TRANSPERSE The Acts of the Persian Martyrs between East and West. Intercultural transmission and images at the beginning of the 5th century. Using multidisciplinary approaches, this project seeks to reconstruct a history of the intercultural exchanges between Persia and the regions bordering it – the Caucasus, the Byzantine world – and as far as Egypt and the Latin West during the circumscribed period of the reigns of the Sasanians Yazdgird I and Wahram V (from 399 to 438) by comparing rich literary sources that are mostly unpublished, untapped, difficult to access, or poorly identified and by developing a supporting open-access digital tool aimed at a wide audience. The Acts of the Persian Martyrs offer an exceptional record of the period. This literary material, originally written in Syriac by the Christian communities of the empire, constitutes a homogenous and absolutely unique set of texts, a cycle spanning both reigns. The project’s first aim is to bring together, edit and analyse the Acts from this period, treating them as a whole for the first time. The second aim, related to the first, is to study the Acts through the prism of intercultural transmission between East and West. This interdisciplinary research will contribute to a better understanding of the essential role played by texts from the Christian communities of Persia in constructing identities, both in Christian societies in the East and in Western regions. Written in Iran, these texts were disseminated very early in exogenous cultural areas: Coptic, Byzantine, Caucasian, Ethiopian, Arabian and Latin. Several aspects remain unknown including the ways in which these martyrological texts were disseminated, the intercultural exchanges among communities in this geographical space, and the fundamental question of the role of lettered Eastern Christian communities in such intertextual movements, particularly in the West. Comparative approaches are a major asset for understanding this transmission across different areas. The third aim is to bring to light contrasted images of the reigns by comparing contemporaneous and later documentation from other corpora, especially in Arabic and Persian. All these sources in diverse languages (Syriac, Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopic, Persian, Arabic and Latin), from various areas and from different time periods, will be gathered to create synergies through original publications, an international conference and the development of a “sourc-e-book”: an open-access database bringing together all documents and previously unpublished sources about the first forty years of the fifth century in Persia. The project seeks to make a significant contribution to a little-explored and highly compartmentalised field of research by making available a freely accessible, innovative research tool to the national and international academic community. The interdisciplinary team formed to conduct this research will endeavour to fill a real knowledge gap and to lift two major scientific barriers, namely the inaccessibility of many documents from Christian communities in the East, often due to their unpublished nature; and insufficient treatment and historical analysis in determining processes of transfer into different languages, among other aspects. Another expected outcome is to strengthen the research network in order to spark new national and international research initiatives on other Sasanian periods or other corpora of sources in the future. Disseminating the knowledge obtained will also contribute to raising public awareness of the history of Christians in the Middle East and their ancient pre-Islamic roots in these regions. The inter-community conflicts of yesteryear will thus help to understand the shaping of identities today.