Amirardalan Emami awarded the Houtan Scholarship 2016
We are proud to announce that Amirardalan Emami has been awarded the Houtan Scholarship (3500€) to help fund his PhD project “Transformation in Ancient Iranian Religion: The Achaemenids as Agents of Long-Term Change”.
Each year the Houtan Scholarship Foundation awards a single scholarship to an excellent, but unfunded graduate student working on a subject related to the history and culture of the Persian Empire. Amirardalan Emami’s does just that by analyzing the role which the Achaemenid Kings played during their reign (550-330 BC) in transforming the religion of Iran into the form of Zoroastrianism that we know from younger, written sources. In his project, Emami analyses an hitherto understudied tablet collection from the Persepolis Fortification Archive with the help of social network theory in order to establish the nature of Persian religion in the Achaemenid period. He furthermore draws on theories of cognitive and (material) culture to explain the religious change that took place before, throughout, and after the Achaemenid period, hereby shedding important new light on the history of Zoroastrianism. Emami’s project is supervised by prof.dr. Ab de Jong and dr. Markus Davidsen.