The small quantity of epigraphic material hitherto recovered in Pahlavi, that is, Sasanian Middle Persian, could easily be accommodated in a single publication. But none such as yet exists, the material still being either unpublished or published inadequately. Unquestionably the most important part of it is represented by the monumental inscriptions of the 3rd, 4th and 5th centuries, with the addition of a small number of later inscriptions executed in a script known as cursive, some ostraca and papyri, and some important collections of seals, inscribed stones, and “bullae” or seal impressions on clay.

Few as they are, these documents constitute a remarkable inheritance; they represent the only strictly Iranian source of Sasanian history, inasmuch as the Graeco-Latin, Armenian or Syriac historical literature is foreign in origin, while the Arab-Persian authors, although they provided useful evidence by drawing on Sasanian writings of which nothing has survived, were much later in date than the events which they record; their perspective may have been open to question and their memory fallible. Thus there is good reason for regarding the Sasanian inscriptions as a cultural heritage of first importance. Moreover they are of especial interest on the linguistic level, for they provide the earliest examples of Sasanian Middle Persian, which otherwise, apart from the Manichaean documents of Turfān, occurs in quantity only in Mazdaean works, which gradually came to be written in a scholarly language at the last stage of its development, into which neologisms and persianisms were intruding.

PARTHIAN HISTORY

It is a well-known fact that Parthian history is extremely difficult to handle in a satisfactory way. This is chiefly due to the character of our sources. In no other period of Iranian history do we find such a lack of indigenous historical texts. Contemporary records from the Parthian empire are scarce and later oriental historians had only a very dim notion of this period.

As to the classical sources we regret above all the loss of the Parthian histories written by Arrian and Apollodorus of Artemita as well as the fact that the universal history written by Pompeius Trogus has survived only in the rather poor epitome compiled by Justin. Of all this rich material only fragments are left.

In the following survey a distinction is made between remains and traditions.

Remains

Remains can be divided into non-textual and textual. The non-textual remains comprise first of all the countryside itself, with its ruins of buildings and fortifications, bridges and canals, as well as archaeological finds. For the reconstruction of history these remains are highly valuable from several points of view. Topographical studies have often been neglected in political history, and even more in the history of wartechniques. Such investigations must of course be combined with the study of place-names. For Parthian history we may refer to the researches of Minorsky concerning the Roman campaigns in Atropatene . His investigations are important also for the Sasanian period.

The impact of Manichaeism on Middle Iranian literature has already been considered in connection with Parthian; but although Mānī was himself of Parthian blood, Middle Persian was in fact the first language which the prophet used in seeking to spread his faith in Iran. The reason for this was that the political situation had changed greatly there during his own boyhood. He was born under the last of the Arsacids, in a.d. 216; but some eight years later Ardashīr Pāpakān, founder of the Sasanian dynasty, overthrew Ardavān V, and the imperial power passed from Parthia to Persia once more. Accordingly, when Māanī resolved to make his teachings known to the King of Kings, it was at the court of Ardashir's son, Shāpūr I, that he presented himself. He brought with him, it seems, a work dedicated to this ruler, entitled Shābuhragān “the Book of Shāpūr”. In this he had set out a summary of his new doctrines; and some pages of it survive. Whether Mānī himself wrote the actual Middle Persian version is doubtful, for years later, after long sojourn at the Sasanian court, he still chose to be accompanied by an interpreter at an audience with Shāpūr's son, Bahrām I; and though this may have been a largely unnecessary precaution, taken because his life was then at stake, nevertheless the action does not suggest that he was an assured linguist. Probably, therefore, as a young man he wrote the Shābuhragān in his mother-tongue, Aramaic, and had it translated into Middle Persian.

INTRODUCTION

The art of the Sasanian period begins, officially, with Ardashīr's accession to the throne of the last Parthian ruler of Iran at Ctesiphon in the year a.d. 226. In fact, however, it already had its genesis in the art produced in Fārs under the kings of Persis well before that date. Ardashīr, it will be seen, had built a city and the first “Sasanian” palace at Firūzābād before, perhaps as a prelude to, his defeat of the Parthians, and the first coinage of his new dynasty followed closely that which he had issued at Stakhr while still a Parthian vassal.

During the nearly four and a half centuries of Sasanian rule in Iran, as with the previous five and a half centuries discussed by Professor Daniel Schlumberger in the foregoing chapter, coins are the only art form that can be traced in unbroken continuity. In establishing his first Sasanian coinage Ardashīr sought to reaffirm and express the connection of his dynasty with its Iranian past. Although in his earliest coins there is still a certain dependence in the portrait style and the helmet headdress on Parthian prototypes, a clear break with the Hellenistic coinage traditions was manifest by the replacement of the former divine figures on the reverse with the Zoroastrian fire altar and by the substitution of Pahlavī for Greek in the legends. In his later coins the portrait is modified, evidently individualized, and the head-dress is replaced by a more elaborate Sasanian version incorporating the mural crown and later is replaced by the mural crown alone.

IRANIAN RELIGION UNDER THE SELEUCIDS AND ARSACIDS

In consequence of Alexander's conquest, Iranian religious manifestations were almost completely submerged under the wave of Hellenism. Only a few facts bear witness to the survival of native religion during the period up to the national renaissance which was adumbrated in the 1st century b.c. and was to be characteristic of the Sasanian dynasty.

A comparison with the artistic development in the same periods is instructive. As shown by Schlumberger, three phases can be distinguished. The first one, represented on the island of Failaka in the Persian Gulf, at Ai Khanum on the Oxus, and elsewhere, is purely Hellenic. The second one, attested on Nimrud Dāgh, at Nisā and, in eastern Iran, at Kūh-i Khwāja, Khalchayan, and Surkh Kotal, offers a blend of Greek and Iranian elements. Only the third one sees a fusion of these heterogeneous elements into the unity of a new style, attested notably at Palmyra and Hatra, but which must have been born in the Parthian capital, Ctesiphon, and spread from there to the whole Arsacid empire, where it is notably attested at Tang-i Sarvak and Bard-i Nishānda.

Maybe the religion also yielded at first to the prestige of the Greco-Macedonian conquerors, at least where it had no deep roots. At Susa, for instance, which had been one of the capital cities of the Achaemenians but where the religion of Ahurā Mazdā was not autochthonous, the coinage of the Seleucid and Arsacid periods does not represent a single Iranian deity.

INTRODUCTION

Within Iran, during the period of nearly 1,000 years which separates the Greek and Islamic conquests, successive stages of religious history are interlocked in a manner scarcely paralleled earlier or later. Links are also to be found connecting Iran as a geographical focus with adjoining civilizations, and within the various strands and levels of the structures that can be detected.

After the Jewish diaspora, it was the religion of the Greek polis which appeared alongside and among the religions of those peoples which had become Iranian by the beginning of the first millennium b.c., but had been only semi-homogenized by the reforms of Zoroaster and the religious policies of the Achaemenians. As a result, the influence of Hellenistic religion, though less marked within Iran itself, forms an integral part of Iranian religious history, extending directly for half a millennium and indirectly for considerably longer. This raises the question of what Iranian features, in the stricter sense of the word, were embodied in this religion, not only in Iran itself but also beyond its borders.

The Arsacid kingdom, which appeared in the middle of the 3rd century b.c., alongside the Bactrian and Seleucid dominions and advanced principally at the expense of the latter, brought with it, or Stimulated, a rebirth of Iranian religious awareness in ethnic, linguistic, cultural and national terms. During this process, not only were older Zoroastrian traditions re-adopted but the relationship of the indigenous religions to the alien ones entered a new phase.

The study of Bactrian literature, under this name, has only recently emerged from adolescence. There is little text-material, and even it is largely elusive. On much of it no opinion has as yet been expressed that would help to place it within the pan-Iranian context of the present volume. Inevitably, therefore, many views here offered are personal. This is true especially in respect of the main Bactrian text, the Nokonzok inscription, on which the present writer is alone in print with an overall assessment.

The notion that Bactrian was the language of the Avesta had rightly fallen into discredit by the end of the 19th century. This left the term inapplicable to any known language until 1960, when W. B. Henning identified as Bactrian the language of a Greek-letter inscription discovered three years earlier on Bactrian soil by the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan. The inscription was carved in the 2nd century a.d. into a beautiful monolith placed at the entrance of the temple-acropolis of Baghlan at Surkh Kotal, situated at some 25 miles south-west of the present-day town of Baghlan, and approximately 100 miles south-east of where the capital city of Bactra had once stood. The inscription, which consists of some 180 words supplying a vocabulary of about 100, deserves to be named after its main protagonist, Nokonzok, described in it as a high dignitary holding the office of “Lord of the Marches” (kanārang) in the year 31, which year fell early in the reign of the Kushān emperor Huviška.