Dr. Gad Barnea. Thanks for coming.

Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, I just got done listening to your podcast with Neil, Gnostic informant.

It was fascinating stuff.

And I'm excited to chat with you about this stuff today.

Can you just explain what your background is?

Sure.

So my focus is really on history, especially of the Iranian world, the infant Iranian world

and the role of the Jews within that world of Jewish history within the context of the

Iranian world, the pre-Islamic,

what I call the age of empires. So the Achaemenid empire, the Parthian Empire, and the Sassanian Empire.

So I'm focusing on these three empires, which together really kind of deeply impacted the ancient Near East for about a millennium together.

So these three empires, unfortunately in scholarship, have been relatively little studied,

little researched thus far, and so I'm trying to correct that and to focus on on that particular perspective of the

Iranian empires in the ancient Near East and my main work is with the original material,

the actual primary sources. So I do a lot of epigraphic work dealing with actual papyri, leather scrolls, Ostraka, and things like that.

And Osterka, just for people don't know, these are shards of jars and ancient things, you know, objects, household objects that were broken.

And so people use that to write short messages on.

And so these Ostraka represent daily communications.

There you go.

Yeah.

So daily communications and short messages.

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