Ethan Friedland

I am a second year PhD student in Iranian Studies. I am primarily interested in studying religious developments in the Achaemenid Period (ca. 550-330 BCE), when Iranians had close proximity to, and hegemony over, a myriad of peoples in the ancient Middle East. I hope to explore how these interactions, and the pragmatic necessities of running an empire, impacted Iranian religions. Similarly, I am interested in studying the Achaemenid period as a sort of bottleneck, in which the religious traditions of the Middle East entered the Iranian world and emerged with significant changes. This line of research necessitates the close study of Iranian and Jewish religious texts, such as the Avesta, the Tanakh, and Jewish apocrypha. I work with Young Avestan, Biblical Hebrew, and Attic Greek, and will learn Biblical Aramaic and Middle Persian this year.