Portrait of an Empire

[Rasputin]

[Rasputin]

The Achaemenid Persian Empire in 550 BCE, under the leadership of one of the most brilliant political and military leaders, a Persian named Cyrus the Great, was able to reconstitute the Median Kingdom and add all of Mesopotamia to it. By the time of the reign of its third ruler, Darius the Great, the three great river civilizations of antiquity, namely the Nile Basin, Mesopotamia and the Indus Plain, were united under the same political power. For the first time in history an empire was formed which stretched from the Indus to the Nile, with a network of roads, centralized monetary system and a provincial organization, headed by a massive operating bureaucracy.

With Alexander the Great, Iran maintained its importance and stability. I very much subscribe to the views of the great Achaemenid historian, Pierre Briant, where he sees Alexander as the continuation and culmination of the Achaemenid Persian rule. [8] With Alexander’s passing, the third ancient Iranian dynasty, the Seleucids, came to power. There are two ways of looking at the Seleucid Empire in the third century BCE. One is to conceive the Seleucids as imperialists who, like their western European successors some eighteen centuries later, came and established their colonial rule in Asia. The other view is that the Seleucids, although Greek in origin, were a force that initiated a Greco-Iranian civilization and continued the path of Iranian history. As with the Achaemenids, we must remember that it is not the language that defines an empire, rather its system of thought, aspirations, organization and aims. In this sense, one can easily make a case for the Seleucids being the third ancient Iranian dynasty. With the weakening of the Seleucid rule over Iran, the fourth dynasty, that of the Arsacids, rose to power. This time from the northeastern fringes of the empire, an Iranian people were able to establish a relatively centralized system which lasted for almost five centuries (247 BCE – 224 CE). The Arsacids were able to amalgamate the Greco-Iranian tradition and to allow different people - be it Greek or Iranian, with different religious affiliation - live side by side.

The religion associated with the Iranian world is of course Zoroastrianism, which manifests itself in various forms. However, one aspect of it, what we may call the Mazdean or Mazdyasnan (“Mazda-worshiping”) tradition, i.e. devotion to the supreme deity Ahura Mazda / Ohrmazd remained constant. Still there were other vibrant religions which the Iranian people gravitated towards. From the Achaemenid period onwards, Jews had lived in Iran and cooperated with the Persian administration, whether in Ecbatana/Hamedan, Babylonia or Jerusalem. Under the Arsacids, Jewish Persian officers served in the army and the regular propaganda assigned the Iranian dynasty a role as saviors, while the Romans were seen as the oppressors. Christianity also found safety from Roman persecution in the Iranian realms, starting in the first century CE. It was only in the third and the fourth centuries that Christianity was held under suspicion, but by the fifth century Persian Christianity itself was recognized by the Sasanian kings and the state. Buddhism and to a far lesser extent Hinduism found a foothold on the eastern fringes of the Iranian World. The Buddhas of Bamiyan are a testament to the vibrant Buddhist community in the eastern Iranian world. We should also mention the Mandeans who lived in Mesopotamia and live there till today, as well as Manichaeans whose religious ideas were almost adopted by a Sasanian monarch in the third century CE.

The fifth ancient Iranian dynasty is the Sasanian Empire whose political history is the subject of this book. The Sasanians are instrumental in the formation of the idea of Iran as a nation and its belief system, moral and ethical values and the language and literature of the Persianate World. It was the Sasanians who forged the concept of a territorial boundary called Iranshahr or “realm of the Iranians,” which in a secularized form, passed on even after the fall of the Sasanians themselves.

The same idea was regularly invoked by the Samanid, Ghaznavid, Mongol, Safavid, Qajar and the Pahlavi dynasties and survives to our day. This traditional historical horizon of the Iranians is encapsulated in the great Persian epic of Shahnameh, the “Book of Kings,” which was originally composed as the royal chronicle, the Xwaday-namag “Book of Lords,” in the Sasanian period. Zoroastrianism as we know it today would not have been established were it not for the Zoroastrian priests in the Sasanian period who committed the Avesta and its twenty one nasks “chapters” - the sacred hymns of that tradition - to writing. It was the Sasanians who firmly established a Persian tradition, with a society based on communal religions in a place called Iranshahr or Iran. When the Sasanians fell to the Arab Muslims, the tradition was so strong that it also influenced Islam and the Persian culture without subsiding. Since the late Qajar and the early Pahlavi period, it has been normal to think of the fall of the Sasanian Empire to the Muslims as the end of all that was glorious and indeed as the demise of Iran.

But cultures do not die, or at least Persian culture did not die and as what it had done with Hellenism, now it did with Islam. Under Islam, the Iranian culture managed to be the driving force in the cultural, artistic, intellectual and literary aspects of the Islamic world. This indeed is the genius of Iranian civilization in that it has been able to absorb foreign conquests and invading cultures into its own tradition and create a universal tradition in return.

This short book attempts to present an outline of the history of Sasanian Iran (224-651 CE) based on the most recent studies. The study of Sasanian history is very much a neglected field, so much so that when I wrote a first draft of this book several years ago for the Sasanika Project (sasanika.com) I was contacted from near and far for permission to cite by the scholars of other periods of Iranian history or other civilizations of the same time period.

It is baffling to me that this piece should merit such reaction, but this reaction goes to show that we are in a dire need of much more in depth study of Sasanian Iran and its history. One can easily survey the existing books on Sasanian history and civilization. The two parts of volume three of The Cambridge History of Iran, edited by Ehsan Yarshater not only deal with the Sasanians, but also with the Arsacids. Richard Nelson Frye’s two important books, the Heritage of Persia, and The History of Ancient Iran deal with the entire period of ancient Persian / Iranian history, where the Sasanians are covered in a chapter or two. Most recently, J. Wiesehöfer’s excellent book, Ancient Persia has provided a complete survey of ancient Iranian history, including the Sasanian period. Consequently, those who want to find a specific book on Sasanian Iran are forced to consult either the classic work of Arthur Christensen, L’Iran sous les Sassanides, written in 1944 in French or Klaus Schippmann’s Grundzüge der Geschichte des sasanidischen Reiches written in 1990 in German. Then it is not surprising that a relatively short piece in English from the internet as part of my Sasanika Project should receive such attention.

[Rasputin]