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1 Map showing the approximate extent of the Sasanian Empire and some of the principal sites (drawing: P. Goodhead).
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The Sasanian Empire had many large, multicultural and typically heavily defended cities. Literary sources are filled with direct or indirect references to the deportation or internal transfer of populations from one region to another, and boosting the urban population was clearly an important part of imperial economic planning, but there has been r...
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In architectural literature, researchers argue that there are many factors that affect architecture. Culture, local materials, climate, socioeconomic conditions, and topography are the most influential factors in the formation of the architecture of a region. The climate of the place is one of the most important factors in the construction of the b...
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... Archaeological evidence and historical accounts attest to a period of widespread landscape modification in the Early Sasanian period (third century CE) in southwest Asia, mostly including urban foundations transforming the Fars region (Persis) in southwest Iran into an institutional landscape (Daryaee, 2009;Miri, 2009;Mittertrainer, 2020;Simpson, 2017). These urban places, with carefully drafted plans, were the core and basis of the Sasanian economy (Simpson, 2017, p. 43), and their landscape was shaped by dense settlements and optimal land use for the production of food supply and trade goods (Daryaee, 2009). ...
... For this reason, the location and layout of such large-scale urban complexes were carefully chosen. A series of innovative plans and practices were implemented during the foundation of Early Sasanian urban centers (Huff, 1978;Simpson, 2017), along with architectural novelties and inventions for secular and religious buildings (Callieri, 2014). The optimal plan seems to have been large and densely populated urban centers in plains with a series of satellite villages and outposts, interconnected by a network of water management systems and routes. ...
The Sasanian period (224–651 CE) marked an era of large‐scale urban projects in southwest Asia, including Iran's semi‐arid highlands, with particular efforts to manipulate water bodies. This study presents a recent interdisciplinary investigation of a spring‐fed pond at the entrance of the Palace of Ardashir (Firuzabad plain, southwest Iran), part of a recently registered World Heritage site. Historical accounts suggest that the entire water system of the plain, including the pond, underwent a hydraulic re‐organization at the beginning of the Sasanian period, a fact that has never been investigated geoarchaeologically. A series of sediment cores were retrieved from the pond to probe its evolution and examine the extent of its landscape modification. The cores were sedimentologically described and radiocarbon‐dated with age–depth models established based on 57 AMS (accelerator mass spectrometry) 14C dates to understand the basin's depositional history. The results indicate that (i) Ardashir Pond has existed as part of a larger wetland complex since at least 4500 years ago, (ii) it was substantially enlarged at the beginning of the Sasanian era, and (iii) it was abandoned at the end of the Sasanian period. The Ardashir Pond is one of the first geoarchaeologically investigated case studies to demonstrate the Sasanian landscape in the framework of the “Iranshahr” sociopolitical concept.
... Contrary to Christensen's claim that the word is Arabic, Anbār (or Hanbār) is a middle Persian word in origin (Faravashi, 1992), meaning 'storehouse' or 'depot', which illustrates the city's logistical significance for Shapur I during his attacks into Syria. Shapur I also founded the city of Gondeshapur in present-day Khuzestan (Simpson, 2017). Archaeological surveys reveal that the city layout follows a network of tunnels, delivering water from a canal off-take from the River Dez (Ibid). ...
In the Iranian lands, sizable cities with a considerable number of inhabitants could not be organized haphazardly. Such a population established an organic nexus of socio-economic relationships among them—necessary for their integrity—through a political body. This political body was able to sustain the population by attending to water affairs that were vital to the pervasive agricultural economy, in the shape of supplying water and protecting against floods. This political body in fact invested in water affairs whose higher efficiency resulted in better agriculture and accordingly more tax. Therefore, water systems have always been a source of income for Iranian governments whose hydraulic agenda systematically tethered the peasants to the cultivated lands. This chapter examines the interrelations between water resources and political organization from a historical–geographical point of view, which have taken different shapes in river-based and qanat-based economies over the course of history. At least since the Sassanian Empire, governments have had a systematic dependence on a river-based economy nourished by irrigated cultivation. Hence, governments used both bureaucratic and military tools to secure their control over water as the vital sources of revenue. However, governments’ interests were not limited to water only as source of finance, but they were also concerned about water to strengthen their political ties with their preferred territories through water allocation systems. Within their kingdoms, some hydro-social territories were given primacy in terms of water shares, through both intensive hydraulic constructions and water management systems. Hydro-social borders were delineated by the political organization through water allocation based on political, religious and social priorities, and those borders altered from time to time following political changes. Such governmental interventions in water affairs could lead to inequitable water allocation, based on a socio-political pattern that seems to have prevailed over the Iranian history. This chapter also shows how “water management” could set the stage for the collapse of those political organizations, when it outgrew the governments’ internal capacities. A systematic relationship between water and political organization suggests a historical model that helps explain the rise and fall of many Iranian dynasties.
... Some defensive walls also have been identified in the mountainous regions of northern Khorasan including the walls of Aq Darband and Mozdouran blocking the main branches of the Silk Road and the towers of which controlled traffic between the Iranian plateau and Central Asian steppes 57 . 50 SIMPSON 1993: 3. 51 NEGRO PONZI 1967SIMPSON 2017: 25-26. 52 READE 1964. ...
Defensive structures have been applied as the permanent elements of the Iranian urbanism, from the first phases of sedentism in the Neolithic period onwards. Following the Iranian tradition in architecture, Sasanian fortifications having local features were constructed in adaptation with the regional circumstances. Nevertheless, we can find some similarities in the components of the defensive installations. The defensive structures located within the Sasanian territory turned Iran into the unconquerable fortress providing Sasanians with military, political, cultural, and economic dominance over a vast area of the ancient world for more than four centuries.
... Less intensively studied have been the ramifications of life within and outside urban spaces in this period (Simpson 2017). Notable exceptions include the excavations of a fortress and town in Qasr-i Abu Nasr (Old Shiraz) in the 1930s that uncovered the jewelry, metal agricultural tools, and ceramics used in everyday life (Whitcomb 1985). ...
This Element will reevaluate the relationship between monasticism and the city in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages in the period 400 to 700 in both post-Roman West and the eastern Mediterranean, putting both of those areas in conversation. Building on recent scholarship on the nature of late antique urbanism, the authors can observe that the links between late antique Christian thought and the late and post-Roman urban space were far more relevant to the everyday practice of monasticism than previously thought. By comparing Latin, Greek and Syriac sources from a broad geographical area, the authors gain a birds' eye view on the enduring importance of urbanism in a late and post-Roman monastic world.
This article argues that the Sasanian government tried to reshape the hydrological order of water resources by damming rivers, digging canals and building aqueducts according to their conception of justice. Although all Iranian dynasties more or less replenished their budget with agricultural revenues, it was the Sasanian government that for the first time exalted irrigated cultivation as the cornerstone of their political economy. The hydraulic mission of the Sasanian polity was to keep a balance between water resources and workforce in their agricultural units. This mission pursued two schemes; first all water resources were reorganized through investing in a considerable number of hydraulic structures, second the agricultural working class was kept confined to the area irrigated and affected by the same supplied water, the area that is called hydro-political territory in this study. Hydro-political borders were the product of a mesh of interactions between ideology, political power, ecology and economy, which impeded social mobility and stifled different aspects of socio-economic change in Iran’s agrarian communities. This article concludes that today’s Iran has inherited the same political tradition that gives rise to hydro-political borders by reorganizing water resources based on a geopolitical disparity between different regions and the leaders’ institutional priorities.
The book “Cultural Dynamics of Water in Iranian Civilization” published by Springer seeks to trace water to the deepest layers of Iran’s culture and civilization. This book has been authored by Majid Labbaf Khaneiki in 2020.
In a nutshell, the author wants to say that the Iranian communities have evolved different dimensions of their culture as an adaptation strategy to the scarce water resources. Nonetheless, he tries not to slip into geographical determinism. The book does not portray their culture as an inevitable passive product of Iranians’ special relationship with the water resources, but it also shows how their cultural structures could have influenced the same water resources as part of a dynamic cultural landscape.
This book starts its journey with symbolism of water and water as a metaphor, in order to show how Iranians used water as the key to their understanding of the universe. God disclosed the world’s secrets to Zoroaster by giving him a sip of water. The same belief that water is omniscience pervaded the Mesopotamian courts where they judged the defendants’ claims by practicing “water trials”. The author contends that this belief is still extant even today in Iran, for which he has tried to provide some historical and anthropological explanations.
Archaeological and historical evidences suggest that the ancient Iranians came to perceive the concept of time for the first time through water. The climatic fluctuations and the unreliable water resources made it impossible for the ancient inhabitants of the Iranian plateau to ration and divide their limited water by its flow volume. Hence, they had to turn their attention to another dimension of the world – time – according to which water could be divided in more harmony with the climatic fluctuations. This way, when the water dwindled, all water shares shortened alike, and vice versa. This book interprets a Manichean poetry dating back to the 5th century AD, in which the words “time” and “clepsydra” are interchangeable, and the same word used for “water clock” is still common in Iran’s present irrigation jargon.
This book also delves into the complex relationship between water and Iran’s political construct. After reviewing most of the classical chronicles on Iran, the author suggests a historical model named “hydraulic collapse” that can explain the lifecycle of many Iranian polities whose economies were systematically anchored in the water management systems. Almost all Iranian governments were economically dependent on a taxation based on irrigated agriculture. Hence, any development in the hydraulic systems could result in an increase in the government’s revenue. However, that development had a social-environmental threshold that the governments tended to pass, and as a result two undesired parallel processes kicked in. First a crippling corruption crept into the bureaucratic structure of water management, second a centralized aristocracy cancerously grew. Therefore, the government’s expenditures increased to the point that the irrigation revenues did not afford to cover. Thus, the government desperately put more pressure on the farmers, which eventually led to the exhaustion of water and soil resources and the outmigration of a considerable population of peasants. Now, the government failed to regain the balance between its dropping income and its extended insatiable aristocracy that did not deign to adjust its demands. At this stage, some chasms started to yawn between different political factions within the same aristocracy, out of fierce competition over the shrinking financial sources. In the book, this sort of competition is called “political cannibalism” that eventually led to the breakdown of the government and paved the way for a newborn government that went down the same path.
The book also points out the role of water in Iran’s social cohesion. The author does not reduce the irrigation cycle to a simple queue of farmers waiting for their water shares. On the contrary, he views the irrigation cycle as a social unit that cements a close relationship among the farmers in different social domains. The irrigation cycle places the farmers in the “dead-end of cooperation” where they have no other choice than looking after the interests of society if they wish to safeguard their own personal interests. The book spells out the socio-economic mechanism of the dead-end of cooperation in the Iranian rural communities.
This book also examines the role of periodic draughts in engendering and diffusing cultural memes across the Iranian plateau. The author seeks to show that the changing climate and recurring droughts could make the inhabitants drift from agricultural economy and add more weight to local industries. The development of local industries which were less dependent on water enhanced their adaptation to the dry conditions, provided that the aridness did not pass their social-environmental tolerance limit. Otherwise, the excess population especially those less bonded to the farmlands spilled into other regions, transferring with them the arts and industries already evolved in their hometown. Many historical evidences give credence to this cycle called “drought pump” in the book.
This book ends with a chapter named “the water delusion” that examines two interesting water rituals; rain-making and qanat marriage. The author’s interpretation is not limited only to the mythological roots of the water rituals, but he has tried to deploy some modern anthropological theories to trace these rituals back to their animistic origins.
This paper examines the interrelations between water resources and political organization, with a focus on Iran, and the different shapes of those relations found in river-based and qanat-based economies, from a historical point of view. At least since the Sassanian Empire, governments have had a systematic dependence on a river-based economy nourished by irrigated cultivation. Hence, governments used both bureaucratic and military tools to secure their control over water—the vital source of revenue. Nonetheless, governments’ interests were not limited to water only as source of finance, but they were also concerned about water to strengthen their political ties with their preferred territories through water allocation systems. Within their kingdoms, some hydro-social territories were given primacy in terms of water shares, through intensive hydraulic constructions and water management systems. Hydro-social borders were delineated by the political organization through water allocation based on political, religious and social priorities. Those borders altered from time to time following political changes. Such governmental interventions in water affairs could lead to inequitable water allocation, a socio-political pattern that seems to have prevailed in Iranian history. This paper also shows how water management could set the stage for collapsing political organizations, when it outgrew the governments’ internal capacities. However, in a qanat-based economy, water management was more endogenous, handled by all shareholders, which appears to have resulted in a more cohesive community. As such, a qanat-based economy may have disfavored accumulation of power and centralized governments.
This chapter focuses on local communities on the Iranian plateau, taking a holistic look at the systematic relationships between them and their water resources in a geographical–historical context. In Iran, water has always been the most crucial production factor, exerting a great influence on socio-economic structures. However, the availability of water in the region has not been stable over time, and accordingly the local people have always had to evolve adaptation strategies through both technologies and social dynamics. This chapter examines the collective response of the local communities to their changing water resources, which occurs mostly through developing water management systems and water-based social mechanisms. The inhabitants could have enhanced their adaptation to their fluctuating water resources through social cohesion.This chapter tries to show how water affects the make-up of a local community through a variety of water-related social mechanisms, like cooperation, qanat maintenance, division of labor and waqf (charitable endowments). The chapter makes a distinction between two types of social cohesion, “inner-territorial cohesion” and “trans-territorial cohesion”, which are both associated with the geographical peculiarities of the water resources of a specific region. Inner-territorial cohesion pertains to a social bond that forms among the residents within a particular territory mainly based on their common interest in terms of their water resources, whereas trans-territorial cohesion refers to a social bond between different territories or neighboring communities within the hinterland of a particular qanat sharing the same water resource.
