#sasanian empire

[mioritic]

Stucco panel depicting a winged horse, Sasanian period

From the Jahangir archaeological site in Ilam province, Iran

Photo by Leila Khosravi, Pourdavoud Institute, UCLA

[palatteflags]

Ancient Iran, Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian empires based aromantic moodboard~ ^^ For an anon!! Hope you like~

Want one? Send an ask! -mod Jay

[aurangg]

Look at this beautiful ossuary.

[nanshe-of-nina]

Women’s History Meme || Empresses (3/5) ↬ Shirin شیرین (d. 628)

The connection between eros and power has long held a great fascination for people. In literature, history, and art, archetypal (in C. G. Jung’s sense) presentations of this theme have been widely disseminated. The story of the Christian Shirin, who rose to become wife of the Persian shah Khosrow II (590-628), is a fascinating example of the link between eros and power. Over the centuries, historians, poets, and artists have taken an interest in her, and she has retained a presence in both East and West until the present day. Byzantine and Syriac writers among her contemporaries, such as the church historian Evagrios, the monk Strategios of St. Saba near Jerusalem, the Byzantine imperial secretary Theophylaktes Simokates, the author of the anonymous Syriac Chronicle, and the Armenian Pseudo-Sebeos, referred to the Christian queen in their works, which represent the first stage of the history of the Shirin theme. Around the year 800, the Byzantine historian Theophanes Confessor attempted to place these events in his chronicle of world history. Only vague reports of Shirin, preserved for us in the Frankish Chronicle of Fredegar, reached the West in the seventh century, but in the Orient, she remained a presence, especially in her faith community, the Apostolic Church of the East, which is usually referred to in the West by the incorrect name “Nestorian.” The East Syriac Chronicle of Seert in Kurdistan and the twelfth-century patriarchal biographies of the Syrian Mari ibn Sulaiman represent the second stage, as it were, of the reception and reworking of this theme in a time which no longer had any immediate connection to the events, since political circumstances had changed dramatically. — Shirin: Christian Queen Myth of Love: A Woman Of Late Antiquity: Historical Reality and Literary Effect by Wilhelm Baum

[zorbarsglogaboungcurture]

Persian manuscript describing how an ambassador from India, probably sent by the Maukhari King Śarvavarman of Kannauj, brought chess to the Persian court of Khosrow I.

The same scene from another manuscript.An illustration from a Persian manuscript "A treatise on chess". The Ambassadors from India present the Chatrang to Khosrow I Anushirwan, "Immortal Soul", King of Persia

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Iran#/media/File:A_treatise_on_chess_2.jpg

[vikachizh]

Gaul

New Kingdom

Persia

Qin Empire

[blueiscoool]

Ancient Iranian Carving Seized at a London Airport

An ancient sculpture illicitly carved from a rock relief in Iran will soon go on display at the British Museum before being repatriated to the National Museum in Tehran.

Carved in calcareous limestone, the sculpture depicts a standing male figure with an ornamental headdress. The piece likely hails from the 3rd century C.E. when the Sasanian Empire ruled greater Iran, according to the Guardian.

“It belongs to a period when Iran was the center of a powerful empire stretching from Syria to the Caucasus and Central Asia, and with its capital at Ctesiphon, south of present-day Baghdad,” St. John Simpson, an archaeologist and senior curator the British Museum’s department of the Middle East, told the paper. “The Sasanians were powerful rivals of Rome, and famous today for their fine silverwares and cut glass.”

The relief was seized at the Stansted airport outside of London, where border officers pulled the item aside because of its suspicious packaging—an unpadded, slapdash crate held together by nails. Inside was the carving, which had recently been excised with an angle grinder.

“We almost never come across a case of something being cut out of the ‘living rock,’” Simpson said. “That’s a level of brutalism that surpasses anything.”

Exactly where the carving came from remains a mystery, though context clues may help to narrow the list of potential locations. Roughly only 30 Sasanian rock reliefs are known to exist today, and almost all them came from the small Fars Province in southwest Iran.

Simpson suspects it “comes from somewhere in the Shiraz area” of the province. “Stylistically, it is similar to one known in the region,” he explained. “I think it probably is part of a big sequence. There might be more bits out there.”

The subject of the piece is similarly difficult to determine. “The lack of an inscription makes it impossible to identify the person depicted, but his dress and diademed headdress signifies him as a person of high rank,” the curator said. “His gesture of greeting and submission, with a raised bent forefinger, is a feature of Sasanian art when figures are in the presence of royalty, which suggests that this was part of a larger composition, with the king to the right and perhaps other figures behind.”

Interpol and the National Crime Agency have both investigated the object, but no arrests have yet been made. An internet auction site in the U.K. was listed as the package’s destination address, but the company claimed not to be expecting it.

Because of its poor padding, the relief broke in two pieces during transport. Conservators have since put it back together.

“The British Museum is committed to contributing to the preservation of cultural heritage in the U.K. and globally, partnering with law enforcement agencies to identify illicitly trafficked antiquities,” read a statement from the museum. “Objects seized in this way are brought to the British Museum for identification and cataloguing.”

The London institution obtained permission from the Iranian government to display the carving for three months. After that time, it will be repatriated to the National Museum in Tehran.

Simpson called the newly repaired piece “stunningly attractive,” before weighing in on its potential worth.  

“The valuation could be anything, really. We’re talking £20 million to £30 million-plus,” ($25 million to $37 million) he said. “There’s never been anything like it on the market.”

By Taylor Dafoe.

[a-modernmajorgeneral]

A bulla (Medieval Latin for "a round seal", from Classical Latin bulla, "bubble, blob"; plural bullae) is an inscribed clay or soft metal (such as lead or tin) or bitumen or wax token used in commercial and legal documentation as a form of authentication and for tamper-proofing whatever is attached to it (or, in the historical form, contained in it).

In their oldest attested form, as used in the ancient Near East and the Middle East of the 8th millennium BC onwards, bullae were hollow clay balls that contained other smaller tokens that identified the quantity and types of goods being recorded. In this form, bullae represent one of the earliest forms of specialization in the ancient world, and likely required skill to create.[1]: 24  From about the 4th millennium BC onwards, as communications on papyrus and parchment became widespread, bullae evolved into simpler tokens that were attached to the documents with cord, and impressed with a unique sign (i.e., a seal)[1]: 29  to provide the same kind of authoritative identification and for tamper-proofing. Bullae are still occasionally attached to documents for these purposes (e.g., the seal on a papal bull).

~ Bulla with signet ring impression.

Place of origin: Near Eastern, Iranian, Persian

Period: Sasanian

Date: A.D. 226–651

Medium: Clay

[whencyclopedia]

Ancient Armenia, located in the south Caucasus area of Eurasia, was settled in the Neolithic era but its first recorded state proper was the kingdom of Urartu from the 9th century BCE. Incorporated into the Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BCE, the Orontid dynasty ruled as Persian satraps, a function they performed for their next overlords the Macedonians and Seleucid Empire into the 3rd century BCE. Under the Artaxiad and Arsacid dynasties the country flourished but was often caught between the ambitions of Parthia and Rome, and then the Sasanian and Byzantine Empires. The boundaries of the state varied considerably over the centuries but such common factors as religion and language were united by long-lasting dynastic clans, which gave Armenia its own unique identity throughout antiquity.

[memories-of-ancients]

Gold and amethyst intaglio ring with royal portrait and Pahlavi inscription, Sasanian Empire, 5th century AD

from Hindman Auctions

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Matti Friedman

The little book may have been kept by a Jewish family in Bamiyan, the curator suggested, with different people adding new texts as the years passed. The hands of at least five scribes are evident in the pages. They were influenced by ideas and writing coming from both major Jewish centers of the time—Babylon, which is modern-day Iraq, and the Land of Israel, where Jewish sovereignty had been lost seven centuries before and whose people were now under Islamic rule.

The previously unknown poem shows the influence of a familiar biblical text, the erotic Song of Songs, according to Professor Shulamit Elizur of the Hebrew University, the member of the research team in charge of the poem’s analysis.  But it also shows the impact of an esoteric Jewish book that wasn’t part of the Bible, known as the Apocalypse of Zerubbabel. This book is thought to have originated in the early 600s, when a brutal war between Byzantium and the Sasanian empire of Persia generated desperate messianic hopes among many Jews. Whoever wrote the poem in the Afghan prayer book had clearly read the Apocalypse, Elizur said—giving us a glimpse of a Jewish spiritual world both familiar and foreign to the coreligionists of the Bamiyan Jews in our own times, 1,300 years later. The previously unknown poem shows the influence of a familiar biblical text, the erotic Song of Songs, according to Professor Shulamit Elizur of the Hebrew University. (Museum of the Bible)

Chapters of the book’s journey from Afghanistan to Washington are unclear—some because they’re simply unknown even to the experts, and others because that’s the way the people in the murky manuscript market often prefer it.  

When the book was discovered by the Hazara militiaman, according to Hepler, the tribesmen didn’t know exactly what it was but understood it was Jewish and assumed it was sacred. The local leader had it wrapped in cloth and preserved in a special box. At one point in the late 1990s, it seems to have been offered unsuccessfully for sale in Dallas, Texas, though it’s unclear if the book itself actually left Afghanistan at the time. 

After the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 triggered the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the book disappeared for about a decade. In 2012 it resurfaced in London, where it was photographed by the collector and dealer Lenny Wolfe. 

Any story about Afghan manuscripts ends up leading to Wolfe, an Israeli born in Glasgow, Scotland. I went to see him at his office in Jerusalem, an Ottoman-era basement where the tables and couches are cluttered with ancient Greek flasks and Hebrew coins minted in the Jewish revolt against Rome in the 130s CE. It was Wolfe who helped facilitate the sale of the larger Afghan collection to Israel’s National Library. “The Afghan documents are fascinating,” he told me, “because they give us a window into Jewish life on the very edge of the Jewish world, on the border with China.” 

When Wolfe encountered the little prayer book, he told me it had already been on the London market for several years without finding a buyer. In 2012, the year he photographed the book, he said it was offered to him at a price of $120,000 by two sellers, one Arab and the other Persian. But the Israeli institution he hoped would buy the book turned it down, he told me, so the sale never happened. Not long afterwards, according to his account, he heard that buyers representing the Green family had paid $2.5 million. When I asked what explained the difference in price, he answered, “greed,” and wouldn’t say more. (Hepler of the Museum of the Bible wouldn’t divulge the purchase price or the estimated value of the manuscript, but said Wolfe’s figure was “wrong.”)

The collection amassed by the Green family eventually became the Museum of the Bible, which opened in Washington in 2017. The museum has been sensitive to criticism related to the provenance of its artifacts since a scandal erupted involving thousands of antiquities that turned out to have been looted or improperly acquired in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East. The museum’s founder, Steve Green, has said he first began collecting as an enthusiast, not an expert, and was taken in by some of the dubious characters who populate the antiquities market. “I trusted the wrong people to guide me, and unwittingly dealt with unscrupulous dealers in those early years,” he said after a federal investigation. In March 2020 the museum agreed to repatriate 11,000 artifacts to Iraq and Egypt. 

[paganimagevault]

Sassanid silver plate 7th C. CE. Decorated with a figure seated on a couch in a crescent moon and a figure standing in an archway. Found in Klimova, Russia in 1907. The base of the vessel appears to have runic script scratched into it. This item is sometimes referred to as The ‘Clock of Khosrow’ or The ‘Throne of Khosrow’ Plate. Diameter: 21.6cm.

I'm just going to do a brief summary of what caused Persia to fall to Islam.

The Islamic invasion of Persia began sometime between 628-632 CE. From 541 CE to this time Persia had been exhausted by an almost constant state of war. Most of the fighting was with the Byzantine Empire in the west: The Lazic War (541-562), Byzantine–Sasanian War of 572–591, Byzantine–Sasanian War of 602–628.

However, there were also wars with the Turks to the north and the east: Perso-Turkic war of 588–589, Perso-Turkic war of 606–608, Perso-Turkic war of 627–629. In this final war the Byzantines and Turks were allies. This alliance took time to come into being but had been sought out by the Turks almost immediately after they destroyed the Hephthalites, indicating they planned to do to the Persians what they had done to the Huns. The medieval historian Movses Kaghankatvatsi described the war of 627-629:

"At the arrival of the all-powerful scourge (universal wrath) confronting us, the invaders [Turks], like billowing waves of the sea, crashed against the walls and demolished them to their foundations. [In Partaw], seeing the terrible danger from the multitude of hideously ugly, vile, broad-faced, without eyelashes, and with long flowing hair like women, which descended upon them, a great terror (trembling) seized the inhabitants. They were even more horrified when they saw the accurate and strong [Khazar] archers, whose arrows rained down upon them like heavy hailstones, and how they [Khazars], like ravenous wolves that had lost all shame, fell upon them and mercilessly slaughtered them on the streets and squares of the city. Their eyes had no mercy for neither the beautiful, nor handsome, nor the young men or women; they did not spare even the unfit, harmless, lame, nor old; they had no pity (compassion, regrets), and their hearts did not shrink at the sight of the babies embracing their murdered mothers; to the contrary, they suckled blood from their breasts like milk."

Ironically, the Sassanid ruler Khosrow I had married a Turkic princess to win an alliance with them so the two could destroy the Huns together in 560 CE at the Battle of Gol-Zarriun. Khosrow I chose his Turkic progeny, Hormizd IV, as ruler over his Persian children. From Iranica Online:

"Hormozd’s character displeased everyone. He antagonized the Zoroastrian clergy, allegedly killing many of them, even the chief mowbed, and alienated the nobility by killing thousands of them (Ṭabari, I, p. 991; tr., V, pp. 297-98; Balʿami, ed. Bahār, pp. 1072-73; Masʿudi, Moruj, ed. Pellat, sec. 632; Šāh-nāma, Moscow, VIII, pp. 319 ff.). In diplomacy he showed inflexibility, even poor judgement. He disrupted the peace negotiations with the Byzantines and made demands (payment of “tribute”) that the Romans could not accept (Menander, frag., 23.9-24-12529). His contemporary, Menander Protector, lamented that “the Romans and the Persians would have made peace, had not Ḵosrow left this life and his son, Hormisdas [Hormizd IV], a truly wicked man, assumed the crown” (tr., pp. 207-9)."

Finally the Sassanid Empire went into a civil war from 628-632 CE where it had become politically decentralized. The Plague of Sheroe also occurred in 627-628 CE, most heavily devastating the populations in the western provinces with some areas experiencing a 50% mortality rate. Afterward, the Arab Muslims flooded into an already ravaged Persia like bacteria infesting an open wound.

[tanadrin]

Shoemaker on literacy, memory, oral tradition, and the Quran:

Studies of literacy in pre-Islamic Arabia have been severely overlooked in recent Quran scholarship; in fact, literacy in the 7th century Hijaz was "almost completely unknown" and "writing was hardly practiced at all in the time of Muhammad." "[T]here seems to be a widespread agreement among experts on the early history of the Arabic language 'that, before and immediately after the rise of Islam, Arab culture was in all important respects fundamentally oral.'" Ancient graffiti in the region seems to have been a bit like early runic writing in Scandinavia--not central to the culture, mostly decorative and incidental, and certainly not used for long, important texts. "There is, in effect, a lot of 'Kilroy was here' scattered across the Arabian desert." Indeed, most of these graffiti are personal names or private in nature--we're not talking monumental inscriptions here, we're talking bored herders scratching stuff onto rocks to pass the time.

Southern Arabia and the larger oases to the north had more in the way of literate elites (and thus things like monumental inscriptions), but these places were far from the central inland Hijaz. If someone in this region did want to become literate, they would probably have learned to read and write in Greek or Aramaic, which were useful and important linguae francae.

As in very early Christianity, writing occupied a controversial position vis a vis orality--oral tradition was primary for the production and transmission of culturally important things like religious texts, poetry, literary prose, genealogy, and history. The shift to a literate culture came only with the expansion of Muhammad's polity into a wealthy, multicultural empire rather than a tribal state. Indeed, much of the early Caliphate's administration used Greek and other languages--Arabic entered administration only slowly, since a lot of early bureaucrats were drawn from the Roman and Sasanian bureaucracy.

And like early Christianity, another reason not to feel any urgency to write down Muhammad's teachings was that early Muslims expected the end of the world to come very soon, maybe initially even before Muhammad's own death.

The dialect of the Quran is distinctive and unusual; it is very difficult to locate where this dialect might have originated. Ahmad Al-Jallad tentatively identifies an Old Hijazi dialect, but the evidence for this dialect (besides the Quran itself) is limited and mostly much more recent, and he assumes the Quran was produced in the Hijaz.

The Arabic of the Quran can probably be identified with the prestige dialect of Levantine Arabic in the Ummayad period, but the origin of that dialect, and what Arabic dialects were brought together there in that time, is hard to ascertain with certainty.

Shoemaker thinks the Quran started as short collections drawn from individual memories following the conquest and encounters with widespread literacy; these collections would have been considered open, and subject to influence from oral tradition. They were combined into increasingly larger collections, with additional traditions and revisions, emergin as something like divergent versions of the Quran (though still not fully static and closed). Finally, the traditions of these regional versions, with other written and oral traditions, were fashioned into their canonical form under Abd al-Malik, and this version was progressively enforced across the empire.

Shoemaker brings in memory science and the anthropology of oral cultures: memory is highly frangible and fallible. Even though it functions well for day to day tasks, it's important not to overlook how common misremembering and re-remembering alters information in both personal and collective memory when talking about a text that even Islamic tradition agrees was not written down within Muhammad's lifetime.

Most forgetting occurs shortly after an event in question; a small core of memories we develop about an event will persist for a significant time after. These findings have been corroborated both in the lab and in the circumstances of everyday life.

Memory is not primarily reproductive; literal recall is, in evolutionary terms, pretty unimportant, and brains omit needless detail. Remembering thus involves a lot of reconstruction more than it does reproduction; memories are storied piecewise in different parts of the brain, and are assembled on recall, with the gaps being filled in using similar memory fragments drawn from comparable experiences.

Note Bartlett's experiments using a short Native American folktale; when asked to recall this story, even after only fifteen minutes participants introduced major and minor changes. Subsequent recall didn't improve accuracy, though the basic structure of the memory developed pretty quickly in each individual. But this structure was not especially accurate, and significant details vanished or were replaced with new information. Most often this information was drawn from the subject's culture (in this case, Edwardian England), forming a memory that made more sense to them and had more relevance in their context. The overall style was quickly lost, and replaced by new formations, and there was a persistent tendency to abbreviate. After a few months, narrative recall consisted mostly of false memory reports, a finding verified by subsequent replications of his experiments.

Experiential and textual memory in particular degrades very rapidly; this degredation is much faster when information is transmitted from one person to another. Epithets change into their opposites, incidents and events are transposed, names and numbers rarely survive intact more than a few reproductions, opinions and conclusions are reversed, etc. Figures like Jesus or Muhammad will hardly be remembered accurately even by people who knew them.

The style of the Quran (e.g., prose, and often terse, elliptic, and occasionally downright nonsensical prose at that) does not lend itself to memorization; Shoemaker argues it is only possible for people to memorize the Quran now because it has become a written document they can consult in the process.

Eyewitness testimony is of course also notoriously unreliable, despite what apologists (in particular Christian apologists) have argued. Cf. Franz von Liszt's experiment in 1902, where a staged argument in a lecture escalates to one student pulling a gun on another--after revealing this event was scripted and staged, and asking different students to recall the details of the event at different intervals afterward, literally none of them got it right--the best reports, taken immediately, got things about one quarter correct. Even repeatedly imagining a scenario vividly enough can eventually lead to a false memory of it occurring (a phenomenon which may explain some alien abduction reports). People mistake post-even hearsay or visualization for firsthand knowledge, especially in the case of dramatic events.

What memory excels at is remembering broad strokes--we are adapted to retain the information which is most likely to be needed, i.e., the gist (or, more likely, the broad themes) of events and information, and not its exact form.

There's a long digression here about John Dean's testimony on the Watergate conspiracy--this may be the first book in early Islamic studies to have Richard Nixon in the index.

Even competitive memory champions train for short-term recall of large amounts of information; they, and other people with preternaturally good memories, are of course exceedingly rare. It's very unlikely that someone could remember, several decades after the fact, precisely (or even mostly) what was told to them by their friend whose brother's wife's cousin was really there. So even within the traditional account of the Quran's composition, it makes no sense to claim it is in fact the verbatim word of Muhammad.

As in the case of Solomon Shereshevski, when you do have preternaturally good recall even for (say) lists of nonsense syllables, the result is actually kind of debilitating--you have so many useless details to sort through, it makes it quite hard to function at an abstract level. And hyperthymesiacs, though they exhibit a high level of recall about their past, still often remember things incorrectly, at about the same rate as people with normal memories--they are no less susceptible to false or distorted memories.

Nevertheless most modern scholars treat the Quran as a verbatim transcript of Muhammad's words. This is exceedingly unlikely! Especially given that "group" or "collaborative" memory--memories as reconstructed by individuals working together--appears to be even less accurate than individual memory. You get better results having people try to recall events by themselves.

Since during the age of conquests the majority of converts were not closely preoccurpied with the interpretation of the Quran, it would have had to have been rediscovered and hermeneutically reinvented later; the memory of Muhammad's words were being shaped by the nature of the community he founded, as its members collective and individual needs continued to evolve along with the context of transmission.

Many people, both scholars and the general public, seem to believe that people in oral cultures have remarkable capacities for memory not possessed by those of written cultures. Study of oral cultures has shown this is demonstrably false; literacy in fact strengthens verbal and visual memory, while illiteracy impairs these abilities. People in literate cultures have better memories!

Oral transmission is not rote replication; it is a process of recomposition as the tradition is recreated very time it is transmitted. Oral cultures can effectively preserve the gist of events over time, but each time the details are reconstituted, and the tradition can radically diverge from its first repetition, with the stories of the past being reshaped to make them relevant to the present and present concerns.

The collective memory of Muhammad and the origins of Islam as preserved in the Sunni tradition would have forgotten many details as a matter of course, many others because they were no longer relevant to the later Sunni community, and they would have been reshaped in ways that made them particularly suited to the life and community of their contemporary circumstances, exemplifying and validating their religious beliefs--ones very different from those of Muhammad's earliest followers.

The early Muslim conquests put a comparatively small number of soldiers, scattered across a huge territory, in a wildly different cultural and social context, especially in close contact with different Christian and Jewish communities, esp. in the Levant, which rapidly became the cultural center of the new empire. Jews and Christians may have joined the new religious community in large numbers in this time also; their faith and identity would have continued to evolve in this period, as we would expect from comparative episodes in the history of other religions. By the time that Muhammad's teachings were formally inscribed, the memories of his few hundred initial companions would have been transmitted and dispersed to a large number of people in a totally different set of circumstances, with consequences for how those memories exactly were recalled.

Jack Goody, researcher on oral traditions: "It is rather in literate societies that verbatim memory flourishes. Partly because the existence of a fixed original makes it much easier; partly because of the elaboration of spatially oriented memory techniques; partly because of the school situation which has to encourage "decontextualized" memory tasks since it has removed learning from doing and has redefined the corpus of knowledge. Verbatim memorizing is the equivalent of exact copying, which is intrinsic to the transmission of scribal culture, indeed manuscript cultures generally."

Techniques like the ars memoriae belong to literate cultures and were invented by literate people; they are unknown in oral cultures. Oral and literate cultures in fact have a radically different idea of what it means for a text to be "the same"--in the former, word-for-word reproduction is not necessary. A poem can be "the same poem" even if every time it is performed it is largely unique.

Case of the Bagre, the sacred text of the LoDagaa people of Ghana, an extended religious poem used in a liturgical context. Variations in its recitation aren't just variations in wording; changes in recitation can be radical, and the last version is always the starting point. Nevertheless (as in other oral cultures) it is considered "the same," functionally identical with each recitation. These differences appeared even among different performances by the same reciter, or multiple times in the same ceremony. Even the most formulaic parts have great variability. Similar variability in oral texts in other oral cultures has been documented by other anthropologists, including for historical events.

Shoemaker notes that the tradition that the Vedas were transmitted without variation from the time of their composition remains an article of faith in some quarters of South Asian studies; this flies in the face of all available evidence. In fact we have no idea what the state of the Vedic texts was prior to the earliest manuscripts; they may have been written all along.

Collective memory is shaped by contemporary cultural imperatives--examples of Abe Lincoln, a white supremacist considered nothing special by his peers; Christopher Columbus, once revered; the last stand at Masada, considered a minor event of little importance to broader Jewish history until the founding of Israel.

There doesn't have to be any conspiracy or coordinated effort for false narratives about the past to take root.

The hard horizon of communicative memory is around eighty years; so historical consciousness basically only has two modes: the mythic past of collective memory, and the recent past less than eighty or so years ago.

Lack of a clear "generic" monotheism in the Hijaz around the time of Muhammad's birth means the expectations and memory of Muhammad would have been profoundly shaped by Christian and Jewish beliefs.

Early Islam, like early Christianity, wasn't old enough to have a clear distinction between historical/origins memory and recent/communicative memory.

"For most of the seventh century, then, Muhammad’s followers had a memory that was still immersed in the social and cultural milieux of the late ancient Near East, from which they had yet to clearly differentiate themselves. They eventually would do this in large part by developing a distinctive collective memory for their group, different from those inherited from Judaism and Christianity, a process that was no doubt delayed by their fervent belief that the world would soon come to an end, making such an endeavor rather pointless for a time. Only as the end continued to remain in abeyance, and the community’s living memory grew ever distant from the time of origins did they develop a collective memory of their own. Yet, as Islamic collective memory began to evolve, one imagines that it initially took different shapes within the various pockets of Believers that were scattered across their empire. The basic elements of this nascent collective memory were, as Halbwachs says of the early Christians, “still dispersed among a multitude of spatially separated small communities. These communities were neither astonished, anxious, nor scandalized that the beliefs of one community differed from those of another and that the community of today was not exactly the same as that of yesterday.” Thus, we should expect to find a significant degree of diversity in religious faith and memory among the different early communities of the Believers, scattered and outnumbered as they were among the Jews and Christians of their burgeoning empire. Only with ʿAbd al-Malik’s program of Arabization and Islamicization was a new, distinctively Islamic collective memory and identity concretized and established for this new religious community. It was a collective identity that was formed from the top down and imposed, at the expense of any other alternative collective memories, with the full power and backing of the imperial state."

The limits of oral tradition apply even more strongly to the hadith and biographies.

[coolancientstuff]

Aerial shot of Takht-e Soleymān (Throne of Solomon), an archaeological site in West Azerbaijan province, Iran, dating back to Sasanian Empire (224-651 CE).

[blueiscoool]

Viking-age Treasure Came to Scotland From West Asia

Ten years on from the discovery of the Viking-age Galloway Hoard in south Scotland, experts have revealed that part of the collection came from West Asia.

The collection - described as one of the most important UK archaeological finds of the century - was found by metal detectorist Derek McLennan in 2014.

A lidded silver vessel was discovered still wrapped in its ancient textiles, which is extremely rare, and meant that the surface of the vessel could at first only be seen through X-ray scans.

Experts say the vessel is originally from what is now central Iran and it was transported halfway around the world more than 1,000 years ago. The vessel was found to contain other treasures, like silk and brooches.

Its textiles have now been partially removed and preserved, and the vessel has been cleaned using lasers which removed any green corrosion and revealed details of the design, including crowns, fire altars, leopards and tigers.

This imagery is unusual in western Europe but it is linked with the iconography of Zoroastrianism, the state religion of the Sasanian Empire which was the last Persian empire before the early Muslim conquests from 632AD.

The hoard - which contained more than 5kg of silver, gold and other materials - was discovered on what is now Church of Scotland land near Balmaghie in the historical county of Kirkcudbrightshire.

Dr Martin Goldberg from the National Museums Scotland said the vessel was "further evidence of the cosmopolitan make-up of the Galloway Hoard".

He said: "We now know that the Viking-age silver that makes up most of the Hoard was melted down from coins and metalwork from early medieval England.

"Some objects, like the lidded vessel, stood out from the rest and the scientific analysis now confirms this.

"It is incredible to imagine how the vessel made its journey halfway round the known world, from Iran to this distant corner of southwest Scotland.”

The artefact from about 900AD is set to go on public display for the first time next week, on loan to the British Museum’s upcoming Silk Roads exhibition in London.

Other objects from the Galloway Hoard will go on long-term display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, while a portion will go on show at Kirkcudbright Galleries.

Dr Sue Brunning, from the British Museum, said: "We're delighted that visitors to Silk Roads will be the first in the world to see this key object from the Galloway Hoard.

"Among its remarkable contents were Scotland's earliest recorded silk, and so it is a highly appropriate inclusion in the exhibition."

[yamayuandadu]

was mithra/mithras worshipped in mesopotamia like was his worship introduced into this area during the achaemenid and later periods? what about cities near mesopotamia like Palmyra and dura europos? also was he syncrestised With any local gods? maybe shamash

I’m sorry but due to space constraints and lack of sufficient familiarity with (or deeper interest in) most Roman mystery cults I can’t help much with the dissemination of Mithras and Mithraism on the eastern periphery. There is no evidence of his cult being present in Palmyra (Javier Teixidor, The pantheon of Palmyra, p. 106) but on the other hand it was definitely present in Dura Europos (the mithraeum discovered there is notable enough to have its own wiki page, apparently); I’m not really aware of any attestations from even further east. According to Encyclopedia Iranica, “though represented virtually everywhere in the Roman empire, it was much stronger in the Latin speaking West than in the (predominantly) Greek-speaking East”. As for Mithra proper: the oldest datable attestation of him - or a derivative, at least, since we are dealing with a highly divergent oddity with a plural name, it seems - is technically at least Mesopotamia-adjacent. 

The treaty between Suppiluliuma of the Hittite Empire and Šattiwaza of Mittani (c. 1330 BCE) lists “the Mitra-gods (d.MEŠMitraššil; the determinative signifies plurality), the Varuna-gods, Indra, the Nasatya-gods” (translation courtesy of Gary Beckman, Hittite Diplomatic Texts, p. 43) among deities invoked as witnesses on the Mittani side. As stressed most recently by Eva von Dassow in Mittani and Its Empire (published in The Oxford History of the Ancient Near East), their position is not prominent, and they do not appear anywhere else. People who try to make this attestation into a big deal are basically automatically untrustworthy. The Mitanni rulers, regardless of their origin, were culturally Hurrianized to such a degree the presence of some derivative of Mithra in a single treaty is borderline irrelevant - and it might not even be strictly speaking Mithra, but rather generic “treaty gods” (hence the plural). I’m not really aware of any Achaemenid, Arsacid or Sasanian efforts to introduce the strictly Zoroastrian version of Mithra to Mesopotamia.

Whether it’s possible to speak of any connection between Mithra and Shamash is a complex matter so that’s addressed under the cut. The material from Hatra pertains to that so it’s covered there too.

To begin with, I’m not aware of any clear case of identification between Mithra and Shamash. It’s a suggestion which sometimes pops up in scholarship, but without any conclusive evidence, as far as I am aware. It’s not entirely implausible, though.

Typically the comparisons depend on sharing both judiciary and solar roles, but it needs to be stressed here that Mithra didn’t really have strong solar associations until relatively late. This aspect of his character is absent from the Avesta, and according to his article in Encyclopedia Iranica there’s no clear evidence for him having a solar role predating Strabo’s account of Persian beliefs. Therefore, it probably only developed at some point in the Achaemenid period.

One relatively recent example of seeking possible connections between Mithra and Shamash I’ve stumbled upon is the article Mesopotamian Influence on Persian Sky-watching and Calendar. Part I. Mithra, Shamash and Solar Festivals by Krzysztof Jakubiak and Arkadiusz Sołtysiak (accessible via De Gruyter). Some quite bold claims are made there, with the supposed influence going all the way back to the Bronze Age. However, the authors provide basically no archeological evidence for early Iranian-Mesopotamian contact (they also don’t address the fact early Iranians would very obviously encounter Elamites first when moving westwards); and some of their sources indicate that a thorough survey of literature wasn’t made (in many cases outdated generalist publications are the only sources consulted). I’m reluctant to recommend it as a point of reference for this reason. It seems much more sound to seek possible influence in the Achaemenid period or beyond. However, matters are complicated by the fact that Mithra is essentially absent from some of the earliest available sources like the Persepolis fortification archives, and largely just appears in theophoric names before the reign of Artaxerxes II.

Margaret Cool Root suggests in Defining the Divine in Achaemenid Persian Kingship (published in Every Inch a King – Comparative Studies on Kings and Kingship in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds, accessible via Brill) that there is already evidence for Persians being familiar with the iconography of Shamash and his association with royal power and legitimacy during the reign of Darius I. However, she doesn’t propose any connection with Mithra, only with the semi-divine king and Ahura Mazda, and relies just on motifs in monumental art. More sound evidence is available from the early centuries CE. Michael Shenkar (Intangible Spirits and Graven Images, p. 102) notes a figure on the relief from Tang-e Sarvak might be either Mithra depicted in a similar manner to Shamash or just outright Shamash. He also proposes that an unusual depiction of the Kushan emperor Vima Kadphises rising from between mountains with rays/flames emanating from his shoulders is patterned on Shamash’s iconography (Royal regalia and 'Divine Kingship' in the pre-Islamic Central Asia, p. 58) and that Iranian and adjacent groups might have associated the images of Shamash rising from between mountains with the customary description of Mithra as responsible for surveying the world from atop Mount Harā. He points out Shamash was still depicted this way in the second century CE, as indicated by works of art from Hatra. I personally found these arguments convincing at least in terms of iconography. The situation in Hatra is somewhat unique, and requires some additional explanations, though. 

A good recent outline can be found in Aleksandra Kubiak-Schneider’s Hatra of Shamash. How to assign the city under the divine power? (there is a small mistake on p. 799 though - referring to Ereshkigal as a sister of Shamash is a questionable syllogism at best, and even her sibling credentials wrt Inanna are questionable as recently stressed by Alhena Gadotti). She argues the city god, Maran/Maren, was essentially a derivative of Shamash - or Shamash under an Aramaic title, something like “our lord”. Some of his local features are unique - for example, his symbol was an eagle, but Shamash was never associated with this bird elsewhere in earlier periods (it was mostly Zababa’s thing). Kuciak-Schneider suggests this might be an evolution of depicting him symbolically as a winged solar disk (p. 798). A slightly different view can be found in an earlier publication. Ted Kaizer in his 2000 overview article Some remarks about the religious life of Hatra states that it cannot be determined with certainty if the Shamash worshiped in Hatra was derived from the Mesopotamian god, or instead from the Arabic sun goddess (p. 234). He also the local pantheon combined “Mesopotamian, Arab, Syrian and Graeco-Roman elements” (p. 230) - but not Iranian. This obviously requires partial revision, since Lucinda Dirven in her fantastic My Lord with his Dogs. Continuity and Change in the Cult of Nergal in Parthian Mesopotamia does demonstrate at least a degree of Iranian influence on the worship of Nergal in Hatra. However, all I dug up in the case of Mithra is a handful of Iranian theophoric names listed by Enrico Marcato in Personal Names in the Aramaic Inscriptions of Hatra: Daosha-Mithra (“Mithra is my friend”), Mithra, Mithra-bandag (“servant of Mithra”) and Mithra-dāta (“given by Mithra”). It doesn’t seem these have any deeper implications than that there were some people with an Iranian background in Hatra, though. Marcato states that the presence of an actual cult of Mithra in Hatra is implausible (p. 167) and has been already disproven in the 1970s by Han J. W. Drijvers in the article Mithra at Hatra? Some remarks on the problem of the Irano- Mesopotamian syncretism, which I tragically failed to find online. For what it’s worth, he also notes some of the same theophoric names occur in material from Palmyra as well.