Iran and the Transformation of Ancient Near Eastern History

The Seleucid Empire presided over one of the most pivotal and creative periods of Iranian history, a fact that has often been elided or misunderstood in both ancient and modern historiography. Iran and the Transformation of Ancient Near Eastern History examines the Seleucid Empire within the context of ancient Iranian history from an interdisciplinary standpoint and seeks to integrate it more fully into the history of Iranian empires. It brings together a wide variety of perspectives, including landscape archaeology, art history, cuneiform studies, as well as political, economic, maritime and religious history. This volume presents the contributions of the conference on the same topic organized by the editors of this volume, which took place on February 24th–25th 2020 at the University of California Irvine (Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Iranian Studies), the third in the series of the “Payravi Conferences on Ancient Iranian History”.