Around 1347 BC, King Akhenaten stated under oath his intention of founding a new city as his residence and cult centre for the visible sun-disk or Aten, whom he had recently promoted to the position of sole god, excluding the majority of the traditional Egyptian pantheon. Details of the foundation and reaffirmation ceremonies were carved onto boundary stelae cut into the cliffs around the site and these are amongst the most important historical documents for the period (Murnane and van Siclen 1993). The above statement emphasises the king's resolve to stand by his chosen site for the city. In passing, he makes an unusual acknowledgement of the potential influence of royal women and courtiers.

Official royal texts in Egypt rarely mention individuals other than the king.

The imperial court in the late Roman state: ‘absolutism’, imperial ‘decline’ and the notion of ‘the court society’

Taking the field of ancient history as a whole, including the Middle and Far East as well as Europe and the Mediterranean, the monarchical court cannot be said to have occupied centre-stage in a way that might seem justified by the prevalence of monarchy as a system of power in antiquity. The reasons for this relative neglect are complex and cannot all be unpacked here. But one, certainly, is the sense of the court as a ‘moribund social formatio[n]’ which has permeated western consciousness since the French Revolution. Backstairs influence, intrigue and flattery: these generic phenomena of courts have earned themselves a bad reputation in western democracies which pose as the mirror-opposites of ‘old-regime’ arrangements of power, and in the study of ancient monarchies they are often sidelined, or their association by ancient writers with ‘bad’ or ‘weak’ rulers, or with whole societies classed as degenerate, as the ancient Persians were by the ancient Greeks (Brosius in this volume), taken at face value. In those nineteenth-century European monarchies which survived, especially after 1848, constitutionalism was the order of the day, as it had been (at least notionally) in the United Kingdom since 1688. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, in the nineteenth and for much of the twentieth century the students of monarchical institutions in the ancient world have often been preoccupied with modernist attempts to define their legal basis – as with the Macedonian kings, say, or the early Roman emperors.

Introduction

With the exception of the (late) Roman imperial court, theoretical and historical approaches to the princely court as ‘the most general arrangement of power in pre-modern society’ are mostly a phenomenon of medieval and early modern, rather than ancient, history. As for the civilisations of the ancient Near East, here we are more or less treading on virgin ground. Yet the monarchies of the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Persians, Parthians and Sasanians stand absolute comparison with their early modern European counterparts in terms of their impact on their subject-populations and neighbours. This does not mean that no scholar until now has ever studied the life, institutions and modes of communication in ancient Near Eastern courts. But such work has seldom been based on a theoretical model or comparison with the court phenomenon in other societies or cultures. As for the Sasanian empire, we do not even possess detailed descriptions or antiquarian studies of the court as a centre of decision-making and governance, as the focus of social networks, as a stage for royal or aristocratic representation, as a centre of consumption, or as a control centre for trans-regional communication. Nor has any expert in the Iranian languages ever addressed the question as to whether there was a Middle Persian or Parthian equivalent of Latin curia, English court or German Hof.

Unfortunately, the specific nature of the Sasanian source material (see below) makes it extremely difficult to rise above the merely descriptive and antiquarian approach.

‘In all ages, whatever the form or name of government, be it monarchy, republic, or democracy, an oligarchy lurks behind the façade.’ With these words Sir Ronald Syme began his landmark investigation into the lively political networks of the late Republican noble families of the city of Rome, families who drew their power from ancestry and landed wealth as much as from the political process. This statement holds gradually less true for their successors at the end of antiquity, who struggled to maintain their position in the face of set-backs such as civil war in Italy in the 470s and 480s, and again from 534 to 554. The fifth and sixth centuries saw a progressive erosion of the landed wealth of Rome's aristocratic families. While they had long resisted the centralizing instincts of Rome's principal land-owner, the emperor, new pressures and opportunities led the Roman aristocracy to seek a more cooperative relationship with Rome's bishop, whose ever greater ex officio holdings came to rival those of the emperor, and were more secure in the face of political upheaval. If this strategy of cooperation was largely successful, however, its success brought with it the eventual waning of Roman memory where the aristocracy was concerned.

During late antiquity, the urban fabric of the city of Rome was the result of efforts by three categories of patron: senators, emperors, and bishops (although individual patrons could belong to more than one category).

After the foundation of the Sasanian Empire in the year 224 the two powers had to deal with and administer an Arab world that was divided into three different groups. The first group was the Arab population in the Sasanian Empire, who had already lived in the Parthian kingdom during the Arsacid period and who now inevitably formed part of the Sasanian Empire. They settled in the eastern coastal area of the Persian Gulf, in northern Mesopotamia, where the desert fortress Hatra was the most important centre (map 1) and in southern Mesopotamia, where Hīra, which was located c. 100 miles to the west of the Sasanian capital Ktēsiphōn on the edge of the Arabian desert, had become a new centre (map 2). The second group comprised the Arab population in the Roman Empire, and the third group was formed by the Arabs who lived beyond the Sasanian and Roman territories on the Arabian Peninsula.

The following events and developments illustrate an ‘Arabia policy’ of the great powers that remained an important component of the foreign relations between Rome and the Sasanian Empire into the seventh century and that both powers designed in a similar way: the inhabitants of Hatra joining the Rome side after 224, the ambitious political activities of the trade metropolis in the Syrian desert, Palmyra, and finally the creation of a system of Arab vassal states.

Hatra

During the course of the Roman imperial period one caravan route, which took travellers through the steppes of central Mesopotamia to the north and via Singara and Edessa to Zeugma and the river Euphrates, became exceptionally popular.

amicitia

The Latin term amicitia describes various personal or political aspects of friendship, i.e. it is used in the context of relations between individuals as well as states. Outside Rome amicitia can point to a treaty or to friendly relations between two states that existed without an official foedus. Amicitia required bilateral consent. In general, the declaration of amicitia was motivated by the desire for a reconciliation of interests.

breviarium

Breviaria were short histories written in a continuous narrative, in contrast to a ‘chronicle’, which was in general a list-type record of events and dates in chronological order. Breviaria intended to both entertain and teach. They primarily served to provide uneducated new elites with a necessary historical and cultural knowledge. This genre became particularly popular during the fourth century ad.

catafractarii

This was the mailed cavalry that the Romans faced for the first time in 190 bc when they fought the Seleucid king Antiochus III. The catafractarii contributed significantly to Crassus' defeat at Carrhae against the Parthians in 53 bc. The impact of this unit was also responsible for the military strength of the Sasanians in the third and fourth centuries ad. The catafractarii were armed with a heavy lance and attacked their enemies' lines frontally in a single body.

Christological controversies

After Constantine the Great had become a supporter of Christianity deep theological confrontations emerged within the Roman Empire. During the time of bishop Alexander I of Alexandria (312–28) the main dispute was over Arianism. According to Arius, a cleric from Antioch, Christ was not truly divine.

From the third century onwards the religious policy of the great powers formed an important part of Roman–Persian relations. Evidently, there was an interaction between religion and foreign relations, and developments in West and East not only were of the same character but also took place simultaneously. This means that Rome and the Persian Empire dealt with religious matters in a comparable way and that the state of religious affairs in the East and in the West affected the neighbour's course of action. In particular after the dramatic religious changes during the reign of Constantine the Great the conflict between the now Christian Rome and the Zoroastrian Sasanian Empire escalated, also ideologically.

Religion and kingship in the Sasanian Empire

First, let us examine the situation in the Sasanian Empire. Here, the doctrine of Zarathustra became the privileged religion and developed into a supporting pillar of Sasanian kingship. Zoroastrianism was therefore the religion of the Sasanian rulers and furthered by them in an exceptional way. The religious development aimed at and entailed a concentration of royal power and a centralisation of rule. This formed a stark contrast to the situation during the Parthian rule. During the Parthian period religious matters in Iran were characterised by an extremely tolerant attitude of the state towards other religious movements to the effect that Eastern and Hellenistic cults mixed profoundly.5 Just as in other regards, after the change of rule in 224 we observe a politically motivated return to old Persian traditions. The beginning of Sasanian rule therefore was an important benchmark in the religious history of Iran.

INTRODUCTION: DISCOURSES AND SOURCES

On 25 April 603 the Lateran basilica in Rome was the venue for a splendid ceremonial occasion. Rome's clergy and senate assembled there, together with the city's bishop, Pope Gregory the Great (590–604), for the reception of images, newly arrived from Constantinople, of the emperor Phocas (602–610) and his consort Leontia. The images were acclaimed in the basilica with chants of ‘Christ hear us! Long live Phocas Augustus and Leontia Augusta!’ After the gathering at the Lateran, Gregory oversaw the placing of the images in the chapel of St Caesarius within the old imperial palace on the Palatine hill. This striking episode is described in a document preserved in manuscripts of Gregory's Registrum. By the standards of our sources for early seventh-century Rome, it presents us with a very comprehensive account: it gives details not only of the date, location, and participants, but also of the ritual performed.

In an important respect, the events of 25 April 603 call into question some central assumptions about the history of the city of Rome in late antiquity. It is a feature of conventional descriptions of Rome in this period to stress how the place in society once occupied by emperor, senate, and imperial officials was taken over by the pope and the Roman clergy. This transformation from one dispensation to another is often regarded as having been mirrored by other shifts, most obviously in the city's religious profile, but also in terms of its physical fabric.