Testimonial by Yang Han

I had a fabulous three-week course with Nshan and my classmates. We went through very good grammar and started translating from DB on the first day. As a corpus filled with formulaic phrases, Nshan's extensive knowledge about the political ideology in the Ancient Near East was illuminating as well as entertaining. He explained the minute differences between various formulae, as well as the theological/political significance of some deceptively minor deviations.

I really appreciated his knowledge of the Elamite and the Babylonian sources. Both of them were quite exciting parallels to the Old Persian corpus. He also mentioned more than once in class the Old Iranian borrowings into Armenian, which was of particular interest to me as an aspiring student of IE linguistics.

I would recommend anyone interested in the world of Achaemenid Persia to take an Old Persian class with Nshan. He was knowledgeable as an instructor and friendly as a colleague/friend. He also has many good stories to share, so the redundant "thatiy Darayavahush xshayathiya xshayathiyanam" would not be too unbearable:).