Eranshahr: Man, Landscape, and Society in Arsacid and Sasanian Iran

This fourth volume of the Atlas of the Ancient Near East (OCAVOA) collects 15 contributions by members of the three Units composing the PRIN 2017 ‘Eranshahr: Man Landscape and Society in Arsacid and Sasanian Iran. Texts, material culture, and society from Arsaces to Yazdegard III. Three case studies: Pars, Pahlaw and Khuzestan’ (2017PR34CS). These papers were presented during the conclusive workshop of the project, held in Ravenna on February 22-23, 2024. The project was conceived in 2017 and launched in 2018, representing a collaborative effort by a multidisciplinary team of scholars from Sapienza University of Rome, Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna, and Turin University, as well as several international partners. The project aimed to study the long millennium bridging two important transition periods in the history of western Asia, the first marking the passage from the Seleucid to the Arsacid era, the second being the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the rise of the Islamic Caliphate. In this framework, the book contains a set of archaeological, historical-geographical, and cultural studies on three ancient regions of western Iran during the Arsacid, Sasanian, and early Islamic periods, which combine into a coherent and innovative narration, shedding new light on the Iranian world in Antiquity, Late-Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages and opening the way for future investigations.