Nathalie M Choubineh

The Medes (aka the Medians) are considered the founding fathers of dynastic, political leadership in the Irano-Persian ancient history and at the same time among the mistiest ethnic identities that migrated westwards from Central Asia sometime in the late third or early second millennia BC. Our two bulks of resources about the Medes, namely archaeological texts and materials in and out of their locality and the ancient Greek writings about them mainly following centuries-old insider and outsider traditions, come in and out of conflict with each other whilst cross-referencing. My article about the Medes in the World History Encyclopedia is a representative introduction to this crucial part of pre-Achaemenid history and the way it was, and is now, looked at and questioned.

Ҫatalhöyük is one of the largest Neolithic settlements ever discovered. Built more than 9000 years ago in modern Konya Plain, central Turkey, it is known in archaeology as a proto-city, a link between the cave-dwellings of prehistoric hunter-gatherers and the early urban constructions. This is where communities began to grow crops and herd animals in preplanned and systematic ways for the first time in history.

Sacred cakes in ancient Greece were baked loaves, biscuits, pastries, and sponges sweetened with honey (meli) and prepared as unburnt offerings to the gods and goddesses and other divine beings. Unburnt offerings were substitutes for or a complement to animal sacrifices whose bones and fat would then be burnt on the altar while their meat would be served in a cultic feast.

Introducing the tympanon, the most popular hand-drum in the ancient Greek world, with a brief historical cross-examination of this rumbling percussion in parallel cultural contexts, bringing forward its variation with the Latin tympanum and the modern tambourine.

https://www.worldhistory.org/Tympanon/

Dance was, and still is, an underlining and influential aspect of Hellenic life and culture. Rather like the overt blending of spiritual matters into reality, dancing could be part of all sorts of daily activities, from cultic practices and dramatic performances to liminal celebrations of weddings and funerals to education of citizens and training of warriors. In pre-modern times when the sacred-secular dichotomy had yet to be developed to an appreciable level, the Greek mindset and performance would rather be divided into the civic and the hedonistic, with dance playing key parts in both. My contribution to the World History Encyclopedia goes through such an illustration of Ancient Greek Dance, giving preliminary details on its origins, forms, and mythical and real-life practitioners.

https://www.worldhistory.org/Greek_Dance/

Inscription BM 364 in the British Museum is an honorary decree from the city-island of Karpathos, the second-largest of the Dodecanese islands. It has been retrieved from the temple of Poseidon Porthmios, to which it might have been originally dedicated, presumably in the late third century BC. The text announces the public endorsement of Menokritos, a metic physician from Samos, whose 20-year professional services have been abundantly beneficial to the citizens of Brukounti in Karpathos and their neighbouring cities. It suggests that whilst the people of Karpathos crowned Menokritos as a healing-hero, he had to endure a long-term dwelling in the lower levels of prosperity and social esteem as a metic, showing a great, notable amount of perseverance in his self-sacrificing ways, before he could enjoy some of the rights reserved for the Karpathian citizens.
The prevalence of Athenian democratic measures regarding citizenship and the rights it might or might not involve in most, if not all, parts of the Hellenic world, is very well-known overall. However, the degree and duration of practicing these measures across different cities and eras are still open to further explorations. The inscription described and contextualized here, although scarcely exposed due to curatorial considerations, is an enlightening piece of evidence about the stability of Athenian public views and treatments regarding metics in the Agean region and in the run-up to the Roman conquest of Greece in the second century BC.
This paper, in Farsi, is published on the website of the Iranian Institute of Anthropology and Culture, December 2015.

Tanagra, the most prominent and prosperous city of Boeotia after Thebes, was also famous for its terracotta and tile-work from the mid-sixth century onward. The fall of Thebes in 335 BC left no rival to shake the polarity of Tanagra as an economically powerful trade-centre in south-east Greece. The terracotta statuettes known as Tanagra figurines, whose unearthing began in the 1870s, disputably reflect glimpses of such prosperity.
These Hellenistic ladies with their sumptuous clothing, immaculate hairdos sometimes topped with stylish umbrella hats, and delicate gestures pose in a charming dignity, and, unlike their earlier Attic sisters, represent an alternative, more eccentric artistic trend in the Hellenic world of the fourth and third centuries. While much has been said about the fabrication, originality, naturalism, and cultural contexts of Tanagra figurines, there is one significant aspect that calls for a deeper look. Tanagra figurines can be categorized into a rather distinctive kind of typology that juxtaposes artistic moves with female social roles. Moreover, the range of female activities recast in Tanagra figurines suggests a reconsideration of women's condition and status in the Hellenistic mindset, which also brings forward evidence of deviation from the fifth-century Athenian gendered ideology in vase-painting.
The present article is an effort in the categorization of Tanagra figurines according to this typology: noble ladies wearing umbrella-style hats and/or holding fans; mirror-bearers; baby-holders; music artists (including musicians, dancers, and/or actresses); ephedrismos-players (piggyback girls); and knuckle players.

The article was first published on 12 May 2014 on the Iranian Institute of Anthropology and Culture website.

http://anthropology.ir/article/22960

Anabasis counts as an eye-witness report of the charge and retreat of ten thousand Greek soldiers, who accompanied Cyrus  the Younger in his expedition against his elder brother, Artaxerxes II, the Achaemenid king of Persia, during the last decades of the fifth century BC. This essay follows the Greek mercenaries on their rout to Persia and back, depicting a historio-geographical picture of people and places then and now.

This essay was first published in 16 June 2014 on the Iranian Institute of Anthropology and Culture website (IIAC).

http://anthropology.ir/node/23402

Gertrude and Ophelia are among those groups of Shakespearean female characters, who, in contrast to their rather emancipated, extraordinary sisters like Viola and even Juliet, represent traditional ideals of femininity. The former, an unruly, deceitful femme fatal; the latter, a dutiful, innocent daughter. These much-repeated characterizations receive general approve and become classic, with no alternative point of curiosity that encourages a fresh look. In this short essay, I will show that such idealism does not comply either with the dramatic conventions used in 'Hamlet' or with Shakespeare's historiographical approaches towards noble women, their status and conditions, as reflected in the two heroines.

This essay was first published in 5 April 2014 on the Iranian Institute of Anthropology and Culture website (IIAC).
http://anthropology.ir/node/22366

The krétiké is the earliest kinetic motif used by the Greek vase painters to represent a dance movement. Its appearance in the Late Geometric art complies with the millennia-old tradition of line-dance painting on terra cotta in the Iranian plateau and the East Mediterranean region. It is used for depiction of the individual dancers in the Late Archaic vase painting and continues its presence in various periods of this art, in Attica and elsewhere, right up to the end of the fourth century BC. My poster explores the krétiké and its polysemic functions in red-figure vase painting.

This chapter was written shortly after the submission of the corrected and finalised copy of my doctoral thesis in 2019 in response to the kind invitation of Lynn Frederiksen and Shih-Ming Li Chang of dance scholars around the world to write a prefatory chapter about the ethnic dance they are inherently familiar with. It gives a comprehensive view of the Persian Dance as individualised from its Arabic sister and highlights the characteristic movements, categorising genres, subdivisions, and styles, and the story of its survival throughout the millennia and under the heavy shadow of a traditionally, religiously, and politically supported choreophobia.

Iconography of Ancient Dance in Iran: A Discursive Review, in Shay, Anthony (ed.), Dance in the Persianate World: History, Aesthetics, Performance, Mazda Publishers, 2023

http://www.mazdapublishers.com/book/dance-in-the-persianate-world

Dance in the past, as a topic, is conventionally explored in the three main modes of historical accounts, ethnographic comparisons, and archaeological conjectures including or occasionally based upon iconographic interpretations. Once contextualised in Iran/Persia, this path of scholarship gets puddled with the marshy dualism of Persian Dance (a modern, ethnographic dancing style effectively shaped by the post-Islamic Iranian culture) versus the choreo-kinetic aspects of human life within the current geopolitical borders of the country from several thousand years ago to this day. How distant, or close, the Persian Dance and Dance in Iran may appear in a writing differs from author to author but muddling them up has remained recurring whilst barely reckoned and recorded.
My overview of dance in/of the Persian/Iranians and its controversial scholarship begins with a brief history of the study of dance archaeology in Iran by the founding pioneer of Iranian museology and curatorship, Yahyā Zukā (1923-2001). In the course of exhibiting his still unparalleled collection of choreologic depictions unearthed in various excavation sites in Iran, I investigate his views and deductions about local forms, meaning, and functions of dance performance and the profound and persistent impact of his work on the successive choreologic studies pre- and post-revolution of 1979, particularly his overarching overlaps drawn between post-Islamic and pre-Achaemenid dance arrangements and routines. Towards a methodological turn, I cast a glance at now ages-old choreologic quest for revisiting, reviving, and reconstructing of classical (mainly Greco-Roman) dance performances, examining some groundbreaking (and ground-making) attempts and challenges of this mainly European quest to preface my in-progress Iconographic Model for Dance Archaeology (IMDA). Benefiting from iconographic frameworks in the identification and analysis of dance movements illustrated in antiquity may well be a step forward in addressing the complex question of understanding Iranian, and other, dances as represented in painted and sculpted remains.