Head of king Shapur II (Sasanian dynasty A.D. 4th century). From The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art permanent collection.
The Sassanid dynasty (also Sassanian) was the name given to the kings of Persia during the era of the second Persian Empire, from 224 until 651, when the last Sassanid shah, Yazdegerd III, lost a 14-year struggle to drive out the Umayyad Caliphate, the first of the Islamic empires.
The Sassanid era began in earnest in 228, when the Shah Ardashir I destroyed the Parthian Empire which had held sway over the region for centuries. He and his successors created a vast empire, based in Firouzabad, Fars, which included those lands of the old Achaemenid Persian empire east of the Euphrates River. The Sassanids wanted to re-create the longed-for ancient empire. Zoroastrianism was made the state religion, and all other faiths were persecuted. It was the shahs' long sought-after goal to reunify all of the old Achaemenid territory, and this brought them into frequent wars against the Roman Empire and Byzantine Empire.
Shah Khosrau II (Kasrā in Arabic) fleetingly achieved this goal in a series of wars against the Byzantine Empire between 602 and 616, conquering Egypt, Syria and Palestine. However, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius turned the tide with a daring invasion of Persia itself. In 628, Khosrau was deposed with Heraclius' army at the gates of the capital of Ctesiphon. In the peace that followed, the Sassanids retreated to their traditional frontiers.
The long war exhausted both sides, and the Sassanids were soon destroyed by the rise of Islam.
The Sasanian age was a dynamic time of cultural and economic revival when a new Persian ruling house in southwestern Iran, like the Achaemenid Persians of a thousand years before, extended its dominion over much of Western and Central Asia, in territories that stretched from Transcaucasia to the Indus.
Sasanian Iran, which remained a highly centralized state for over 400 years, forged a fusion of the offices of church and state, of religious authority and secular rule.
This symbol is explicit on Sasanian coins where the reigning monarch, with his crown and regalia of office, appears on the obverse, backed by the sacred fire, the symbol of the national religion, on the coin's reverse.
Ardashir I, a king of Persis, defeats the Parthian king Artabanos IV and two years later is crowned as the first Sasanian king in 226 AD.
His son, Shapur I, expands the borders to include all of modern Iran and parts of Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and the Gulf Coast of the Arabian peninsula.
400 years of war with Rome, Kushans, Chionites and Hephthalites takes its toll and in the mid 7th century the Arabs overrun the Sasanians, replacing Zoroastrianism with Islam.
Feeds |
Contact