Overview
The eight centuries of Parthian and Sasanian domination brought dramatic and lasting changes to the lands of Western Asia. Emerging from the upheavals of the Hellenistic era, the Arsacid and Sasanian dynasties created new and lasting military, economic, and social practices that responded to the new threats and pressures of a new age.1 This period witnessed the permanent decline of traditional Western Asian powers, such as Egypt, Babylon, and Assyria and, with it, the eclipse of their ancient royal, religious, artistic and architectural traditions.
Because of the dynasties' own myths of continuity, as well as the Romans' interest in drawing historical comparisons, scholarship has often focused on evaluating the ruptures or continuities between the Achaemenid and these Middle Iranian dynasties instead of focusing on the innovations that they introduced. While both dynasties paid attention to the half-remembered traditions, and sometimes sites, of the Achaemenids early in their empires, the Parthian and Sasanians dynasties forged new ideas, images, and practices of Iranian kingship that united the eastern and western Iranian worlds and, just as importantly, created powerful traditions of ruler representation and royal ritual that impressed and impacted many peoples beyond their borders.After taking the Iranian uplands and Mesopotamia, the Arsacids began conforming their subordinate kings to the culture of the Arsacid court and replaced the dynasts of important kingdoms with their own family, a process that the early Sasanians continued. Constant military pressures from both sides of the empire demanded that the Parthian and Sasanian armies adapt to meet not only to the logistically and technologically formidable traditions of Roman warfare to defend their cities in Mesopotamia and their interests in the Caucasus, but also the technologies and tactics of mounted warfare to match the formidable threat of the steppe. Both empires cultivated long-distance land and sea trading networks and developed ever more extensive irrigation-based agricultural systems in Mesopotamia. These organizational capacities and techniques enabled the empires to successfully hold the Roman Empire at bay and defeat the waves of Iranian-speaking, and later Turkic, nomads that threatened their northern and eastern borders.
1 Mann 1986, vol. 1, 6-10. I would like to thank my graduate research assistant, Ileana de Giuseppe, for her assistance in correcting the manuscript.
Matthew P. Canepa, The Parthian and Sasanian Empires In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0010.