The Sasanian Empire

One of the least understood and yet most influential periods in Mesopotamian history coincides with the reign of the Sasanian Empire. Named after an ancestral figure, the Sasanian empire lasted over four hundred years and 40 kings (Marx, p.1). Born out of the ashes of the Parthian Empire, the Sasanian Empire ushered in an era of cultural and economic revival. Harking back to the dominance of generations long gone, the Sasanian Emperors extended their dominion from their base in the Southwest of Iran to Central and even Western Asia. Sasania profited from a period of intensified trade and exchange, and shepherded Iran's role as a major gateway on the Silk Road that connected the Western world with China. Eventually, however, the wealth of the Empire led to the weakening of its military might, and the Empire fell to the newly formed armies of Islam (ecai.berkeley.edu). As the final great Iranian monarchy before the Arab conquest of Western Asia, the Sasanian Empire holds an important, yet often neglected, piece in the puzzle that is Mesopotamian history.

The Sasanian empire's beginning had its roots in the weakening power of Parthian Empire. The Ashkanid period of the Parthian empire was marked by high taxes and obligatory military service. A type of Feudalism was established by the regional ruling families. "The Nobles would be assigned a certain territory to rule and profit from and in exchange they owed the Imperial court a fixed amount of tax." For

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25-326). The tax reform was to have wide-ranging impacts and ramifications. Due to the confusion engendered by the seizure of lands by peasants during the Mazdakite movement, Chosroes first move was to order the empire's lands surveyed. Land was to be taxed equally everywhere, and funds that had previously gone to the feudal lords was now to be diverted to the central government. Chosroes may or may not have based his new system on the tripartite Roman model, but nevertheless "under the new system the land was measured, the water rights determined and yearly average rates were set for the land which produced grain, other rates for land which had date palm and olive trees according to the number of the producing trees, and other reforms of which we only have hints" (Frye, p. 327). Thus Chosroes moved initially to divert power away from the nobility and in doing so strengthen the central government. By clarifying and simplifying the previously arcane tax-code, Chosroes also fostered support for his reign in the peasantry. The second major reform of Chosroes' reign was the restructuring of the military. Under the previous standing tradition, when war beckoned the Sasanian feudal lords provided their own equipment and b

Category: History - T