Dr. William W. Malandra earned a B.A. in Philosophy at Haverford College, an M.A. in Religious Studies at Brown University, and a PhD in Oriental Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. Prof. Malandra has written four books and published numerous articles on various subjects related to Ancient Iranian religion, ancient Persian scripts, languages and their grammars. He has contributed to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Iranica, and other reference handbooks and has been on the editorial boards of the Encyclopaedia Iranica, Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity, and Pahlavica, An Encyclopedia for Middle Persian from PIE to New Persian (Dialects). He was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship 1964-65 and the National Endowment for the Humanities, Translation Grant, 1979-80.