We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
To save content items to your account,
please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies.
If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org
is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings
on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part
of your Kindle email address below.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations.
‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi.
‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
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.
Recommend this
Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.