The Glittering World of Sasanian Iran

[Sean Manning]

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: ...

I believe that is what they call an argument from incredulity ("X, and I can't imagine any alternative to X, therefore X"). However, I just suggested another way in which an ancient literature could die with few traces, and gave some examples when we can be very confident that this happened. The hypothesis that Mesopotamian literature appears to trickle out because it switched from cuneiform on archaeologically-visible clay to Aramaic on archaeologically-invisible organic media is pretty common (Nicholas Ostler follows it in his survey of world language history). Are you saying that you can’t imagine elite Greeks ignoring (or at least not citing) literature in other languages?

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 Babylonian astronomy/science was superseded by the Greeks in the last centuries BC and as a tradition long discontinued even before the Muslim period.

Those are some sweeping statements, and I'm not sure I understand them. I can't speak to Iran, but in what sense is Babylonian astronomy or Egyptian surgery not an example of logos? In what period do you think that Iran "fell behind in the world order" and what does that mean?

I don`t have an opinion on the scientific achievements of Sassanid Iran. I'm just very sceptical about general statements about lost literary traditions which didn't have much contect with surviving ones. Its hard enough to speak with confidence about the Presocratic philosophers or Hellenistic historians, and we know quite a lot about both …

[Lyceum]

Probably because these ("Logos" vs "Mythos") are the kind of meaningless pseudo-intellectual distinctions we've been ashamed to use since the time of Dodds and company. Its always fun to substitute them for the "logos" of Heraklitos and the "mythos" of Aristotle though, just to really expose the oversaturation of Victorian wankery in light of later philology. All in all pointless.

Also you'd have to be a madman to think the "Babylonians" less advanced. Greece was hardly particularly brilliant Scientifically, especially when put in context alongside India (you know...number system, decimals, quadratics...computational linguistics, crazy metal working) and Babylon (arguably the source of a lot of the Indian stuff, certainly re: quadratics and computation). This isn't the '60s. Also Greece itself is very much in the tradition of the fertile crescent anyway. However we're not talking about Greece now.

Let's see re ancient lit. You have to an odd kind of wilfully ignorant person in light of the work of Parry, Lord, Foley, Finnegan and a hoard of other scholars to assume literature requires a textual basis. Or that its a form of development, as if having written sources is somehow better. Its a matter of form and function.

To take Greece as example the vast majority of literature until the Hellenistic age wasn't written down. Not just because of limitations in technology, but because there was no real reason to. Writing in terms of early Greek poetry was a step back, coupled with the fall of the phorminx it was one of the major death knells of epic.

Yet we know from philological reasoning that Greek epic actually has a very long pedigree, several centuries before we could even begin to postulate the Iliad narrative arising. Lyric arguably even longer based on metrics. From Greece, we've lost considerably more than we have before we even have the Homeric epics. In India, where the surviving texts are so great we have no idea how many they are you can bet the problem is compounded.

Now, for Persia. Well you have two things to bear in mind: the Persians DID leave a lot of stuff behind in terms of administrative documents and inscriptions (i.e the Aramaic and Akkadian stuff), we even had a fun project here at Oxford recently working with some Satraps correspondence etc. In general though the Persians made the switch over to more advanced, perishable, items early (as evidenced by sealing stones etc) and that probably went up in flames/generally did not survive.

I personally doubt there was any literature there though. We do know they had access to the Gathas, however (in an Eastern Iranian language) which are monumentally awesome poems, they existed in an oral format. Moreover we know from analysis of later texts that they were reacting in some part to older remnants.

I'm tired, having been writing since 6 I doubt I make much sense so I'm off.

tldr: I agree with Sean, here a few reasons why.

EDIT: PS if you're all interested outside of the older French books like Bryant (which in themselves are often criticised) I know of at least two academics publishing on Persia 2013 though I can't guess the price, probably usual academic prices e.g I can't afford them unless I review and keep the book prices. Still, worth looking for. Oh and the project I mentioned here a while back was called the "Arshama Project" if you want to google.

[Alanus]

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.

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.

Good points. I think we're fortunate to at least have surviving fragments, plus extensive examples of early IE oral traditions (the Vedas, Gathas, and the Shaname) wherein we find such warriors as Vishpala and Rustan, perhaps the two oldest recorded. I'm not well-versed on this subject, certainly not academically, but love the links that hark back to origins in the pre-Saka steppe culture, Sassanian or otherwise. :wink:

[Eleatic Guest]

Coming back from a trip to Central Asia and reminded there of the great scientific tradition Chorasmia, historically a part of the Greater Iranian sphere, enjoyed during the medieval period (Avicenna, al-Biruni, al-Khwarizmi), I have to change my verdict on the significance of pre-Islamic Persian science from bad to worse.

First thing: is it a coincidence that the Babylonian scientific tradition, the longest and strongest in the world for millennia, faded away after the Persion conquest? The literary cuneiform tradition largely went out of existence in the following centuries and what little Mesopotamia contributed scientifically, was firmly in the Hellenistic mould (e.g. Seleukos of Seleucia). The ancient Persians themselves never managed to step in but remained confined throughout the Achaemenid, Parthian and Sassanid period to their traditional role of rulers, bureaucrats and military men.

What is more, even though the Persians were greatly favoured in being positioned in a triangle between the great power centers of classical science, Greece, India and China, they never made much of it. They rather acted as a barrier against the exchange of ideas than as a venue.

So, not only coincides (caused?) the Persian expansion in the wake of Cyrus the end of the millennnia-old tradition of cuneiform science in the Middle East, but Persia itself also remained strangely resistant to scientific outside influence despite enjoying a unique geographical position.

I therefore stick to my original suspicion, namely that you can learn from this case a great deal more about the distorting influence of nationalism - the sentimental Iranian nationalism of the Shah period, now cultivated by the large and learnt Iranian diaspora - than about the subject of ancient Iranian science itself, which was non-existent. Persian science only started in the 9th-10th century AD, under Muslim rule.