The Archaeology of Perso-Iranian Entanglements in the Tarim Basin, Central Asian Religions, and the Afro-Eurasian World

17 January 2024 - Matthew Canepa (Irvine)
The Archaeology of Perso-Iranian Entanglements in the Tarim Basin, Central Asian Religions, and the Afro-Eurasian World
online guest lecture at the BuddhistRoad project, CERES, Ruhr University Bochum
This lecture will provide an overview of the influence of Iranian religions and political and visual cultures on Central Asia, particularly Buddhism and the Tarim Basin. Focusing primarily on visual and archaeological evidence, the lecture will examine the role that religious traditions, cultural forms, and visualities originating from or connected with Persia and the Iranian world played within the broader geographical sphere of Central Asia, with an emphasis on the Tarim Basin. The lecture will approach this problem from a variety of standpoints, including the movement of objects and people, the use and integration of Persian-Iranian visual or cultural forms as an Afro-Eurasian idiom of prestige, and the competition between religions in these regions.