The Ancients - Edges of Empire: The Sasanian Frontiers

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

For centuries, arguably the greatest external threat the Roman Empire faced came from the East. From the Sasanian Persian Empire. With its nucleus situated in Iran, at its height the Sasanian Empire was one of antiquity’s most formidable kingdoms, controlling lands that stretched from the Hindu Kush to the River Euphrates. Like the Romans, the Sasanians had to deal with various potential threats. From the north, from the lands of the steppe east and west of the Caspian Sea, nomadic peoples such as the Huns would become renowned for descending on Roman and Sasanian territories and wreaking havoc. And so, on the edges of their empire, the Sasanians constructed frontiers of various forms. For military purposes, yes. But also for economic and political purposes as will be explained.In this podcast, we’re going to look at some of these Sasanian frontiers. From a dominating fort a ‘top an alpine gorge in the Caucusus to a barrier that makes Hadrian’s Wall pale in comparison. To talk through this incredible topic, I was delighted to be joined by Dr Eve MacDonald from the University of Cardiff. Alongside her research on the Sasanian Empire and its frontiers, Eve has also done work surrounding the ancient history of Carthage and of North Africa. She is the author of ‘Hannibal: A Hellenistic Life’.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's The Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast, we are going to be focusing on some remarkable frontiers

of one of the great empires of antiquity. Not the Roman Empire, not one of those remarkable successor empires that emerge in the aftermath of Alexander the Great's death, if I don't say so myself, we're going to be looking at a Persian empire, the Sasanian Empire. And in particular, we're going to be focusing on Sasanian frontiers to the north, because we have surviving some remarkable archaeology, from the Caucasus, one of the highest gorges in the Caucasus, to across the Caspian Sea,

to a wall which makes Hadrian's Wall pale in comparison. It was called the Great Wall of Gorgon. Absolutely astonishing. These were huge, formidable structures. And joining me to talk through why they were constructed, what their purpose was and how they were built, I was delighted to get on the show Dr Eve MacDonald. Eve is a professor at the University of Cardiff. She's done a lot of work on Hannibal, on Carthage. She's done a lot of work looking at the life of Hannibal and his origins but she's also done a lot of work on Sasanian frontiers and on the Sasanian empire in general. It was great to get her on the show to talk about this topic. She's a fantastic speaker and without further ado, here's Eve. Eve, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. You're welcome, a pleasure to be here.

Now I'm very excited about this one because we're talking about edges of empire. And in particular, we're talking about some extraordinary material frontiers belonging to one of the greatest ancient empires of Asia. Yes, the Sasanians. Well, the Sasanians. Eve, who were the Sasanians to kick us all off? So to understand the Sasanians, it's probably best to think about them as the last of the pre-Islamic empires of Iran. They come to power, they come to rule this area that we consider to be the Iranian Persian Empire in the 3rd century AD, and they succeed the Parthian Empire. So the name Sassanian, or sometimes they're called Sassanid, you'll see both, comes from the dynasty that ruled,

and this is the House of Sassan, you might call them, and they were originally vassal kings of the Parthian Empire, and they overthrew the Parthians in the early mid-third century AD, so 224 AD. And then they create an empire that lasts until the mid-seventh century, until 651 AD. So they carve their power out of this traditional empire that had existed for many hundreds of years, going back to the Achaemenid Empire of Xerxes and Darius. And this is a really long lasting empire. And from what you're saying, obviously, it's centered in Iran, but its frontiers are hundreds and hundreds of miles away from its nucleus. Yes. So this empire of the Sasanians was a massive geopolitical entity.

That's the best way to think about it. Rules an empire that stretches in the east from the Oxus and sometimes even the Indus rivers to the west. The Euphrates is the traditional boundaries. In the north, the Caucasus, the high Caucasus mountains, and in the south, the Arabian Peninsula. So they rule more or less over this area. And they rule from the 3rd century until the 7th century. So it's not a static time, nor is it a static geographical region. It changes, it shifts and flows. But in the 5th and 6th century AD, after a fair bit of political and military upheaval in the Sasanian

Empire, they start to invest in a sort of heavily developed frontier infrastructure. And this really has left us with quite an amazing archaeological record on these frontiers. But it's important that we think about these not just like as frontiers, as barriers, as walls, but as places of dialogue, as places of cross-cultural influence, of connectivity. It's a place where cultures met, but also, of course, a place of conflict as well. Let's have a look at some of these remarkable frontiers. And the first one I'd really like to have a look at, I know you've done quite a bit of work on it. And I hesitate to say the name because I know

there's debate around it. The Caspian Gates. Eve, where roughly are we talking about with the Caspian Gates? Now, the original name that you use, the Caspian Gates, of course, actually refers to a mountain pass, which is in Iran. But what we're talking about today, the Caspian Gates, gets conflated by Greco-Roman historians with a mountain pass in the High Caucasus Mountains, which we today call the Daryali Gorge. Now, sometimes you see these referred to as the Caucasian Gates, but these gates, as we refer to them, is actually a narrow mountain pass that runs along the River Turgi, which is in the modern country of Georgia and in Russia. And this is one of the major

north-south passages through the High Caucasus Mountains. And so it's up there in the high Caucasus with this incredible high alpine topography. I mean, it's a gorgeous landscape. And the nearest marker is this incredible mountain, Mount Kazbegi, which is over 5,000 meters high. And today, the gorge is actually, a road runs through it. It's called the Georgian Military Highway. It was built when the Russians ruled Georgia. And it is, the gorge itself and the border between the two countries lies right in the middle there between this gorge. It's as strategic today as it was in the ancient world, which is so interesting.

So yes, it's quite a cool place. Absolutely. And I must admit, Eve, just from what you were saying there, with how high this mountain range is, it makes perhaps the more famous parts of Thermopylae for people like me sound like kids play compared to this mountain pass separating what is now modern Georgia and Russia. Absolutely. And it's so extreme. I think doing a high alpine archaeology was a revelation for all of us who first went there. But the climate and the landscape is rugged and just magnificently beautiful. I mean, it's absolutely stunning place to go. But when you think about what it must have been like to be stationed there as an ancient soldier, it really does boggle your mind when you think

about the snow, the landslides, this wild river that floods regularly, even still, and destroys the road because of a big glacier up on Mount Kazbegi. It's just incredible. Now, we'll get definitely onto the Sasanians guarding this frontier in a bit, but just before, and you've mentioned it there, Eve, before the Sassanians arrive here, this gorge, we hear about it, it's almost slightly legendary in the accounts of the ancient Greeks and the Romans. Yeah, it's really one of those places that is lodged deeply in the psyche of the Greeks, of the Romans, but the Persians as well in their legends and in their stories. And it was really considered the very fringes of the civilized world by all these cultures that inhabited what they considered to be the civilized world. And it's related to all kinds of different myths and

legends in Persian and Greek traditions. So for example, in one of the great Persian stories is Spandiar, who is a Persian prince, supposedly built a fort at this place. And this is told by the 10th century Arabic historian al-Masudi. But also the Greek stories of Amazon queens living there are really important. And if you think about the myth of Prometheus, One of the very foundation myths of the Greeks is connected to the high Caucasus as well. So they're really connected. And the stories of the gates really become conflated with legend and romantic traditions that grow up in the aftermath of Alexander the Great. So when Alexander destroys the Persian Empire, although Alexander never gets anywhere near these gates itself, we have in like 5th century AD Christian Syriac traditions, Alexander building a fort at these gates to protect the world. Georgian medieval tradition. It's a very important place for identity in modern Georgian and in medieval Georgian culture. So their king, Mervan, who was a king in the second century BC,

reportedly built a mortared wall across the path, built these gates as well. And there's all kinds of other stories. Anyone who's ever been near it has a little bit of a story, really, about the gates. And you can imagine, again, as of a story, really, about the gates. And you can imagine, again, as I was trying to describe, because the landscape is so enormous, I think that it really was somewhere that captured the imagination of the almost supernatural location of it. the world as it were, because Eve, why this location? What in ancient history was this gorge, this mountain range, separating, let's say, the cultures further south from those cultures, those rather nomadic cultures further north? Well, the gorge itself is today called the Daryali Gorge. And the Daryali Gorge is a word that means in the Iranian languages, the gate of the Alans. And that's probably the most accurate description of the place, actually, because

it was the pass, this area, through which the Alans who live north of the Caucasus would come through into the southern parts of the Caucasus, which are more connected to what, as I was talking about, the more imperial and more quote-unquote civilized regions of Greco-Roman traditions and of Persian tradition. And so these gates turn up in the Roman Empire in the first century, really, BC, when the Romans start to conquer into the Middle East and into the regions of Armenia. As the Romans start to take away and conquer into the traditional lands of the Parthians, these gates become a place of dialogue between the two bigger empires. And the people who live beyond the gates, these Alans,

almost become pawns in the conflict and the cooperation between these two powers. So the Alans are used as soldiers by the Parthians and the Romans against their enemies. So they're used as auxiliary troops, you might want to call them, and they fight for one side or the other. But it's also a place of, as all frontiers, of connectivity, of an exchange, of the development as well. So there's not just one thing going on, but this idea of the Alans and other peoples, other famous nomadic peoples, of myth and legend, Scythians, all these other people who live north in that area of the Asian steppes are sort of connected to this passageway. So when you get these ideas of building a barrier to keep out the nomads, it's that kind of concept, those sorts of people that are being kept out. Yes, Eve, from exactly what you're saying, particularly like the military focus of this frontier, but as you say, it's not just that. Is it also the importance of controlling

this gorge, whether it's the Romans or the Parthians or the Sassanians, it's also maybe, as we see on Hadrian's Wall, to manage traffic going north and south. Could that be possible too? Yes, definitely. There's no question that it's a landscape of control rather than a landscape just of keeping anyone out or of a barrier itself. It's really about being able to control who comes and goes. But also there's financial aspects to all that as well, to control trade and traffic through these areas as well is hugely beneficial to the people who do that. You can tax goods coming in and out. It is a place where, and you have lots of things moving north, you have markets up there, people might want to buy the goods that are from the south. So it is a place of both economic and social dialogue,

and the construction around that too. Economic and social importance too. Let's get back to the Sasanians then, Eve. When do we start seeing the Sasanians establishing themselves at this frontier? So yeah, there's lots of rumours and bits and pieces of evidence that come from some earlier pre-Sasanian sources about different buildings being built at the Darialli Gorge. And we have famously the Roman author Pliny in the first century AD tells us that, and I'm going to describe this in the words Pliny uses because it's so great. Pliny tells us this place of wonder in the landscape where there was an enormous natural monument, where there's a natural break in the mountains and where the gates, which are made of iron-covered timbers, have been installed,

and underneath them flows a rapid river. So we know Romans start to engage in this landscape in the first and second century, as I said, when they start to involve themselves militarily in areas that would be traditionally Parthian or Persian imperial zones. And then the very first evidence that we have of the Sassanians claiming control over this landscape comes from one of the very earliest of the Sassanian kings. And the Sassanian king Shapur I, who ruled from 240 to 278 AD, he was the second Sassanian king. He has this amazing monument and inscription at a place called Naqsh-e-Rustam, which is in the very heartland of Persia, of the traditional Persian homelands of the Sasanians, not far from the famous site of Persepolis in Iran. And this is an inscription that is long,

and it talks all about the deeds that Shapur did during his reign while he was the king of kings. And he did lots of great things, of course. He defeated and captured Roman emperors. He conquered big swaths of land for the Sasanian empire. He ruled for 30 years. He was really important in this idea of an establishment of legitimacy for the Sasanians. And so he wrote an inscription telling us all about what he did. And in that inscription, he says it, and the words are important here because it says that he possesses the lands of Persia, of Parthia, of all these different regions. He includes in that list Armenia. And he says that his lands go all the way up to the Caucasus Mountains and the gates of the Alans. So these gates, this place, this exact location is specifically mentioned by the second Sasanian king in the third century AD. So it's obviously somewhere which is very much in the psyche of an imperial construction. Now whether or not in the third century the Sasanians are actually there,

we don't really have any evidence for. But certainly in their minds, they are there. Yeah, it does really seem like a really important landmark to advertise you have control over, and it seems similar to, for instance, the Pillars of Hercules in the West, people saying, I've got control over this distant part of the land too. And it seems the Gate of the Allens is in a very similar mindset. Absolutely. I think because it had become very important in the second century AD, because as you know, the whole story of Trajan's conquests into the Parthian Empire, and Trajan, of course, conquers all the way across the Parthian Empire and all through this region.

And this is a hugely tumultuous time in the period. And the Parthians lose control bit by bit over the second century of a lot of their empire and are severely weakened by Roman incursions. So part of the Sasanian legitimacy is to prove that they are in control of this old empire. They do own the land. It is they who can control this landscape. And that's really important in the face of the Roman Empire. And of course, Shapur not only says he controls all these lands, but he also articulates his military defeats of Roman emperors as well.

So you can see there's a little bit of a propaganda game going on here. He's really trying to convince not just that he's the king of kings, but that he is absolutely in control. Definitely. One can really emphasise that strategic and political importance of holding this particular frontier, especially. Well, let's go on to the archaeology found at this gorge that the team that you've been working with have discovered some remarkable stuff from the Sassanian period. Eve, what have you discovered? It's very exciting. Well, so the fort sits above, like literally right above the Georgian-Russian border, like the building that you have to pass through to cross the border. And you stand there and you look up across the river and you see these medieval walls that reflect this really

long use of the fort over 2,000 years. So we have evidence of and found evidence of Second World War bunkers, a dense medieval occupation. And it's deeply connected to this idea of a Georgian national identity in the medieval period. The fort is sometimes referred to as Queen Tamara's Fort, and she was this famous, important 12th, 13th century queen of Georgia. And so we have a big, dense medieval occupation. And then we also have even older walls

that are made of a mortared construction that date back to the 5th century AD. And that is about as early as our evidence takes us. Although there may very well have been buildings on the same place at an earlier date, but because it gets a little technical, but because of the way the buildings are constructed, because of the landscape, is that these stone walls are sat right on top of the bedrock. And so the bedrock has been cleaned all the way back in order to establish these walls. And so because of that, any earlier occupation than these mortared walls built in the 5th century AD would have probably been swept away off of this rock and lie under meters and

meters and meters of rock fallen. So because of the landscape itself, it's very difficult to know if there were other structures earlier than that. But 5th century AD is what we have, and that works really well with the Sasanian period influence. And is there any big events that occur around that time, Eve, that might possibly suggest why there is such a heavy investment in this frontier by the Sasanians? I think you know what I'm getting at, at that time. Yes. So in the 5th century AD, it's a pretty tumultuous period along all of the northern frontiers of the Sasanian Empire and into the late Roman Empire as well. And what happens in this period is the arrival of the Huns on the scene. Now, the Huns seem to arrive in the 4th century.

The invasions of the Sassanian territory of what we call the Hefeleite Huns or the White Huns takes place in the 5th century. And I just want to actually say one thing here to rephrase a really great scholar of this period, whose name is Khudad Rezekani, is that the Hefeleit Huns and the Huns in general are more famous than known about. So one of the problems

we have with what's actually happening out there is we really have so little information about the Huns, about who they were, about what was happening north of the frontiers. And it's really in this period that we get a picture of some of the things that are happening. But the Huns arrived, they caused a whole lot of havoc, and then they seem to just melt away. And that's one of the driving factors, we think, for the construction of the fort that we've been excavating at the Daryali Gorge, is the arrival of the Huns into the Sasanian Empire and the havoc that they wreaked. But yeah, there's a lot of other stuff going on there behind the scenes that we don't really have a good picture of. That's remarkable though, if it is possibly linked to that. I mean,

it's an extraordinary part, a horrible part of ancient history with all of that. now we've been talking a lot about this particular frontier in the Caucasus, but Eve, these weren't the only Sasanian fortifications that we can see in this part of the world. We also see some staggering ones, particularly further east near the Caspian Sea. Yes, so there's a couple of different frontier walls built across the west of the Caspian and also on the east of the Caspian. The ones in the west, most spectacularly, if you ever have a chance to look it up, is the wall of the fort of Darband, which is on the west coast of the Caspian Sea. And today it's in Dagestan, which is a territory of Russia. And it would have been in what was the ancient area of the Albanians, as we call it, not to be confused with the modern Albanians that we know of in the Mediterranean.

And it's a magnificent site. Absolutely amazing. The walls, it has walls running from the sea straight up the hillside that encompass really the town at the moment and encircle it. But what we have there is evidence from two inscriptions, which is amazing. So we have two Middle Persian, which is the language of the Sasanian Empire, inscriptions from the 6th century AD that are the northernmost evidence for Middle Persian writing, actually. So it's very cool that part of the walls of this site where we know were constructed or at least occupied and claimed again by the Sasanians. But the fortress itself

and the location is very, very old. It's obviously very strategic as well. It goes back, the excavations were done there in the 1980s by various Russian archaeologists and dates go back into the Scythian times. So there's a lot of occupation. It was a strategic point that guarded the coastal plain, north and south, and also then the Caspian Sea as well, which is a really important sea of communication and contact in the ancient world. But yes, it was very much likely part of this idea of the Sassanian development of their northern frontiers. It would be included. And there's another wall, which I'm going to butcher the pronunciation of, the Gilchai Wall, which is a little bit south of that, which is also dated to this period and key to the story too.

And from what you're saying there, Eve, so this wall, and I've had a look online at those Google images of that fortress, the fortifications that survive, they are absolutely staggering. Do any of them, or do all of them, date back to the Sasanian period? So our evidence for some of the walls at the Daryali Gorge certainly date back to the Sasanian period. The fort itself at Daryali, up in the Caucasus, was a really traditional fort with a casemate structure all around it. So its walls are built of mortared stone, and our walls, our oldest walls, are mortared stone walls. So we know that from this period, there's a lot of investment in the 5th century in the construction of very substantial walls, many of which have lasted to what stands today. But of course,

they were used and reused and reoccupied, same in Darbent and all these places. So there's just layers upon layers upon layers of different constructions and fixing and reconstructions. But the very foundations of a lot of these walls are from the Sassanian period. Remarkable. And also, just before we go on, does this really emphasise if they had this fortification between the Caspian and the start of these remarkably high mountains, the importance to the Sasanians of protecting this northern border from not just the threats from further north, but also from controlling traffic coming from further north? Yes, definitely. And I think that one of the things it's hard to get a picture of certainly would have been one of the most important agricultural areas of the ancient Persian Empire. So the Sasanians have a very important vested interest in protecting this landscape. It was heavily urbanized and today even you just it's amazingly lush and everything grows there from, there's rice paddies and fruit orchards, there's grain growing.

It's incredible. So this was really important and very settled and developed part of the Sasanian Empire. And it wasn't some faraway outskirts all around the Caspian. So this is really key. And so I, the assumption is this, that the Sasanians are building in order to protect this really key part of their landscape. That's astonishing. And it seems to continue if we then go east to the other side of the Caspian Sea with this extraordinary frontier that, Eve, I'm sure you're going to tell us all about now. It makes Hadrian's Wall look tiny. Exactly. It's amazing. So this place is called the Great Wall of Gorgon today is one

place. And it ran almost 200 kilometers along the Gorgon Plain, as it's called, from the Caspian Sea towards the east to the Pishkumar Mountains. And at its height, we think it stood about nine meters high, and it was constructed of fired brick, which gives it another modern name you'll see, which is the red snake. And the reason it's called the red snake is you can see it from the air, you can see it from satellite. One of the great pieces of evidence for this wall are the 1960s Corona spy satellites that the American CIA took along this, again, buffer zone. When you think about that northeastern part of Iran, it was very much the frontier in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and Iran as well. And so this area has been explored through satellite imagery and through aerial photography. So you get this name, the Red Stake. Anyway, it was an amazing structure. It's huge. It was a line of the wall.

It had towers, over 30 associated forts that span across the whole of the Gorgon plain. And it's occupied, we think, for several hundred years by tens of thousands of soldiers. And the work that's been done there, that's by Professor Eberhard Sauer at the University of Edinburgh, has been the driving force between the excavations at all these different sites. It has really profoundly shifted

our idea of the Sasanian empire, of Sasanian military capacity, of infrastructural investment. Because if you think about one fort in one strategic mountain pass, that's one thing. But this is a massive investment in a whole landscape. So it's not just a wall. And it's not just the forts on the wall and the tens of thousands of soldiers that would have manned these forts on the walls. And we have barracks and stuff so we can make calculations around the numbers. but there's this incredible sort of landscape development as well there's a whole

canal system so there's irrigation and there's urbanization happening in behind the wall as well that is all part of a much bigger as you've I think we've both been saying this idea that these frontiers are not just places of conflict and barrier, but they're also places of communication, of trade, of development. So it's a really fascinating place to try to get a sense of the Sasanian empire and its capabilities almost in the fifth and sixth centuries when this wall was built. I'm astonished that people don't know more about this. This is absolutely extraordinary. built. I'm astonished that people don't know more about this. This is absolutely extraordinary. And Eve, it's really interesting what you're saying. And I'm going back to the Hadrian's Wall because it's something that I obviously have visited a few times. It's very interesting to me because you mentioned, I said, all these forts, the turrets, but also the logistics behind the

construction of the fortifications as well with the urban settlements. I'm guessing there are roads, but also with the water and everything. It sounds so similar in so many ways, but Master Said also really emphasises how brilliant these Sasanians were at constructing these remarkable material frontier lines. Yes, and you know, one of the things that we always find difficult to make the comparison between places in the ancient Iranian empires and in the Roman empires or the Greek empires is the manufacturing of buildings and the construction of buildings in mud brick or fired brick which are not as durable of course as the constructions in stone and so therefore you don't always have the same levels of preservation and it's very difficult to get

a kind of comparative look at organization because of that. But the wall at Gorgon, the Great Wall of the Sasanians, was built of fired brick, and that fired brick meant as well. So in a world of mud brick, the fired brick meant that every couple of hundred meters, there are massive kiln structures as well that were built all the way along as it was being constructed to supply the fired bricks for the wall. So yes, the industrial infrastructure that would have been needed to build this thing was just incredible. As, of course, Hadrian's Wall, I think, is a perfect comparison in so many ways. It's an interesting comparison because Hadrian's Wall was very much a place of dialogue and very much a place in which, you know, how much control it actually

had over the landscape is something that's always debated and discussed. And so I think that's really true. It's a moment, but it lasts for so long. And its memory on the landscape, I think, is so interesting. I recently did some work on the memory of the Gorgan Wall and in this landscape of eastern Iran, which becomes really important in the early medieval period in the, what's called Khorasan, the Khorasan province, this whole region, which has got these great cities and its place of development of culture in the Arab world. and the Khorosani soldiers who fight for the caliphate are really famous. And these cities are so vibrant, Nishapur and Georgian and Balkh, Merv, all the way through until the Mongols, really, until the 13th, 12th, 13th century. So this

orientation of the Sasanian Empire in this period of the 5th and the 6th century in this region isn't just about defence. It's very much about power shifting, perhaps a little bit to the east as well. So that's a really interesting thing, the way we see infrastructure in empires and how it reflects what's going on maybe behind the narratives that we get from our sources. Absolutely astonishing. I love that you mentioned Balch there and ancient Bactria and how important it could have been for the Sassanians because obviously it was this immensely wealthy province, wasn't it, with the Silk Roads and everything. But Eve, for all you've been saying,

these remarkable frontiers in the north of what was the Sassanian Empire, does it seem to emphasise that, I know perhaps the power's going further east, but don't quote me on this, the Sassanians perhaps see the Romans to the west as more of a nuisance, but the real threat was perhaps those further north and it was protecting these eastern lands from possibly being taken over. That's a really interesting point and it actually touches on something that's

really important, is that in this period of the later Roman Empire and what we would call the Byzantine Empire, certainly in the 6th century, for example, when you have the Emperor Justinian and Constantinople and you have the Emperor Khosrow I in Ctesiphon and some of the Sassanian capitals, they see each other as equals. They see each other as this wonderful book by Matthew Canepa, it's called Two Eyes of the Earth, that there's a balance between these two great powers. And the other parts of the empire in which they have to engage with kingdoms and things like that are relatively important to the empires themselves. But it's they at times fight, of course, the Romans and the Sasanians do, but at other times they're at peace. Sometimes they come together. For example, like with the Darialli Gorge, we know that the Emperor Justinian pays the Sasanian king

a huge amount of gold in order to help supply and man the fort at the Caspian-Caucasian gates. It's sort of a joint effort to defend their lands against the Huns. So it's a really complicated and much more equal relationship in the borderlands between the Romans and the Sasanians that it is in these regions where you seem to have one large power and then a lot of negotiation with smaller kingdoms and nomadic peoples and people like the Kushans, you know, the inheritors of the Bactrian lands and the Sogdians and all these really important people in Central Asia are all part of the dialogue in which the Sasanian kings are having over their lands and their frontiers. Once again, this is really interesting and I've got to draw

a comparison with Hadrian's world or the Limes in Germania how the people who perhaps in the nearby vicinity there is no other great empire in that part of the world and they have these remarkable fortifications there against these places where there isn't any other great empire but on the frontier where there is this other great empire with the Sassanians and the Romans round about the Euphrates you have a very different looking frontier. Absolutely and fact, would we even call it a frontier? It's a river. And it's really interesting because it's much more than a frontier. It's densely populated, of course, this borderlands between these two powers. And it is truly a place of dialogue and shared cultural values. But I think what's important is that it's dialogue and shared cultural values coming from that region. And the Sasanians and the Romans take culture from these

places rather than bring it into this incredibly old and deeply important part of the development of civilizations everywhere in the world, of course. So it's really interesting to think about the Euphrates as a border, because it is at times a very important place in which there are forts built along, and there's different forts all up and down the region. But it's also such an important place for cities and identities in the zone itself. And I think that's really key, because that certainly, I think, leads us right into things like the Arabs and the development of an Arab identity and the way that cultures sort of articulate themselves in the face of bigger influences on either side. a more important conduit of ideals and identities, is there really? And the fact that it is right in the middle between these two big powers as well only accentuates it.

It's absolutely astonishing. You mentioned the Arabs. So correct me if I'm wrong, but the Sasanians that eventually overthrown from Arabia, is that correct, Eve? Yes. So the whole of the Middle East, of course, and all of North Africa eventually in the 7th century fall to the armies of what we call the Rashidun Caliphate, the rightly guided, who are the successors to the Prophet Muhammad. And the people of the Arabian Peninsula in sort of any time from, say, the 1, second century AD all the way through until their political and religious unification in the seventh century are a really important part of the dialogue, again, between the greater powers.

And we see them fighting, like in the north, we see Arab groups fighting for Romans against Sasanians and Sasanians against Romans. We have with the Sasanians and certainly in the Iranian memory a very wonderfully complicated and long history and memory of the Arab people in their dialogue. So one of the Sasanian kings known as Baramgur, he's always depicted on the camel because he was brought up in the Arabian Peninsula. And we know the Sasanians at various times tried to control directly in a hard power way, or at least our sources tell us

that, or perhaps they negotiated in a soft power way with vassal kings in the Arabian Peninsula throughout their whole history. Then in the 6th and 7th century, there's a sea change with a much more, seems to be harder power of the Sasanians, like we see all around their frontiers. And as the Sasanians seem to impose more power in the Arabian Peninsula, we have a reciprocal political and religious unification and the rise of Islam and then the development of a completely unique culture that eventually, through its amazing military prowess in the 7th century, defeats the Byzantines and the Sasanians successively and takes over the whole of the Sasanian Empire.

But it's a complicated process and it's a really interesting discussion to have. But one of the things you might be interested in this, I was just reading some stuff around this. And when some people trace this back in some ways all the way to Zenobia, which is an Arab empire in many ways in the third century A.D. That is in dialogue with the Sasanians and the Romans and the really important of Palmyra as a place of identity, too. Romans and the really important of Palmyra as a place of identity too and you see this kind of indigenous identities developing in the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh centuries so lots of really cool stuff there. Very cool indeed yes Anubia a remarkable figure from that period I mean Eve I guess around that area something I'm just quite keen to ask just before we wrap this all up is that we've talked about the frontiers in the north and all the way to Bactria we talked about its links with Rome on

the Euphrates I was just interested because of that link with the end of the Sasanian empire from Arabia I mean do we have any idea at all about Sasanian frontiers on the southwest in that part of the world in the Arabian peninsula yes Yes, well not so a couple of things. One is that just not far from the Euphrates just to the west and the south is a structure that's known as the Kandak Shapur, supposedly a ditch. It's a very not fully explored monument just at the moment but there was a ditch that is reportedly built by the Sassanian Shapur II. And along this region, that was to the west of one of the most important cities in the Sasanian Empire, their winter capital, Ctesiphon, and the sort of tribes of the Arabian Peninsula. But it's very, very close contact when you think

about it. If you think about Baghdad and the Tigris and the Euphrates, I mean, Katisifon is only 20 kilometers south of Baghdad. So this area geographically is very close. And the Arabs are an integral part of the infrastructure of life there. I mean, there's communities of all different kinds of people living in the Sasanian city of Katisifon. There's Christian communities, Jewish communities, Orastrian communities. There's Arabs, there's Greeks, there's Latin speakers. There's everybody there in this environment, in this thriving city in the late antique period. And so we know that in the 4th century,

this king, Shapur, digs a ditch. We don't know if the ditch is an irrigation project, if it's a defensive project. It's characterized as a defensive project, but there's a fair bit of really interesting work being done by Iraqis right now on this. So there'll be some interesting stuff hopefully coming, more clear articulation about what it actually was. So that's one of the areas where there is some development. But the Arabian Peninsula was fundamental, of course, to Indian Ocean trade, to the trade in the spice routes, all that.

So there was a great deal of motivation to make sure that things worked as they always had. And when perhaps things don't work for the Sasanians or the Romans, you see this imposition of more of hard power. So we have some interesting evidence, but it's still in its developmental stages, I guess. Wow, fantastic. On the bright side, that's very exciting then for the future and future projects on that. Eve, we've talked about all these frontiers. Are there any other frontiers of the Sasanian Empire

that are particularly interesting to you that you'd like to mention just before we finish? Well, the one thing that is connected to that is a project that we're just working on is the little fort in Oman, just 15 kilometres inland. And the reason it's so interesting, this fort was found by accident. And it's a fort, it's a perfectly square, small, little, like a fortlet rather than a fort, just by itself in this landscape. And we've excavated enough to have dated it to the Sasanian period. There's enough material culture there to give us an idea

that this was very much like they constructed in the Sasanian period. And it is then taken over in the developments that we see with the rise of Islam and this identity for Arab peoples in the period. It's all connected to that. But what we don't know is where are the other forts? There's one fort along the coast of Oman. And you can imagine why the Sasanians would have built it because to control the Indian Ocean trade is really, really important. But we don't have any evidence for any other forts. And that's something that I'd really like to do more work on with satellite imagery and to try and get an idea is this a line of forts

is this another frontier that we have no evidence for other than this one fort or is it just a mistake did the Sasanians mess up did they build this one little fort and think oh no we have to leave we don't know yet so that's something that I think is really intriguing and I'd like to know more about because it's on the Batinah plain, which is north of Muscat, near the city of Sohar in Oman. And that is one of the few really fertile areas of the Arabian Peninsula. So it's again, a strategically important spot. Copper comes down from the mountains, trade comes from India, along the coast. There's all kinds of things, but where are the other forts? So that's my curiosity for the future. Very intriguing indeed. Eve, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. And I just want to mention just briefly Professor Sauer, because he really is the heartbeat behind all these projects. And a lot of the work was done in Georgia with a group from Tbilisi State University, colleagues there, and all of it was funded by the European Research Council. So I just want to make all those things clear. Well, fantastic. I've got plans to get some of them on as well for even more amazing information from this part of the ancient world.

And once again, Eve, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you.