Month: October 2021

Today my paper ‘A Parthian shot of Probable Arsacid Date’ appeared in Dabir, the open-access journal published by the Jordan Center for Persian Studies at the University of California, Irvine. It is an object study of a ceramic bowl in the Met, which I argue is the only known example of the Parthian shot motif that may actually date to the Parthian Empire! (The dating is not as precise as I would like, unfortunately.)

My short essay on Achaemenid money, entitled “Von Silber und Getreide – Zahlungsmittel und Wirtschaft im Achämenidenreich,” has appeared on my door in its corporeal form. I originally wrote it for an exhibition at the Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe, but thanks to (ex-)President Trump, the exhibition was cancelled (and to be fair, the pandemic probably would have done it in too). Fortunately the exhibition’s organizers Julia Linke and Silke Hockmann converted the catalog into a book for the Zaberns Bildände zur Archäologie entitled Die Perser: Am Hof der Großkönige (Julia also translated my text into German, for which I am very grateful). It has also been published simultaneously (with identical pagination) as a Sonderheft of the magazine Antike Welt.

In my essay I try to give an overview of the different forms of money in the Achaemenid Empire, including coins (even though there was no imperial coinage per se), bullion, grain, geese and even chert.

The book is beautiful! I’m looking forward to reading the rest of it.