Sasanian Iran 224-651 Ce: Portrait of a Late Antique Empire Paperback – January 1, 2008

Touraj Daryaee has done a fantastic job narrating the political history of the awe-inspiring Sasanian Empire. Anyone who has even the mildest interest in Sasanian Iran, Ancient Persia or even Middle Eastern history in general has to pick up a copy of this book.The Sasanian Empire was a formidable and influential world power that is not widely remembered as other important parts of history are. It is one of the largest and most significant entities to ever challenge (and even defeat, numerous times) the feared and imposing Roman/Byzantine empire, creating a power balance in a volatile, important region of the world.What I liked the most about this book is the elements I mentioned in the title. The book's terminology is far from complicated, making it very accessible and readable by regular people (like myself). It is also very focused, concentrating on the main subject and steering clear from any detailed and irrelevant deviation. And lastly, the book is deliciously dense with information on Sasanian Persia. The author keeps an objective, straight-to-the-point tone from beginning to end.There's only one slight issue, which is that the author sometimes suddenly talks about people who were not introduced, so you have to already know about them to know what he's talking about. But this isn't very common throughout.A rewarding and very enjoyable read. I highly recommend it.

I think that the best way to review this book is to describe what's good about it before going into what's bad. The good: this is basically the only straight history of Sassanian Persia. The Persian Empire as a whole has gotten very little press, and no era more so than the Sassanian one. The Parthians have several books on them (mostly out of date) but the Sassanians are only covered in general histories of Iran (Such as Frye's excellent Heritage of Persia) or in foreign language works such as Christensen's 'L'Iran sous les Sassanides' and Schippmann's 'Grundzüge der Geschichte des sasanidischen Reiches.' Obviously this poses a problem to anyone working on them in English. The only other works which deal with them are books on the Romans and Arabs and then only through the lens of these cultures. This book tries to correct that lack and generally succeeds despite its brevity.First off this book really functions best as a companion piece to Dr. Daryaee's other book Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire. This book offers a pretty straightforward political narrative of the Sassanid era while that book offers a social and economic view. That book includes a summary of the political side too, but it is so brief as to be almost unintelligible. The political narrative here is also fairly brief, though not fatally so. It is unfortunate that the book couldn't be longer (it's only about 100 pages). There is clearly much further that needs saying. However, focusing on what it does have it contains the best overview of Sassanid Persian history that I can find. It is less in depth than I would like (I feel like there was a missed opportunity here) but in general it is complete and provides a solid grounding for further research. The Cambridge History of Iran goes more in depth but offers a confusing and dense account of the period. It is also easily sidetracked. This book is a good reference for the political history and offers details on where to search elsewhere for information.A complaint from an earlier reviewer is indeed valid, though I didn't even notice it until he pointed it out. Dr. Daryaee often uses X for Ch (as in loch). Thus Khusrau becomes Xusro. That's a standard use of the letter in Near Eastern linguistics, but it will be confusing for people who've never seen it before. Beginners in other words, which is who this book is designed for. Also appearing is the letter s with an inverted ^ over it. It's pronounced sh. Don't ask why they don't just write sh, it just is that way. Perhaps a pronunciation guide would have helped. This book also features some horribly outdated maps. I believe that they are just photocopies of 19th Century originals. There is only one decent map and it comes at the very end. Better maps are a must for future works in this field.Now for the real problem of the book. It has a definite nationalist agenda. The first chapter is more of a rant about Eurocentrism and Western prejudices than any serious introduction to the subject. In it he makes some seriously unsupportable claims. For example, he states that historians of Iran, Egypt, and Mesopotamia are hopelessly scarce in the West. For Persia he has a point, and perhaps that's why he went so far off base on the other two. But he is off base. Without the efforts of European scholars there would be no histories of Egypt or Babylon. All of the early archaeological work as well as the linguistic decipherment of the ancient languages was done by Europeans. Even today the majority of archaeologists are European and among the countries of the Middle East only Egypt and Turkey have really learned the value of archaeology. Europeans invented, refined, and dominated the field. In short, what he says is not only false but insanely so. A doctor of history cannot possibly be so ignorant. I have no choice but to assume he got so carried away that he just typed the whole thing out in a rage. I turned vainly to the end in the hope that the introduction was written by another author, but to no avail.I have to feel that a lot of this anger comes from his finding that Iranian studies are put in with Near Eastern Languages and Cultures or Civilizations rather than with History. He is also exceedingly annoyed that Greek and Roman history falls under the heading Classics, a fact which annoys me as well. Using this as a basis for a belief in the essential racism of the Western University system however is just wrong. The reason that Persian, Egyptian, Babylonian, etc. history comes under Languages, Anthropology, or Archaeology is because the evidence is primarily archaeological or linguistic. Greece and Rome left behind a great deal of written material and thus come under History (which is why the term Classics throws it all off). If the Western system were truly incorrigibly racist then even cultures with rich written material would also fall under different departments provided they were foreign. Cultures such as China, which is the only other society from the time to leave vast written records. And Africists are among the most sought after historians in the field. So why the fuss?He also rants about Eurocentrism and calls Black Athena the 'best historiography of the development of Classical Studies in the past three centuries.' That book is a long discredited attempt to prove that all of European civilization was stolen entire from Egypt. Listing it on page one as a major influence automatically discredits your objectivity before you even start. Then going on to rant about how blind the "New World Order" is to Iranian history and how unimportant and temporarily their period of dominance is only serves to highlight such bias. Rome's fear of Persia cannot be compared to America's fear of Iran since the one derives from their proximity and failures and the other from religious conflicts. I don't think that most Americans are even aware that Persia is the same as Iran. I here feel nothing but embarrassment for the author as this section reads more like one of Ahmadinejad's speeches than the work of an impartial historian. I certainly don't expect an author to remain unenthusiastic or fail to defend his field, but if he can't do that except by denigrating the entire educational and cultural system of his target audience then the problem lies with him, not them.Fortunately such propaganda is mostly contained in the introduction. In the work itself he is better able to maintain the appearance of impartiality. To my surprise he even listed Alexander Severus' campaign against Ardashir as "a conflict which proved to have no clear winner," when he could easily have maintained that it was a Persian victory (as many others do). He is also undecided on Gordian's death which makes me all the more astonished at his introduction. I've seen many writers on the Sassanians maintain that Gordian was killed in battle with Shapur so to find an undecided voice when expecting a fanatical nationalist is quite a relief.So what to make of this book? It's still very good although the nationalistic elements and cultural paranoia are a nuisance. They can however be filtered out as long as you can spot them. If you read a book on Roman history you will be forced to filter out the Roman perspective anyway, so in some sense you're doing the same thing for this book. Nonetheless a modern work has different standards from an ancient one. To spend so much time going on about these things is disgraceful and unprofessional. Fortunately his second book has toned down the rhetoric some which comes as a welcome relief. Books on this subject are simply unavailable anywhere else which makes this work invaluable.

This is an excellent book for some of the details of that era that is missing in our history books. As many are beginning to attest, the current history books are written by one side (the Creek and Romans) and greatly exaggerate the accomplishments of their side while down play the achievements of the other side, which they confess, were great civilizations. A good such exaggeration is the fact that 300 Spartans blocks 200,000 Persian with primitive weapons of that era.I would have liked to see more of a story telling details in this book. This book is a little dry and just reports dates and events without much detail and elaboration.

I enjoy reading history for pleasure and found this to be extremely tedious, boring reading. The author seems to be more intent on packing in as much minute detail in every sentence than writting an easy to read, enjoyable history book. Seems like every sentence is "this ruler was the son of this ruler who was the father of this ruler.." and all of these names were impossible for me to pronounce. Very unfortunate since this period of time for Iran seems very interesting and important.