Myth, Literature, and Geography in Transoxiana from Late Antiquity to the Early Islamic Period: Siyavash at Bukhara

Florian Schwarz
(Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Wednesday January 13, 2027 at 4:00 pm Pacific Time
Royce Hall 306 and Via Zoom

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The conquest of Transoxiana, the region beyond the river Oxus (Amu Darya), in the 7th to 8th centuries is generally regarded as a major historical watershed in the history of Central Asia. This view obscures deeper processes of transformation that affected the entire eastern Iranian world since long before the end of the Sasanian empire. The ideological shifts and re-ordering of the geography of power in late antique eastern Iran and Central Asia came along with a re-framing of the mythical geography of Iranian epic narratives. This presentation explores the underlying historical processes behind the complex literary representations of the story of Siyavash, the tragic hero whose story and memory became deeply enmeshed with the historical transformations in the late antique and early Islamic Iranian East.

About the Speaker

Florian Schwarz is Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna and affiliate professor at the University of Vienna. He previously taught at the Ruhr University of Bochum and the University of Washington in Seattle. His work on the history of Iran and Central Asia from late antiquity to the early 20th century includes research on Sufi communities, manuscript culture, transimperial elites, urban history, and rural spaces. He is particularly interested in long-term transformations, borderlands, and trans-regional and trans-/non-imperial spaces. Among his recent publications, a book-length chapter titled “Land Behind Bukhara” (2022), explores the emergence and transformation of the oasis of Bukhara as a historical landscape from antiquity to the early modern period. The author or co-editor of nine books, he serves on the editorial boards of the Brill Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 1: The Near and Middle East, two Iranian Studies monograph series for the Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, and the book series Afro-Eurasian Transformations (Harrassowitz).