The Glittering World of Sasanian Iran

[Sean Manning]

There is a lot of talk about this Sassanid translation movement and this so-called Academy of Gondishapur, but what do we actually know about it? AFAIK, hard facts are so hard to come by that it is reason enough to be suspicious of its actual influence. If it was so active in drawing in knowledge from Rome to China, it just helps to demonstrate that Persia then was still a recipient of knowledge, not a propagator. And if the translation movement is hyped, like I believe in the absence of solid evidence, Persia was not even an importer of knowledge, but a black spot on the scientific map. Like it already was in the days of Dareios and Xerxes.

Assuming by "Persia" you mean Iran or Persis, doesn't that have a danger of creating a circular argument "they created no new knowledge because none survives in writing, and no writing survives because they created no new knowledge"? For the use of (for example) Egyptian and Ionian doctors at the King's court, we have anthropological parallels that preindustrial elites often favoured foreign doctors, not because they were necessarily wiser but because they were rare and unusual and therefore clearly powerful. To pick another example, we know, for example, that the Carthaginians had a substantial literature which has been completely lost except for some allusions to Romans who translated part of it.

I'm not an expert, but the shift to archaeologically invisible writing media makes me a bit skeptical of attempts to write an intellectual history of Southwest Asia in the late 1st millenium BCE and early 1st millenium CE.