The Macedonian conquest of the Orient (334-323 b.c.) suddenly turned Achaemenian Iran into hellenized Iran. For a better understanding of the effects of this change on the arts, it seems necessary briefly to look back on what Achaemenian art had been. In the 6th century b.c., with the Achaemenians achieving for the first time the political unity of the civilized countries of the Ancient Near East, the arts of this area had reached the last stage of their development. At Pasargadae under Cyrus, at Susa and Persepolis under Darius, great palaces had been raised, whose architecture and decoration reflected and blended the various national traditions of the conquered countries: of Mesopotamia, of Egypt, of Anatolia, and even of the Asiatic Greeks.

The purpose of these great sovereigns had been to provide adequate seats for the “universal”, supranational power which Ahura Mazda had granted them. In spite of their architects heavily borrowing from foreign arts, the palaces may be said to be original creations by the peculiar way in which these foreign elements are associated and combined together into a harmonious and new synthesis. It might be suggested that just as the Achaemenian sovereign assumed the new position of a “King of kings”, Achaemenian art was conceived as an “Art of arts”, drawing, by deliberate choice, from the national arts of the Orient, some techniques, architectural forms, figurative or ornamental motifs, and rejecting no less deliberately other techniques, forms and motifs, which, although traditional in these arts, were not found convenient - an art, in short, “superior” to those national arts by reason of a resolute purpose of borrowing from each only “the best”.

There is no direct contemporary evidence for the festivals celebrated by Iranians in the ill-documented Seleucid and Parthian periods; but much can be deduced from various sources, notably the national epic, and the Zoroastrian calendar and holy books. There can be no doubt that Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion in Iran in both these epochs, as it was in the succeeding Sasanian period, and that accordingly it was the Zoroastrian festivals which were those most widely kept in the land, even if Hellene and Babylonian, Jew and pagan held their own feast-days locally and among themselves.

Festivals are a characteristic part of Zoroastrianism, a faith which enjoins on man the pleasant duty of being happy, but there are no fast days in this religion, according to whose tenets hunger belongs, with sorrow, to the Devil. All holy days were celebrated accordingly with feasting, music and merry-making, and many pretty or poetic customs attached to them. It was chiefly these which were recorded by non-Zoroastrians in post-Sasanian times, rather than the religious intention of the observances (although valuable information even in this regard is provided by some Muslim writers, in particular by Birūnī).

Worship was an essential part of each festival. To offer it acceptably the worshipper had to be clean in body as well as devout in spirit, and there are many references to bathing in stream and cistern on holy days. The devout then gathered for communal worship, at which the services would be dedicated to the divinity whose feast it was; and, to judge from later practice, especial prayers were offered and rituals carried out also by individuals.

Mazdakism was a gnostic religious movement with strong social implications which flourished during the reign of Kavād (a.d. 488-531), caused revolutionary upheavals of a socialistic nature in Iran, but was brutally suppressed at the close of Kavād's reign, mainly through the efforts and machinations of Kavād's son and successor, Khusrau I. A populist and egalitarian movement, it preached in its acute form an equitable distribution of wealth and the breaking or lowering of the barriers which made for the concentration of property and women in the hands of the privileged classes.

The rise of socialism and communism in Europe has spurred special interest in the history of the movement, and Mazdakism has received considerable attention in the past hundred years. The first major attempt at a systematic study of the sect was by T. Nöldeke, who brought together the Greek, Syriac, Arabic and Persian sources, and set forth the essential facts of the history of the movement. His study has served as the basis for all subsequent elaborations; he emphasized the religious nature of the movement, and characterized Kavād as a strong-willed monarch and a capable politician, who leaned towards Mazdakism not so much as an act of faith but as an expedient in order to curb the power of the nobles and the clergy.

E. G. Browne, in his discussion of the 8th and 9th century Persian heresiarchs, drew attention to the affinities between their doctrines and those of Mazdak, and O. G. von Wesendonk in 1919 elaborated on the survival of Mazdakite doctrines among a number of sects, mostly of an Isma'īlī tendency, which sprang up after Abū Muslim's murder, and drew parallels between some Mazdakite doctrines and those of the Druzes of Lebanon.

ELEMENTS OF TIME-RECKONING

Every method of time-reckoning uses and combines three natural time elements: day, lunation, and year. Since the day is the indispensable component of time measurement, three combinations of natural time units are possible: (a) days plus lunations; (b) days, lunations, and year; and (c) days and year. The extant evidence shows that the Persian, Macedonian and Parthian rulers of Iran, from the 6th century b.c. until the 3rd century a.d., used the second scheme (b). The Sasanians in the 3rd to 7th centuries a.d. used the third scheme (c), as do the Zoroastrians to this day. Before explaining the intricacies and history of these calendar types in pre-Islamic Iran, some comments on the chronological terms used in this chapter may be of use.

For the purposes of time-reckoning, the “day” includes the night-period between two successive daylights. The peoples who used the moon as a marker of time, for instance the Babylonians, counted the complete night and day as a single “day”, (from onset of evening to onset of evening), whereas the Zoroastrians, who disregarded the lunar reckoning entirely, insisted that the calendar day was the period between two sunrises.

The waxing and the waning of the moon recur about every 29 days, and the calendar month began at the appearance of the new moon. As its visibility depends on many accidental and variable factors, e.g. the cloudiness of the sky, the month for the purpose of the calendar was counted as having twenty-nine or thirty days.

In the Persian epic Firdausī portrayed his conception of the ancient past as a tripartite world in which Iran and Tūrān interacted as the principal antagonists. Tūrān, or Transoxiana, was there vaguely defined as the area between the Oxus River and Khotan “on the frontiers of China”. Hudud'āl-alam gives a more detailed geographical picture of Transoxiana in the 10th century: “The Marches (hudūd) of Transoxiana are scattered districts, some lying to the east of Transoxiana, and some to the west of it. East of the Eastern Marches of Transoxiana are the borders of Tibet and Hindūstān; south of them, the [Marches] of Khurāsān; west of them, the borders of Chaghāniyān; and north of them, the borders of Surūshana which belong to Transoxiana… This is a vast, prosperous, and very pleasant country. It is the Gate of Turkestan and a resort of merchants.” Today Transoxiana would be the roughly rectangular area between the Āmū Daryā (Oxus) and the Syr Daryā (Jaxartes) rivers, which flow into the Aral Sea from the Pamir and Tien Shan mountain ranges respectively.

In antiquity the river boundaries of Transoxiana were neither impassable barriers nor isolating features. The lower course of the Āmū Daryā, which lies in the Turkmen plain, is accessible from the flat-lands surrounding the Aral Sea. The middle course of the river rises northeast of Marv (Murghāb valley), and its upper course forms the present-day borders between Afghanistan and the Soviet republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan as far as Badakhshān in the Pamir range.

JEWISH SETTLEMENT IN THE WESTERN SATRAPIES OF IRAN

Jews settled in the Tigris-Euphrates river system long before the region fell under the rule of Iranian governments, and they remained long afterward. The first community consisted of the upper classes of northern Israel, exiled in 722 b.c. to Hālah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan” (2 Kings 17.6, 18.11), the Khābūr river area, around Nisibis. Jewish settlement in the same territory is well attested in the 1st century a.d. and afterward, and it stands to reason that the later community derived from the earlier one, although the passage of six hundred years and the formation of legends about the “ten lost tribes of Israel” do little to illuminate what happened in between. The second, and far more important settlement, in central Babylonia along the rivers and the Royal Canal, followed the destruction of the first Temple, in 587 b.c. In addition to the two larger communities we know about smaller ones from Armenia to the Persian Gulf, north-eastward to the Caspian, eastward to Media, and, in later Sasanian times, in Fārs as well. But outside of central Babylonia, the Jews left no substantial records. In most instances our evidence about the location of Jews in various places is episodic and random. Jews did not constitute a majority in any one city, although in central Babylonia some villages were mainly, even exclusively, composed of Jews. In the mosaic of peoples and cultures in the western satrapies of Iran Jewry did not constitute a dominant or important element.

Of the imaginative literature of Persia in Sasanian times almost nothing survives in Middle Persian, and this has tended to obscure its width, variety and richness. Some survives, however, through Arabic and Persian translations, and a good deal more in Persian recensions and adaptations. The originals were destroyed partly during the Arab conquest and some subsequent foreign invasions, notably the Mongol onslaught, and partly through religious fanaticism in Iran itself, down to recent times. But the most important factor for the disappearance of Middle Persian works was the neglect and disuse that they suffered as a result of the change of the script and the adoption of Islam. After a lull, a new literature – that of New Persian – emerged, which embodied and continued many of the norms and traditions of Sasanian literature and met the literary needs of the people. It is to this literature above all that we must turn for an appreciation of Sasanian literary genres and conventions.

Apart from religious literature, the most important genres were poetry, fiction, wisdom literature, history, and informative writing. Poetry is perhaps the most elusive of these genres, not because it was neglected or weak, but because Sasanian poetry was largely united with music in the art of the minstrels, who had a tradition of oral transmission and usually did not commit their songs to writing.

With the fall of the empire, court minstrelsy, which was highly cultivated by Sasanian monarchs and the nobility, suffered a grievous blow; but the tradition continued, and when local dynasties emerged on Persian soil, court patronage was renewed and the Sasanian tradition was revived in a new garb.

SOURCES

For the questions dealt with in this chapter the available sources are markedly uneven in quality: evidence for the Parthian period is extremely meagre and fragmentary when compared with the information provided by the written sources of the Sasanian period.

Historical records in the Iranian language for the Parthian period, if such ever existed, have not survived. Some information, very scanty and inadequate, can be gathered from the works of Greek and Roman writers who lived in that period, and also from later Syriac and especially Armenian texts which sometimes refer back to events of the Parthian period and preserve a number of social and legal terms. Of incomparably greater value is the Parthian epigraphic evidence, the three private-law documents of the 1st century b.c. and the 1st century a.d. from Avroman (the earlier two are in Greek, the third in Middle Iranian), and some parchments from Dura-Europos which belong to the period of Parthian rule. During excavations of the Parthian fortress Mihrdātkart (at Nisā in modern Turkmenistān) Soviet archaeologists found about 3,000 potsherds inscribed in Parthian. The inscriptions cover the period from the end of the 2nd century b.c. to the middle of the 1st century a.d. They are mostly accounts, and the majority of them were found in the wine-storehouse where contributions in kind from neighbouring vineyards were assembled. Many of these documents have been published, but full publication is still in the preparatory stage.

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN EXPANSION IN IRAN

It will always be difficult to form a clear picture of the initial stages of a religion, however much one may know of the revolutionary character of the founder's circumstances and basic religion. It is quite a long process for a new religious society to free itself of the old traditions, to create its own image and to justify its claim to independence. Christianity is no exception in this respect. To the Romans, for example (cf. Suetonius and Tacitus), it was scarcely more than an episode in the history of Jewry, an internal Jewish problem giving rise to disturbances which had regrettable political consequences for the Romans. Nevertheless, the young Christianity very soon became a missionary church whose history is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. It is clear that this missionary work soon made a lasting mark. As early as the beginning of the 2nd century, the Younger Pliny, the imperial representative in the province of Bithynia and Pontus in Asia Minor, found it necessary to write (x. 96) to Trajan for advice concerning the treatment of the Christians. At about the same time, Tacitus (Annals xv. 44) records that the “pernicious superstition” (exitiabilis superstitio) had spread to Rome itself (per urbeni), One should be cautious, however, in assessing the extent and influence of these first communities, and even more so in evaluating the missionary activities in the Euphrates-Tigris area. It is only necessary to establish that Christian groups existed in these parts of the empire at an early date.