Book Title | Birth Of The Persian Empire |
Book Author | Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis |
Total Pages | 156 |
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Language | English |
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Arabic: An Essential Grammar
Birth of the Persian Empire Volume I Edited by Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis and Sarah Stewart
BIRTH OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE
The Lecture series “The Idea of Iran: from Eurasian Steppe to Persian Empire” was prompted by a desire to explore the multifarious ideas about the notion of “Iran” beginning with the origins of Achaemenid hegemony.
The first half of the title was borrowed from Gherardo Gnoli’s collection of essays entitled The Idea of Iran (Rome, 1989), in which he discussed the complex question of Iran and its national identity from a historical perspective.
The title of the present volume, The Birth of the Persian Empire, broadens the approach and takes into account research undertaken during the past fifteen years. It enables scholars from different subject disciplines; archaeology, history, religion and philology, to debate various issues concerning the nature and origin of Iran as a political, religious and/or ethnic entity.
The importance of Iranian studies cannot be underestimated. It is our hope to re-invigorate the subject, which for many years has been neglected. This would require ending its vulnerability due to changes in the international political environment or fluctuations related to government funding.
As well as providing a forum for academic debate, our aim in organizing this series is to attract young people to the field of Iranian studies and encourage them to think beyond contemporary geopolitical boundaries.
Iranian cultural heritage spans a vast area of what is now a region divided by nation-state borders, religious ideology and political conflict.
There is a need for a coherent approach to Iran’s historical cultures that is free from contemporary pressures to reinterpret the past in ways that conform to present norms of whatever nature.
We are extremely fortunate to be able to bring together a collection of papers by eminent scholars, all of whom are experts in their field.
The editors have, therefore, respected the fact that their research sometimes involves pushing back the boundaries of conventional terminology and challenging existing translations.
The first paper by Daniel Potts deals with the contribution of the Elamites to the formation of an ethnic and cultural identity which is usually associated with the foundation of the Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great in 550 BCE.
The author discusses the question of “cultural diversity” in the pre-Achaemenid period and the role of the Elamites as the non Iranian inhabitants of present-day southwestern Iran. The Elamite contribution to the culture and civilisation of Iran has been neglected.
The main core of the Elamite cultural zone, according to Potts, consisted of Elam and Anshan, which comprised the Deh Luran plain, Bushire, and Marv Dasht in Fars. Anshan consisted of the eastern highland, with the city of Anshan located at the site of Tal-e Malyan, north of modern Shiraz in southern Iran.
This site was excavated in the 1970s under the directorship of Professor William M. Sumner of Ohio State University. Elam also included Shushan, the area around Susa. It was within a Neo-Elamite cultural and political milieu in the region of Anshan, modern Fars, that Cyrus the Great and his family emerged. Potts discusses the genealogy of Cyrus in connection with his royal title “king of Anshan”, which appears in the Cyrus Cylinder.
He dismisses any connection between Kurash of Anshan and Kurash of Parsumash, the latter mentioned in Assyrian annals of Assurbanipal of 643 BCE, and argues that Cyrus may have been “an Anshanite, with an Elamite name”.
Potts argues that inspiration for the cultural and political unity of Iran came from the Elamites rather than the Persians. When Darius seized the throne after the death of Cambyses, he replaced “the Anshanite Teispid family of Cyrus” with “the Persian line of Achaemenes”.
This gave cause to a rebellion by three Elamites, Açina, Martiya and Athamaita, as described by King Darius in his Behistun inscription.
From Elam and the west we move east to Central Asia and the Hindu Kush. In Chapter 2, Frantz Grenet discusses the geography of the Avesta with particular reference to the list of countries contained in the Vidēvdād.
The paucity of evidence regarding the homeland of the prophet Zarathuštra and his early followers has resulted in a variety of scholarly theories based on the tantalizingly scant allusions and references contained in the Young Avesta.
The positioning of the countries listed in the Vidēvdād is an important factor in determining when the migration of Avestan peoples from east to the west began and, therefore, whether or not the early Achaemenids are likely to have been Zoroastrians.
At the center of the debate has been the location of the country Ragha referred to in the Vidēvdād, which has been variously identified with the holy city of Ragā in ancient Media (modern Ray near Tehran), and a region to the east of the Iranian plateau with a cognate name.
Grenet approaches the subject from an archaeological as well as a philological perspective. He looks at the natural topography of the region in relation to the text asking: “Do the descriptive words of the Avesta make sense on the ground.” Each of the countries in the list is blighted with an Ahrimanic plague and so it is possible to speculate for example, where would winter have lasted ten months? Where is there likely to have been excessive heat?
Where did non-Aryan masters rule and where grew “thorns fatal to cows”? The basis for Grenet’s discussion is the logical sequence of the countries contained in the Vidēvdād list according to their geographic location.
He charts the progress of this sequence with reference to the arguments presented by Gerhardo Gnoli, Willem Vogelsang, Helmut Humbach, and Michael Witzel and traces the process by which the Median city of Ragā came to be associated with Zarathuštra’s legend.
In the second part of his paper, Grenet proposes his own sequence in which the countries of the Vidēvdād are divided into four groups fanning out from around the same area which is that of “Airyanem Vaējah of the Good River” (central Afghanistan).
After identifying the location of the “Good River”, he gives a detailed analysis of each of the four groups of countries with reference to the geography of the region and textual sources including the ancient Yašts.
The idea of Iran from a religious perspective is addressed by both Oktor Skjærvø and Albert de Jong.
The question of whether or not the early Achaemenid kings were Zoroastrian has long been a subject of scholarly debate and raises the important question of how and when the Avesta, a collection of oral texts compiled in an eastern Iranian dialect, came to be understood, adopted and interpreted by priests in the west.
The religion of the Achaemenid kings, therefore, is directly linked to the broader question of east/west relations during the early Achaemenid period, and the time immediately preceding it, and to whether or not we can see in the religion of this period a coherence that can be said to contribute to a sense of Iranian identity.
One of the advances of modern scholarship in the field of Zoroastrianism is research into the character and composition of oral texts. The corpus of the Zoroastrian extant literature is small.
It had been in oral transmission for well over a millennium before being written down in the mid-Sasanian period by which time, with the probable exception of the Gāthās and ancient prayers, it had been through many redactions and translations.
In discussing the religion of the Achaemenid religion both Skjærvø and de Jong give insights into the difficulty of dealing with such texts. While both scholars are broadly in agreement that the Achaemenids were Zoroastrians, they reach their conclusions via very different routes and do not agree on certain issues.
For example, Skjærvø suggests there are parallels between Avestan texts and Persian inscriptions that show that the king (Darius) “…unites in one and the same person the functions of supreme king, prototype Yima …, and supreme
sacrificer, prototype Zarathuštra.” Conversely, de Jong maintains that the roles of king and priest were entirely separate: “There is no evidence at all to suggest that the Persian kings were in any way interested in possessing authority in religious matters ….”
Oktor Skjærvø deals with the question of the religion of the Achaemenid kings by looking at the religious significance of the Persian inscriptions with reference to Avestan texts.
He finds the parallels so convincing that it soon becomes a foregone conclusion that the Achaemenid kings were Zoroastrian.
The more interesting question, in Skjærvo’s view, is whether the early Achaemenids had become Zoroastrians or whether the faith was part of their religious heritage.
Skjærvø begins by outlining the Zoroastrian worldview with reference to the Gāthās and the Yasna haptaŋhāiti;
Ahura Mazdā as creator, the assault upon the cosmos and the central ritual of the sacrifice by which the world is renewed and the powers of darkness banished. He draws our attention to Avestan s@™n≥gha- “announcement” which is used with reference both to Ahura Mazdā and the sacrificer. Whereas the announcements of the former are effective in fighting the Lie, the sacrificer, through his announcements becomes a saošiian≥t-, “revitalizer”, one who will help to rejuvenate the world.
It is these quintessentially Zoroastrian elements contained in the Gāthās that provide the basis for the parallels that Skjærvø finds in the “announcements” of the king in his inscriptions.
For example at Naqsh-e Rostam Darius is shown sacrificing to Ahura Mazdā whom he acknowledges as the creator of the ordered cosmos.
Here, as in the Yašts, the sacrifice is a reciprocal arrangement between man and god. At Behistun the king declares himself an enemy of the Lie in various contexts. He also shows himself to be responsible for maintaining social order and the welfare of the land, cattle, and men under his rule.
In the final section of his paper, Skjærvø focuses on the similarity between the role of the king and that of Zarathuštra. In the Fravardīn Yašt, the prophet functions as priest, charioteer, and husbandman. It is these functions that Skjærvø suggests were assimilated by the king: “whom we have already seen sacrificing, is, of course, a supreme charioteer and fighter, but he also pays attention to the well-being of his subjects and his land”.
In Chapter 4, The Contribution of the Magi, De Jong focuses his discussion on what is meant by Zoroastrianism at the time of the early Achaemenids beginning with the interesting concept of magic and the meaning of the term magus.
With reference to Greek sources, he illustrates the way in which the word and the concept acquired an ambiguity being understood both to mean a Zoroastrian priest and a sorcerer.
While there were some who appeared to have a correct understanding of the function of a Persian priest, for others the term magus was associated with “private, non-social types of ritual activity, often with sinister overtones, harnessing unseen powers to reach concrete goals”.
The Magi were the repositories of the religion, at least according to the available evidence, and De Jong proceeds to trace images of the Magi through the Iranian traditions of western Iran where the term is attested from the Achaemenid period onwards.
In so doing he challenges the view, long held by some scholars, that the Magi were a Median tribe.
He also discusses the subject of Gaumata the magus suggesting that Darius deliberately used this title to emphasize Gaumata’s priestly status thereby challenging his right to the throne. Evidence from the Elamite Persepolis tablets agrees with Greek sources as well as the later history of the priesthood in depicting the magi as ritual specialists, the role with which we are most familiar. They were also responsible for transmitting the oral religious texts and played an important role in education
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