Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024): 577-583

Conference Report:
Ērān: Central and West Asia in the First Millennium CE 

Research Forum
(University of Lille, 15-19 July 2024)

Conference Organizers: 

EkatErina nEchaEva                khodadad rEzakhani

University of Lille                                           University of Leiden

Report by: 

daniEl alford

University of Lille

The Ērān: Central and West Asia in the First Millennium CE Research Forum was held 
on 15–19 July 2024 at the University of Lille, France. Convened by Ekaterina Nechaeva 
(University of Lille) and Khodadad Rezakhani (University of Leiden), the event was the first 
in a series of what are planned to be three, week-long forums conducted as part of the Ērān, 
Tūrān, and Hrōm: West and Central and Asia in the First Millennium CE project. The Ērān 
Forum focused particularly on the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE), while future forums are 
anticipated to emphasize the Turanian and Mediterranean worlds, but to keep the center of 
research on the Iranian world broadly.

The Sasanian Empire played a critical global role in Late Antiquity, but its scholars 
typically find themselves dispersed and peripheral as parts of larger projects focused on 
other areas and political powers. While recent decades have seen an increased interest in 
global studies of the first millennium, more still needs to be done to center the Iranian 
world, which is often sidelined by difficult, less accessible or available source material, 
especially in comparison to the Mediterranean and Roman worlds. There is also a tendency 
to collapse the Sasanian Empire between the better studied empires of Rome and China, 
and research has been further restricted by a shortage of coherent groups and agendas that 
seriously consider Central and West Asian Late Antiquity from a global viewpoint. Even at 
the Forum itself there was often a sense of “outsider” status. Several academics present 

© 2024 Daniel Alford.  This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 
License, which allows users to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and 
only so long as attribution is given to the original authors and source.

https://globallateantiquity.com/
https://globallateantiquity.com/


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Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 32 (2024)

told me that they considered themselves primarily Byzantinists, Armenologists, Syriac 
scholars, art historians or a number of other identities before Sasanianists. Despite, or 
perhaps because of this, the Forum provided a valuable opportunity for cross-disciplinary 
collaboration and contact.

Part of the problem facing Sasanian scholars is a lack of networks connecting senior 
and junior academics. A primary goal of the Forum was to create just such a network, 
bringing junior scholars into a welcoming environment where they could benefit from 
research presentations by established and successful scholars; present their ongoing work 
to solicit critique and feedback from peers and mentors; and establish connections with 
colleagues working across chronological and political-cultural boundaries for the purposes 
of fostering global historical collaborations and inspiring interdisciplinary research. It was 
also hoped that the presentations of junior scholars would introduce senior academics to 
new trends, interests, and approaches. This emphasis on collaboration across experience 
levels was supported by daily lunches and conference dinners on Tuesday and Friday, as 
well as informal gatherings throughout the week. 

Each day of the Forum was focused on a specific theme, reflecting the expertise and 
interests of participating senior scholars as follows:

• Historiography (Keynote: Touraj Daryaee; Seminars: Khodadad Rezakhani, Alison 
Vacca)

• Languages (Keynote: Lili Varahram; Seminars: Charles Häberl, Stephen Rapp)
• Religions and Cultures (Keynote: Albert de Jong; Seminars: Charles Häberl, Simcha 

Gross)
• Material and Visual Culture (Keynote: Eberhard Sauer; Seminars: Eve MacDonald, 

Judith Lerner)
• Material Culture and Economy (Keynote: Judith Lerner; Seminars: Nikolaus Schindel, 

Khodadad Rezakhani)

Days began with a keynote lecture and two seminars delivered by senior scholars 
that were open to the public free of charge, followed by afternoon workshops by junior 
researchers that were closed to the public. The morning seminars were intended as teaching 
events designed to provide an overview of a particular field and advice for engaging with 
it. As such, while these sessions were primarily conducted in a lecture format, a significant 
minority, for example Eve MacDonald and Alison Vacca, adopted a more collaborative 
approach focused on discussion and group work. The open nature of these mornings was 
intended to encourage outreach and make it possible for interested parties to attend 
regardless of their connection to Sasanian studies. Afternoon workshops, by contrast, 
took the form of several fifteen-minute presentations of pre-circulated papers (and in one 
case a pre-circulated sound file) followed by a 45-minute discussion. The purpose of these 
workshops was to solicit critique and introduce new research questions and methods, 
rather than to present completed, conference-style papers. As such, many of the papers 
represented ongoing research and prompted open discussions on how to improve the 
models and findings presented, although some junior researchers did deliver completed 
and even published material that was more typical of a conference setting. Due to the 



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unpublished nature of much of this work, afternoon sessions were open only to Forum 
presenters. This potentially restricted the variety of backgrounds represented in the 
discussion, but was necessary to protect work in progress by junior scholars. The Forum’s 
popularity also resulted in a late addition to the program in the form of poster sessions 
at the end of each day, which expanded possibilities for participation. These posters have 
kept the memory of the Forum alive long after its conclusion, as several still decorate the 
Ex-Patria project’s office and hallway at the University of Lille.

In total, 14 senior academics and 24 junior academics presented their research, totaling 
five keynotes, ten seminars, fifteen workshop papers, and nine posters over the week. 
Participants represented institutions from California to Beijing, with significant cohorts 
from Cardiff University, Free University Berlin, and the A City of Many Cities Project, which 
focus on the ways in which the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon was remembered. Just as the 
academics came from all over, their research on the Sasanian Empire also stretched from 
east to west, with a healthy but not overpowering number invested in researching the 
empire’s neighbors, most notably the late Roman Empire.

In what follows, I have opted not to adhere strictly to the day-to-day sequencing of the 
forum program, but rather to trace thematic and geographical connections. Nonetheless, it is 
useful to begin by addressing many of the first day’s papers, as the conversations had during 
these sessions formed a springboard for later discussions. In his seminar entitled “Sasanian 
Historiography: Between the East and West,” Khodadad Rezakhani (Leiden University) 
emphasized the need not to reduce the Sasanian Empire to just Rome’s enemy and Islam’s 
precursor, as this results in an overemphasis on Mesopotamia and elides developments 
and events occurring further east. This argument has been developed by Rezakhani in his 
book ReOrienting the Sasanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity (Edinburgh, 2017), and indeed 
the geographical and temporal interests of participants ranged broadly across the week. 
That said, many of the speakers on the first day focused precisely on the Sasanian Empire’s 
relationship with their western neighbor and eventual Arab conquerors. This established 
a helpful foundation for conversations later in the week, as not only are these two polities 
the most well known in relation to the Sasanians, but to exclude them would undermine the 
more holistic approach to Sasanian studies cultivated by the Forum.

The keynote delivered by Touraj Daryaee (University of California, Irvine), entitled “The 
Eyes of the King in the Sasanian Empire,” addressed spy networks in the Sasanian court and 
questioned whether a formal institution of spies existed and how they might have operated. 
Sean Strong (Cardiff University) looked at ideas of Sasanian treason in Theopylact Simocatta 
in his paper “Bahram Chobin’s Revolt: A Sasanian Asset and Ally of East Rome the Late 
Sixth Century?” This was followed by “Historiographical Narrative and Memory Shaping in 
Early Islamic Historiography: The Nihāyat al-Arab and the Arab-Islamic Conquest of Iran,” 
presented by Matteo Cecchetti (University of Pisa), which examined the narratives of the 
Islamic conquests of Iran found in the anonymous ninth-century Nihāyat al-arab. The idea 
of narratives and how we use them also undergirded Alison Vacca’s (Columbia University) 
more instructional and discussion-based seminar “Sasanians in Early Islamic Sources,” 
which cautioned against approaching Islamic-era sources as unreliable and in need of 
“fixing.”

https://globallateantiquity.com/programme/
https://globallateantiquity.com/programme/


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Both posters during the first day focused on conflicts between Sasanians and Romans. 
Christopher Lillington Martin (Coventry University) considered the stone used for fortifying 
Dara during the reign of Justinian, and Michael David Ethington (University of Padua1) 
examined depictions of Husraw II in the Syriac Life of Bar ‘Edta and how these were affected 
by the Roman-Sasanian War of 602–28 CE. Ethington’s poster – “The ‘Peaceful Crown’ and 
the ‘Assyrian’: Shifting Views on Khosrow II Parvēz in an East Syriac Hagiography” – with its 
emphasis on Syriac sources, particularly demonstrated the need for research to go beyond 
the more familiar languages of Greek and Arabic to address the diversity of the Sasanian 
world.

The question of how to treat the Middle Persian corpus, which was central to the 
administration of the Sasanian Empire but includes many works compiled in the post-
Sasanian period, was a focus of talks throughout the Forum and especially on the second 
day, dedicated to the language. This day began with a keynote lecture delivered by Lili 
Varahram (University of Tehran) entitled “Two Different Narrative Methods in Middle 
Persian Historical Texts.” In this paper, Varahram considered the importance of lists to the 
oral tradition that undergirded Middle Persian, as well as many Arabic sources on Sasanian 
history. Careful corrections and insights into the complex Middle Persian corpus were also 
delivered by Nima Asefi (IHSC Tehran/A City of Many Cities Project2), who identified what 
he suggested was the earliest known appearance of the term Tāzīg (“Arab”) in a document 
from the Pahlavi archive as part of his afternoon workshop presentation “Dangers in 
Central Iran in the 7th Century (Study of Two Middle Persian Documents from the Pahlavi 
Archive of Hastijan).” Meanwhile, Alberto Bernard (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) 
sought to solve “The Puzzle of <mgwh>. New Readings from the Ṭabarestān Archive and 
the Mādayān ī hazār dādestān,” comparing the commonality of seals bearing the title of 
maguh with the curious absence of officials by this title in textual sources. Reconstructing 
the Sasanian administrative apparatus through Middle Persian sources was a topic returned 
to by the Forum’s final poster, “The Structure of the Sasanian Empire – Administrations 
and Governments” by Nils Purwins (Free University, Berlin), which provided a potential 
reconstruction of the Sasanian Empire’s tax administration.

Information on the Sasanian Empire also comes down from the many different cultures 
and language communities that comprised it. This led to the conference attracting a broad 
range of expertise focused on linguistic and religious minorities, both as Sasanian subjects 
in their own right and as resources for understanding the imperial center. The study 
of Christian groups within the Sasanian Empire could be split into two broad regional 
categories—the Caucasus and the Syriac world. As an Armenologist with interests in the 
broader Sasanian and Caucasian contexts, I was particularly happy to see a trio of speakers 
dedicated to this period: first, Stephen Rapp (Sam Houston State University) in the seminar 
“Caucasian Sources for Sasanian History (and What They Reveal about the Iranian World): 
An Introduction,” and then Lana Chologauri’s (Tblisi State University) “Sasanian Silverware 

1.  Michael David Ethington has since joined the University of Lille’s Ex-Patria project as a PhD student.
2.  Nima Asefi has since completed his PhD at IHSC Tehran and begun a postdoctoral position at the University 

of Hamburg.



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from Georgia and Its Political Significance” and Stephanie Pambakian’s (Ca’ Foscari 
University, Venice) “Anania Širakac‘i’s Treatise on the Universe (7th c.): An Armenian 
Cosmology between the East and West.” For the Syriac world, Yulia Furman (Free University, 
Berlin) discussed “The Genre of Universal History in the Syriac Tradition,” considering how 
modern understandings of universality could obscure the local implications of the genre 
among Syriac Christian communities. The discussion of religious minorities also turned 
to the reflexive question of how these groups perceived Zoroastrian elites, which Bahram 
Roshan Zamir (École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris) addressed in his poster, “Persian 
Martyr Acts’ Portrait of the Zoroastrians under the Sasanians.”

According to Ab de Jong (Leiden University) in his third-day keynote entitled “The 
Religious History of the Sasanian Empire,” a weakness of the field of religious studies as it 
has developed in the context of western, Christian universities has been its sidelining of 
Iranian religions. The Ērān Forum cannot be said to have entirely lived up to the challenge 
of giving equal time to non-Christian faiths in its discussion, but it did feature a pair of 
fascinating seminars by Charles Häberl (Rutgers University) on the Iranian Mandaean 
community and its colophons, which also served as an introduction to Semitic languages that 
richly informed subsequent presentations on Syriac and Hebrew linguistic communities. In 
addition, Simcha Gross (University of Pennsylvania), whose “Minority Religious Groups in 
the Sasanian World and Beyond: New Directions” followed Häberl as the second seminar of 
the third day, centered Judaism as its case study for understanding religious groups within 
the Sasanian Empire, meaning that the Christianities discussed were not merely being 
compared to each other. In fielding de Jong’s challenge, the Forum was most successful 
in the area that was arguably most important. The Iranian faith of Zoroastrianism—the 
religion of the Sasanian king of kings and his court—received equal if not greater coverage 
than Christianity.

In fact, Zoroastrian diversity was particularly highlighted at several points by scholars 
studying the eastern edge of the Sasanian Empire, where practices were often more varied 
than those reflected in Middle Persian sources. Nooshin Sepidkar (SOAS-University of 
London) presented a poster “Exploring the Evolution and Transmission of Zoroastrian Texts: 
The Pahlavi Yasna and Sogdian Ashem Vohu in Historical Context,” which studied the only 
surviving Zoroastrian prayer written in a language other than Avestan. The eastern climes 
of the Sasanian world were likewise broached by Robert Schulz (Berlin Graduate School of 
Ancient Studies). In “Is there a God PHARRO? About Syncretism and Local Interpretations 
in Gandhara,” Schulz hypothesized that the Pharro deity on Kushan coins could be tied to 
the Hindu Kubera, leading to discussion on the concept of syncretism and its role in the 
comparative study of religions. How to approach comparative research was a frequent 
question among attendees due to the broad range of topics the Forum addressed, and a 
repeated refrain was the need to recognize difference rather than seeking “smoking gun” 
similarities that might serve only to corroborate a researcher’s pre-existing assumptions.

The Forum’s final two days were dedicated to Sasanian material culture. Two talks—a 
seminar and a keynote—by Judith Lerner (ISAW, NYU) laid the groundwork for discussions 
on sigillography and artistic depictions. This was then expanded on by Delphine Poinsot 
(Collège de France), who noted art history’s obsession with the human realism of western 



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Classical art and the way that this implicitly positions Sasanian art as inferior. Poinsot 
illustrated how this model might be challenged, examining the often quite complex 
standards of human presentation and animal emotional realism found in Sasanian art as a 
valuable form of expression in itself rather than something inferior to the likes of Laocoön 
and His Sons. 

Archaeology often allows insights into Sasanian lived realities, a topic that was explored 
by the papers “’A Tale of Pots and People,’ an Unwritten Material History of Everyday Life 
in the Bukhara Oasis During the Long First Millennium” and “Shaping Vessels in Shifting 
Economies: Unraveling Material Transformations of Tableware from Post-Yazdgerd to 
Samanid Times,” by Jacopo Bruno (Institute of Iranian Studies, Austrian Academy of 
Sciences) and Layah Ziaii-Bigdeli (University of California, Irvine) respectively. The greatest 
chronological span of the entire Forum was tackled by Naghmeh Mahzounzadeh (Ca’ 
Foscari University, Venice) in “Diverging Trajectories: Arrowheads, Slingshots, and the 
Cultural Dynamics of Weaponry in First Millennium Iranian Plateau and Adjacent Region,” a 
preliminary part of her PhD project categorizing change over time in arrowheads and sling 
missiles between the sixth century BCE and the seventh century CE.

Studying material culture, however, is by no means an uncontroversial method for 
discovering “truths,” as demonstrated by a lively debate spawned by seeming contradictions 
between a seminar on Sasanian numismatics by Nikolaus Schindel (Austrian Academy) and 
a keynote on the archaeology of the Sasanian frontiers by Eberhard Sauer (University 
of Edinburgh) a day earlier, which demonstrated the high-quality production and broad 
distribution of coinage within the Sasanian Empire while also revealing a seeming paradox 
that coins were nearly entirely absent from military sites. The debate about how exactly 
these findings could co-exist led neatly into the last seminar of the Forum, where Khodadad 
Rezakhani (Leiden University) considered the question of the Sasanian economy, how 
much of it could be reconstructed, and what we are doing when we do economic history. 
This seminar nicely complemented that of Eve MacDonald (Cardiff University) the day 
before, which took a discussion format and asked what exactly it was that made Sasanian 
archaeology “Sasanian.”

In studying the architecture of the Sasanian world, two junior scholars at different stages 
of research, Sarvenaz Parsa (Free University, Berlin) and Hamta Mousavi (SOAS-University 
of London) presented on the construction of the chahartaq-type Zoroastrian fire temple. 
The former’s poster “Sasanian Fire Temples? Study of Chahartaqs and Their Architectural 
Groups” provided a useful survey of the different types, while the latter’s “Studies in the 
Architecture of Sasanian Zoroastrian Fire Temples vis-à-vis the Astrological Concepts of 
Chronocratoria and Melothesia” outlined Mousavi’s intention to survey the geographical 
coordinates of 110 such fire temples and provided a methodology for analyzing them in 
relation to heavenly bodies. This focus on intentionality in choosing monumental sites was 
also central to an innovative outlier presentation on the first day, “Reflections of Power: 
A Comparative Study of Reflection and Reflective Surfaces in Ancient China, Persia, India 
and the Greco-Roman World,” wherein Goran Đurđević (Beijing Foreign Studies University) 
showed how imperial powers heightened displays of royal glory through pairing monuments 
with pre-existing reflective bodies in a talk with impressive cross-cultural range. Yusef 



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Saadat (Ruhr University Bochum/A City of Many Cities Project) offered a reflection on the 
connections between Sasanian architecture and Zoroastrian eschatology, suggesting in his 
“The Way Činwad Bridge Gets Reshaped: A Possible Reflection of a Bridge Technology in 
Sasanian Era” that the titular bridge over which the deceased crossed reflects no-longer 
extant Sasanian irrigation technology.

Several scholars at the conference dealt not just with new approaches to research, 
but also with the question of how to engage students and lay audiences through novel 
collaborations and approaches. Domiziana Rossi (Cardiff University) collaborated with sound 
engineers to produce a sound file that acted as the basis for her presentation “Soundscapes 
of Eranshahr,” in which she reconstructed how Sasanian cities may have sounded and led 
a lively discussion on the balance such projects must strike between realism, audience 
engagement, and resources available. Mohammad Rasoulipour (Eranshahr project), the 
visual designer who created the Ērān, Tūrān, and Hrōm logo, presented a poster on the 
considerations that went into creating facsimiles of the faces of Sasanian notables. His 
“Portrait of a Shahanshah. Imagining the Likenesses of the Sasanian Nobility Based on 
Material Culture” addressed the limitations of this process in terms of technology and 
accuracy and situated it within a larger strategy for attracting lay audiences that includes 
comics, board games, and Iranian folklore (all available online). Online resources formed 
a significant part of the discussion of engaging outsiders to the field and allowing access 
to pre-existing scholarship. Layah Ziaii-Bigdeli currently manages the Sasanika database  
originally started by Touraj Daryaee, while conference-organizer Ekaterina Nechaeva is 
in the process of creating the Ex-Patria database for compiling data on trans-imperial 
travelers. Furthermore, the Forum ended with the creation of a Substack to allow for 
connections formed within it to continue into the future.

Discussions of how pedagogic approaches should be adapted to better introduce students 
to Sasanian history and avoid privileging Western research were features of several papers, 
and an elephant in the room that periodically reared its trunk was the question of whether 
there even was such a thing as Sasanian history! Simcha Gross noted that the field has no 
chairs or gatekeepers; Eve MacDonald questioned its archaeological boundaries; and Ab de 
Jong commented that since the Sasanian Empire began as a regime change (albeit one that 
ushered in a particularly long-lived dynasty), referring to discrete Parthian and Sasanian 
Empires is akin to referring to Rome as the Flavian Empire. Behind these insights was the 
understanding that the Sasanians are what we have made them, and our conversations 
throughout the week made and remade them in various forms. Returning to the first day, 
both Alison Vacca and Sean Strong warned against skewing our approach by “fixing” texts 
we deem “problematic” in our modern context or warping reality to fit our pre-existing 
understandings. That these warnings came from both sides of the senior/junior divide 
indicates the thoughtful climate of the Ērān Forum and highlights its success in generating 
two-way dialogue. The ideas presented at the Forum both in papers and informal discussion 
suggest opportunities for broad and exciting collaboration across disciplines in search 
of ever fuller understanding. The week has laid seeds that will surely bear fruit in future 
research and forums under and beyond the Ērān, Tūrān, and Hrōm banner.

https://www.eranshahr.com/
https://sites.uci.edu/sasanika/