studies in the History of Religions, Text and Sources in the History of Religions, vol.124), xii, 250 pp. (Proposal by A. Hintze)
- The Literature of Pre-Islamic Iran. Companion Volume I to a History of Persian Literature. Ed. Ronald E. Emmerick & Maria Macuch. London & New York: I.B. Tauris 2009, xxvii, 522 pp. (Proposal by J. Amouzegar)
2. Decision of the committee
The committee decided unanimously to split the Award of § 3000.- and to nominate the book by Vladimir A. Livshits for the First Prize (to be doted with $ 2000.-) and to recommend the monographs by Dieter Weber and Alan Williams for Honourable Mentions, doting them each with $500.-. Notwithstanding its merits the committee also decided not to take The Literature of Pre-Islamic Iran into consideration, since three of its five members (A. Hintze, M. Macuch and N. Sims-Williams) were involved as authors in its making. Moreover, the volume is part of the prestigious project A History of Persian Literature, undertaken by Ehsan Yarshater himself, in whose name the Award is being given.
Apart from the reasons given under 3 below, our decision to give Vladimir A. Livshits the First Prize also takes into account that his book can be seen as a summation of his life's work in Sogdian epigraphy, approached with the instincts of a historian and a philologist, who also has excellent knowledge of archaeology and numismatics, and carried out, often in difficult circumstances, with great talent and commitment. It reflects not only his achievements as an epigraphist and linguist, but also demonstrates the advantages of a complex approach when the work of a philologist is combined with archaeology and numismatics. For years Vladimir Livshits participated in the excavations of the Panjikant expedition, closely collaborated with Belenitskii, Rapoport, Marshak, Rtveladze and many other leading archaeologists of Central Asia, and worked with all kinds of numismatic materials. Even when this immense experience is not directly mentioned, it is perfectly felt in the background of the book. In other words, Vladimir Livshits would be awarded for more than just epigraphic and philological work, but also for life-long cooperation with archaeologists and numismatists.
Moreover, as A. Naymark informs us, Vladimir Livshits has always been regarded as the specialist on Middle Iranian languages for the entire Russophone scholarly community: he consulted, helped and taught innumerable people. He has always been an extremely generous man who gladly shared his broad knowledge, and first of all the knowledge of western scholarly literature, which was not accessible even to Moscovites, to say nothing of scholars living in Central Asia. He was always a man of independent opinions and never bowed to power. Yet the collapse of the Communist regime brought him nothing but economic insecurity, while the decline of Central Asian scholarship under the current political and economic circumstances has robbed Vladimir Livshits of a lion’s share of deserved respect and honour. An award given to him at this point can be seen as a deserved compensation for the hard life of a true scholar.
Since the author is now 86 years old, this seems to be a fitting opportunity to recognize with the Ehsan Yarshater Book Award not only his remarkable book, but also a lifetime’s distinguished contribution to Ancient Iranian Studies.
2. Evaluation of the chosen monographs
First Prize
Vladimir A. Livshits, Sogdijskaja Èpigrafika Srednej Azii i Semirech'ja. St. Petersburg 2008, 414 pp. ,112 illustrations [Sogdian epigraphy of Central Asia and Semireche]
The largest part of the book (pp. 9-263) consists of a new edition -- text, translation, historical and philological commentary, glossary -- of the Sogdian legal documents and letters from Mt Mug near Panjikent. The present book supersedes what has been up to now the standard edition, the same author's earlier work published in Moscow in 1962. The new version is updated both in general (e.g. by adopting a revised transliteration system for Sogdian) and in particulars (taking into account more recent studies of specific documents such as those of Gershevitch, Sims-Williams, Yakubovich, Grenet and de la Vaissière). Unlike the previous edition, this one includes photographs of all the documents.
As the only significant Sogdian texts actually written in the Sogdian homeland and as a primary source for the period of the Arab invasions in the early 8th century CE, the documents from Mt Mugh are immensely important both to linguists and to historians. They include letters written by Dewashtich, the last independent Sogdian ruler, and his subordinates, a letter in Sogdian from the Arab amir Abd al-Rahman b. Subh, a pair of marriage contracts, a contract for the lease of a dakhma -- documents which throw light on both the political and the social history of the period. The script and language differ in many
respects from those of other Sogdian materials. While some details still remain and perhaps will always remain debatable, Livshits’s ability to interpret these exceptionally difficult documents deserves our deepest respect and admiration.
The second part of the book (pp. 265-388), which is also very valuable, is a collection of Livshits’s papers concerning Sogdian inscriptions from Sogdiana and from further east. One article deals with a Buddhist Sogdian manuscript fragment. Most of these papers have been published before, but where necessary they are revised, and some sections (on the late Sogdian inscriptions of Semireche and Kirgizia) are new.
Honourable Mentions
Dieter Weber, Berliner Pahlavi-Dokumente. Zeugnisse spätsassanidischer Brief- und Rechtskultur aus frühislamischer Zeit. Harrassowitz: Wiesbaden 2008 (Iranica 15), xxxi, 286 pp., XLVI illustrations [Pahlavi Documents in Berlin. Evidence on the Art of Letter Writing and Late Sassanian Legal Culture in the Early Islamic Period]
The book is a meticulous edition of a group of 40 new Middle Persian documents in the Pahlavi cursive script which appeared in the international market for antiquities in the late 1980s in Europe and the USA. There is no reliable record of their original provenance, but internal evidence suggests that they belong to the same larger group of 260 documents which were bought by the University of Berkeley in the early 1990s and now belong to the Pahlavi Archive of the Bancroft library. Both groups of texts, now in Berlin and Berkeley, seem to have originally belonged to the same archive of a large economic unit in which different kinds of important records conserving economic and legal transactions were placed. The vast material written on leather and linen also includes letters and other unique texts (among them economic lists and a magical text). According to D. Weber’s dating the documents in his edition belong to the period between ca. 660 to 680 C.E., hence to the very early Islamic period from which almost nothing else has survived. The find is important not only because of its unique value as a source for this otherwise completely dark period of Iranian history, but also since only very few original documents of economic and legal provenance have survived from any age of Iran’s past up to the 10th century C.E. The difficulties of deciphering the cursive script are, however, almost insurmountable. It is by no means an exaggeration to maintain that this script can only be read if the reader is well acquainted with legal and economic terminology, the precise formulae used in all kinds of documents and, besides, knows the exact content of the text beforehand.
D. Weber’s edition of these texts is the admirable work of an expert who has spent all his life deciphering documents written in the extremely difficult Pahlavi cursive script. As in all his work to date he combines the knowledge of an experienced specialist with the common sense of a scholar who avoids speculation and all the pitfalls the ambiguous script offers. For his edition he has not only taken the paleographical evidence of the Pahlavi papyri (a revised version of which he published himself a few years ago) into consideration, but has also used all the unedited documents in Berkeley to verify his readings and interpretations. Hence, despite the difficulties described above, his treatment of these texts is one of the most reliable editions of the past years, dealing, moreover, with original sources of great interest for the reconstruction of the economic and legal history of Iran in the very first decades of the Muslim era. In 2009 his edition received the Prix Ghirshman of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres of the Institut de France in Paris for outstanding scholarly monographs.
Alan Williams, The Zoroastrian Myth of Migration from Iran and Settlement in the Indian Diaspora. Text, Translation and Analysis of the 16th Century Qeṣṣe-ye Sanjān ‛The Story of Sanjan’. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2009 (Numen Book Series, Studies in the History of Religions, Text and Sources in the History of Religions, vol.124), xii, 250 pp.
This book constitutes a very important contribution to Iranian Studies for a number of reasons. While the text of the Qeṣṣe-ye Sanjān (QS) has been readily available in Gujarati and English translations since the 19th century, the Persian original has been little known. For the first time Williams now provides the text not only in romanized transcription and a parallel English version, but also in facsimiles of the best and oldest manuscript, SH, which he rediscovered in the library of the Cama Oriental Institute, Mumbai. While Williams’ text is mainly based on the readings of SH, his is the first ever edition of the QS with any claim to being textcritical. In addition to SH, Williams records variant readings of M.R. Unvala’s 1922 lithographed reproduction of the ms. MU, the whereabouts of which are currently unknown, and of five other manuscripts.
Unlike earlier translations, in particular Hodivala’s and Edulji’s prose versions, Williams’s English rendering is in verse. By dispensing with rhyme Williams has been able to keep his translation close to the literal meaning of the Persian couplets, while the iambic metre conveys a flavour of the musical rhythm and imaginative colours of the poetic form of the Persian original. By taking the metre seriously, Williams has been able to argue against Hodivala’s proposed date of 936 CE for the landing of the Parsis in Sanjan, a date which has been widely accepted by the Parsi community and endorsed by scholars, including Mary Boyce.
Williams also offers a detailed commentary on individual passages and argues convincingly that the text emulates the national epic tradition of Iran in miniature and aspires to be the national epic of the Parsis. He also offers an entirely new and intriguing interpretation of the text as a whole with regard to its composition and narrative structure. He argues that the narrative structure of the QS follows the model of Zoroastrian cosmology. Moreover, he offers a new evaluation of the function of the text as a record of historical events. As the only surviving narrative of the Zoroastrian emigration from Iran, during the 19th and 20th centuries the QS had been taken as a historical account of displacement. Williams shows that, rather than being viewed as a very imperfect history of the Parsi community, the text is much better understood as a ‟mirror” of the Sanjāna priestly tradition, the stewards of the Irān Shāh fire: it tells the story of that fire and of its priesthood, so that the Sanjāna lineage is ‟the direct beneficiary of the text’s glorification”. Moreover, he shows that by the installation of Yazdegerd’s spiritual successor, the ‛King of Iran’ fire, first in Sanjān, then in Bānsdah and finally in Navsari, the story remedies the trauma of the Zoroastrian loss and defeat in Iran. <!--EndFragment-->
