Sasanian Iran and the Early Arab Conquests

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 54 (2011) 528-536 brill.nl/jesh Sasanian Iran and the Early Arab Conquests David Morgan* Touraj DARYAEE, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. Inter- national Library of Iranian Studies. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009. xxii + 225 pp. ISBN: 978-1-85043-898-4 (hbk.). £35.00. Parvaneh POURSHARIATI. Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran. London and New York: I.B. Tauris in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation, 2008. International Library of Iranian Studies. xiv + 537 pp. ISBN: 978- 1-84511-645-3 (hbk.). £45.00. Greg FISHER, Between Empires: Arabs, Romans, and Sasanians in Late Antiquity. Oxford Classical Monographs. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. xviii + 254 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-959927-1 (hbk.). £55.00 / $110.00. Historians of the early Islamic period in the Middle East have always been uneasily conscious that they ought to know and understand more about the great Persian empire, which was overwhelmed and destroyed by the Arabs in the mid-seventh century. The other great empire that the Arabs attacked, the Byzantine or East Roman, survived, albeit having lost some- thing like half its territory; and its history is hence comparatively well known. But Persia was swallowed whole, and vanished as an independent polity. Yet it did survive, in some sense, in Islamic garb. Within little more than a century, the capital of the Islamic world was in Iraq, at Baghdad, not far up the River Tigris from the old Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon. And the ‘Abbasid dynasty of caliphs which founded Baghdad in 762 had been *) David Morgan, University of Wisconsin-Madison: [email protected]. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156852011X611364 Sasanian Iran and The Early Arab Conquests 529 brought to power by a military rising originating in Khurasan, the eastern province of the old Sasanian Empire. The extent to which these events should be seen as some kind of a Persian revival has been much debated. Persianists point to such things as the geography, to the fact that Baghdad began as a round city on Sasanian lines, and especially to the apparent revival of Sasanian administrative forms in the ‘Abbasid Empire. Arabists, in contrast, remind us that the legitimacy of the ‘Abbasids was framed exclusively in Islamic and Arab terms: this was not an overt restoration of the old Persian monarchy. One difficulty has been the lack of any substantial and up-to-date, book- length account of the history of the Sasanians to which reference could easily be made. The standard work, in French, is now 67 years old (though there is a more recent account in German). One strongly suspects that Arthur Christensen’s L’Iran sous les Sassanides (2nd ed., 1944)1 is more often cited than read; and in any case, much has happened to the study of the subject since it was published. It is therefore a cause for much satisfac- tion that Touraj Daryaee has published his Sasanian Persia. The Rise and Fall of an Empire—avowedly an attempt ‘to provide the basic outlines of the history of the Sasanian civilization, where its history, society, religion, economy, administration, languages and literature are reviewed’. It is a very successful attempt. Daryaee makes it clear that his survey is somewhat provisional; but one has to start somewhere, and at least we do now have such a start, from the pen of a leading scholar of the subject. It should be mentioned that we now also have a shorter survey, as a chapter (‘The Late Sasanian Near East’) of the first volume of The New Cambridge History of Islam (2010).2 The author is Josef Wiesehöfer, already well known for, among much else, his excellent and chronologically more wide-ranging history of Ancient Persia (1996).3 There can be no doubt that a large part of the difficulty encountered by scholars who wish to write a coherent account of Sasanian history lies in the nature of the surviving primary source material. This is in part because a large empire which endured for four centuries had relations of various 1) Arthur Christensen, L’Iran sous les Sassanides. Copenhagen, 2nd. ed., Copenhagen: E. Munksgaard, 1944. 2) Chase F. Robinson (ed.), The New Cambridge History of Islam I: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. 98-152. 3) Josef Wiesehöfer, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996..

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