The dominant religion of the Iranian plateau since at least the sixth century B.C.E. had been Zoroastrianism. Although its presence in the world today is limited to the small group of Parsis, most of whom live in India, Zoroastrianism played a major role in history. It shaped many features of Iranian cultural identity, and it apparently bequeathed to Judaism (and, consequently, to Christianity) the concepts of a bodily resurrection, last judgment, heaven and hell, and Satan. Those ideas cannot be found in Judaism prior to the conquest of Babylon by the Iranian Cyrus the Great, who allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem from Babylon and to set up an autonomous province within the Iranian empire from the sixth to fourth centuries B.C.E. Zoroastrianism focused on the worship of Ahura Mazda (Ormazd), who was challenged by the evil principle Ahriman. Zoroaster (who lived sometime between 1000 B.C.E. and 600 B.C.E.) had clearly battled polytheism, but by the Sasanian period many of the old gods whose worship he had attacked were members of the pantheon again. The Sasanian version of Zoroastrianism is usually referred to as Mazdaism.
Great Hall of the Sasanian royal palace in Ctesiphon.
In Iraq, the westernmost territory of the Sasanian Empire, Zoroastrianism was a minority religion and had to coexist, sometimes uneasily, with other faiths. The Sasanian policy of granting refuge to non-Orthodox Christians from Byzantine territories affected the demography of the empire. So many Christians emigrated to Iraq that by the early seventh century Christians may have formed the largest single religious community in Iraq. Many Nestorian merchants based in Iraq made their way along the trading routes to China and the Indian Ocean basin, establishing Nestorian communities in Central Asia and India. By the late sixth century, even some members of the Sasanian royal family were converting to Nestorianism.
Judaism also flourished in Iraq, and it was probably the second largest religious community there. Jews formed the majority of the population in central Iraq, where they had lived since the time of the Babylonian Captivity of the sixth century B.C.E. During the late fourth and early fifth centuries C.E., Jewish scholars in Iraq compiled the famous Babylonian Talmud. For the most part, Sasanian rulers did not interfere unduly with their subjects’ religious lives, but periodically the Zoroastrian priesthood, the Magi, persuaded them to persecute Christians and Jews.
The various Iranian peoples within the empire spoke different dialects of Persian, and those on opposite ends of the region found each other’s language almost unintelligible. Nevertheless, the Sasanians found the culture of even distant fellow Iranians more congenial than that of Iraq, where the majority of the people spoke Aramaic. The Persian language is a member of the Indo-European family of languages and, as a result, is structurally more similar to Greek and Latin than to Semitic languages such as Aramaic, Arabic, and Hebrew. Little remains of Sasanian literature other than Zoroastrian religious texts or translations from other cultures, especially the Byzantine.
Iran did have great centers of learning, however. One was Merv, which was also the primary military garrison in the east, and the most famous in the west was Jundishapur (Gondeshapur) in Iraq, some one hundred miles east of modern Baghdad. At Jundishapur, Nestorian scholars worked with pagan philosophers from Athens who sought refuge from Byzantine persecution, and the school became particularly famous for its medical instruction. At these cities and at other, less important, intellectual centers, many books were translated from Greek, Sanskrit, and Syriac into Persian.
The empire struggled to maintain stability in a context of greater cultural diversity than the Byzantines faced. The Iranian peoples themselves, who inhabited the vast area between the Persian Gulf and the Syr Darya, were divided not only by a wide range of dialects, but also by means of subsistence: They included nomads, peasants, and wealthy urban dwellers. The diverse nature of the empire’s subjects became more pronounced in Iraq, where Semitic culture predominated. Iraq was an ancient urban society whose wealth the court needed, a fact that the dynasty acknowledged only late in its history by constructing Ctesiphon as the empire’s chief administrative city. Most of the ruling elite preferred the province of Fars, in the vicinity of modern Shiraz, and left Ctesiphon for vacations in Shiraz whenever they could.
Arabs were an important segment of the empire’s population along and west of the lower Euphrates River in southern Iraq and between the Tigris and Euphrates in northern Iraq. Like their Byzantine counterparts, the Arabs of the Sasanian Empire included nomads, seminomads, peasants, and townsmen. Some Iraqi Arabs followed traditional polytheistic religions and a few seem to have followed Judaism, but most appear to have been Christian, another parallel with the Byzantine Arabs. Among the Christian Arabs, the nomads tended to follow Monophysitism and the urban dwellers tended to be Nestorian. The city of Hira was the largest Arab town in the empire. It contained a sufficient number of Nestorians to qualify as the seat of a bishopric as early as 410, even though the ruling Lakhmid tribe converted to Nestorianism only in the 580s.
The Lakhmids led a sophisticated community. The Arabs of southern Iraq developed an influential poetic tradition as well as the so-called Kufic script for their dialect of the Arabic language. The Kufic script under Islam would become important not only for writing, but also for the decorative arts. The poetic vocabulary of this tradition, as well as the script, would contribute to the development of a common Arabic language in the early Islamic period. The Lakhmids were important enough for the Sasanians to rely upon them for the same purpose that the Byzantines used the Ghassanids. They were responsible for warding off raids by nomads from the Arabian Peninsula and for serving as auxiliaries against their imperial Byzantine enemy.
Perhaps in response to Justinian’s own assertion of power, Khusrow I initiated a new, aggressive policy toward the Byzantines, symbolized by the establishment of Ctesiphon in Iraq as the imperial capital. The economic importance of Iraqi agriculture could not be ignored, and a new urgency developed regarding competition with the Byzantines for control of international trade routes. Not all of the interaction with the Byzantines was hostile. In the sixth century, Byzantine architects helped to build the palace at Ctesiphon, and Aristotelian concepts were borrowed to redefine points of Zoroastrian ethics. It was during this period, moreover, that much of the translation work of Byzantine medicine, philosophy, and courtier literature into Persian was commissioned at Jundishapur. Nevertheless, diplomatic and military conflicts with the Byzantines dominated the last century of Sasanian history. In addition to establishing control of ports on the western coast of the Persian Gulf, the empire began diplomatic and military initiatives in the Red Sea in order to control the trade routes to the Mediterranean from the Indian Ocean. From 570 to 630, the Sasanians succeeded in controlling most of the coastline of the Arabian Peninsula.
In 540, major warfare broke out between the Sasanians and the Byzantines, and the former were able to control Aleppo temporarily. Fighting continued until 561, and then broke out again in 572, lasting for another twenty-year period, to 591. Only a decade of peace followed before the final war between the two powers began. Neither empire was prepared for the conflict. The Byzantines had lost the trust of the Ghassanids, and the Sasanians terminated their relationship with the Lakhmids in 602. In that same year, skirmishing began between the two great powers after a Byzantine emperor was overthrown in one of the many episodes of dynastic instability that characterized Byzantine history. Even the accession of a new emperor, Heraclius, in 610 did not end the plotting, and the Sasanians took advantage of the disunity in Constantinople. They inflicted a series of military disasters on the Byzantines, taking Antioch in 613, Jerusalem in 614, and the Nile delta in 619. By 620, Sasanian troops stood on the banks of the Bosporus and taunted the watchmen atop the walls of Constantinople. Heraclius was finally able to begin a counterattack in 622, and with help from Khazar tribesmen from north of the Black Sea, he waged a major campaign from the Caucasus, penetrating behind Sasanian lines into the heart of Iraq. By 628, all the Sasanian troops had been expelled from Byzant
ine territory.
The two empires were exhausted. Byzantine agriculture and town life in Anatolia, Syria, and Iraq were devastated, and the assassination of the Iranian emperor in 628 left the Sasanians in confusion and fear. Monophysites in Syria and Egypt, having been under Sasanian rule for a decade, were anxiously waiting to see if Byzantine policy would be more sensitive to provincial needs than it had been before the war. Jews in both empires were desperate, having been punished during the war for suspicion of helping the enemy. Arab nomads in the desert south of the traditional frontiers were probing the imperial defenses and discovering that the Ghassanids and Lakhmids no longer provided a barrier to plunder. Had the political elite in both empires not been so preoccupied with rebuilding, they might have been able to realize their precarious position and to take steps to prevent disaster. Instead, in less than a decade, the Byzantines would lose their territories in Syria and Egypt forever, and the world of the Sasanians would utterly collapse.
The Arabian Peninsula
Despite the proximity of the Arabian Peninsula to the Byzantines and Sasanians, imperial officials in neither empire regarded it as major security threat. Militarily, the vast, northern plains normally represented only a nuisance, as small bands of tribesmen would occasionally raid border settlements in southern Syria and Iraq. Throughout the centuries, an occasional, temporary, tribal confederation would arise that each empire then confronted with a massive show of force, but the confederation would collapse after a few years due to internal conflicts. On the whole, however, the peninsula was of more importance to both empires for its strategic position. The Sasanians depended on the Persian Gulf for access to African and South Asian ports, and the Byzantines relied on the Red Sea basin for its southern trade routes. Both empires carefully monitored the security of those trade routes.
Arabia is almost a million square miles of largely arid to semiarid terrain, but both its climate and topography reveal surprising variety. In the west, a highlands area, the Hijaz, intersperses barren valleys and sheer crags with numerous lush oases. It slopes to the east, where pebbly plains can spring to life with seasonal grass and flowers after the winter rains. The famous Empty Quarter of the south central region cannot support human or large-animal life. Its tens of thousands of square miles of sand dunes receive only a trace of rain, and temperatures can exceed 130 degrees. In Yemen, however, peasants laboriously carved out terraces on the slopes of mountains that soar to over 12,000 feet above the narrow Red Sea coast. The terraces trapped the rainfall from monsoons and produced grains, vegetables, and fruits without irrigation. Some of the valleys made lush for a few months by the monsoons grew semitropical fruits and boasted of waterfalls. For at least three millennia, until the last quarter of the twentieth century, Yemen’s agriculture sustained by far the largest population in the peninsula.
The wide variety of climate and topography in Arabia resulted in a corresponding variety of means of subsistence. In Yemen, the agricultural and commercial economy supported royal dynasties for much of the first millennium B.C.E. These governments had been able to mobilize their populations to construct impressive monuments, such as temples, palaces, and dams. International trade supplemented the agricultural wealth of Yemen and other South Arabian kingdoms. Several cities, some on the coast and some in the interior, thrived on the trade of luxury goods from the Indian Ocean bases to the Mediterranean. The most famous of the products from Yemen itself was frankincense, an aromatic tree sap. Frankincense was a luxury product, much in demand throughout the Mediterranean. All the major pre-Christian religions of southwestern Asia and northeastern Africa—as well as Christianity itself—required the incense in their rituals, and families used it as an air freshener in their homes during the centuries before soap, toilets, and garbage disposals came into use. The legendary Queen of Sheba, famous in both the Bible and in Arab lore, is thought to have ruled over Saba’ in southwestern Yemen, which was famous for its frankincense. Centuries later, Yemen was still so identified with the valuable aromatic that the Romans called it Arabia Felix, or Happy Arabia.
Outside Yemen, most farmers in the peninsula depended on irrigation from underground wells. Usually the water sources were artesian wells, whose natural pressure sent water to the surface without pumping. Numerous oases lay scattered about the peninsula except within the Empty Quarter. Some were tiny, but others could be surprisingly large. Yathrib (later known as Medina), for example, in the Hijaz, was a cluster of hamlets located in an oasis that was several miles across. An oasis located in the middle of a desert was a refreshing delight for a traveler. It would present the visual appearance of a thick forest of date palms, but would typically also support citrus trees, banana trees, and the essential grains. Cool water was almost always flowing from one part of the oasis to another, and the combination of the water and the dense shade yielded a dramatic contrast in temperature with that of the surrounding desert.
Every town and city had to rest on an economy whose base was agriculture, but a few cities obtained the bulk of their surplus wealth from the profits derived from the transit trade. Some cities in southeastern Yemen appear to fit that model, and so did Petra. Petra was founded by an Arabic-speaking people known as the Nabateans, who migrated to the northwestern fringe of the peninsula as early as the sixth century B.C.E. By 200 B.C.E., they had established Petra as an entrepot for the overland transit trade. A century before Jesus was born, Petra controlled the area as far north as Damascus, and Nabateans continued to exercise local authority even after the Romans annexed their domain: The apostle Paul escaped over the walls of Damascus in the first century C.E. under the rule of a Nabatean governor. Petra’s rulers were sufficiently wealthy to hire Greek architects to design the facades of monumental structures carved into the sheer cliffs of the gorge into which Petra was fitted.
The appearance of Petra marks a watershed in the history of the area, for it was the first of the great caravan cities that were to play an important role in the history of southwestern Asia for the next millennium and more. The evidence suggests that, sometime between 500 B.C.E. and 100 B.C.E., the Arabs of the northern half of the peninsula developed a new saddle that provided two improvements over the old. For military purposes, the new saddle provided a secure perch from which to use a long sword and lance with devastating effect; and when used as a pack saddle, it allowed a larger load to be mounted on the camel. In the wake of this new development, the camel breeders of the northern part of the peninsula became prominent in regional trade, and thereby, became a formidable military force. The camel became such an important means of transport that it displaced wheeled vehicles from the region. As one historian has written, “the North Arabian saddle made possible new weaponry, which made possible a shift in the balance of military power in the desert, which made possible the seizure of control of the caravan trade by the camel breeders, which made possible the social and economic integration of camel-breeding tribes into settled Middle Eastern society, which made possible the replacement of the wheel by the pack camel.”1 As the economic and military advantages of the camel became apparent, caravans and caravan cities became more numerous.
The camel breeders of Petra were urban merchants who maintained relationships with the bedouin, or Arab nomads. The bedouin were of two basic types, the camel tenders and the seminomads. The most famous are the camel-tending bedouin, whose use of the camel provided them with remarkable mobility and independence from settled authority. In terms of material wealth, the camel-tending bedouin might appear to be very poor compared with those who dwelt in settled communities and with the seminomads. Because they grew no crops, their diet was restricted to camel milk and dates for most of the year, and they were also dependent on agricultural settlements and towns for tools, weapons, and food supplements. On the other hand, their martial skills, speed, and ability to escape into the waste lands enabled them to steal such items with near impunity from oases and towns, even within imperial territories. They were also able to extract “p
rotection money” from settlements and caravans, contracting to protect their clients in return for tribute money (and attacking anyone who failed to agree to the offer). For this reason, the leaders of all caravan cities attempted to maintain peaceful relationships with the bedouin through whose grazing territory their caravans passed.
Contrary to a popular image, camel-herding bedouin appear never to have formed the majority of the population of Arabia. They have been present in almost all areas of the peninsula, but the agricultural settlements have always been able to support more families than has camel tending. Among the bedouin themselves, semi-nomads were more numerous than the camel tenders. As in other arid and semiarid regions of the world, most of the bedouin herded sheep and goats and kept a few camels on the side as pack animals. They spent the summers in the higher and cooler plateaus to allow their herds to graze and then moved to the lowlands during the winter in order to plant crops. Sheep herders occupied areas in which they had access to plentiful sources of water for their animals. Because of this dependence on reliable water sources, they were forced to maintain amicable relations with both agriculturalists and any state authorities in their area.
A History of the Muslim World to 1405 Page 4