The Glittering World of Sasanian Iran

[Vindex]

Interview and a new book on the way.

http://www.ancient.eu.com/news/1439/?gob..._110005558

[Simplex]

Thanks a great lot Moi,
....this one surely deserves wider recognition.
In the meantime:
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/sasanika/
I faintly remember that the guy mentioned above is one of the
chief contributors here, too.

Greez

Simplex

[daryush]

Touraj Daryaee is probably the most knowledgeable guy in the world on the Sassanians. I've read some of his work and it's extremely well written and well put. The Sasanika website is well worth a read for anyone interested.

Thanks for posting.

[Jona Lendering]

Touraj Daryaee is probably the most knowledgeable guy in the world on the Sassanians. I've read some of his work and it's extremely well written and well put. The Sasanika website is well worth a read for anyone interested.

Yes, he's a good scholar.

[Alanus]

Hello, Moi

Interesting and informative interview. Also interesting-- the History Encyclopedia website has "no definition" for "Sarmatia" and the word "Alans" hovers in a vacumn.

So, it's not just the lack of data and studies on Sassanians. It's nearly a COMPLETE void of any scholarly/university info on Eastern cultures within our Western educational systems. This is reflected right here on RAT. We have countless threads on Romans, Greeks, Germans, Celts, all presented through Eurocentric studies since the days of Queen Victoria... BUT, if it were not for the Russians, the Iranians themselves, and lately the Chinese, we would know nothing about Iranian and steppe cultures.

[Lyceum]

You raise an entirely valid point, but I don't think it is quite so clear cut as that when it comes to scholarly/university circles. This is really one area where there is a firm divide between academia and elsewhere. Most Universities are very well stocked to this regard. Its quite common to learn about the Eastern contribution to Greece, for example, and no one can get anywhere with Comparative Philology without a grasp of the Indo-Iranian languages due to all the similarities.

This is more a problem outside of academia. There is literally quite a hoard of book on this stuff, they just don't percolate down to the general public due to lack of interest and how specialised they are. I suppose one could argue that the education system in general is to blame but I guess than depends on where (and when you are.

Eurocentrism is a problem, sure, but a gradually retreating one.

Also good article, but two quibbles: Chess actually comes from India, I'd figured that would be fairly well known by now? and the Greeks didn't borrow "king of kings" from the Sassanids, in fact it was a common inheritance from the days when Akkadian was the principle language of the Eastern Aegean (Lugal lugalbandu I think it was, my Akkadian is...well...way worse than I need as a Homerist frankly) and if anything I'd be more likely to posit a Greek > Sassanian line of transmission due to chronology.

[D B Campbell]

This is reflected right here on RAT. We have countless threads on Romans, Greeks, Germans, Celts, all presented through Eurocentric studies since the days of Queen Victoria...

But thankfully not in Ancient Warfare magazine, which recently devoted an issue to this subject: Ancient Warfare V.3. Also, a Sassanid article in the latest issue: Ancient Warfare issue VI.1

[Eleatic Guest]

Eurocentrism is a problem, sure, but a gradually retreating one.

Somewhat offtopic, but still: I would argue that a sharp and shrill anti-Europeanism has become in recent years more of a problem for science and objectivity standards than old-fashioned Eurocentrism.

In recent querters of world history it has even become the norm to downplay Western achievements (Romans were uninventive, Colombus a fluke, Brits lucky to have coal in the IR etc.).

This has all led me to look out for the real bias, whenever someone tries to beat the dead horse of "Eurocentrism", Usually then some other ethnocentrism, cultural marxism or some misunderstood political corrrectness pops up.

Btw to say that chess came from India is an oversimplification. More correctly, the forerunner of chess comes from India. We do not know more of the rules of this Indian Chaturanga than that the figures had different attributes and that the game was was won by beating the enemy king. Chess as it is played today is based on the Western variant which in turn evolved when this Indian basic game was transmitted westwards by way of Persians and Arabs.

[Eleatic Guest]

Read the interview. Don't want to spoil the fun, but I cannot agree to this statement:

The accomplishments of Sasanian Persia rival those of Gupta India (320-550 CE), Han dynasty China (206 BCE-220 CE), Imperial Rome and later, Byzantium (27 BCE-476/1453 CE). For Iranians, the rule of the Sasanians is largely remembered as a golden age of art, science, and culture...

Militarily, the Sassanids were certainly one of the most formidable ancient empires, but its scientific significance was surprisingly negligible. None of the scientific and scholarly disciplines which the Greeks, and later the Chinese, had been developing centuries before were really present in Iran even at the day of the Arab conquest: the disciplines of philosophy, theology, geography, history, grammar etc. all these new fields which set classical antiquity apart from the older cultures of Ancient Near East were only systematically cultivated in the Muslim period when Persia really rose to a place of prominence in science and learning (from the 9th c.).

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.

[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.

[Eleatic Guest]

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"?

Well, this shift took place among all every literate people, so the conditions for the archaeological preservation was the same for all ancient corpuses of literature.

What must be necessarily the starting point of any analysis of the quantity and quality of ancient Persian or Carthagian literature (or any literature for that matter)? Obviously, always the material we still know of today, be it archaeological and epigraphical evidence, surviving texts or ancient references to lost texts. This is comparatively scarce and rudimentary for both peoples. So the only way to go against the evidence and assume that the Persians nevertheless possessed a rich and highly developed literature is by assuming that the survival rate of their writings was so much lower than, e.g. of that of the Greeks, Chinese and Indians. But I have never seen anyone seriously daring to make a case of some exceptional Persian rate of loss.

Even in the case of the 'extinct' Carthaginians I would find such an argument hard to hold much water: Punic was, by the testimony of Augustinus, a spoken language until at least the 5th century AD, so almost as long as Latin. Still, the Punic corpus is very small and, save some agricultural works, unimpressive.

So, absence of evidence does not necessarily mean evidence of absence. But in the absence of evidence which helps explain the absence of evidence it is still the most viable hypothesis to assume that we have no Persian corpus of true literary arts today because Persia never developed one.

[Eleatic Guest]

PS: At http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_of_Gondishapur you can see how little we actually know of 'Sassanid science'. Where are the works which it produced? It says the academy was then an international centre of medicine, but the physicists listed are almost without exception from the post-Sassanid period...and so it goes with Sassanid science. So often maintained, never proven to have existed.

[Sean Manning]

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"?

Well, this shift took place among all every literate people, so the conditions for the archaeological preservation was the same for all ancient corpuses of literature.

That is intuitive, but it is also incorrect. Certain environments are much better at preserving texts on writing boards, bark, skins, papyrus, or paper than others. I think that most of southwest Asia is neither dry and neutral enough, nor muddy and anaerobic enough to preserve texts on these media as well as a British latrine or Egytian garbage dump. I’m sure that the archaeologists here could provide more specific information on what conditions allow particular media to survive. Bishop and Coulston have written about this in the context of military finds, and why so many examples of kit come from the northern limes.

What must be necessarily the starting point of any analysis of the quantity and quality of ancient Persian or Carthagian literature (or any literature for that matter)? Obviously, always the material we still know of today, be it archaeological and epigraphical evidence, surviving texts or ancient references to lost texts. This is comparatively scarce and rudimentary for both peoples. So the only way to go against the evidence and assume that the Persians nevertheless possessed a rich and highly developed literature is by assuming that the survival rate of their writings was so much lower than, e.g. of that of the Greeks, Chinese and Indians. But I have never seen anyone seriously daring to make a case of some exceptional Persian rate of loss.

If you think about it some more, I think you will see why that is wrong. Most surviving Greek and Latin literature is not known from archaeological finds, even with miracles like the Villa of the Papyri or Oxyrhynchus’ garbage dump or the epigraphic craze. A few percent of all that was written survives because it was continuously valued and copied until people who valued and copied it got access to printing presses. This tradition preserves allusions to some of the 99% which was lost, as do other literary traditions which borrowed from classical sources. In other traditions, such as Punic literature, or most Aramaic literature, this transmission was interrupted. The same thing happened with, for example, Bactrian Greek literature: the Bactrians fell out of communications with the west, then they were destroyed, so that tradition died. The two hypotheses “the Bactrians wrote very little literature” and “the Bactrians produced a substantial literature which perished when there were too few wealthy Greek-speakers to pay for copies” predict the same absence of archaeological evidence!

A brief essay by Maurice Sznycer on what we know about Punic literature is at http://phoenicia.org/ethnlang.html (the first part of the page is anonymous, so scroll down until you see her name).

The other problem (although less for science than other areas) is oral literature. Some genres last for a millennium before anyone bothers to write them down. I believe historians of early modern science and technology have done a lot of work tracing things through oral and vernacular traditions before they were "discovered" or "invented" by someone with the habit of writing for a learned audience in Latin.

[M. Caecilius]

I concur with Sean. Fortunately, we do not have to rely on archaeological discovery of ancient papyri to study Graeco-Roman literature. Though there are tantalising fragments, what we have now survived because it was copied, largely in the monasteries, throughout the Middle Ages until the printing press could catch up the slack and make books more available again, to and beyond the scale they may have been in the Roman times. However, for the rather substantial corpus of Egyptian literature, we do rely on papyrology, but then Egypt's climate (and the tendency to use written papyri as mummy-wraps on occasion) is fairly exceptional.

Still, Stefan raises a good point in asking why the sources were not transmitted from Achemenid or Sasanian culture, with the Parthian Arsacids possibly being a culture much closer to their nomadic Saka roots to produce large, written corpus. The Achemenid works may have been lost under Alexander, although he was rather appreciative of Persian culture elsewhere, restoring the tomb of Darius the Great and adopting Persian style and traditions, possibly under the successor kingdoms. The Sasanian culture was followed by the Arab invasions, but there remained enough Iranian self-consciousness and pride not to cause a complete ban on what had gone before.

A case in point is Ferdowi's Shahname, the Persian national epos, written towards the end of the 10th century. On the other hand, it seems to me that it is also a case in point to indicate that there was a large body of sources Ferdowsi could draw on (some of them, as regards Alexander, possibly Greek, but many must have been Persian), whether they were written or oral; he did not simply invent things.

It is a pity that there are so few sources to show the Persian side of things, as opposed to looking at this culture from the usually hostile eyes of Romans and Greeks. There are a few reliefs, at Behistun for instance, which show some epigraphic habit.

[Eleatic Guest]

Sean, we don't even have a few Persian 'lighthouse works' which could have given a glimpse of a genuine Persian high culture in the arts in the way of the Greeks, Chinese or even the Indians. There can only be one reason: the ancient Persians, as in fact the whole Ancient Near East, never make the decisive step from the Mythos to the Logos and the rise of all the scientific disciplines which accompanied it. It simply did not happen in the Ancient Near East and that's why this region fell behind in the world order compared to the younger high civilizations. In fact, I found most world historians agree on this point. Babylonian astronomy/science was superseded by the Greeks in the last centuries BC and as a tradition long discontinued even before the Muslim period.

Touraj Daryaee looks like a honorable chap but he too wants his Persians up there with the big boys where they just don't belong. I have read many interviews and secondary material which makes this claim but when it comes to evidence they just all fell silent.