Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute wishes to congratulate Professor Mark B. Garrison for being the winner of the 2018 Ehsan Yarshater Book Award for his new book, The Ritual Landscape at Persepolis: Glyptic Imagery from the Persepolis Fortification and Treasury Archives (The University of Chicago: SAOC 72, 2018). The award was given out at the opening ceremony of the Association for Iranian Studies Twelfth Biennial Conference that took place at the University of California, Irvine, on August 14-17, 2018.
Named in honor of Professor Ehsan Yarshater, an internationally recognized scholar who has made a major contribution to the field of Iranian Studies, the purpose of this book award is to advance the scholarship on Ancient Iranian Civilization and its cognate fields.
The Ritual Landscape at Persepolis focuses on a corpus of glyptic imagery preserved as impressions on two large archives of administrative tablets from Persepolis, the Persepolis Fortification archive (509–493 BC) and the Persepolis Treasury archive (492–457 BC). The glyptic imagery published in The Ritual Landscape at Persepolis concerns representations of what have been traditionally termed “fire altars” and/or “fire temples”; and are the most numerous, the most visually complex, and the best dated and contextualized evidence that currently exists for the study of religious ritual in early Achaemenid Iran. The publication was made possible thanks to a grant by Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute.
Mark B. Garrison is Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art and Art History at Trinity University, where he has been teaching since 1989. He also is the Editor of the Persepolis Fortification Archive (PFA) project at the Oriental Institute, The University of Chicago. His primary research interests are the glyptic arts of ancient Iran and Iraq in the early first millennium B.C. He has devoted decades of study to the PFA tablets and is known as the foremost expert on Achaemenid glyptic art, having published extensively on the subject.