Touraj Daryaee

The Persian Gulf in Late Antiquity

The following article discusses the importance of the province of Fars/Persis as an important province and the Persian Gulf as an important entrepôt. The essay seeks to demonstrate that because of the Perso-Byzantine rivalry the amount of trade on the silk roads was reduced and consequently the amount of sea trade via the Persian Gulf was increased by the fifth and sixth centuries C.E. The campaign for controlling trade in silk and spices was taken to the seas, and Persian colonies were established as far away as Sri Lanka. Administrative seals and Sasanian silver coins also indicated a lively exchange of commodities and the presence of Persians in East Asia.

Bazaars, Merchants, and Trade in Late Antique Iran

This essay discusses the formation of an economy in late antiquity with the coming of the Sassanian Empire in 224 CE. Local, imperial, regional, and international trade and the role of the state and traders and their relation with one another are previewed. Based on surviving evidence, one can see that a vibrant bazaar economy had developed in cities, protected by the imperial government and at times through the resettlement of populations from outside of the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia. These local economies in turn created an imperial network by the Sassanians but acted autonomously. Trade networks were mainly developed based on religious affiliation, and they created connections throughout Asia to control commodities such as silk and other precious goods. Through Sassanian protection (224–651 CE) of trade, their Byzantine rivals were unable to gain an economic foothold in Asia. In the international trade provided by the Silk Road and the sea route, China and India became important centers of production, while the Iranians, such as the Sogdians, Bactrians and Persians, acted as traders and intermediaries in the Eurasian trade. These structures created in late antiquity by the Sassanian Empire in Asia were inherited by the Muslims in the seventh century CE and were continued and expanded.

The Study of Ancient Iran in the Twentieth Century

The following article discusses the development of ancient Iranian studies, namely the important philological, archaeological, religious, and historical discoveries in the twentieth century and how they have changed our views of ancient Iran and its impact on modern Iranian identity. The essay also previews the use and abuse of ancient Iranian studies by the state and their focus on the newly discovered Achaemenid Empire at the cost of Arsacid and Sasanian dynasties.

The Persian Gulf in Late Antiquity: The Sasanian Era (200–700 c.e.)

The evidence of the history of the Persian Gulf in the pre-Islamic period is steadily growing. This is important because in comparison with the Mediterranean1 and the Black Sea,2 information on the Gulf is rather meager.3 This chapter does not attempt to provide a complete history of events, but rather focuses on the region’s slow cyclical rhythms with a four-hundred-year perspective. The Parthian Empire (247 b.c.e.–224 c.e.), which ruled the Near East in antiquity, had benefited from the Silk Road trade, which was not only land-based but also a sea trading route. The Parthians ruled in what may be called a feudal system, in which the local kingdoms along the Persian Gulf, in both the northern and southern region, were semi-independent. We know, for example, of a king or local ruler named Sanatruq who ruled over Bahrain.4 His name suggests that the ruler was Parthian, so we may surmise that he was installed by the Parthian king of kings. We also come across the title of Arabczrch. The Arabarch was a high official in the Parthian period who appears to have patrolled the desert area where the Arabs lived.5 Thus, the Parthians were certainly aware of the importance of their southern provinces and concerned with their control.

Mind, body, and the cosmos: chess and backgammon in ancient Persia

BOARD GAMES WERE PLAYED IN MANY PARTS OF THE ANCIENT WORLD AND SO IT is very difficult to attribute the origin of any board game to a particular region or culture. Board games have been found in ancient Mesopotamia, the oldest from the city of Ur, but one must also mention the game of Senet in ancient Egypt. Often board games were placed in the tombs of the pharaohs and sometimes the dead are shown playing with the gods, for example one scene shows Rameses III (c. 1270 B.C.) playing with Isis to gain access to the nether world. The importance of this image lies in the depiction of the cosmological and religious significance that ancient peoples attributed to board games—they were not just games played for pleasure. Reference to board games in Persia can be found as early as the Achaemenid period, where, according to Plutarch, Artaxerxes

The Limits of Sasanian History: Between Iranian, Islamic and Late Antique Studies

This essay discusses the position of Sasanian Studies from its inception in the late nineteenth century, to its reinvigoration at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The work also discusses the development of the field of Sasanian history and civilization vis-à-vis the three fields of Iranian, Islamic and Late Antique Studies. It is posited that Sasanians have benefited from cross-disciplinary and new historical frameworks that go beyond the traditional field of Iranian Studies, which was never as interested in the history of the period.

Michael Morony, An Academic Biography

A volume of articles in honor of Michael G. Morony, focusing on Sasanian history, might appear a strange way to pay tribute to an eminent historian of the early Islamic period. Michael Morony is known as a prominent social and economic historian of Iraq and Syria in the seventh‒ninth centuries, with special focus on issues relating to land acquisition and use, taxation, agricultural policies, and related administration. His book Iraq After the Muslim Conquest is the definitive work on the subject, providing a thorough assessment of all of the above issues, as well as matters of the administration of religious communities in the Sasanian province of Iraq. Other than providing a rich source of information about the situation in Iraq during the seventh and eighth centuries, the book also offers many methodological avenues through which one can study similar phenomena and institutions in other parts of the Islamic world. His other works, including his articles on conversion to Islam in the early centuries or his studies of land acquisition and exploitation, also firmly place him in the early Islamic period. However, for the editors and author of the present festschrift, Michael Morony is also a prominent historian of the Sasanian period. This is mostly because he has been among the most active scholars of late antiquity in the lands east of Byzantium. Late antiquity, the period of history marking the gradual change from “Classical” antiquity to the “Middle Ages” is slowly being accepted as a periodization of the history of the regions outside the western Roman Empire. While in Byzantium it has now become the accepted form of periodization, marking the history of Eastern Europe, Syria, and Egypt from the third to the sixth/seventh centuries, in the regions further to the east the process has been slower. Dominated by the established notions of pre-Islamic and Islamic periods as two separate entities, divided by an unfordable gap caused by the “Islamic conquests,” late antiquity is occasionally deemed unsuitable for the history of the world outside the Roman Empire. Despite the insistence of Peter Brown, the father of the concept of late antiquity in the Anglophone world, that the Sasanian Empire should be studied within the same framework,

Persianate Contribution to the Study of Antiquity: E'temad Al-Saltaneh's Nativisation of the Qajars

Abstract This essay discusses the contribution of the Iranians to the understanding of their own past and how the Qajars attempted to place themselves within the ancient history of their realm. The first Iranian archaeological excavations and study of monuments and history are analysed and it is concluded that the choice of the Arsacid empire as an ancestor of the Qajars was part of their efforts to become nativised and connected with Irans distant past.

Marriage, Property and Conversion among the Zoroastrians: From Late Sasanian to Islamic Iran*

AbstractThis essay discusses the impact of xwēdōdah or consanguine marriages, sanctioned by the Zoroastrian tradition on the population during a time of religious dialogue, and proselytizing in Ērānsahr (600-800 CE). I believe that advocacy for such a type of marriage was intensified in particular periods in Iranian history, namely the third century, when the Manichaeans challenged Zoroastrianism; and more importantly in the 6th century when Christianity became a major threat; and finally in the eighth and the ninth centuries when state support for Zoroastrianism had collapsed and the Muslims were gaining numbers and becoming the new elite. It is asserted here that xwēdōdah had a practical purpose, which was to keep wealth within the family and the community at a time when conversion threatened the survival of Zoroastrianism.

Food, Purity and Pollution: Zoroastrian Views on the Eating Habits of Others

This article discusses the use of food as a mode of differentiation and identification according to Zoroastrian Middle Persian and Persian texts of the late antique period. In these texts, the list of foods consumed by Arabs and Indians are juxtaposed with that of the Iranian diet, and each group is given anthropological treatment. The article contends that the Zoroastrian dietary law, based on the Middle Persian texts, provides a mode of purity and impurity vis-à-vis others. Finally, the article touches upon the idea of moderation and the consumption of wine as dealt with in some Middle Persian sources.