Master of Arts / Department of History / Donald J. Mrozek / On 16 January 1991, a coalition of nations led by the United States launched a series of air strikes against Iraq to force that country to withdraw from Kuwait. What followed was an intense aerial bombardment of Iraqi military and civilian infrastructure which lasted until 24 February when the coalition began a ground offensive. After four days of ground fighting Iraq withdrew from Kuwait. American pictorial print media created a historical interpretation of the 1991 Persian Gulf War in the sense that selected images were immediately published to a broad audience and these images provided an acceptable story of the war. Perceptions of an Air Campaign examines the cultural meanings of the air war and how these meanings took shape in the narrative pictorial print media produced. The narrative is intricately related to the legacy of the Vietnam War. For generations, Americans viewed contemporary war, politics, foreign affairs, and culture through their memories of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. President George H.W. Bush guaranteed the U.S. public that the Gulf War was consciously being constructed to avoid a conflict similar to Vietnam. According to the president, the United States was going to war with enough resources for a swift and decisive victory, thereby avoiding the Vietnam pitfall of an open-ended conflict. Pictorial print media articulated a narrative displaying U.S. military strength and dominance that fulfilled Bush’s promise.

This thesis examines the construction of ideology in three public speeches held by the Secretary of the Iranian Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Ali Shamkhani. Shamkhani’s position makes him one of the most powerful public officials in Iran, with vast influence over domestic and international security matters, including over Iran’s nuclear negotiations. This thesis presents theories on discourse analysis as ideology analysis, which enables identification of linguistical ideologization. With this theory as backdrop, three speeches with varying content and context are analysed in order to determine whether or not Shamkhani is constructing ideology in them. Political officials are arguably expected to ideologize speeches to a certain extent. Even though Shamkhani enjoys a similar seniority as many politicians, Shamkhani’s position remains formally apolitical, which makes it is interesting to analysis his speeches. Linguistic analyses of public speeches in Iran are rarely deployed when attempting to understand the Islamic Republic but given the attention Iranian officials themselves ascribe their language, a discourse analysis of what they say might disclose otherwise hidden qualities in their communications. Through the speeches’ diverse content in written, orally formal and orally colloquial Farsi, it was possible not only to establish that Shamkhani uses discourse to construct ideology but also to what extent this is done, depending on modes of communication.

This dissertation seeks to explore the social reality of Iranians living in the United States. The main objective is to find out how Iranians (Iranian Americans) maintain, construct and perceive their Iranian identity and to identify factors that could intervene in this process. Another aim is to examine intra-diasporic social relations, social interactions with American society and stance towards Iran. To fulfill the purpose of this dissertation, a qualitative research method was applied. The selected qualitative data consisted of thirty-one in-depth interviews with Iranians in New York City and Los Angeles. The results of the research indicated a strong sense of Iranian pride among all respondents, regardless their religious, inner ethnic or generational affiliation. This pride stems from ancient Iranian cultural heritage (and from Pahlavi era that adopted ancient symbolism into its ideological repertoire) and is still kept alive through pre-Islamic symbols and religiously indifferent traditions. It is obvious that the "pure Iranian identity" belongs to the first generation Iranians only, while the 1.5 and second generations, in their self-concept, proved to be rather hyphenated or torn between three spaces (typically young Iranian Jews). Research revealed their identity is oftentimes chosen,...

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This thesis examines the first collections of modern Persian literature written by Iranian female authors in the context of a process of gender modernization during the Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s reign (1941-1979). This thesis argues that women’s literature written during the period of transition from tradition to modernity is clearly influenced by the state’s gender policy and illustrates the changing position of women’s status in private and public life. Indeed, an examination of the collections of short stories and poems that were produced in this period demonstrates that female authors were concerned with the unveiling policy, arranged marriage and polygamy, women’s education, women’s social participation, women’s domestic obligations, women’s political awakening, and female sexuality. Furthermore, central themes covered by female authors changed significantly based on the transformations of gender politics the society experienced from the 1940s and 1950s to the 1960s and 1970s.

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Languages occasionally have syntactic constructions that are difficult, if not impossible, to describe using a context-free grammar. One such construction is a crossing dependency. Crossing dependencies have been well studied for Dutch and Swiss German (Huybregts, 1976; Shieber, 1985), and recently for Tagalog (Maclachlan and Rambow, 2003). In this paper I propose that Persian exhibits crossing dependencies. In this SOV language, a light verb construction in the future tense becomes interrupted by a future auxiliary verb, which agrees with its subject in person and number. The future auxiliary also splits passive constructions in a similar manner. These forms present interesting challenges for computational models of language. I will discuss implications of this phenomenon within current formal and linguistic theories.

The Twelfth District. Towards a Connected History of Achaemenid Northeastern Central Asia «When the Persian king referred to his Greek “subjects” in their various subcategories, he certainly may have included the entire Greek world in this claim, whether it held “true” or not for those Greeks included in his list of imperial subjects. The same applies to the Saka who lived in the vast territories of the north and the east. The dynamic between these two concepts manifested in the imperial border zones that developed within the tension between these two competing concepts, which are contradictory only at first glance». - R. Rollinger, The Persian Empire in Contact with the World. In The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East. Volume V. The Age of Persia, ed. K. Radner, N. Moelle, and D. T. Potts. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 928. 1. And I Think It’s Gonna Be a Long Long Time. Once Again on Baktria: Why and How The present dissertation to study the processes - and to identify their underlying actors – which fueled the emergence and development of the most important satrapy of the Achaemenid Empire in the East (Baktria and the neighboring regions of Sogdiana and Chorasmia). It does so by adopting three mutually complementary perspectives: the «imperial» (top-down), the «local» (bottom-up) and the «liminal» (frontier studies). At the same times, it subjects the sources (both written and archaeological), to an innovative methodology in this field of studies by making extensive use of the ethnographic record on the one hand and, on the other, a wide range of secondary literature focusing on historical and human geography. In the face of the great vitality shown by research on Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic Central Asia over the past fifteen years, the Achaemenid period still remains comparatively little explored, although both archaeological investigation and some very recent documentary discoveries have significantly increased the body of sources available for the study of this region. Moreover, due to the geopolitical events of the past forty years, research on Central Asia in general - and pre-Hellenistic Asia in particular - has faced remarkable challenges. In the case of Achaemenid Bactria, the dearth of literary sources on the one hand and, on the other, the linguistic obstacles arising from the hindrances, for most Western scholars, of accessing the – bodacious - Russophone archaeological literature, has meant that, since the time of some seminal studies by Pierre Briant (1983, 1984, 1985), this region of the Empire has been neglected in favor of contexts, such as Babylonia or Egypt, which are better covered by the extant evidence. In recent years, however, there has been a significant reversal of this trend. The publication of the results of a massive survey of Eastern Afġānistān (Gardin et al., 1989-1998) has shown that, contrary to earlier assumptions, even before the rise of the Seleukid satrapy and the kingdom of Baktria (Coloru 2009, Morris 2019a), the region enjoyed a highly complex infrastructure, such that it was a key piece in the Achaemenid imperial mosaic. The discovery of some parchment documents that can probably be traced back to the archives of an important Achaemenid official on the eve of Alexander’s invasion (329-327 BCE, Naveh - Shaked 2012) also showed the deep level of Central Asian integration within the imperial administrative machinery (King 2021). This has been further confirmed by the publication of a new dossier of tablets from the Persepolis archives, from which we can see the very high regard in which workers (kurtaš) originating from Baktria as well as the officers assigned to their escort were held (Henkelman 2018a). Although to date it has been impossible to bring to light the archaeological levels of the capital of the satrapy (Baktra), the work of the French Archaeological Delegation to Afġānistān (DAFA) in the oasis of Balḫ has recently uncovered a complex system of fortifications apparently intended to control the surrounding steppes by means of garrisons located at strategic points in the oasis: this seems to further back hypotheses put forward by Briant regarding the strategic importance of the city as a stronghold of Achaemenid power in Central Asia (Maxwell-Jones 2015, Marquis 2018). Despite these significant advances, the image of Baktria still in vogue among both some scholars and the wider audience is that of an ungovernable province, a breeding ground for «autonomist» drives on the one hand and, on the other, under constant threat from the «nomads» of the steppes. Conquered by Cyrus II and integrated into the fold of the Empire by Darius I, the satrapy would progressively have removed itself from Achaemenid power beginning with the reign of Xerxes: from there, it has been argued, regions such as neighboring Sogdiana would become «independent» from Achaemenid control, finally erupting, by the time of Darius III, into a state of «anarchy» culminating in the invasion of Alexander (Holt 2005, Wu 2010). Distancing itself from such narratives, the present dissertation intends on the contrary to show how, throughout the entire history of the Empire, the whole of Central Asia (not only the oasis territories, but also the steppes) remained an integral part of its framework, and a critical one – economically, socially, and politically – at that. To this end, its overarching goal is to to analyze the relations between the political-administrative center of the satrapy and the surrounding territory in greater depth than has been done so far, since the ecology (and thus the politics) of the Central Asian oases cannot be understood without adequate consideration of the surrounding steppes and deserts. Put it otherwise, given the significant increase in documentation over the past decade, the present dissertation sets for itself the goal of calling into question the mainstream view of Baktria as a Perilous Frontier (however important it might have been) of the Achaemenid Empire still so popular among both researchers, especially historians, and the wider public today. At the same time, it seeks to develop a new understanding of this region and the surrounding territories as a «complex space», in which different social actors - not only the Empire and its administration, but also the peoples of the steppes, whom some important recent studies (Miller 2014) have shown to be decisive actors on the Baktrian chessboard - move around and constantly negotiate the terms of mutual coexistence and mutual exploitation (White 20112). Key to this effort through the work is moreover a critical examination of categories such as of mobility and fixity (Horden-Purcell 2000) in light of the most recent studies on interactions in frontier spaces in Inner Asia (Di Cosmo 2015, 2018). Such a wide-ranging comparative approach in the context of Achaemenid historiography ought to be taken as perhaps the boldest – and as the 8 chapters of the work strive to show, fruitful – contribution of the present dissertation to current scholarship on pre-Hellenistic Central Asia. Such a strategy is necessary because of the fact that, unlike more recent research on post-Achaemenid Baktria, which has turned decisively toward cultural history (Mairs 2014, Hoo 2020), the study of the Persian satrapy appears exclusively interested in investigating the impact of the Achaemenid conquest on Central Asia, thereby relegating a multitude of local actors to the background of the historical trajectory of Persian rule. However, the ever-expanding dataset of primary sources available today offers an opportunity to critically reevaluate concepts such as «center» and «periphery», as well as to significantly deepen our understanding of the social complexity of Achaemenid Baktria. In doing so, the present dissertation aims at giving back voice and agency to actors (starting with the steppe people) that have been overly neglected until now. A qualifying point of the work as a whole, and one that distinguishes it from all previous research focused the same subject, is the attempt to place Achaemenid Baktria squarely within is (Central)Eurasian, in the wake of some important recent studies (for example Kuz’mina 2008 and Beckwith 2009) that have emphasized the importance of this space as a subject of historical action and not as a remote periphery (Morris 2019a). To this end, extensive use is be made through the entire dissertation of comparative evidence and methodological insights drawn from studies on, among others, the relations between the Hán China and the Xiōngnú nomads. (Di Cosmo 2002, Miller 2015). There reason behind this choice is that this disciplinary field provides the scholar of Achaemenid Baktria with important ethnographic material, which the present dissertation tries to exploit to the bottom of their remarkable potential in order to analyze in a new perspective (co-dependence rather than opposition) the relations between the Achaemenid Empire and the Central Asian people. 2. Of The Earth With Many People: A Survey of the Present Work The general introduction (Why Baktria, after all? An Introduction to Altneuland) aims at centering the recent scholarly debate on pre-Islamic Central Asia within a wider tradition of historical, anthropological, and archaeological research. Here the case is made for adopting a connected, truly Eurasian perspective, which looks at both Baktria and the Achaemenid Empires against the background of a broader historical and sociopolitical context, in synchronic and, crucially, diachronic perspective. This, it is argued through the chapter, provides valuable opportunities for making the best of a wide array of comparative evidence and methodological approaches which might prove crucial, as several chapters in the work set out to show, to shed better light on the formative stages and the inner workings of the Northeastern borderlands of the Empire, especially during time periods (such as the long 5th century, from the reign of Xerxes onwards), where the documentary evidence is particularly scanty. Chapter 2 (Baktria in Wonderland: Sources and Methods on Achaemenid Central Asia) focuses on the the available sources. It has recently been suggested that, as it comes to the Hellenistic or the Kuṣāṇa periods, the real challenge for scholars is how to profitably exploit the extant evidence, which a thorough investigation of the record shows being not as scanty as usually bemoaned. The five sections of the chapter are meant to show that the same can be said concerning the Achaemenid period. In order to achieve this goal, besides taking stock of the usual Greek and Latin accounts, of the royal inscriptions and the Persepolis tablets, of recent archaeological research and of excavated texts, the present works makes use of a wide set of theoretical approaches and methodologies (from cultural memory and intentional history to the scholarship of the so-called Imperial Turn). The case study of a famous passage in Herodotus (3.117) on Achaemenid hydraulic infrastructure in Chorasmia is offered at the end of the chapter as a trial test to show how such a comparative, sometimes heavily theoretically informed approach as the one pursued through the present work can help in paving the way towards a less imperiocentric, bottom-up oriented assessment of the Achaemenid imperial experience in Central Asia. Chapter 3 (Nomina nuda tenemus) ought to be taken as an excursus of sort, for it critically addresses a long-lasting debate on the – several time suggested, sometimes uncritically accepted, but in many respects problematic – hypothesis of a pre-imperial history of Central Asia. A survey of the scholarship, and a discussion of the (mostly archaeological) evidence available suggests that the unavoidable starting point for reconstructing the genesis of the satrapy and the mechanisms that ensured its control by the Empire is the Bīsutūn inscription. That no pre-Achaemenid Empire (Ḫayānid, Mede, or otherwise) existed before Cyrus, however, is not the same as to claim that the conqueror was faced, upon entering Central Asia, with a remote periphery or a politically blank space. This is made particularly clear by a close reading of a crucial paragraph in the Bīsutūn inscription, which for the first time mentions a «Persian» as «satrap in Baktria». As suggested in the second part of the chapter, once read against the grain of a growing body of literature on Empire formation and of the messy nature of its working on the ground, Darius’ terse statements open a window on an intriguing process of power negotiations in which local communities and their élites were able to considerably affect imperial goals and ambitions. With these premises established, chapter 4 (The Road to Oxiana: Reconstructing a Presumptive Satrapy) attempts to reconstruct the sociopolitical and economic landscape of Central Asia during the 6th century BCE. This is, it is argued, a critical step towards a better understanding of the conditions faced by the Teispid (and later Achaemenid) administrators once they tried to consolidate their conquest of Baktria and the neighboring regions. To this end, the few narrative and archaeological pieces of evidence available are integrated with a thorough discussion of the socio-political organization of the steppe, ranging much wider than Baktria proper both in space and time. If in fact, based on the currently available evidence, it seems highly probable that the geographical and administrative configuration of Baktria (perhaps even its very name) should be interpreted as the result of the inclusion of Central Asia in the Persian political and administrative framework, it appears at the same time no less evident that the process of this inclusion took place according to a very precise pattern, dictated to a not inconsiderable extent by 1. ecological and 2. socio-political contingencies. These two factors were chiefly responsible for the development of an extremely sophisticated system of territorial exploitation capable of integrating, while at the same time being inevitably modified by them, structures built up over the previous centuries for the functioning of which it was essential to offer 1. economic, 2. social and 3. political guarantees to actors capable of controlling these structures and the relational networks which fueled them. Not only were these structures not dismantled, but to a considerable extent they were exploited to their own advantage by the Persians, who even took care of their further expansion and development within the imperial infrastructures. Chapter 5 (Thus Saith the Lord: Darius, Son of Vīštāspa) is chiefly devoted to Darius’ reign, which thanks to the Persepolis Fortification Archive stands out as by far the better-known period of Achaemenid rule in the East. It is divided into two main parts. The first one offers an overview of the current scholarly standpoint on the Persian administration in the region, combining both literary and documentary evidence. It shows how and to what extend the Empire was able to extract material and human wealth from the territories it conquered, and furthermore shows how, thanks to their remarkable skills, Baktrians and other Central Asians critically integrated into the administrative framework of the Empire considerably beyond the Northeastern satrapies of their origin. In the second part, however, the focus shifts to a more local perspective. By investigating the production and circulation of luxurious specimens of material culture such as drinking vessels, the chapter closes by pointing out how and to what (considerable) extent locals succeeded in negotiating their position as subjects of the Great King, while never giving up on their remarkable agency. From Xerxes’ reign down to the middle 4th century BCE (the scope of Chapter 6: Uno fumavit Baktria tota rogo? Achaemenid Baktria from Xerxes to Aḫvamazdā), we are left with close to nothing to investigate local and trans-regional development in Northeastern Central Asia. Given moreover that the literary evidence covering – however scantily – this period is filled with court intrigues and prudish anecdotes, it has become commonplace in scholarship to frame this period as one of stagnation if not of decay. The main goal of the chapter is to question such an assessment. It does so, on the one hand, by critically reexamining Greek and Roman evidence on Baktria and, on the other, by bringing such accounts in dialogue with both archaeology and excavated texts (such as the Aramaic Ritual Texts from Persepolis). The case study of a major Achaemenid-period site in Southern Uzbekistan (Kyzyltëpe), is extensively discussed in order to show that, if from its excavations a thorough picture emerges of the imperial administrative footprint during the long 5th century, a proper contextualization of the findings against scholarship on pastoralism remarkably brings to the fore the agentic capacity of local actors. The Aramaic Documents from Ancient Bactria (ADAB) deserve a detailed treatment on their own, and therefore they are thoroughly discussed in Chapter 7 (My Kingdom for a Camel. On Satraps and Powerbrokers in 4th Century Achaemenid Baktria). The value of this dataset lays, on the one hand, in its nature as a primary source illustrating, in astonishing details, the inner working of Achaemenid power in Central Asia from a regional, at times micro-historical perspective. Once again, the chapter is divided into two main sections. The first takes stock on the scholarly debate sparked by the publication of this remarkable body of evidence, and shows how, even at the very eve of Alexander’s campaign, the Persian imperial paradigm in and across Baktria had transformed the satrapy into a political, economic, and cultural unity linked both to the rest of the Empire and to regions beyond it, where Achaemenid power was nominal at best. At the same time, the ADAB shows a system of socio-political networks capable of involving in a symbiotic relationship all the social actors present in the territory of the satrapy, from the satraps of the Great King to the stewards of a camel driver. Such a network, even though was critical to securing Persian overlordship over the land, its resources, and its people, could however also be exploited by local powerbrokers to pursue their own aims and goals, sometimes openly defying the satrap’s authority. In order to better understand this apparent contradiction, in a second part of the chapter the ADAB are put into dialogue with the longue durée of Central Asian social and administrative history. Against this backdrop, a dialectical relationship once again emerges between central power and regional authorities, which the comparative approach presented in this chapter shows to have been at the same time, and over a remarkably long time-span, both profitable, and therefore solid (by virtue of the mutual dependence of the two players) and fraught with tensions, and therefore sensitive: to understand its social mechanisms, the conclusion argues, is crucial in order to make better sense of the reasons for the expansion, consolidation, and fall of the Empires, at least the pre-modern ones, in this region of Eurasia. Finally, Chapter 8 (Голые Годы. Alexander in Baktria), discusses how – and why – the unexpected coming on stage of a young conqueror from the Empire’s periphery ended up in the opening of a new chapter in the history of the relations between the Baktrian élites on the one hand and, on the other, representatives of imperial power. In the first part of the chapter, the two-year Central Asian campaign is reviewed, paying particular attention to its impact on local resources (especially in the steppes) and the texture of communal – not only élite – solidarity. In a second step, the outcome of the expedition is evaluated against Seleukos’ reconquest of the former Achaemenid East. In doing so, it is shown why the system established by the Persians came to an end, and why Alexander’s heirs had to fight hard (and eventually to come to terms with those élites who survived the campaign), to rebuild some sort of it in order to substantiate their claims on the lands which once the Great Kings ruled.

This thesis is a reflection of the design, fabrication, and production of the Zal and Simorgh story in Shahnameh in puppet and stop motion. It is an original performance piece of my concept, design, and fabrication and it was presented to the public in August 2023.

This thesis explores the variable behavior of bare nouns in Persian. Bare singular nouns realize different grammatical functions, including subject, object and indirect object. They receive different interpretations, including generic, definite and existential readings. However, the task of understanding the reasons for, and limits on, this variation cannot be achieved without understanding a number of pivotal features of Persian sentential architecture, including Information Structure, prosody, word order, and the functions of various morphological markers in Persian. After a brief introduction, chapters 2-3 deal with bare noun objects, firstly comparing them with nominals marked with indefinite morpheme -i suffixed to the noun, and the determiner yek. A bare noun object differs from morphologically marked nominals as it shows properties associated with noun incorporation in the literature (chapter 2). Of particular interest are the discourse properties of these ‘quasi-incorporated’ nominals. With respect to the discourse transparency of Incorporated Nominals, Persian belongs to the class of discourse opaque languages within Mithun’s classification (1984). However, under certain circumstances, Persian bare nouns show discourse transparency. These circumstances are examined in chapter 3, and it is proposed that bare nouns do introduce a number neutral discourse referent. There are no overt anaphoric expressions that could match such number-neutral antecedents in Persian. But covert anaphora lack number features, and hence can serve as means to pick up a number-neutral discourse referent. Also, in case world knowledge tells us that the number-neutral discourse referent is anchored to an atomic entity or to a collection, then an overt singular pronoun or an overt plural pronoun might fit the combined linguistic and conceptual requirements, and may be used to pick up the number-neutral discourse referent. This proposal is phrased within Discourse Representation Theory. In the second half of the dissertation, the interpretation of bare nouns in different positions and with different grammatical functions are discussed. Under the independently supported hypothesis of position>interpretation mapping developed by Diesing (1992), we will see the role of the suffix -ra in indicating that an object has been moved out of VP. Following Diesing, I assume that VP-internal variables are subject to an operation of Existential Closure. In many cases, VP-external –ra-marked objects have a different interpretation to their VP-internal, non-ra-marked, counterparts, because of escaping Existential Closure. For subjects, there is no morphological marking corresponding to –ra on objects, and we have to rely on prosody and word order to determine how a VP is interpreted using theories of the interaction of accent and syntactic structure. We assume that VP-internal subjects exist, under two independent but converging assumptions. The first is prosodic in nature: Subjects can be accented without being narrowly focused; theories of Persian prosody predict then that there is a maximal constituent that contains both the subject and the verb as its head. The second is semantic in nature: Bare nouns require an external existential closure operation to be interpreted existentially, and we have to assume existential closure over the VP for our analysis of the interpretation of objects. So, this existential closure would provide the necessary quantificational force for bare noun subjects as well. It is proposed that both subject and object originate within the VP, and can move out to the VP-external domain. The motivation for these movements are informational-structural in nature, relating in particular to the distinctions between given and new information, and default and non-default information structure.