In Our Time - The Sassanid Empire

Episode Date: December 13, 2007

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Sassanian Empire. Founded around 226 AD, in Persia, the Sassanian Empire lasted over 400 years as a grand imperial rival to Rome. In modern day Iran, just down the road from the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis, there is a picture carved into a rock. It depicts a king, triumphant on horseback, facing two defeated enemies. This is no pair of petty princes, they are Roman Emperors - Philip and Valerian - and the king towering above them is Shapur I of the Sassanian Empire. So complete was his victory that Shapur is reputed to have used Valerian as a footstool when mounting his horse. This super-power traded goods from Constantinople to Beijing, handed regular defeats to the Roman army and only fell to the Islamic conquests of the 7th century. It still influences Persian identity to this day. But what was the culture and the literature of the empire, its structure and organisation? And what was its role in the great geopolitical game played out between the decaying empires in late antiquity?With Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic in the Faculty of Languages and Cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies; Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis, Curator of Iranian and Islamic Coins in the British Museum; James Howard-Johnston, University Lecturer in Byzantine Studies at the University of Oxford.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in modern day Iran, near the ancient Persian capital of Vesepalus, there's a picture carved into a rock. It depicts a king, triumphant, on horseback,

facing two defeated enemies. This is no pair of petty princes, their Roman emperors, Philip and Valerian, and the king towering above them is Chapoor the first of the Sasanian Empire. So complete was his victory that Chapoor is reputed to views Valerian as a footstool when mounting his horse. Founded in 226 AD, the Sasanian Empire lasted over 400 years. It traded goods from Constantinople to Beijing, handed out regular defeats to the Roman army, and only fell to the Islamic conquest of the 7th century. It still influences Persian identity to this day.

discussed the Sassanian Empire, its wars, its culture, and its beliefs, Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Vesta Sarkosh Curtis, curator of Iranian and Islamic coins in the British Museum, and James Howard Johnson, University of Lecture in Byzantine Studies

at the University of Oxford. Hugh Kennedy, the Sassanian Empire flourished from 226 to 651 AD, but there's a deeper history to empires in Persia. Was there any way in which the Sassanians were inspired by that? Yes, the Sussainians, The Palestinians are the last really of the great pre-Islamic empires of Iran.

The story starts with the Achaemenids. It starts with Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BC. And then the empress who we know most about, I'm sure that the Darius and Xerxes, who led the ill-fated expeditions to try and conquer Greece. And we hear mostly about these people from the records of the Greek historians and so we have a vivid impression of the splendor of the empire, but also of it being a life.

luxurious oriental despotism, if you like, which is the way the Greeks cast it. But we also know about this great ancient empire, of course, from Pazepalus, the wonderful reliefs, the wonderful sculptures which show the great procession at the New Year and all the people coming to the royal court and so on. But then the Achaemenids were brought low by Alexander the Great and his conquest of Iran. And for several centuries, the political history of Iran was very turbulent. First there were Alexander's successors, and then there were people called the Parthians. Now, the Parthians were really nomadic people from northeast Iran who came in and asserted some sort of sovereignty in control, but they didn't really build up a very firm or substantial empire.

They were great warriors, so they certainly defeated the Romans on a number of occasions, but they didn't create perhaps a lasting and stable state. and it was really a reaction against this that the Sasanians appear in southwest Iran in an agricultural area, an area of towns and villages, a settled people, and they tried in a way to recreate

what they, the ancient Persian Empire. And as you were just saying in your introduction, they had themselves portrayed along with the great Achaemenid emperors, they had themselves. Can you tell us something about the Sassanians, the Sassanians, You say they came in that particular part of Iran.

What were they like? Why did they triumph over all the other clans, as it were, and small dynasties around? Well, they seem to have been started off as hereditary priests of a shrine and then gradually religion led to politics. And I think they were, they used the resources of this rich and prosperous area of southwest Iran to really assert their control over their enemies. and they defeated the last of the Parthians in battle

and then set about establishing a systematic, an organized government for Iran, dividing it into provinces, appointing governors, establishing a regular army, and again, as you were just saying, triumphing over the Romans in the most spectacular way. But let's get to 226 AD, the first ascertaining king, Ardashir,

crowned himself as king of kings, in the capital of Tessifon. Again, just to spell it out, bit more. How did that regional lord become king of kings in a very short time, about 20 years, isn't it? Yes, I think he was just

a more effective and energetic ruler than his rivals. And he, of course, as you say, he established himself as king of kings as Shahan Shah. And that meant that there was still space for families of Parthian descent and others to participate. It wasn't

as it were a monolithic monarchy that involved trampling all over everybody else. A lot of it was cooperation with existing elites and existing aristocratic families to create a sort of, almost a sort of imperial federation. But as I understand it, Vesta Charkoskirtis, they kept it tight

among themselves, the rulers, the Sasanians. That was an aristocratic elite which ruled, even though they made federal allies as Sirius said of various of the other tribe, including the Parthians, the great empire that had gone before them. How did Adishione's son, Shapo,

sent themselves to what became their new peoples and people? They presented themselves right from the beginning as the mighty king of kings. And also what is very important, if you look at their rock reliefs, and there are quite a number of them in the area around Persepolis, and also on their coins, they presented themselves as the God-chosen leader. And that is interesting because on their reliefs, They often appear in the presence of the wise Lord or the Lord of Wisdom that is God in the Zoroastrian sense, and they receive their ring of power, the symbol of kingship, from God.

So from the very beginning, as soon as Adashir comes to the throne, he mince coins where he describes himself in the inscription as the Mazda worshipping Lord Adeshir, king of kings of Iran. I mean, that is a very strong message. On their relief, he is either shown on horseback facing God, who is also shown on horseback, or he's standing in front of God and receiving his symbol of kingship from God. Did he know this from the Parthians or from earlier?

Yes. The Sasanians would not exist without the legacy of the Parthians and the Parthian tradition. It's a continuation. I mean, Arishir and his family came from around. Persepolis, but they were local kings under the Parthians. And the reason why the Parthians collapsed and Ardavan IV was defeated by Adashir, is because the Parthians were in power over 400 years. And they were a mighty power just as much as the Sasanians were opposing Rome. So did the Parthians. So the Parthian Empire was weak after more than 400 years. And it was time that a local

prince from southern Iran took actually power in his hands. You mentioned the Zoroastrian faith. How important was that? Can you briefly remind people what it was? And how, first of all, and then how important? We'll do that first. Yes. Zoroastrianism is an ancient Iranian religion. It's a monotheistic religion which believes in one god, and that is Ahura Mazda, the Lord of Wisdom.

Now, Ahura Mazda is the creator of all goodness, of all. creatures. And opposed to Ahura Mazda within every person is evil. But evil is not as important as Ahura Mazda. It's not a dualistic religion. It's a monotheistic religion. So every person has to decide and choose between good and evil, and at the end of the day, people will choose for goodness and Ahura Mazda. The sort of date of this religion is not very clear. Some scholars believe that Zarathustra or Zoroaster, the prophet who gives his name to this religion,

lived around 1,200 or 1,000 before the Christian era. Other people think he lived around the 6th century before the Christian era, but usually people, and I certainly think, it's the earlier date of around 1,000. And how important was this religion to the Sassanians? Very important. They were Zoroastrians, but what one has to bear in mind, that Zoroastrianism under the first Sassanians did not become the state religion.

I mean, you don't have a state religion in ancient Persia until the 4th century. But Aideshir worshipped Ahura Mazda, and he mentioned that in all his inscriptions, and so does his son Sharpur. James Hyde Johnson, how did the Sasanian Empire fit into, let's call it a global picture of the time or that area. What other empires are around? Can you give our listeners a sort of

map of the time? Well, that's quite a tall order. We have to take the whole Eurasian continent for our area. So basically, the Zazenian Empire

was the continental power in the western half of Eurasia. At the beginning of the third century, the two halves of Eurasia, that that looked east to China and that which looked west to the Mediterranean world, were still in effect disconnected, except that, of course, commerce went from one side to the other. But politically, militarily, they were disconnected. And, of course, the South Asian continent was.

also disconnected save through trade routes. So within this western half of Eurasia, Iran forms the sort of natural power centre, balancing that of the Mediterranean-centred Roman Empire to the west. And so there is, in a sense, a natural arena, which is the highlands of Iran, so bounded by the Elbow's Mountains to the north, which run south of the Caspian Sea,

the Zagros Mountains to the south that run up on the eastern side of the Gulf, and southwest Iran to which he was referring, from which the Sasanians drew their origin, is at the southern end, towards the southern end of the Zagros Mountains, and was the original homeland of the Achaemenids in the distant past. Cyrus and Darius. Yes.

So what we have is, in the third century, within this broad Iranian world, the old sort of local power centre, if I can refer to it as that, within Iran, that is of the southwest of Fars, of Persia proper, reasserting itself vis-à-vis the mountains to the north, the Elbaas Mountains, Kourazan, which is another great power centre in the northeast,

and Midea, the third natural local power centre within Iran to the northwest. And then as Persia reunites the Iranian highlands, then they set off on the great historic enterprise of past Persian dynasties, which was to take over Mesopotamia, the rich lowlands of what is now Iraq, from which they could draw a great deal of wealth.

So the answer is that they are the second great power in Western Europe, Asia, drawing on the highlands of Iran basically for their military manpower, their religion, their sort of political ruling class, feeding off the lowlands of Mesopotamia for the wealth, more urbanized world, a more commercial world, and able to face the Roman Empire as basically on terms of equality, militarily, politically, ideologically. And they reach out to China, of course, we know a lot of trade with the European Union. China and influences through to and through India and so on. Thank you very much, Vard. Rome was

much bigger than the Sassanid Empire and it was more established, but by 260 AD the Sassanids had captured one Roman Emperor and killed another. This seems to be a mighty feat of arms. Yes, indeed. It almost, I think one could simply, I think one could probably simply stand back and be astounded. If one is looking for an an explanation. I think one has to find it in terms of really the dynamic process of which the Sasanians had developed their power, first within Fars in the southwest, then within Iran at large, then within the wider world of the dependencies of Iran proper, Mesopotamia, the Transc Caucasus, the eastern marches of Central Asia,

the whole dynamic process which, to keep it going, had to keep it going, had to be basically find a new adversary, Equipollant, and they turn west, and in those first 30 years, victory after victory, and there are some reverses, but the victories are infinitely more spectacular. Then from 264, there's a pause. There are two further engagements in the third century, and then at the end, after a reverse, quite serious in that then Shah and Shah's family were captured in Armenia,

a first durable treaty was made between the Great Powers in 298, in which certain sessions were made by the Sasanians to the Romans, which I think they probably found in the long run unacceptable. So quite soon, this small regional family or group of families was challenging the greatest empire that the world had ever seen and not only taking them on, sort of seeing them off, as it were. Vesta, we have very few written accounts of life in the Sasanian Empire, but we do have the Book of Kings from a slightly later period.

What does that tell us about the Sasanians in their court? The Book of Kings, which was based on an earlier Sasanian book of probably the 6th century, retells really the story of Iran. it consists of three parts, excuse me, the legendary part, the heroic part, and then the last part, which is the largest part, the Sasanian part. And it's all in rhyme.

It's in poetry. Now, Ferdoisi, the poet who put this story into rhyme, gives a beautiful account of the Sasanians, starting with Adashir the first. It describes how Adashir has, a dream, sorry, Aduvan, the last Parthian king, had a dream that his empire was being conquered, and then this young prince appeared on the scene and it was Aderishia. What did you tell us about the Sassanian?

We've got to concentrate on the Sassanians. What does you tell us about that? It tells you that this, it gives you an account of every single Sissan king. For Arashir, Shapo. Yeah, and not the Nails. What do they like? What are they doing? That they are the king of kings, that they are very powerful, that they are fighting.

with the Romans and also with enemies in the East and what is also very important that for the Sasanians, religion and kingship are inseparable. Does he talk about the wealth of their palaces? It talks about the kings, how they had many, many minstrels, how they had palaces, how they, for example,

sent for musicians to India who came and performed at their palaces, how they treated people, how they treated their enemies. It gives a very detailed account of the Sasanian Empire. And the crown was so heavy had to be suspended above the king. And silk was dropped in front of him

so he could not be seen by the people. So they're in a big business of being divine, aren't they really? Well, they're not supposed to be divine according to the Zoroastrian religion, but I think what is one thing how the king saw themselves, another thing how religion described them. Hugh Kennedy, let's stick with the Zoroastrianism

for a moment, because it in a sense that you obviously, correct me how wrong, please do, they became the state religion. And you had to be a Zoroastrian to be part of this ruling elite, or the ruling elite were all Zoroastrians. What effect did that have on the way, they set about holding together this almost surprisingly arrived at Topsy Empire, just Grewd.

What effected the Zoroastrianism as a state religion have on that? Yes, it has it. It is very much a state religion. There are a network of fire temples, where the sacred fire is maintained in purity for forever and ever. What's the idea of that? It's an eternal fire, and there are different fires for different classes of people. There are three most important fires are the fire of the ruler and the fire of the warriors and the fire of the farmers and so on. And then there are lots of subsidiary fires. Lots of little fire temples dotted, often in very remote rural areas throughout the empire.

And these were looked after by priests, or Mobaths or sometimes Harbaths, and they often had estates attached to them. There was quite a lot of property, so that the fire could be kept in due form and the fire could be protected from the... So originally was being used to help bind the people together and help keep them subservient to the elite, to the elite.

Yes, the elite were largely, they're not entirely Zoroastrian, but lots of, should we say the common people, and particularly in the Iraqi part of the empire, were Christians or Jews or mandates, or that belonged to a wide variety of other faiths. And for them, I think, that the Zoroastrian fire temple cult of the ruling elite was something rather alien and different.

That doesn't, and Vester may correct me on this, I think, but it always seems to me that Zoroastrianism was a slightly elite religion. It didn't have a lot of popular following, at least in the Iraqi Party empire. James Hodge. Sorry, please. Sorry, it's a very large empire, so it's difficult to think that everybody living under the Sassanian king followed the same religion. But it's interesting that, for example, the kings in their inscriptions, certainly the early kings, they differentiate between the Iranians and non-Iranians, meaning the Zoroastrians and non-Zorastrians. Can I ask James Howard Johnson, it's soon after this, around this time, that Constantine, emperor is imposing

Christianity as the state religion, changing the whole thing. We need to go to that. We're going to go into that a few weeks ago, it's so happens. By some fluke of, we were going to be joined up programming for once anyway. Never mind. Is there any sense in which the Sasanians are

imitating that, that the Romans are getting powerful with this centralised state religion, and they're going to do it as well? Well, that's an interesting question. In some ways, the Sasanians take the lead in that it's in the late third century when a great priest Kirtia promotes Zoroastrianism and you start seeing the Zoroastrian structure

beginning to correspond to the state structure. So I think there's an extraordinary phenomenon in the Roman Empire, which is you have the state, the church, basically models its structures on that of the state. So there are, as it were, higher authorities, and they have executive power, and then, fools, they try to agree on doctrine. Now, I think the Sasanians have a much better system in that they have basically a state religion,

which is the religion of the ruling family and the governing elite. It's clearly a core part of the whole ideological project, but they don't require everyone to adhere to it. So other religions can coexist. So it is, in that sense, it's a driving force, but it is not all-embracing. At about 370 AD,

the Romans and Sassan is entered into a long period of more or less peace for more or less 120 years. What brought about that surprising development? Well, I return to that original contrast division I was making between the two halves of Western Eurasia, that which looked east to China and that which looked west to the Sasanian Empire or the Iranian world and the Mediterranean Roman world.

In the... To go east for a moment, perhaps you're not going to have a program on China in later antiquity, but I would urge you to do so. We're on the case. We're on the case. But basically the great Chinese crisis begins in the late 2nd century AD, rumbles on through the 3rd century.

Peaks in the year 311 when the Xunu captured the capital near modern Beijing, somewhat to the south, Loyang, in 311. And over the following 40 years, you have chaos in China, you have the nomad overlordship, control of northern China. And then in the mid-fourth century, the nomads, the Shung-nu, get driven out of China, and they go west. Now, the Shung-nu are the Huns. There is a Sockyan document, so emanating from Central Asia, from what is now Uzbekistan, which makes the identification certain.

So the nomads who had basically built up their state structures in the world facing China, the Huns, with much more developed structures than that of the nomads of Western Eurasia cross the great central mountain spine of Eurasia, come into contact and conflict with the Sasanians in the 350s, and for five years they have to break off their wars with the Romans to cope. and then in the 370s start affecting the Germanic peoples and eventually the Roman Empire itself.

So from the point of view, the Romans suffered worse the Emperor Valens, if it's another emperor, was killed at the Battle of Adrianople in 378. And within 10 years or so of that, conventionally we put the date at 387, Romans and Persians basically establish

a long-lasting treaty with a fair division of spheres of influence in what is now Iraq and what is now Eastern Turkey. Is there an element of my enemy's enemies, my friend, they're united against the Huns. The Romans send reinforcements to the Sasanians at a certain point and so on.

So that is what is bringing them together. Their mutual enemy, the Huns. Maybe we can leave that hanging in. Is there something in that? Yes, and it is explicitly stated at one or two points. Can we talk about trade, Hugh Kennedy? I mean, this is the wonderfully placed the Sassanian Empire, as we look at them up now, east and west as, as James has described.

And so, and this Chinese thing is tantalizing, of course. Can you tell us about their trading purpose and the reach of their trade? Well, there's a lot of development of Indian Ocean trade, because, of course, the Sassanians controlled the ports of southern Iraq and the ports of southern Iran as well. the Indian Ocean trade that we know a lot about from the early Islamic period certainly started under the Sasanians. And a lot of the trade was in high-quality textiles, especially.

Sasanian silks were extremely highly valued. They find their way into European markets. A surprising number of them end up in cathedral treasuries in Western Europe, which is mostly where they're preserved, in fact, because the Iranian originals have been lost. And it's the textiles that give us some idea of the market for luxury goods in the Sassanian Empire. In the way in which the Sassanians, as you say,

joined up east and west and brought these. If I could chip in, in China one finds some of the more durable artifacts of the Sassanian world in a form of magnificent cut glass vessels. An investor will probably know more of this than I and basically picked up from Chinese tombs. So I would have, I mean the problem about trade in antiquity and late antiquity

is that the elites were not interested in trade, unlike the Muslim elites in a later period. So we hear very, very little about it. So we're dependent upon archaeological finds. And so the question then is, do you take what we've got as the tip of an iceberg of commercial transactions or as, you know, a very significant part of it? If it's the tip of an iceberg, there's an enormous.

amount going on in the Indonesian. What's your view of that? I think it's the tip of the iceberg, because for example, if you look at the third century and the trade that existed between Palmyra in the East, which is now in Syria, northern Syria, and for example, Parthian-Sessanian Iran, and then also the Kushan East in India, it was enormous and it created also a very wealthy sort of merchants structure really in the ancient near east and they traded along this northern

Silk Road, they traded along the Persian Gulf and it really made the Iranian middleman very wealthy as well that is very important I think would like to add to that to the Strait thing just to give people an idea of what this empire is dealing in we know so much about the Roman Empire

so much about the Greek Empire and then later empire but this is still a dark area, partly because of the porcity of the records. Yes, the porcity of the records is a real problem. We get very few, as it were, Sassanian voices. What we do have is quite a lot of records from Sogdhir, which is that series of principalities in what is now Uzbekistan and so...

to the north-east of Iran, and the Sogddeans were the great merchants of the time travelling to China and travelling to the West and bringing the goods of China to the West in exchange particularly for silver, coined money and someone that was exported by the

Sasanians to China. So there are these Sogdian middlemen and they're the traders we actually know most about not as it were the Sassanians themselves. Given the difficulty of getting sufficient records so far about the Sustanian Empire because of the burning of various documents because the language itself has become a dead language

because of a powerful oral tradition and so on, we have to take views from other people and we have to take views from their great enemy. What did the Romans think about and write about the Sassanians? Alas, the author to whom we should look for a really good, well-informed view on Sassanian Iran in its fourth century heyday, the great Roman historian Amiens Marcellinus.

He includes a long excursus on the Sasanian world, but he becomes a learned antiquarian when he does this excursus and basically draws on the Hellenistic writers, so from the, basically the age of Alexander, does not tell us the things we want to know. So we have to piece it together, incidentally. I mean, the Sharnama and then the 6th century source, when it was probably written down,

the Quadainama or Book of Lords, this basically gives us a history of kings, courts, court intrigues, hunting, adventures, feasting, basically family history. We hear of the aristocracy, but everything below that is invisible to us. So, trade, the normal processes of administration,

that is the everyday business of government which kept this great enterprise going is basically entirely concealed from us both on the Sasanian side and largely on the Roman side. Yes, there's another source of information which is the Arabs, an Arabic writing. The Arabs in Da'u conquered this Sasanian empire

were keenly interested, a lot of them were keenly interested in the Sasanians as the model of how a great empire should be run. When Arab rulers wanted to ask the question, how do I be a great monarch, they would look back to the way the Sassanians had done things. And so a lot of Sassanian writing was translated, or at least taken into the Arab tradition,

and mostly by, in fact, by Iranians who were Arabic speaking and Arabic writing as people became after the conquest. So we have a lot of information about the Sassanians from this sort of source. There are also economic texts found in Egypt particularly that give quite a bit of information, for example, about administration, about, for example,

prizes of slaves and land and inheritance. So there's quite a bit, you know, it's Apache evidence. And we've saved one briefly, but I don't you move on to another stage, James. It's just following up Hugh's point on, the Sasanian Empire as a model for later Muslim states on the grand scale in fact we can see

the state functioning first of all in terms of its the military power it could project to east and to west but above all in the great infrastructure projects and that is huge agricultural and urban development projects based upon

canalisation of water for transport routes and for irrigation and gigantic ones both in Iraq and in Iran and secondly huge military infrastructure projects of which the most spectacular currently being investigated is the Great Wall of Gurgan which runs from the Caspian eastwards for 195 kilometres

seems to have been constructed in a single phase huge number of kilns producing the bricks to face the wall in the mid-5th century in the reign of Peros 459 to 484. Yes, it's actually incredible architectural feature. I mean, it's only comparable with the German Limus and Hadrian's wall. I mean, it runs about 200 kilometres from west to east, and the excavators, it's been excavated by a British and Iranian team,

they found about 35 forts along this wall. But it's interesting that this is sort of the period where the danger is coming really from the northeast, by the nomadic people attacking the northeastern part. Can you tell us, Hugh Kennedy, how this great empire came to an end? What brought it to its... Well, it was destroyed by the invading Arab Muslims from 636 onwards. But the background to that is that there was what I think James...

is described as the last great war of antiquity, which was the struggle to the death between the Byzantines and the Sassanians that happens in the first decades of the 7th century. And for a long time, it seemed as if the Sassanians were going to finally triumph over their ancient enemy. There were Sassanian armies outside the walls of Constantinople, Istanbul, and so on.

And then there is a terrific fight back by the Greek Emperor Heraclius, which brings Heraclius to right into the heart of Iraq and into the heart of the Iranian world. And by the time this war had finished in 628, both sides were militarily exhausted and the Sasanian Shah had lost his throne and his life and just at the moment when the Arabs are beginning to put the pressure on and the

Arab forces are beginning to appear, the Sasanian Empire is convulsed by a series of succession disputes and intrigues and murders and mayhem. But it's also because the Sasanian army He was really exhausted by that time. Do you agree with that, James? No, I don't. I don't.

You see, I don't think that the Sasanians were defeated in that last war. We have a brilliant operation, sort of desperate rareguard operation by the then-Roman emperor Heraclius, who operates with a very small force, attacking where he's not expected, but relying basically on a great nomadic ally, the Turks of Central Asia, Asia, who come into the war in the mid-620s. And the fundamental reason for the reversal of fortunes is that the Turks intervened in force in the northwestern reaches of the Sassanian Empire, that is south of the Caucasus, in what is now Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia, and they threatened to do more.

And their Kagan issued an ultimately. ultimatum to the last and possibly the greatest of Sasanian kings, Khuzro the second uparovaz, in a heyday of his achievements. And he spoke as the Lord of the North, the king of kings and your king, and he addressed him as the ruler of Assyria, i.e. just of Mesopotamia or Iraq. And he said, get out of Roman territory, return all Roman prisoners of war, make peace. What then happens is Heraclus gets in the north, conducts a military campaign really designed to bring about regime change. This is an example of intelligent and successful regime change

achieved bloodlessly in Ketisip in the capital on the night of the 23rd, of the 24th of February 628. There then follows a period of upheavals, Hugh is right, at the very top, changes of regime, but these are changes of figureheads. But in my view, the Sasanian armies of conquest that had conquered the Roman Empire,

everything except Asia Minor and the approaches to Constantinople, this army was undefeated, and it fought the Muslims hard, and the Muslims won. And the Muslims won here, not with the consequences of that. The Arab Muslim armies,

firstly took Iraq and then there was a certain amount of debate as to whether they were going to stop at what of the rest, essentially the borders of modern Iraq. But they decided not to that the remains of the Sassanian army was still too dangerous. Excuse me, they pushed on up into

the Iranian plateau and they defeated the Sassanian armies again and again and the last of the Shars fled to the east to what is now termed Menistan, accompanied by his entourage, but unable to as I won't generate any resistance until he was eventually murdered

by a miller by the river Morgab in what it is now termedistan We haven't time to go into these elaborations But the fury of the Muslim armies It's not unlike the earlier fury of the Sasanian armies When they sort of the first As James pointed out in the first few decades Tore into the Roman Empire

The Muslim armies came and tore into these empires Particularly the Sassan Empire Did it hold anything Bastard? Did they keep anything? You said earlier in the program that the Sasanians kept a lot from the Parthian Empire, which had preceded them. That itself had also been 400 years like the same.

Did the Muslim Empire take anything from a keep anything from the Sasanian Empire? I think it was certainly they did. I mean, if you look at, for example, the Islamic architecture in Iran, particularly with the mosques and the four-vaulted halls opening into a courtyard, that is definitely a Sasanian palace architecture,

which goes back to the Parthian palace architecture. So here you have a wonderful example. Then you have these magnificent stucco decorations inside the mosques. That also is a tradition that comes from the Sasanian period. And yes, certainly. What would you say remain here? Yes, well, lots of political structures remain. The Arab conquest was very patchy.

They defeated the Sasanian hierarchy, if you like, and the military. But in many other areas, the advancing Arab Muslims simply made treaties, made agreements with local people on the base. basis of you pay taxes and we'll leave you alone. So in many areas, particularly the mountainous areas on the edge of Iran, local dynasties that had flourished under the Sassanians continued to flourish under the Arabs. James?

Well, I think it's still true today. Vesta will correct me on this, but I think the Ayatollah Khomeini tried to suppress the celebration, the traditional celebration of the Persian New Year when it clashed with Ramadan. And in the end, the traditional New Year, year one. And I believe

that a few days are then added on to the end of Ramadan to make up for the fact of the feasting and enjoyment and picnicking in the middle of Ramadan that goes on in Iran now. So I agree. Yes, Iranian, I think the Iranian tradition does

continue and it has continued. But what is also interesting is to go back to what you said that not everywhere in Iran did the population convert to Islam at the same time. I mean, there were pockets. I mean, on the Caspian

Sea and in the southern parts, there remain Zoroastrians for quite a long time. Yes, that's certainly. Conversion to Islam is something that happens over two or three hundred years. The political conquest is very quick. Conversion of the majority population to Islam is something that takes much, much longer.

I suppose the question I'd like to end with, really, did the Sasanian culture and influence really change? modify, make a serious difference to Islam? I'm not sure that I'm in position to answer that. It's what we call an open problem in discussions on in... I think that they... I mean the principle...

Well, it has to Islam within Iran. Shere Islam, I mean, the cultus saints, the great... the great mourning ceremonies is sort of astonishingly different from the Sunni Iran of Arabia. So I, on my visit there, if one goes

to Iran and it is the most magical, attractive country to see where all of us who go are entranced. I haven't got much time. Hugh, what do you think? Yes, I think that the pre-Iranians the pre-Islamic heritage is extremely important,

but mostly at the level of politics and visual culture, the sort of thing that Vesta has been talking about. I see a very clear link between the power of the priests and present day Iran. Right, well, thank you all very much indeed. Thank you, Vesta Saakos Kirtis. Thank you, Hugh Kennedy. Thank you, James Howard Johnson. Next week we'll be talking about the four humours,

black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm, once thought of as the four essential juices. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukh forward slash radio 4.