Western stereotypes of Ancient Persia often focus on images of exotic harems, scheming queens, and decadent court life. Prof. Lee explains what the ancient textual and archaeological sources actually reveal about women’s lives in the empire of Achaemenid Persia (550-330 BC).  The lecture examines the economic, political, and social power of women across the Achaemenid […]

In recent scholarship, family archives in the form of a manuscript have been posited as sites for more broadly rethinking archives in the pre-modern Islamicate world.In the context of Isfahan, household anthologies provide a particularly rich ground for theorizing and reassessing pre-modern archival mechanisms and spaces. The anthology referred to in Persian as the majmuʿa […]