UC Press is pleased to share that the Archaeological Institute of America has awarded the 2020 James R. Wiseman Book Award to The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE by Matthew P. Canepa.
Of The Iranian Expanse, the Award Committee said that it “is enormously ambitious, highly original, and dizzyingly erudite. . . . The range of disciplines and resources Canepa brings to bear as he argues each of his cases is startling. He seems equally comfortable in handling the broad range of philologies of the languages of the Iranian plateau and the Middle East as he does classical sources. His knowledge of archaeological, numismatic, and art historical scholarship from the Aegean to Central Asia is thorough and current. It is a remarkable achievement to be able to see Antiquity ‘with Persian eyes’ for the first time, and it would be difficult to imagine a book more worthy of the 2020 James R. Wiseman Book Award.”
Also of note is Canepa’s previous winning of the 2010 James Henry Breasted Prize for his title The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran.
Awarded annually by the American Historical Association in honor of James Henry Breasted, “a pioneer in ancient Egyptian and Near Eastern history,” the award is presented to “the best book in English on any field of history prior to the year 1000 CE.”
Congratulations to Matthew P. Canepa!
