Heliacal Phenomena is a parallel to the author's Eclipses, being another astronomical introduction for Humanists. The aim is that of providing Humanists with a general overview on the importance of heliacal phenomena from the standpoints of history, literature, astronomy. The book is an invitation for students and scholars to consider this subject, as it has been incredibly useful to science, agriculture, people in several ways. The book covers documents dating back to the ancient texts from Babylon, China, Greece, Rome or the Academies and Scientists, up until the present time. That is, from the epochs in which stars were gods, to the modern applications of high speed astronomical photometry. Heliacal Phenomena is useful as a compendium of information, from which to develop further studies. The new publication series, opened by the present volume, has the ambition to fill a gap in the research landscape in the field of Asian Studies.
In spite of the considerable development of comparative and contrastive research into Indo-Iranian languages and civilizations, and notwithstanding the general trend to interdisciplinarity in the studies of the multicultural areas of Central Asia, of Iran maior, of the Indian subcontinent and the surrounding territories, we still miss a forum for publications in the sphere of Philology, Cultural and Social History, with a special focus on the topics and regions in question. Therefore we would like to establish the Indo-Iranica series as a deliberately large as well as thematically and methodologically open framework of scholarly discussions, in which both monographs and miscellaneous volumes on relevant subjects may find their place.