The rise of the Sasanian dynasty can be understood as the successful struggle of a minor ruler of Persis not only against his Parthian overlord, but also against a multitude of neighbouring rulers. The main adversary of the Persians was the Roman empire, and the ambitions of the first Sasanian ruler were soon countered by Rome. It was during the reign of Yazdgard that the Christians of the Sasanian empire held a council in the city of Seleucia in the year 410. Shortly after Bahrāam accession in 421 the persecution of Christians in the Sasanian empire was resumed, probably at the instigation of Zoroastrian priests. The Sasanians inherited from the Parthians a legacy of over two centuries of conflict with the western power. With a Sasanian belief in the destiny of Iran to rule over the territories once held by the Achaemenians, it was inevitable that wars between the two great powers would continue.

The political history of iran under the sasanians

In the Seleucid period, Mesopotamia served as a base for the Seleucid kings' attempts to extend their political and commercial power into the Persian Gulf region and along the eastern coastlands of Arabia. The Parthians and then the Sasanians made Ctesiphon, on the eastern bank of the Tigris in central Mesopotamia, their capital and the centre from which Iranian power radiated over Aramaic, and then increasingly Arab, Iraq. The 6th century was a propitious time for Persian intervention in South Arabia. In the sphere of architecture, Persian influence on the buildings of the Lakhmids, such as the palace of Khawarnaq, must have been decisive, and Persian models must have dominated the architecture of early Islamic Iraq. Persian artistic influences also penetrated across the Syrian desert to the structures of the Umayyad caliphs on the fringes of modern Syria and Jordan, where there was a symbiosis with the local hellenistic and Byzantine artistic and architectural traditions.

Iran and the Arabs before Islam

The Cambridge History of Iran

The first fixed point in Parthian history is provided by the startingpoint of the Arsacid era, the vernal equinox of 247 BC. The significance for the Parthians of this moment in time has been variously explained: by Gardner it was seen as the date of a Parthian revolt against Seleucid suzerainty; by Tarn, as the coronation year of Tiridates I, the second Parthian king. The incursion of Antiochus III had interrupted the Arsacid control of that part of the province of Parthia which lies south of the Alburz Range around Damghan and Shahrud. This chapter discusses the the consolidation of the Parthian kingdom. The reign of Mithradates I came to an end in 138/7 BC, the first precisely established regnal date of Parthian history and the campaign of Carrhae. The chapter also discusses the "Roman peace" and its consequences.

The political history of iran under the arsacids

(b): Iranian National History

The Roman occupation of Northern Iraq lasted less than a hundred and seventy years, from A.D. 197 to 364, and was little more than a turbulent episode in the long struggle between Rome on the west and Persia, under her successive Parthian and Sassanian rulers, on the east. The purely military character of this frontier extension is the first of the factors controlling the nature and distribution of its material remains; the second is the high degree of civilisation which the area had attained long before the Romans came, and was to maintain with little change long after their withdrawal. The process of Romanisation, if it was ever attempted, has left no mark. New towns would hardly have been built on sites already occupied by cities far older than Rome itself, and new roads were only constructed for particular military purposes which did not coincide with the requirements of commercial traffic and were not served by the existing highways. Few western imports have been found, and only five Latin inscriptions, three dedications by Roman soldiers and two milestones, have come to light in Iraq; it is significant that there is no known inscription of this period in Greek, the koinē of civilian life in the other provinces of the Roman East. Roman historians usually refer to Mesopotamia only as the scene of eastern campaigns of which they had, with the exception of Ammianus Marcellinus in the fourth century, no personal or detailed knowledge.

Joan Oates

Papers

Ain Sinu: A Roman Frontier Post in Northern Iraq