Monday, August 10, 2026

Open Access Monograph Series: Živa Antika / Antiquité Vivante: Special issues and Monographs

 [First posted in AWOL 10 November 2021, updated 10 August 2026]
 

And see AWOL's Alphabetical List of Open Access Monograph Series in Ancient Studies

 

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Sunday, August 9, 2026

Open Access Journal: Berkeley Working Papers in Middle Iranian Philology

 [First posted in AWOL 3 April 2023, updated 9 August 2026]
 
Berkeley Working Papers in Middle Iranian Philology publishes short and longer articles or research reports on the philology and epigraphy of the Middle Iranian languages (Middle Persian, Parthian, Bactrian, Sogdian, Chorasmian, Khotanese). Submitted papers will be reviewed by the editors, and published on an ongoing basis and as annual volumes. The series is edited by Adam Benkato and Arash Zeini.

Three Middle Persian documents from Fārs dating to the reigns of Xusrō II and Ohrmazd IV

(2026)

In 2024, images of three previously unknown Middle Persian documents on leather became available, reportedly originating from an undisclosed location in Fārs province, Iran. All three documents are formal letters. In this article, we propose that the documents originate from the same site, Tang-e Bolāġī, as seven other documents which became known beginning in 2023. Based on an analysis of the opening sections of these three new documents, we argue that two date to the reign of Xusrō II (r. 590–628 CE), while the third is attributable to the reign of his father, Ohrmazd IV (r. 579–590 CE). We furthermore consider the evidence for the titulature of the Sasanian kings at the end of the 6th and beginning of the 7th centuries CE.

New readings in seven Middle Persian documents from the archive of Hastijan with an edition of Berk. 19

(2025)

This article proposes new readings and interpretations for parts of seven Middle Persian documents first published by Philippe Gignoux and Dieter Weber, namely: Berk. 80, Berk. 95, Berk. 43B, Tehran B, LA1, Berk. 149, and Berlin 28. It also provides the editio princeps of Berk. 19.

The Xorde Avesta and the structuring of time

(2024)

The Xorde Avesta is considered a collection of shorter Zoroastrian liturgies. Until recently, neither the architecture of the manuscripts in which the Xorde Avesta was handed down was analyzed in detail, nor was the relationship between manuscript and practice adequately described. This article develops the thesis that the representation of the Xorde Avesta in manuscripts and liturgical practice can be understood from the point of a ritual structuring of circular units of time.

A New Middle Persian Document from Hastijan belonging to the Farroxzād Family

(2023)

This study publishes a first edition of a newly-discovered Middle Persian document located in a private collection but stemming from the area of Hastijan, Iran. It is related to the ‘Pahlavi Archive’, the majority of which is held in the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley, and the contents concern the family of a certain Farroxzād, mentioned in several other documents in the archive.

Notizen zum Xorde Avesta V: Das Avesta-Pahlavi Ms. T12 betrachtet im Rahmen der historischen Veränderungen des Xorde Avesta

(2023)

Das „Xorde Avesta“ ist eine (in Handschriften und Drucken überlieferte) Sammlung von (größtenteils) kürzeren liturgischen Texten in avestischer Sprache (sowie in persischen und in indischen Sprachen) auf der Grundlage einer sie charakterisierenden, allgemein verbindlichen Struktur folgt. Diese Struktur zeigt typische Variationsmuster gemäß Klasse, Zeit und Ort der Handschrift. Im Rahmen von allgemeiner Struktur und partikularem Muster finden sich wiederum individuelle Differenzen in Material und in dessen Anordnung, die dafür verantwortlich sind, daß Xorde Avesta Handschriften fast immer Unikate sind (und vermutlich darum auch niemals im Rahmen der Hypothese der 'Stammhandschriften' diskutiert wurden). Die Hs. T12 aus der Mitte des 16. Jh. gehört zu jenen Handschriften des Xorde Avesta, die für unsere Rekonstruktion der Geschichte einer bestimmten Handschriftenklasse eine herausragende Position besitzen. Sie bildet zudem eine Schnittstelle von frühem iranischen Xorde Avesta (in Pahlavi) und der indischen Tradition, in die die Handschrift (wieder?) eingeführt wird.

A newly discovered Middle Persian funerary inscription from Mount Zaneh

(2023)

Mount Zaneh is among the mountains of Marvdasht located in the current municipality of Abarj. The mountain has long attracted scholarly attention for housing a rich variety of scattered archeological remnants from the Elamite up to the Sasanian eras. In particular, there are two ancient ossuaries whose patterns resemble the ossuaries in Naqsh-e Rostam. This study introduces and deciphers a newly-discovered six-line Middle Persian inscription in the skirts of Mount Zaneh. The inscription is comparable with other funerary inscriptions in Middle Persian.

Towards a Manifesto for Middle Iranian Philology

(2023)

The purpose of this manifesto is to raise broad questions about philological inquiry as a background to the purpose of this occasional journal. It reflects both on general questions of philology (Section 2) and delves into an example from the Middle Persian translations (Zand) of the Avesta in which can be seen a clash between the traditional approach in that field and the type of inquiry that I advocate here (Section 3).

 See AWOL's full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies


 


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Open Access Journal: CHEIRON: THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF EQUINE AND EQUESTRIAN HISTORY

 [First posted in AWOL 4 February 2024, updated 9 August 2026]
 
ISSN 2786-3182

 

 

Cheiron: The International Journal of Equine and Equestrian History is a biannual journal facilitating a debate in equine and equestrian studies across chronological periods and disciplines. The journal welcomes contributions from many fields, including, but not limited to, archaeology, anthropology, social sciences, animal studies, art history, interspecies communication, and veterinary history.

The journal is double-blind peer-reviewed and is published in February and September.

We publish thematic issues, the subject of which are announced in advance in a call for papers for the issue. Besides, open sections/issues of the journal provide a place for general discussion of the history of equines and horsemanship. 

Cheiron accepts submissions throughout the year on subjects related to the scope of the journal (non-binding to special issues): the history of horses and other equines, equestrian sports, equines and equestrianism in art, horse management, breeding and preservation of endangered breeds, tack and equipment, ethical issues, and other

Volume 6, Issue 1/2026

FRONT MATTER

EDITORIAL NOTE

NEWS SECTION



OPINION ESSAY


Doom and Salvation: The Genetic Turn in Medicine, Genetic Variant Testing, and Equine Muscle Disease

Christian Gundermann

Abstract 

This article analyzes the impact of the genetic turn in medicine on the horse worlds, whether breeding, training, management, buying, or selling. More specifically, it traces the dynamics around a genetic technology start-up company, Equiseq, which developed a genomics-based test for the controversial equine myopathies known as PSSM2, MFM or MIM, its contentious science, its marketing strategies, its clashes with academic veterinary science, and the social media forces employed to amplify its reach. The author suggests that the characteristics of this phenomenon illustrate the “broken science” of our historical moment and closes with a reflection on the uses of bioenergetics.  



ARTICLES 


The Image of the Horse from its Origin to its Transformation in the Bronze Age of Eastern Europe / Western Asia

P. F. Kuznetsov 


Abstract 

The article presents a comparative analysis of the image of the horse in art from the Palaeolithic to the beginning of the Late Bronze Age in the cultures of Eastern Europe and Western Asia. Initially, horses were depicted as ideal game animals. In the fifth millennium BC, this tradition changed. At the turn of the third-second millennia BC, the domestic horse became the main sacrificial animal. Three successive traditions of horse depiction are distinguished: the first is game animals; the second is wild horses; the third is ideal swift horses. We can observe the transformation of the image of the horse from the Palaeolithic ideal game animal to the central sacrificial object of the Late Bronze Age. At the same time, in ornamental casting the horse is represented as the compositional dominant element.  



Bronze Figurines of Domestic Horses in Central Ciscaucasian Burials of the Second Quarter-Middle of the Third Millennium BC

Alexey A. Kovalev   


Abstract 

To date, data has been published on three cases of finds of images of domestic horses in third millennium BC. sites of the steppe zone of Eastern Europe: miniature bronze figurines in two burials under the burial mounds (kurgans) near Kislovodsk and one burial under the burial mound not far from Cherkessk. Evidence that all of them represent domestic animals is the long hanging mane, combed into separate strands. These figurines in at least two of the three cases were part of a special ritual set of pendants, analogies to which were found, among other things, in the catacomb burials of the Stavropol Region (Bolshoy Ipatovsky kurgan, burial 168) and the Seversky Donets basin (Ivano-Daryevka, kurgan No.1, burial No.6). These and other analogies for the burial goods allow us to date the ritual sets with “little horses” to the second quarter — mid–third millennium BC. Thus, these are the oldest images of domestic horses of the Bronze Age in Eastern Europe and Western Asia. The bronze figurines in question date to the “bottleneck” period of intensive selection, including inbreeding, which resulted in the emergence of modern domestic horses (genetic group DOM2). This may point to the Central Ciscaucasia as the formation zone of the modern domestic horse lineage before its explosive spread across Eurasia beginning around 2200 BC.



“Bellies close to the ground”: Some Observations on Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Visual Representations of Racehorses

Miriam A. Bibby 


Abstract

There is a general perception that artists attempting to paint horses in movement, particularly running-horses or racehorses, did not (and could not, until the arrival of photography) understand the sequence of footfalls during the equine gait known as the gallop. This resulted in inaccurate, if evocative, images of horses with forelegs and hindlegs stretched out in an artistic convention known as the “flying gallop.” Further, the horses are usually shown suspended with all four feet off the ground, a sequence in the gallop that was long-disputed until Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographic images showed that a moment of suspension existed during gallop, albeit not with the legs stretched out like a rocking horse. This paper argues that rather than indicating ignorance of how horses moved, the artistic convention of the flying gallop was, by the seventeenth century, employed as an intentional formula calculated to show the ideal qualities of the running-horse, or racehorse. It was a formula with ancient parallels.



Richard Ten Broeck and the “American Invasion” of England, 1856-1887

Gary A. O’Dell


Abstract 

Richard Ten Broeck (1810-1892) was the first American to bring Thoroughbred horses across the Atlantic to compete against their British counterparts. Ten Broeck was a former riverboat gambler who became the majority owner of the most important American race course, the Metairie track in New Orleans. After falling out with his partners at Metairie, in summer 1856 he brought three of America’s best horses to Newmarket, Lecomte, Pryor, and Prioress, to fulfil a long-cherished dream of American turfmen. He was befriended by Admiral Henry J. Rous and invited into British social circles. His horses performed poorly at first, and both Lecompte and Pryor died unexpectedly in autumn 1857. Ten Broeck’s fortunes sharply reversed when Prioress captured the prestigious Cesarewitch in October, and, with backing from wealthy American turfmen, new importations of American horses during 1859-60 produced victories in many English races. The horse Starke became the star of his stable, winning several important stakes races during 1859 and taking the Goodwood Cup in 1861. Ten Broeck continued to race horses successfully in England until returning to the United States in 1867. He came back to England in 1878 as part of the second “American invasion” of horsemen, instigated by Milton H. Sanford and Pierre Lorillard, and became advisor to James R. Keene in 1880. Purchasing horses in England, Ten Broeck raced unsuccessfully until 1887, having dissipated a fortune in profligate living. Although his importations to Britain removed several important bloodlines from America, this was balanced by Thoroughbreds exported from Britain, notably Eclipse, Phaeton, Barbarity, and Australian.



Yakutian Horse as an Asset for Sustainable Tourism in Yakutia

Anastasija Ropa 


Abstract 

The Yakutian horse is an invaluable cultural and economic asset for the indigenous people of Yakutia. In recent decades, it has been contributing to the local economy not solely in its traditional agricultural role, but also in serving as a tourist attraction. The aim of this study is to explore the current use of the Yakutian horse in the tourism industry and to assess the contribution of the horse to sustainable tourism in Sakha (Yakutia). The research methods include the study of scientific literature tourism in Yakutia, as well as literature on the Yakutian horse, its origin, and its cultural significance; in the practical part, the offer of horse tourism in Yakutia is explored, analysing the sustainability and ecological provisions within the range of activities offered for tourists.



BOOK REVIEWS


David Chaffetz, Raiders, Rulers and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires

Reviewed by Rena Maguire


Ben Parsons, Introducing Medieval Animal Names

Reviewed by Anastasija Ropa


Emma Louise Herbert-Davies, The Warhorse in England 1272-1327

Reviewed by David S. Bachrach


Gary O’Dell, Reinventing the American Thoroughbred. The Arabian Adventures of Alexander Keene Richards

Reviewed by Anastasija Ropa



NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

 

Volume 5, Special Issue/2025

Volume 5, Issue 2/2025

Volume 5, Issue 1/2025

Volume 4, Issue 2/2024

Volume 4, Issue 1/2024

Volume 3, Issue 2/2023 

Volume 3, Issue 1/2023 

Volume 2, Issue 2/2022

Volume 2, Issue 1/2022

Volume 1, Issue 1/2021


 

 See AWOL's full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies


 

 

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The Vase Explorer

Created by Victoria M. Castle 

What this site is

an independent research interface

The Vase Explorer is a free, single-page visual interface to the scholarly record of ancient Greek painted pottery. It creates no new attributions, dates or readings: all scholarship displayed here is the work of the institutions and scholars credited below. What this site adds is an interface: cross-linked filters, maps, charts and photographs brought together in one place, plus a set of clearly labelled derived layers (iconographic tags, regional groupings, date midpoints) computed from the sources by transparent, documented rules. It was created by Victoria M. Castle and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any of the institutions named on this page.

1 · The vase records

Beazley Archive Pottery Database, University of Oxford

Every vase record on this site derives from the Beazley Archive Pottery Database (BAPD), created and maintained by the Classical Art Research Centre (CARC) at the University of Oxford. The BAPD is the world’s largest database of ancient Greek painted pottery. It is the digital continuation of the card archive of Sir John Beazley (1885–1970), whose attributions of Athenian vases to painters and workshops created the framework the whole field still uses. This site is built on a full export of 136,650 BAPD records and uses these fields: vase number, fabric, technique, shape, provenance (findspot), date range, inscription transcriptions, attribution, decoration description, collection history, publication references, and the Pleiades-gazetteer coordinates the BAPD provides for findspots.

The BAPD vase number remains the citable identifier of record, and every vase’s detail panel links to its canonical record at the Beazley Archive. Nothing in the underlying scholarly content has been altered; where this site abbreviates (decoration descriptions are truncated for display), the full text is one click away at the source.

2 · The inscriptions

Immerwahr’s Corpus of Attic Vase Inscriptions

Inscription analysis, including the retrograde (right-to-left) and nonsense-inscription data this project began with, derives from Henry R. Immerwahr, Corpus of Attic Vase Inscriptions (CAVI), in its January 2008 web edition, a corpus of notes on more than 8,000 inscribed vases which Immerwahr generously made openly available. 8,506 CAVI entries were parsed programmatically; Immerwahr’s “retr.” annotations supply the retrograde flags (explicit negations such as “not retr.” excluded), and his commentary supplies the kalos, nonsense, signature, graffito and dipinto classifications. 2,476 CAVI entries were machine-linked to their BAPD records and carry those flags in this interface. Scholars should be aware that CAVI is a working corpus (Immerwahr himself described it as notes to be used with caution) and that Rudolf Wachter’s Attic Vase Inscriptions (AVI) project is its revised successor.

3 · The photographs

served by the museums themselves

Official photographs for 10,761 vases are displayed via the museums’ own public image servers, most of them speaking the IIIF (International Image Interoperability Framework) standard, using collection data published as linked open data in the manner of the Kerameikos.org project. No image is copied to or re-hosted on this site: each is requested live from its museum, displayed with that museum’s credit line, and linked to the museum’s own object page. Matching between museum objects and BAPD records was done by museum and accession number; the match method is documented below.

CollectionVasesImages & rights
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York8,459Open Access (CC0); served from the Met’s image API
The British Museum, London1,781© The Trustees of the British Museum; CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; served from the BM’s IIIF service
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles650Getty Open Content; served from Getty’s IIIF service
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford495© Ashmolean Museum; displayed via the museum’s IIIF service with credit
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge168© The Fitzwilliam Museum; served from the museum’s image store
Yale University Art Gallery; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Tampa Museum of Art10Public-domain or courtesy images from each museum’s service

For vases without a matched official photograph, the site can search Wikimedia Commons and the open-access APIs of the Metropolitan Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art at the moment you open a record; those results are labelled with their source and are matches by search, not catalogue joins; verify against the linked record.

4 · The maps

ancient places, modern cartography

Findspot coordinates are those provided in the BAPD export, which aligns findspots to the Pleiades gazetteer of ancient places (53,320 vases). Present-day museum locations were geocoded to city level by hand for this site (88% of records). Map tiles are © OpenStreetMap contributors, styled by CARTO; when no connection is available the site falls back to built-in outline maps derived from public-domain land data.

5 · Derived layers: what this site computed

and where honest error can live

Everything in this section was computed for this site from the sources above, by rules any user can reason about. Errors here are the site’s alone, not the sources’.

  • Iconography tags (101 subjects: gods, heroes, creatures, myth cycles, daily life, objects, animals) are keyword matches against the BAPD decoration descriptions. They are conservative lower bounds: a vase is tagged “Herakles” only if its description names him. They inherit any ambiguity in the descriptions themselves.
  • Date midpoints reduce BAPD date ranges (e.g. “-525 to -475”) to a single midpoint for charting. All period charts use 25-year bins of these midpoints.
  • Findspot regions group provenances into ancient-market regions (Etruria, Attica, Sicily, the Black Sea…) by a published place-name table.
  • Museum/accession matching for photographs normalises accession numbers (spacing, prefixes such as the Ashmolean’s “AN”, and the British Museum’s old- and new-style numbering) and joins on museum plus accession; British Museum coverage is extended through the BM object identifiers present in the BAPD export. Roughly 14,500 museum objects in the source collections remain unmatched, chiefly non-Attic wares outside the BAPD’s scope and BM vases catalogued under nineteenth-century letters.
  • Retrograde and inscription-type flags parse Immerwahr’s notation as described in section 2.

6 · How to cite

stable views, canonical numbers
Castle, Victoria M. The Vase Explorer (2026). https://www.vaseexplorer.org. Built on the Beazley Archive Pottery Database, Classical Art Research Centre, University of Oxford; inscription data after H.R. Immerwahr, Corpus of Attic Vase Inscriptions (2008).

For an individual vase, cite its BAPD number and the Beazley Archive record linked from its entry: that is the identifier the field recognises. For a particular selection (a filtered view, a map, a trend), use the Copy link button: filters are encoded in the address, so the link reopens the exact view and is stable enough for a footnote or a syllabus.

7 · Corrections

please tell me what’s wrong

If you find an error in a derived layer (a mistagged scene, a misplaced findspot, a wrong photograph match) I want to know, and I will fix it. If the issue lies in the underlying record, the authoritative place for it is the Beazley Archive record linked from the vase’s entry. This site is periodically rebuilt from its sources, and corrections propagate at each rebuild.

Acknowledgements

With gratitude to the Classical Art Research Centre at Oxford, whose Beazley Archive Pottery Database makes work like this possible; to the late Henry R. Immerwahr, and to Rudolf Wachter, for the inscription corpus; to the Kerameikos.org project for demonstrating what linked open data can do for Greek pottery; to the museums that publish their collections and photography openly; and to the OpenStreetMap community, CARTO, and the Pleiades gazetteer.

 
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Open Access Journal: Sinus Persicus: The International Journal of Persian Gulf Studies

 [First posted in AWOL 30 December 2024, updated 9 August 2026]
 

Welcome to the online submission and editorial system for Sinus Persicus. 
Sinus Persicus is the official journal of Tissaphernes Archaeological Research Group. The journal was established by Dr. Shahin Aryamanesh. Sinus Persicus is an international, peer reviewed journal, publishes high-quality, original research. Sinus Persicus is a journal devoted to Archaeology, history, linguistics, religion, epigraphy, numismatics, and history of art of the Persian Gulf region, encompassing both prehistoric and historic periods. The journal’s geographic range spans the northern and southern coasts of the Persian Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, Persian Gulf islands, and Gulf of Oman.

 

Journal Archive

 


 

See AWOL's full List of Open Access Journals in Ancient Studies

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Saturday, August 8, 2026

Open Access Journal: Aristotelica

 [First posted in AWOL 20 December 2024, updated 8 August 2026]
 
ISSN: 2785-4515
View No. 4 (2023): Aristotelica, 2023-4 

Aristotelica is a peer-reviewed journal devoted to Aristotle and Aristotelianism through the centuries with a special focus on the texts and textual traditions of Aristotle as a common intellectual background for European and Mediterranean cultures.

Based on a cooperative agreement between the Università del Piemonte Orientale and the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (ILIESI-CNR, Italy), Aristotelica will appear through two channels: Rosenberg & Sellier, a digital publisher with a strong profile in classics; and the ILIESI-CNR Open Journal System platform.

Aristotelica, 2026-9
No. 9 (2026)

Full Issue

Articles

 

 

Aristotelica, 2025-8
No. 8 (2025)

Full Issue

Articles

 

Archives 

 

 

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