The historical Buddha, Śākyamuni, lived in north-east India in the 6th to 5th century b.c. He died at the age of eighty in about 483 b.c., leaving no written records of his teaching. At that time, northern India was dominated by the kingdoms Avanti, Kosala, Vatsa and Magadha. In the north-west, Gandhāra was a province of the Achaemenian empire. In the 4th century the Achaemenian empire fell to the all-conquering Alexander, who came in person to north-west India, the furthest east he ventured. The Indian parts of the Achaemenian empire had in practice under the last Achaemenians recovered their independence. Alexander's control of these regions, which he conquered during 327–324 b.c, was short-lived. His death in 323 b.c. was followed by widespread disaffection in the east. The Indian emperor Chandragupta annexed the Indian kingdoms of the Punjab in 317 b.c. Seleucus Nicator attempted to regain all the possessions lost, but he was not exactly successful, and he was obliged to negotiate with Chandragupta about 304 b.c.

During this period of nearly two hundred years after the death of Śākyamuni, his followers were active in establishing the canonical scriptures and the religious rules for daily life among Buddhist communities. Despite the considerable number and variety of literary sources concerning the events which occurred during this process, few details can be regarded as having any marked degree of authenticity. Prominent in the sources are the events concerning two councils held in order to obtain some measure of agreement among the Buddha's followers.

INTRODUCTION

The oldest known references to the region of Sogdiana occur in the Old Persian inscriptions and in the (Younger) Avesta. In the former, Sogdiana (suguda) is mentioned as a satrapy of the Achaemenian empire, listed between Bactria and Khwarazmia or between Bactria and Gandhāra. In a building inscription at Susa, lapis lazuli (kāsaka haya kapautaka “blue ‘kāsaka'”) and carnelian (sinkabruš) are said to have been brought from Sogdiana for the construction of the palace. In the Avesta the Sogdian area is referred to as suxδa- in a list of lands, between Margu/Marv and Khwarazm (xwāirizm); as suδδa- the area is said to be the second best, after airyanm waējō “the Aryan ‘range'” and before Margu/Marv, of the territories created by Ahura Mazdā and to have been visited by the Ahrimanic plague known as skaiti-, a term which seems to mean rather “thorn, weed” than “locust” as the Pahlavi translation (kullag “locust”) has it. Although these data provide only rough geographical delimitations, they establish Sogdiana as the areas around the cities of Bukhārā and Samarkand including part of the Farghāna valley.

As subjects of the Achaemenid rulers, the Sogdians (Σογδιανοι or Σογδοι) became known to the Greek world; a Sogdian contingent under the command of Azanes, son of Artaios, formed part of the Persian army which attacked and invaded Greece under Xerxes in 480 b.c. A century and a half later, resistance to Alexander the Great became apparent, in 329–8 b.c, in an unsuccessful offensive mounted by the Sogdians under the leadership of Spitamenes against the Macedonian garrison in the city of Maracanda/Samarkand.

This volume encompasses a time span of about one thousand years, from the emergence of the Seleucid empire in 312 B.C. to the collapse of the Sasanian empire in A.D. 651. The period saw the rise and fall of three mighty dynasties, the Seleucids, the Arsacids, and the Sasanians, as well as the formation of a number of states and empires to the east, notably the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and the Kushan empire. In the religious sphere the millennium witnessed the expansion of gnostic tendencies in western Iran and Mesopotamia, culminating in the appearance and spread of Manichaeism; the consolidation of Zoroastrianism under the Sasanians as an authoritarian state Church; and the birth and suppression of the egalitarian movement of the Mazdakites. In more general terms, the era saw the ascendency and demise of Hellenism in Iran; the development of a distinct Iranian art-style with wide impact; the evolution of a national saga; the development of local systems of writing in the major provinces; and finally, the shaping of an administrative system and court procedures which were to play an important role in the 'Abbasid caliphate and its eastern vassal states.

THE HISTORY OF THE PERIOD

Seleucus, one of Alexander's generals, seized Babylon in 312 B.C. and forged a large empire which included most of western Asia. The eastern provinces of the empire, however, where the Parthians, Bactrians, Sogdians and Chorasmians lived, did not remain long in the possession of the Seleucids, slipping away from their hold when the satrapies of Bactria and Parthia aspired to sovereignty. The defection in 246 B.C. of Diodotus, satrap of Bactria, marked the beginning of a new dynasty, the Greco-Bactrian, which gradually expanded southward, occupying the Kabul valley, the Peshawar region, and Taxila in the Punjab.

No Parthian literature survives from the Parthian period in its original form. The only works of any length which exist in the Parthian language were composed under Sasanian rule. For the literature of older times we are dependent on Middle Persian redactions, or even on Persian and Georgian versions of these, to give at second or third remove some impression of the nature and scope of what has been lost. One reason for the scale of the loss is presumably that Parthian literature, both religious and secular, was oral, composed and transmitted without the use of books. The Parthians had, however, their own distinctive system of writing, attested from the beginning of the 1st century b.c., a development evidently of the chancellery script of the Achaemenians. This script was in origin Aramaic, and had been used under the Achaemenians to write Imperial Aramaic, the administrative language of their empire. Under the less firmly unified rule of the Seleucids and Parthians a number of regional forms of this script developed, of which five have been identified, namely that of the Parthians themselves, that of the Persians in the south-west (which came to be called Pahlavī), that of Median Āzarbāījān in the north-west (attested by the solitary gravestone at Armazi) and those of the Khwārazmians and Sogdians in the north-east. All these regional scripts show the same development, namely that they were used to write, not Imperial Aramaic, but instead the various local Iranian languages, with a number of fossilized Aramaic words serving as ideograms.

A real, if fragile, political unity had again been established over the majority of the Iranian-speaking peoples by the 1st century b.c. Indicative of this process was the generalizing of the term “Aryān” (Eratosthenes' Ariana). Formerly it had designated the kingdom of the Aparni and Parthians in eastern Iran; it now applied to the entire range of Iranian and non-Iranian regions tributary to the Arsacid dynasty. In the centuries that followed, the unity of the state was often illusory; while the topography of the empire and its ethnic, economic, linguistic, and cultural composition remained divisive factors. But the Sasanian concept of Ērān-shahr re-affirmed the ideal of unification contained in “Aryān”; and, by the end of Shāpūr I's reign, Ērān-shahr had attained its greatest stable extent.

An Iranian, at the time of Shāpūr I, could have located himself geographically in two ways. He was, most generally, a resident of Khwānirah. This was the favoured part of the material world, the central one of the seven earth-regions (kishvar). More specifically, his village or town lay within an administrative district (ōstān) of one of the empire's provinces (shahr). His province, already possessing an ancient history, was marked by its distinctive cultural complex. Geographical factors – rivers, mountains, deserts, seas – and the practicable lines of communication helped define it. So, of course, did climate and soil. The Dēnkard, Book iv, records the aphorism: “Produce is found as from a certain province thus according to its type of land”.

Chorasmia, one of the provinces of the Achaemenian Empire (Huwārazmiš), which provided a “dark blue stone” (turquoise?) to adorn the palace of Darius at Susa, yet receives only a late mention by name in the Zoroastrian scriptures (Yasht x. 14, Xvāirizm). Many scholars, for various reasons, have explained this apparent eclipse of a flourishing country by declaring that Chorasmia was a part of the very heartland of the early Iranians, the airyanm vaējō “Aryan range” of the Avesta, later Ērānwēz of the Pahlavī books. Be that as it may, no word identified as Old Chorasmian has been preserved for us, apart from the name itself. Even the meaning of this is still disputed, though meaning it clearly has if we accept that the final element -zmī contains the word for “land”, Persian zamīn. One explanation which has not yet been seriously advanced is that the beginning of the name, Hwāra-, may have been the ancestor of Persian khvār “abject”, Kurdish khwār “down, low”, that in effect Chorasmia meant “Netherland”. Such a name would well fit the lands lying around and between the lower reaches of the rivers Oxus and Jaxartes, today the oasis of Khiva and the Qizil Qum desert, and ending on Shelley's

lone Chorasmian shore… a wide and melancholy waste of putrid marshes.

MĀNĪ'S LIFE

Mānī, the founder of Manichaeism, was born in a.d. 216 in the village of Mardinu in the Babylonian district of Nahr Kūthā. His parents, however, were both of Iranian nationality. His father Pātik was an Arsacid prince, his mother belonged to the Kamsarakan family, a branch of the Arsacid dynasty. His mother's name is given in various ways in the sources, but may possibly have been Maryam which would indicate that she was either of Jewish, or more probably, Christian confession. Pātik, who had been living in Hamadān, the capital of Media, had left this city and moved to Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of the Parthian empire where many Iranian nobles possessed houses and palaces. Because of a revelation which he received in what is called a “House of idols”, ordering him to abstain from eating meat, drinking wine, and having commerce with women, Pātik left the capital and attached himself to a sect in Mesene whose members were called “practitioners of ablutions” (al-wughtasila).

It is difficult to identify the sect to which Pātik belonged. The Syriac writer Theodor bar Kōnai designates its members as “those who purify themselves” or as “(wearing) white garments”. The Manichaean writings in Coptic tell us that Mani says that “the chaste”, who are the same as “the baptizers”, venerate the First Life and the Second Life. The text then breaks off, but there is a remarkable coincidence here with the oldest layer of Mandean literature, where we find, as designations of the three highest principles, the First Life, the Second Life, and the Third Life.