Was there geographical science in Sasanian Iran?

The study examines the extant Sasanian material relating to geographical knowledge, trying to answer the question whether Iranians of the Late Sasanian period possessed the notion of “geographical science” comparable to that of their Byzantine neighbours or their Islamic heirs. Geographical traditions found in several texts, both in Avestan and Pahlavi, are studied and compared, in order to reach the conclusions, whether the actual geographical knowledge was systematised. It appears that there was much diversity in geographical views in various periods of Sasanian history; the views on geography were generally geopolitically motivated; there was a gap between the learned traditions and real geographical knowledge; Sasanian geographical attitudes were characterised by Iranocentrism and little interest in real geography; Sasanian Iranians did not develop a geographical science, and much of what we are left with is rather geographical mythology

The Karaim translation of the Book of Nehemia copied in the 17 th century’s Crimea and printed in 1840/1841 at Gözleve, on the copyist of the manuscript, and some related issues

In this article, the author describes the nature of the 1840/1841 Turkic Karaim translation of the Bible, published at Gözleve / Jevpatorija, and especially, the translation of Nehemia, the last book in this publication. The author tries to identify the translator / copyist of Nehemia, who was working on the MS in 1672 in Mangup,having been based himself on the colophon, and surmised that the rest of the Bible translation may come from a MS copied by the same copyist. The author further speculates why the publisher of the Gözleve edition chose this particular MS. In order to define the Turkic language of the translation, the author goes in details about the earlier Jewish – both Rabbanite and Karaite – population of Çufut-Qal‘eh in the Crimea; his conclusion is that the earlier population was mostly immigrants from the North (the Duchy of Lithuania) and their language could not be originally any sort of Crimean Turkic. In the article, the author publishes and republishes different Judeo-Turkic Karaite Biblical translations and tombstone inscriptions

Our Daily Bread Is At Risk: The Term rōzīq/g as Vorlage for ἐπιούσιος in Lord’s Prayer

This note proposes a new hypothesis that ἐπιούσιος of the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6:11 and Luke 11:3 was an attempt to translate adequately rōzīq/g, the Middle Iranian loan word in Jesus' Hebrew / Aramaic, whose meaning was ‘nourishment provided by God's mercy day to day’, and not merely ‘daily [bread], needed for the day/for today’

A New Karaite-Turkish Manuscript from Germany: New Light on Genre and Language in Karaite and Rabbanite Turkic Bible Translations in the Crimea, Constantinople and Elsewhere

A Karaite manuscript in Istanbuli Turkish written in Hebrew characters has turned up in Germany lately. This article investigates the whereabouts of the manuscript and tries to place it in its historical and linguistic context. Although the manuscript was apparently written/copied in Constantinople, the Turkic language used in it has some Crimean connections. The novelty of this discovery lies in the fact that Turkish was used by the 19th century Constantinople Karaites as a literary language

Not by Firkowicz's Fault: Daniel Chwolson's Comic Blunders in Research of Hebrew Epigraphy of the Crimea and Caucasus, and their Impact on Jewish Studies in Russia

Daniel Chwolson (1819-1911) made a huge impact upon the research of Hebrew epigraphy from the Crimea and Caucasus. Despite that, his role in the more-than-a-century-long controversy regarding Crimean Hebrew tomb inscriptions has not been well studied. Chwolson, at first, adopted Abraham Firkowicz's forgeries, and then quickly realized his mistake; however, he could not back up. The criticism by both Abraham Harkavy and German Hebraists questioned Chwolson's scholarly qualifications and integrity. Consequently, the interference of political pressure into the academic argument resulted in the prevailing of the scholarly flawed opinion. We revisit the interpretation of these findings by Russian, Jewish, Karaite and Georgian historians in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Soviet period, Jewish Studies in the USSR were in neglect and nobody seriously studied the whole complex of the inscriptions from the South of Russia / the Soviet Union. The remnants of the scholarly community were hypnotized by Chwolson's authority, who was the teacher of their teachers' teachers. At the same time, Western scholars did not have access to these materials and/or lacked the understanding of the broader context, and thus a number of erroneous Chwolson's conclusion have entered academic literature for decades