Читать книгу The Lost Treasures Persian Art - Vladimir Lukonin - Страница 2

Interior of Blue Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.

This book consists of two sections. The wide-ranging introduction attempts to outline the basic stages in the development of Persian Art, from the first appearance of Persian peoples on the Iranian plateau during the 10th-8th centuries BCE up to the 19th century CE. Detailed commentaries on the works of art reproduced here provide not only factual information (dates, iconography, provenance, techniques, etc.), but are also, in many instances, followed by brief scholarly studies of the examples of Persian art housed in various museums of the former Soviet Union that are, in the authors’ opinion, of the greatest interest and significance. Some of these objects are reproduced and discussed here for the first time.

As far as possible, we have tried to select only such works as are typical of Persia itself, and not those produced beyond the present-day borders of Iran (Transcaucasia, Central Asia, etc.), however strongly influenced by Persian culture these may have been. At the same time, we have tried to present material to illustrate our basic thesis, namely that Persian art, though it had periods of ascendancy and of decline, remained coherent, individual and profoundly traditional throughout its development, from its formation in the 10th-7th centuries BCE right up to the 19th century CE. This is despite the violent, often tragic political upheavals, fundamental ideological changes, foreign invasions and their concomitant, devastating effect upon the country’s economy.

In attempting to sketch a general outline of the development of Persian art over this vast period, we have been obliged to set aside artistic descriptions or analyses. The specific “morphology” and “syntax” of Near-Eastern art differs fundamentally from Western art. There is a lack of source material, insufficient analysis of the work of some periods, and art history suffers from terminological inflexibility – how many more arguments could be put forward in support of the indisputable fact that at the present time, so far as Near-Eastern art is concerned, no serious artistic analysis is possible. At the moment, the task of fundamental importance is to interpret the objects in a historical light, to attempt to analyse them as one of the sources for a history of the culture of one period or another and investigate these objects in such a way as to enable them to fill the considerable gaps in our reconstruction of the ideological, political and economic history of Iran.

Our present state of knowledge inevitably means that we can plot the course of the development of art only approximately; nevertheless, the points along this course tally with all the sources, written and otherwise, on the history of the period. Research into Persian art is impeded by a number of obstacles that are extremely difficult to overcome. From the foundation of Persian art to the end of Sassanid rule there are very few antiquities extant, and the chief danger in suggesting an outline for art of this period is that one is forced to draw excessively straight lines between the rare incontrovertibly established facts. The result is an incomplete and problematic description. Yet even the drawing up of such outlines is made extremely difficult by the need to take into account a whole network of facts – from iconographical analyses of cultural artefacts to linguistic studies. Confidence in the accuracy of the resulting outline is inspired only in those cases where there is no contradiction between any of its component elements. In other words, recourse to a very wide range of sources of the most varied nature is required.

On the other hand, a vast number of objects survive from the Middle Ages, yet here the construction of outlines is far too complex. At every point along the way, the researcher is confused by the attempt to take into account all the twists and turns of development inherent in the material itself, and in a comparison of written sources with information contained in any inscription there might be on the object. There is thus a real danger of drowning in a sea of facts, albeit incontrovertibly established facts, without having clarified the general trends.

There is yet another danger – that of the “academic” illusion, which links the cardinal ideological or political changes (for example, the change from the Zoroastrian religion to Islam or, say, the conquest of Iran by the Seljuk Turks) far too closely to developments in the art produced by that culture. There are a number of further difficulties – the unreliable dating of individual objects, lack of data as to origin, etc.

As far as possible, we have attempted to draw a clear distinction between two levels, the prestigious works of art reflecting concepts of an ideological, official, dynastic or other such nature, and handicrafts or, more accurately, traded objects in which one can see more clearly changes in the aesthetic taste of a wide range of buyers, the influence of local traditions and developments and innovations in particular techniques. Clearly, both categories of objects are closely linked and to study them together significantly enriches the overall picture of the art of the time, but it is also clear that prestigious objects more obviously reflect changes in the art of the period, whereas the study of handicrafts offers important assistance in dating and identifying the origin of articles. Apart from this, these objects provide evidence of changes occurring in the economy, but only partially reflect social change.

In antiquity, beginning at any rate in the Median era, prestigious objects were those directly connected to the ruling dynasty, commissioned by the Iranian sovereigns and members of the court, and reflecting their tastes and ideological views. They all relate to a specific period in the history of the Ancient East – that of the Ancient World Empires – and they reflect the level of art in the region as a whole and not just the art of a dynasty. At this particular stage, the only possible scientific means of dating is by dynasty.

In the Middle Ages, owing to fundamental changes in the nature of the state and the structure and outlook of society, the objects which had been used to reflect status and ideology in ancient times changed, and new forms of art took over. One cannot say that dynastic dating and dynastic chronology lose their meaning altogether in the Middle Ages, but dynasties degenerate, become local and inward-looking, and their range of subject-matter and technical skills naturally diminishes. The concept of “prestige” also changes. It is no longer purely an expression of dynastic ideas, but an assertion of high social status based on wealth and influence rather than nobility and ancient lineage.

It is much more difficult to draw up a general outline for the development of art during this period because of the increasing decentralisation, and because the range of prestigious works expands and their interpretation becomes more complex, whilst handicrafts and prestigious art objects become more closely allied. For the time being, only what one might term “technical” dating by period is possible, founded largely on mass-produced objects, above all on handicrafts. Whilst observing specific stages in the development of Persian art during the Middle Ages, it is still impossible to say what determined significant changes in various types of art. It is not even possible to say whether we are merely observing changes in various technical skills and devices or a change in fashion.

By no means have all of the suggestions in this essay been proved with a satisfactory degree of certainty. There are a number of questionable hypotheses and the result may well be similar to that in a story told by Jalal al-Din Rumi. The son of a padishah was studying magic and had learned to identify objects without seeing them. The padishah, clasping a jewelled ring in his hand, asked him, “What is this?” The prince decided that the object in the hand was round, was connected with minerals and that it had a hole in the middle. “But what exactly is it?” asked the padishah. After long meditation the prince answered: “A millstone…”.

For over a hundred years, specialist studies have looked at the question of when and by what routes the Iranian peoples, above all the Medes and Persians, first emerged onto the plateau.

The first references to these peoples are found in Assyrian texts of the 9th century BCE (the earliest is an inscription by the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III, c. 843 BCE): despite this, specialists have discovered Iranian names for a number of places and rulers in earlier cuneiform texts.

According to one of the most widely held theories, the settlement of Iranian tribes on the present territory of Iran dates back to about the 11th century BCE, and their migration route (at any rate, the migration route of a significant proportion of them) passed through the Caucasus. Another theory traces the Iranian tribes back to Central Asia and has them subsequently (about the 9th century BCE) advancing towards the western borders of the Iranian plateau. Whatever the case, a new ethnic group gradually penetrated into an immensely varied linguistic environment – into regions where dozens of principalities and small city-states existed side-by-side with lands subjugated to the great empires of antiquity – Assyria and Elam.[1] The Iranian tribes, who were cattle-breeders and farmers, had settled on lands belonging to Assyria, Elam, Manna and Urartu and subsequently became dependent on the rulers of these states.

Miniature: Rustam Besieging the Fortress of Kafur, from Firdausis’masterpiece (Shanama or The Book of Kings), c. 1330. Gouache on paper, 21.5 × 13 cm. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

Persian carpets (detail).

It would seem that these questions of the routes by which the Iranians entered the plateau and of how they settled among the heterogeneous native population of what is now Iran during the 12th and 11th centuries BCE have only an indirect bearing on the history of the culture and art of Iran. However, it was these very questions which inspired archaeological excavations and research, covering a large area into the pre-Iranian and proto-Iranian period, or, in archaeological terminology, Iran’s Iron Age. As a result of intensive work undertaken in Iran by archaeologists from many countries from the early 1950s almost to the present day, the majority of specialists have come to the conclusion that new tribes appeared in the western provinces of Iran (in the Zagros Mountains) during “Iron Age I” (c. 1300–1000 BCE), bringing about sudden changes within the material culture of this region. Some archaeologists suggest that this invasion was “completely clearcut and dramatic”. Pottery shows drastic changes. Red or grey earthenware vessels appear in place of painted ones and they adopt new shapes – so-called “teapots”, long-stemmed goblets, “tripods”, etc. Burial customs change. Spacious cemeteries appear beyond the city walls and bodies are buried in “stone boxes” or cists. Later, during the lron Age II (c. 1000-800 BCE) and the Iron Age III (c. 800–550 BCE), gradual changes occur within the confines of this culture, which was in essence introduced wholesale from outside. Its spread throughout the Zagros region was at first limited and appears, in theory, not to contradict the resettlement of Iranian tribes known from written records.

Later (during the Iron Age III), it took over practically the whole of western Iran, and this may be linked to the formation and expansion of the Median and Persian states. However, a detailed study of all the hitherto published material destroys this neat picture.

Firstly, there is no hard evidence of any incontrovertible link between new forms of pottery or decoration that would be necessarily and exclusively attributable to ethnic changes, rather than to other types of change (technical developments, fashion, cultural influences, etc.). Secondly, as far as burial rites are concerned (a factor apparently more closely bound to a specific ethnic group), the picture also turns out to be unclear throughout Iran. Burial rites are not consistent and vary considerably.

Finally, a closer examination of the facts relating to the “archaeological revolution of the Iron Age” leads to the conclusion that the beginning of this period in no way demonstrates either a general unity of culture or any sudden changes.

It would be far more consistent with the process established by written sources to postulate a gradual accumulation of new characteristics within the material culture, taking place over several centuries.

Disputes about archaeological aspects of the early history of Iran or changes in its pottery and rituals appear to be only indirectly linked to the history of Iranian culture and art. Yet it was due to archaeological work from c. 1950–1970 that an unexpected and remarkably vivid page of ancient Iranian culture was revealed.

There were splendid works of art, above all metalwork, that had hitherto remained completely unknown. Archaeologists date these works with varying degrees of success, but the search for the sources of Iranian culture depends on finding an answer to the questions: who produced these works, the local population or the Iranians?; and what do they depict: local, ancient oriental designs or new Iranian ones?

In the summer of 1958, whilst clearing away the remains of a collapsed ceiling from one of the rooms in the fortress of Hasanlu (in the Lake Urmia region), the archaeologist Robert Dyson came upon a man’s hand, the finger-bones covered with verdigris from the plates of a warrior’s bronze gauntlet. When Dyson took over the excavation of the find and began to brush off the bones, a sliver of gold was suddenly revealed. At first the excavator thought he had a bracelet, but the gold went deeper and deeper until a solid gold bowl, eight inches in height and eight in diameter, was revealed. Careful observation of the two skeletons found with that of the man who had carried the bowl, resulted in the following reconstruction: the bowl “was being carried out of the flaming building by one of three men who were on the second floor at the moment it gave way. The leader of the group fell sprawled forward on his face, his arms spread out before him to break the fall, his iron sword with its handle of gold foil caught beneath his chest. The second man, carrying the gold bowl, fell forward on his right shoulder, his left arm with its gauntlet of bronze buttons flung against the wall; his right arm and the bowl dropped in front of him, his skull crushed in its cap of copper. As he fell his companion following on his left also fell, tripping across the bowl-carrier’s feet and plunging into the debris.”[2]

The fortress of Hasanlu, the headquarters of one of the local rulers, was besieged and sacked, apparently at the end of the 9th century BCE or the very beginning of the 8th century. The gold vessel which the warriors of the palace or temple guard were trying to save was a sacred object. Its dimensions are 20.6 × 28 cm, its weight 950g; around the top are scenes of three deities on chariots, with mules harnessed to two of the chariots and a bull to the other, whilst a priest stands in front of the bull with a vessel in his hand. These probably portray the god of thunder, rain or the sky (water streams from the bull’s jaws), the national god wearing a horned crown, and a sun god with a solar disc and wings. In all there are more than twenty different figures on the vessel – gods, heroes, beasts and monsters, scenes of sheep being sacrificed, a hero battling with a dragon-man, the ritual slaughter of a child, the flight of a girl on an eagle.

In all probability, they illustrate local Hurrian myths (which survive in Hittite versions: “The Divine Kingdom”, “The Songs of Ullikummi”) in which the son of the Hurrian deity Anu, the dragon-slayer Kummarbi, features as the main hero. Iconographic and compositional parallels to the scenes on the vessel are also known in the Hittite reliefs of Malatya and Arslan Tepe and on ancient Assyrian and Babylonian seals. This vessel from Hasanlu is the first of a number of metalwork objects whose technique and style are evidence that a new local school and a large artistic centre had developed in north-western Iran at the end of the 2nd or beginning of the 1st millennium BCE.

Illegal excavations have always taken place in Iran – peasants have dug up ancient monuments and sometimes remarkable works of art have appeared on the market, though unfortunately lacking any scientific documentation. This continues to be the case. Gold and silver goblets, found somewhere in Gilan, near the town of Amlash (the centre of the region in which the Marlik burial site is situated), appeared in the mid-1950s, both in antique shops and in private collections. Marvellous zoomorphic ceramic vessels, depicting either zebu-like bulls or antelopes, have also come up for sale.

In 1962, the Archaeological Service of Iran sent a scientific expedition to Gilvan, about nine miles west of the settlement of Roodbar. The archaeologists discovered 53 graves on the hill of Marlik in the form of four different types of “stone box”. Golden goblets were found, several of them very large, up to 20 cm in height and weighing more than 300g (at one time, one of them was even depicted on modern Iranian banknotes), plus gold and bronze vessels, bronze weapons, parts of horse harnesses, pottery (including a great number of zoomorphic vessels in the shape of zebu-like bulls) and ornaments, etc. So far, however, only preliminary reports of these finds and a spate of popular works have been published.

There are, however, some remarkable metalwork objects amongst the Marlik finds, although these have not been precisely dated.[3] Judging by their technique and a number of stylistic features, they are attributable to the same school as the Hasanlu bowl, but evidently a considerable time elapsed between the production of these objects. None of the Marlik vessels bear narrative designs; in general they depict real or fantastic birds and beasts. Unlike the decoration of the Hasanlu bowl, the illustrations are clearly divided into registers.

One of the vessels – a large gold goblet (height: 20 cm, weight: 229g) – bears “the story of a goat”.[4] The supervisor of the Marlik excavations, Ezzat Negahban, describes its design as follows:

“In the lowest row, A, the young kid is suckling from its mother. In the second row, B, the young mountain goat, just beginning to sprout horns, is eating leaves from the Tree of Life. In the third row, C, is a wild boar (apparently the killer of the goat). In the fourth row, D, the body of the goat, now grown old – as indicated by the long elaborately curved horns – lies on its back with two enormous vultures ripping out its entrails. On the fifth row, E, a small creature, an embryo or a monkey, is sitting in front of a small stand. If this is an embryo, it indicates rebirth; if a monkey, it is telling the story. It is common in the ancient fables of Iran for an animal, particularly a monkey, to tell the story.”

In our opinion register A (the mother goat) is not a goat at all but a deer. This design, a deer with a suckling fawn, is copied almost exactly from ivory plaques in the provincial Assyrian style of the 8th century BCE. One finds exactly the same design on plaques from the famous treasure of Ziwiye. Register B is an ordinary goat. The design is typically Assyrian and known from numerous objects, especially cylindrical seals, and it has a particular symbolical significance in a local (Assyrian) religious context. Finally, register D is an ibex, but the composition – birds pecking a goat – is known from Kassite glyptics (14th-13th centuries BCE), Elamite cylinders and Hittite stone reliefs. In the above cultures this motif symbolises victory in war. Only the boar (register C) and the strange “embryo” have no direct iconographic parallel, although the latter is depicted in front of a typically Assyrian Tree of Life. They alone betray the artistic individuality of the craftsman.

Thus we have before us four different references to the symbolism of different religions (Assyrian, Elamite, Kassite and Hittite), but they have been removed from their context and brought together on one vessel by a local craftsman in a simple, guileless tale of life and death, lacking any of that complex symbolism and meaning which the separate components possessed in their own context. Who was this craftsman? An Iranian or a Mede? At any rate he was not an Assyrian, a Hurrian or an Elamite – he did not understand their pictorial language. To produce his tale he used representations on carved ivories, seals and signet-rings and possibly images from other vessels rather than those on works of official court art such as reliefs. However, the essential difference between what is depicted on the Hasanlu vessel and this goblet is that on the former all the images are used to create a single story which can be clearly deciphered on the basis of a single religious or epic tradition (Hurrian myths). The Marlik goblet, however, tells a new story with the help of old but very varied images. Taking the analogy of language, one could say that the craftsman of the Marlik goblet is employing foreign ideograms in order to create his own coherent text. Perhaps for the first time we are encountering an example of the formation of Persian art as a whole. We will return to this in far more detail, for a great deal of evidence will be required, but on the basis of this example it is already possible to suggest that Persian art was created from heterogeneous quotations taken out of context, from elements of religious imagery from various ancient eastern civilisations reinterpreted and adapted by local artists to illustrate their myths or (subsequently?) to depict their deities. This theory suggests the possibility of an Iranian interpretation of works that still consisted entirely of foreign ideograms, but only of those works where these ideograms are taken from various artistic languages. In the case of the Hasanlu vessel, it is unnecessary to seek an Iranian interpretation of the Hurrian myths depicted. The Marlik goblet is an example of quotations from several languages and periods where the search for another, Iranian, content appears to be feasible.

Khaju Bridge. Isfahan, Iran.

Persian carpet.

In 1946, an enormous hoard was discovered by chance near a high hill some 25 miles east of the town of Saqqiz, not far from Hasanlu. The story of its discovery was rapidly transformed into confused legends. For example, the story was told of two shepherds who accidentally stumbled on the rim of a bronze vessel whilst searching for a young goat. Trying to dig it out, they are said to have noticed a large bronze sarcophagus packed full of gold, silver, bronze, iron and ivory objects. All of this was distributed among the peasants of the nearby settlement of Ziwiye and in the course of the distribution many valuable objects were broken into several parts, shattered or trampled. At the same time, some of the objects appeared in Tehran in the hands of a few antique dealers. One of them, having first arranged to receive a share of the proceeds of scientific excavations, informed André Godard, then inspector-general of lran’s Archaeological Service, of the find’s whereabouts.

In 1950, Godard published part of the gold, silver and ivoryware, gave a confused account of the circumstances of the hoard’s discovery and suggested a date for the bulk of the items – the 9th century BCE. He defined these objects as “art in the animal style” of the Zagros region with elements from the art of Assyria and nearby regions – an art which was subsequently adopted by the Scythians and the Persians of the Achaemenid period. Godard noted that many objects in the same style had previously been found in this region, some of them at the site of the ancient town which he identified as Izirtu, the capital of Manna.

In 1950, the “Ziwiye fashion” began. The activities of antique dealers led to the dispersal of objects from the hoard into private collections, though some ended up in museums in the USA, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Japan. Until the 1980s a large part of the treasure was kept in the Tehran Archaeological Museum. One of its first researchers, Roman Ghirshman, drew up a list of finds, attributing 341 objects to the hoard, including 43 of gold, 71 of silver and 103 of ivory.

Such variety in the contents of the hoard aroused incredulity. Godard had already pointed out that items ascribed to the hoard had been discovered by chance in neighbouring regions or even in Southern Azerbaijan. In recent years, the disputes have grown even more bitter. Some specialists have flatly refused to consider that the majority of the objects on the “Ghirshman list” were really found at Ziwiye, declaring some of them to be modern imitations. It must be said that these suspicions have some basis, for archaeological investigation of the hill at Ziwiye has, in essence, yielded nothing (archaeologists only gained access more than ten years after the discovery of the hoard). The entire hill had been riddled with holes dug by treasure seekers. Remains of the walls of a small fort which once stood on the hill have been found. Judging by the pottery found there, it was built between the end of the 8th and the middle of the 7th centuries BCE. But the hoard might well be unconnected with the fort. One of those who studied the hoard remarked: “Unfortunately, what is left in an empty stable after a horse has been stolen merely tells us that a horse was once there, but it does not identify the horse.”[5] This ironic remark is, in fact, extremely significant, for the answer to the question of what this collection of objects was hinges upon whether there was a real, not a metaphorical, horse at Ziwiye. Was it a hoard or the remains of the rich burial of an Iranian – or perhaps a Scythian – chief with his steed, weapons and personal belongings, like the Scythian barrow at Kelermes? Ghirshman considers that the hill of Ziwiye is quite definitely the grave of the Scythian ruler Madias, son of Partatua, who was king of the Scythians and a powerful ally of Assyria (died in c. 624 BCE). But what then of the remains of walls discovered by archaeologists? As has already been stated, together with the other objects from Ziwiye housed in the Tehran Archaeological Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York there are fragments of the sides and edge of a large bronze “bath”. Similar artefacts, undoubtedly Assyrian and dating from about the second half of the 8th century BCE, have been found at other sites. Sometimes they were used as bathtubs – for example at Zincirli, sometimes as coffins, as at Ur. But whatever the case, whether it was a burial or a hoard hidden in a large bronze vessel, it is clear that all these items were plundered from various places. Amongst the objects from Ziwiye are many ivory plaques with various designs. Some of them, fashioned with unusual artistry, are undoubtedly Assyrian, similar to those discovered in the Assyrian palaces of Arslan Tash, Nimrud or Kuyunjik. Another group, fashioned under the influence of Assyrian art, bears the stamp of the provincial style of the mid to late 8th century BCE, with signs of the influence of Phoenician art, the art of northern Syria and possibly that of Urartu. The bronze bath already mentioned is also Assyrian. Some of the jewellery has neither been precisely dated nor precisely localised as such earrings, necklaces and bracelets are characteristic of many areas of the Near East. Amongst the bronzeware – parts of furniture, bells, bronze pins, and animal figurines are items that are undoubtedly from Urartu. Several ceramic vessels, supposedly found in the same hoard, are also Urartian or Assyrian (8th-7th centuries BCE). Most interesting of all are the gold and silver items in the hoard. Some of them, mostly silver objects, are also Urartian, but the majority of the gold objects belong to the so-called mixed style, in which stylistic features that are definitely Urartian and some that are definitely Assyrian, along with others that are apparently from Asia Minor and some almost certainly Syrian, all blend together with new, more vivid representations of a style, technique and, above all, choice of imagery which may be cautiously termed “local”.

Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.

These are all prestigious items. Richly decorated weapons, insignias of a king’s or courtier’s power, such as a pectoral, a diadem, a gold belt and so on. On nearly all these objects the composition is based on heraldic principles, symmetrical scenes depicting mythical creatures are displayed on either side of the Tree of Life. There are no less than ten versions of the Tree of Life from Ziwiye, consisting of standard S-shaped curves woven into a complex pattern. The representations of the Tree of Life on Urartian bronze belts of the 13th-7th centuries BCE form the closest parallel. The fabulous creatures depicted at the sides of the Tree of Life on objects from Ziwiye are not very numerous – a dozen in all.

There are also purely Assyrian compositions on gold, as on ivory, objects. These include a king with a sword defeating a rampant lion. Apart from this, zoomorphic figures are represented on gold objects and even on fragments of pottery. There is a stag with legs drawn in and branching antlers executed in a typically Scythian style, very close to those on famous objects from Scythian barrows, such as the Kelermes or Melgunov swords or the Kelermes pole-axe; a panther with its paws entwined into a ring, almost the same as the famous Kelermes panther or the panther on the gold facing of the Kelermes mirror; the head of a griffin, identical to that on the Kelermes sword; a mountain ram with legs drawn under it, its pose and the treatment of its body identical to those of the Kelermes stag; and, finally, a hare.

Amongst the objects from Ziwiye are some which show only mythical beasts (the gold breast-plate, the gold quiver-facing, and others) or only real animals (the gold belt with stags and rams, parts of the gold diadem with panthers and griffins’ heads, and others); only one object a gold pectoral, the symbol of power of a king or a courtier shows both types of animal.

At this point, an important detail must be emphasised. Without exception, all the images on both gold and silver items as well as some articles of carved ivory are fashioned using the same stylistic devices (for example, idiosyncratic “underwings” appear on the bodies of the fabulous creatures and the panther).

Thus the craftsmen of Ziwiye created prestigious objects such as symbols of power (ceremonial weapons, a pectoral, a diadem, a belt, etc.), employing the pictorial language of Urartu, Assyria, Elam, Syria, Phoenicia and, lastly, the “animal style” of the Scythians, so that their own pictorial language was again created from elements extracted from various alien contexts to produce a new text. They also employed many older metalwork techniques (as seen, for example, in the Marlik objects).

Three facts are of importance here. Many of the objects at Ziwiye were produced for rulers or for the aristocracy, they clearly display the Scythian animal style which was new to this area, and the majority of similar designs (such as the Tree of Life and the monsters) link these objects to the art of Urartu.

All these parallels inevitably pose fresh questions. Above all, for whom were the Ziwiye objects produced? And then, how are these works to be dated? If they were made earlier than the Scythian items at Kelermes, or were even contemporaneous with them, what then is their significance in the formation of the Scythian animal style and of those other aspects of Near-Eastern art to which we have already referred? How are these objects to be interpreted? Lastly, how did these images subsequently develop?

Vase, 9th century. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.

First of all, one has to answer, however cursorily, the question of how the animal style developed. The origin of the nomadic tribes known to the Ancients by the generic name of Scythians or Saka – their first homeland, their migration routes and their ethnic origin – is as controversial as the question of the Iranians’ original homeland and of their migration. However, the important thing for the history of Iranian culture is that detachments of nomadic warriors are first mentioned in writings in the Near East during the 8th century BCE (the oldest known references are the reports of Assyrian spies from Urartu in the 720s BCE). They are known by various names: umman-manda (the Manda tribe), gimirrai (Cimmerians?), ashkuzai, ishkuzai (Scythians), saka (Saka). In the 670s BCE, these tribes were already playing an active part in the foreign policy of the Near-East and subsequently they even set up a short-lived “Scythian kingdom” in Southern Azerbaijan, somewhere in the vicinity of Manna. No less controversial is the origin of the Scythian animal style itself. Images of beasts stylised in a Scythian manner connect a number of archaeological cultures covering a vast territory from the Mongolian steppes to the Crimea. In recent years, the term “Scythian-Siberian animal style” has become current in Russian archaeological literature. It has been suggested that this style emerged in the eastern steppes, perhaps as early as the late 9th century BCE, and then migrated westwards along with its bearers. Two features of “Scythian stylisation” are also characteristic of Ziwiye imagery. One is the generally closed construction of the animal figures (for example, beasts twisted into a circle), resulting in a distortion and simplification of form, and the other is the consequent construction of designs consisting of several entirely distinct planes of geometrical regularity.

Thus the question of dating is highly important, but at present it remains unresolved. It is not impossible, of course, that it was the Scythians themselves who brought with them to the Near-East the motif of the stag with legs drawn in and branching antlers, the motif of the panther and the stylised image of the griffin’s head.[6] One cannot, however, point to a single similar object of incontrovertible Scythian provenance which is reliably dated and known to be older than the pieces from Ziwiye.[7] At the same time – and leaving aside the stag’s or ram’s pose, which was already extremely widespread in the art of the Near-East by the end of the second millennium BCE – objects have been found on Iranian territory depicting these same beasts but stylised in a different manner.

A griffin’s head adorns the butt of a number of Lorestan axes as early as the 10th-9th centuries BCE, the stag with legs drawn in is found on Lorestan psalia of the late 8th century BCE, and there is a panther on a bronze pin from Baba Jan Tepe, also from the 8th century BCE.

Let us assume that Ziwiye and the Kelermes burial mounds date from the same period.[8] Despite an abundance of Urartian and Assyrian motifs, the buyer for whom these articles were intended could have been neither an Assyrian nor an Urartian ruler because the pictorial categories of fabulous beasts are grossly confused, which would have been unacceptable in the unified systems of religious imagery of Assyria and Urartu. Thus we must seek another candidate, and he must be an Iranian. Only in this case would the “Scythian animals” have to feature on his belongings, insofar as they were a totem or emblem of his tribe (in Vladimir Abayev’s opinion, for example, the term saka – the name by which some Scythian tribes were known in the Near East – signifies “stag”).

It should be borne in mind that the craftsmen who incorporated them into insignias of power were employing the very same technical and stylistic devices they used for the ancient eastern motifs with which they were familiar. For example, the stag’s antlers are depicted with the same S-shaped curves as the branches of the Tree of Life.

The intended recipient of these articles would have to be a king to account for the royal symbols of investiture. In other words, the most likely candidates are kings of a Scythian power settled in the Sacasene province of Transcaucasia and conducting raids from there on Urartu and Assyria, the rulers of a “Scythian kingdom” (one of these, Madias, has already been mentioned) who may have adopted the customs of eastern potentates, or the kings of Media, the first Iranian empire established on this territory in the 670s BCE. Two facts give grounds for considering these objects to have been produced for Median rulers.

Firstly, the political situation in the area in question during the late 8th and early 7th centuries BCE; secondly, the subsequent history of objects made in this style.

Manuscript frontispiece, c. 1340.

How rapidly early Scythian articles lose that fabulous imagery which is characteristic of Near-Eastern art! This imagery has already vanished completely from early Scythian objects in burial mounds of the northern Black Sea area dating from the 6th-5th centuries BCE. Here Scythian art comes into contact with the art of Greece. On the other hand, this imagery survives in Persian art of the Achaemenid period. One finds it on Achaemenid seals, on silver and gold vessels (especially on rhytons), in the decoration of Achaemenid swords, and even in monumental art – on the capitals of columns and on reliefs.[9]

The most natural explanation for this is that the imagery of the Near East was not interpreted by the Scythians in any way.

On the very earliest Scythian objects it simply constituted a form of exotic decoration. Yet images of actual Scythian “totems”, although originally produced by Near-Eastern metalworkers using Near-Eastern models and styles, were to be developed further in Scythian art.

In Persian art, on the contrary, Scythian images rapidly degenerate,[10] whilst it is the fabulous imagery of the Near-East which continues to develop. This indicates that their selection, both at the beginning (at Ziwiye) and subsequently (under the Achaemenids), was not accidental and that they were interpreted in some way.

Thus some of the objects from Ziwiye were produced for Iranian, and in all likelihood Median, rulers. The metalworkers, successors to the Hasanlu and Marlik “school”, produced works of art on the same principle as did the Marlik craftsmen, depicting in a single object images of “evil demons” and “good genii” extracted from the context of various religious pictorial systems. The field of selection for such “quotations” is a great deal more extensive than at Marlik, but the choice itself is more limited. Some dozen or so images are repeated on all the objects. In making the selection, no great importance has been attached to the symbolism these images possessed in their own pictorial systems. The quotations sometimes alternate with a “narration in one’s own words”.

Lastly, even though the Near-Eastern “text” is ideographic, images that are already indisputably Iranian are introduced into it as “phonetic indices”. If such a system were to be found in written records, we would conclude that the text, despite the fact that all, or nearly all, of it was composed of foreign words, would have to be read in Iranian owing to the presence of phonetic indices. Here is the situation in the written Iranian language: in the Achaemenid period standard correspondences were beginning to be developed between Aramaic words and expressions and their Iranian equivalents (all the business of the chancellery in Achaemenid Iran was conducted in Aramaic, a Semitic language).

Senior civil servants had the (Aramaic) text read to them in Iranian. Gradually, scribes developed the habit of reading the entire text, even to themselves, in their native (Iranian) language. Aramaic spellings turned into a type of conditional sign system for the Iranian words – ideograms or, more precisely, heterograms.

The actual use of heterograms was subject to specific rules: thus, for example, one or two of the numerous Aramaic verb forms were arbitrarily selected all the time to serve any purpose… An Iranian verb ending was often joined to the Aramaic form which had been selected once and for all, as a phonetic complement in order to reveal the real Iranian verb form concealed beneath the heterogram. When they arrived on the Iranian plateau, the Iranians did not have their own written language.

They used the cuneiform script of the Near East in order to set down the official manifestos of the Achaemenid rulers, and Aramaic writing and language in order to conduct their state and business affairs. Neither did these Iranians have their own representational art. Therefore an analogous process can be traced in art – quotations and a limited choice of images can be explained by the fact that the resulting works were also to be understood in Iranian.

It is only in late Zoroastrian works that we find faint hints of anthropomorphic representation. In fact only a single Iranian goddess – the goddess Anahita – is depicted anthropomorphically. All the other deities of the ancient Iranian religion are represented abstractly, only through their “hypostases” or incarnations (chiefly as certain birds or beasts). The Yasna Haptanhaiti – one of the oldest parts of the Avesta, the ancient Iranian sacred text – mentions the worship of mythical creatures such as, for example, the sacred three-legged ass Khara and a few others, but the deities of the ancient Iranians were not pictorially represented.

This probably explains why, when the need arose to depict the Iranian gods, artists had to seek a suitable iconography amongst examples of ancient eastern art. These were foreign to them both as regards religious content and, of course, ethnic origin, but they were at the same time widely known and revered and the Iranians interpreted them in their own manner. It was entirely natural for the Median kings to use the very rich figurative art of Assyria, Urartu and Elam as their basis, and especially the art of that region in which their state developed historically and culturally; nevertheless, the selection had to be purposeful and relatively strict. At Marlik and Ziwiye a native Iranian representational language was created on the basis of foreign representational languages; this was, in effect, a native Persian art which, by the Ziwiye stage, one can justifiably term Median.

An inscription by the Achaemenid ruler Darius I, concerning the construction of his palace at Susa more than a century after the creation of the Ziwiye complex, states (lines 49–50): “The Medes and the Egyptians were skilled in the use of gold, they crafted works of gold”. As we find out in the following lines when he comes to list other craftsmen – stonemasons, specialists in glazed tiles, sculptors and builders (Ionians, Lydians, Babylonians and Egyptians) – Darius’s information is accurate. In all probability he was equally correct in speaking of the Medians as noted metalworkers.

We have already pointed out the characteristics that link the pieces described and the art of Lorestan – one of the most distinctive regions of Iran. Interest in the culture of Lorestan began in the late 1920s. The story has it that in 1928, in the small town of Harsin, a Lur nomad offered a local merchant a strange bronze object – an idol with a human body ringed with fabulous beasts – in exchange for a few cakes. The Lur had found the idol in an ancient grave. The story may be without foundation but it is well known that when similar objects appeared in the antique shops of Tehran and subsequently those of London, New York and Paris, the interest in them was so great that thousands of Lorestan bronzes were soon scattered amongst private collections and museums and virtually nothing remained for the expert archaeologist arriving in Lorestan, except for ancient graves pitted with holes and entirely robbed of their treasures. It required no little time and effort for systematic excavations finally to reveal the ancient civilisation of Lorestan.

Nowadays the so-called “typical Lorestan bronzes”, characterised by their original form and iconography, have been singled out from the wide range of objects from this ancient centre. These bronzes consist of ritual bronze axes, often decorated with cast figures of men or beasts (some of them bearing inscriptions with the names of Elamite kings of the 12th and 11th centuries BCE), bronze daggers (also frequently bearing inscriptions, for example of the Babylonian king Marduk-nadin-ahhe, 1100–1033 BCE), and bronze handles of whetstones, terminating in protomes of a goat with splendid horns or birds.

Of later date (8th-7th centuries BCE) are the bronze psalia – parts of horse harnesses fashioned entirely in the Assyrian style (similar to those depicted on the relief of the Assyrian king Sennacherib, for example), or showing Elamnite or local Lorestan deities, and psalia with depictions of beasts – moufflons, horses, unicorns (similar to those on Marlik metalwork), stags and even elks. Representations of some local deities, fabulous creatures, “demons”, and anthropomorphic figures combined with complicated zoomorphic images which appear not only on psalia but on heavy bronze pins, on the finials of standards and on weapons, etc., have no iconographic parallels beyond the bounds of Lorestan itself. The most characteristic standard finial takes the form of a hybrid image – an anthropomorphic deity ringed with fabulous animals and birds of prey (these are what were termed “idols”) – or a female deity with the heads of birds growing from her shoulders. No less typical are the large, disc-shaped or openwork heads of pins ornamented with floral motifs or representing a female deity surrounded by beasts, birds, fish, and plants. Sometimes these are in the form of plaques with a polymorphic deity combining feminine and masculine characteristics or the features of a youth and an old man.

Evidently, it will be a long time before we succeed in understanding this imagery, for in Lorestan only one local temple where such items might have survived has been excavated to date. This is the temple of Surkh Dum where exploratory excavations were carried out in the 1930s, but the material from these excavations has still not been published. However, those articles fashioned in the Assyrian or Elamite style were evidently made to order. The craftsmen of Lorestan who, as excavations show, had thousands of years of tradition and extensive experience in the field of metallurgy, manufactured weapons and parts of horse harnesses for various customers, among whom were kings, princes and chiefs of tribes of different ethnic origin.

Miniature: The Fall of Bahram Gor into the Ditch, from Amir Khusraw Dihlavi’s masterpiece, Chamse or The Collection of Five, c. 1370–1380. Gouache on paper, 8.7 × 12.8 cm. Biruni Institute of Oriental Studies. Documentary heritage submitted by Uzbekistan, Tashkent.

These were the craftsmen who manufactured psalia in the form of Iranian beasts – a stag with legs drawn in, an ibex, an elk; it was they who made bronze quivers with the same pictorial quotations seen in the Marlik age. But no unified representational language was created here out of such images; the articles were simply made in accordance with the customer’s taste. A native, and very complex, art coexisted here alongside the foreign articles. But the important fact about them is that they can be dated much more precisely than, say, objects from Marlik and Ziwiye, and here it turns out that the “Iranian animals” portrayed on them have a date – the 8th century BCE – demonstrably earlier than any item hitherto discovered in the Scythian animal style.

There are no prestigious objects from Lorestan exhibiting Iranian characteristics. This is understandable, for in the 9th-7th centuries BCE the Iranian tribes, which had by then already settled in the vicinity of Lorestan, had not yet evolved any sort of strong or stable unified state.

On turning to an analysis of the art forms developed in the Achaemenid empire, one of the world empires of antiquity, we should describe at least one architectural complex, such as Persepolis.

Persepolis, Parsa in Old Persian, is situated some 30 miles from Shiraz in the south of Iran. Its construction began c. 520 BCE and continued until c. 450 BCE. The city was erected on a high artificial platform reached by a wide stairway with 111 steps made of limestone blocks.

On the platform there is a unified architectural complex made up of two types of palace – the Tachara (an inhabited palace) and the Apadana (an audience hall). The best known of them is the Apadana of Darius and Xerxes – a square audience hall, its ceiling supported by 72 stone columns. The Apadana was raised 13 foot above the terrace and was reached by a wide stairway decorated with reliefs. On the left side are three tiers of identical soldiers of Elamite regiments with spears, bows and quivers, Persian guards with spears and shields, and Medes with swords, bows and spears. There are also warriors carrying the king’s throne, leading the royal horses and driving the royal chariots. On the right side the reliefs depict a procession of the nations which formed part of the Achaemenid empire. At the head of each group is a courtier, possibly a satrap – the governor of a province who was always chosen from one of the leading aristocratic families – in ceremonial Persian dress with a high tiara. The different nations are depicted in approximately the same order as that of the kingdoms composing the empire on official inscriptions of the Achaemenid kings.

Here are the Medes with their famous horses of Nisa, bearing gold vases, goblets and torques, Elamites with tame lionesses and gold daggers, Africans with okapi, Babylonians with bulls, Armenians with horses, vases and rhytons, Arabs with camels, and other peoples.

The stairway leading to another palace, the Tripylon, is decorated along the outside with a solemn procession of the royal guard, and along the inner side with a procession of servants carrying rams, vessels and wineskins. By the east door of the Apadana of Darius-Xerxes; close to the door Darius I, the king of kings of the Achaemenid state, is represented, seated on his throne, and behind him stands the heir to the throne, Xerxes. The hands of both of them are raised and stretched out in a gesture of worship towards the symbol of the royal deity, Khwarnah. At the north entrance to the throne room, the king of kings is depicted fighting a monster with the head, body and forelegs of a lion, the neck, wings and hindlegs of a bird and the tail of a scorpion. Identical monsters appear on several pieces from Ziwiye.

The Persepolis reliefs form a slow procession, a rhythmic, solemn and magnificent parade of hundreds of soldiers, courtiers, civil servants, priests and hundreds of representatives of subject nations, occasionally interrupted at specific points by the figure of the king of kings himself on a throne supported by these same representatives of subject nations, or by the struggle of the king of kings with a monster, or, lastly, by the scene of a lion attacking a bull – an ancient eastern religious symbol. The separate figures and scenes do not themselves form a sequence, rather the sequence is of groups or complexes of scenes (“the Apadana complex”, “the Tripylon complex”, etc.). Close examination of them gives rise to the impression that the king’s army was innumerable, that the whole world was subject to the king, that he himself was like a god and fought with the monsters of evil, as the god of light and goodness himself fought against them.

The laws governing the imagery are meticulously elaborated and carefully observed in such details as weapons, dress, headdress, masterful depiction of valuable vessels, ornaments and details of horse harness. Such articles of Achaemenid applied art as have survived are reproduced with absolute accuracy in the sculpted reliefs at Persepolis. We may restrict ourselves to a single example – the relief on the western doorpost of the Apadana shows Darius wearing a garment, the hem of which is decorated with an engraved procession of lions. A wool hem with the same figures of lions – identical down to the minutest detail – was found in one of the Pazyryk burial mounds in the Altai.

Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.

The “portraits” at Persepolis are extremely stylised but the subjects are distinguished by details of attire – crowns, weapons or bracelets, by their position in the scene depicted or by clearly delineated “ethnographic” features.

In the first Achaemenid capital, Pasargadae, which was built twenty-five years before Persepolis, only remains of reliefs decorating walls and entrances to the palaces have been found. Comparing these to the Persepolis reliefs, one can trace the rise of the “Achaemenid style” of sculpture and its evolution. Above all, at Pasargadae the prototype for these reliefs can be more clearly discerned, going back to the stone orthostats of Assyrian palaces.

Their style and imagery also derive from the Mesopotamian traditions of Assyria and Elam. Several of them have exact counterparts in Assyrian art, especially amongst the orthostats of Sennacherib’s palace at Nineveh, where portrayals of fish-people and “demons” recur with great frequency. These images were probably seen by the Persians as guardians of the Assyrian rulers.

Perhaps some political purpose lay behind the repetition of these motifs at Pasargadae. Perhaps they express an attempt to proclaim the concept of a succession of power from the Assyrian kings. But the pictorial quotations are as chaotic as those at Ziwiye and the total sacrifice of the meaning of the Assyrian composition indicates that the original religious message was of no consideration. At any rate, we are faced here with the earliest example of imagery intended to convey a message adopted from kingdoms destroyed by the Achaemenids and used by them in order to glorify their own majesty and power.

It is significant that at Pasargadae too a limited repertoire of themes has been selected from the enormous variety of sculpted designs of Assyria and Elam – there are only depictions of “monsters”, “demons” and fabulous creatures, a king and courtiers, or processions of warriors and people offering gifts. Achaemenid reliefs have none of the scenes so characteristic of Assyrian art such as hunts, battles, the storming of cities, feasts, depictions of landscapes or various types of religious ceremony.

When analysing Achaemenid monuments we should recall an Egyptian hypostyle hall, the image of the Egyptian winged sun-disc, the Egyptian crown of one of the fabulous creatures on a relief at Pasargadae, the obvious Ionic influence in the form of the columns, and especially the Lydian features in the layout of the palaces and the Urartian techniques of erecting buildings on enormous artificial platforms, as well as the already mentioned Assyrian and Elamite reliefs.

We have already referred to the inscription of King Darius to mark the building of his palace at Susa (written in the three officially accepted languages of Achaemenid Iran: Akkadian, Elamite and Old Persian). It lists a wide variety of materials delivered to Susa from many of the kingdoms subject to the Achaemenids (from the Mediterranean coast as far as India) and a host of craftsmen of all nationalities (Ionians, Carians, Egyptians, Medes, Babylonians, etc.).

Carl Nylander, an expert on Achaemenid art, describes something like the following situation. Having subjugated Media and Asia Minor and destroyed Babylon, the Achaemenid king of kings, Cyrus II, became the ruler of an enormous powerful state. He ordered building to begin at Pasargadae, in view of the new political and religious tasks which confronted him. The buildings of his official residence were to be constructed of stone and decorated with reliefs. Median concepts and techniques were employed,[11] or those used in Assyria and Elam which Cyrus had subjugated. In other instances ready-made traditional forms were lacking, so there was a certain synthesis of other elements. But as all the palaces were to be constructed of stone and at that time such buildings only existed in Asia Minor it was essential to attract stonemasons from Sardis and Ephesus, in addition to those craftsmen schooled in the Mesopotamian and Median traditions who were employed above all as sculptors.

Iranian carpet, c. 1600. Silk and silver wire, 249 × 139 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Persian carpet.

A school of craftsmen developed at Pasargadae which later flourished at Persepolis; this united various formal languages in a single style which reflected state requirements. In other words, we are faced, in theory, with a pattern similar to that which characterised the formation of early Median art, which was itself a determining factor in this new school.

The Achaemenid age was the first period of a native Persian art from which many objects have survived, as well as written records. Such of its features as are formulated below may well help reconstruct the history of Median art from a few surviving objects and at present a comparison is possible only of general patterns and theories rather than of actual objects.

Thus, first of all, Achaemenid art cannot be characterised any longer as one of direct visual references, despite the colossal number of borrowings – in this instance from prestigious branches of the art of subjugated lands. Such borrowings quickly lose their original meaning. The paradox of Achaemenid art lies in the fact that all, or nearly all, the details of any particular image or any particular architectural construction can be traced back to prototypes of previous ages and various lands, but the image itself, nevertheless, remains distinct from anything known and is specifically Achaemenid.

Secondly, the entire pictorial repertoire of art of this era, established with the participation of craftsmen of various nationalities, fairly rapidly spread down to the minutest details to all the monuments – from reliefs on palaces and kings’ tombs to metalwork, textiles, ornaments, etc. A single imperial Achaemenid style was created and this unified culture can, moreover, be traced from the Indus to the shores of Asia Minor.

The plan of the Apadana at Persepolis, for example, was repeated by Darius at Susa, and in Armenia (at Erebuni) an Urartian temple was rebuilt according to the same plan; the same sort of palace was erected for the Achaemenid satrap at Khwarazm (Kalaly-gyr). In many instances, however, local traditional materials were used instead of stone.

Thirdly, the art of the Achaemenids as we now see it, primarily in the monuments of Pasargadae, Persepolis, Susa, the Behistun rock reliefs and the rock tombs of the Achaemenid kings at Naqsh-e Rustam, as well as in numerous articles of metalwork and glyptics, is in essence intended to proclaim the majesty of royal power and the majesty of the empire. This characteristic in particular also explains the paradoxical selection of themes in Achaemenid art. Only such proclamatory themes interested the Achaemenid monarchs and not tense, dynamic hunting or battle scenes.

There is conscious selection, or a strict pictorial system dictated by specific aims. One might say that the reliefs of Persepolis, for example, are thematically monotonous because Persepolis itself was a ritual city. Apparently the solemn celebrations of the sacred Iranian New Year (Nawruz) were performed here, when the coronation of the king of kings took place. We can thus conclude that it is this ritual that is depicted on the Persepolis reliefs, the sculptural reflection of the myths and images of the ancient Iranians.

These include the struggle of good and evil symbolised in the battle of the king with the monster, festive processions and subjugated nations presenting New Year gifts and tributes to the king of kings. It could be said that the reliefs of Pasargadae constitute the specific political programme of the Achaemenid empire’s founder, Cyrus.

Yet these very images took over the whole of Achaemenid art. It seems that the programme was a great deal more extensive, reflecting more than the specific aims that arose during the construction of Pasargadae and Persepolis. Canons stipulating certain “principal” scenes were laid down at this time: the scene of the king’s triumphal reception, the scene reflecting his religious faith (the king at a sacrificial altar with a burning flame) and certain symbolical compositions. These canons were to endure in Iran for several centuries.

Like all Near-Eastern art, that of Achaemenid Iran is distinguished by its realism in the portrayal of everyday objects which are faithfully reproduced down to the tiniest detail, combined with stereotyped, idealised portraits lacking any individual features. Unlike the art of the Near-East, however, there is nothing that might be termed personal or private in Achaemenid art, for nearly all compositions have a specific symbolic meaning. Thus, for example, the symbol of the supreme god of the Assyrians, Ashur, was chosen as the symbol of the deity of fate, success and “royal predestination”, Khwarnah. There was not even any need for any serious iconographic changes in doing so – in late Assyrian cylindrical seals Ashur is depicted in a sun-disc in the form of the figure of the king between two outspread wings.

Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.

The symbol of Khwarnah probably appeared at the time of Darius and evolved during his reign: the rock at Behistun bears an image in which a sphere with a star crowns the deity’s tiara and in his hand he holds a torque – the insignia of power. At Persepolis, Khwarnah is depicted exactly like the king, Darius. The Assyrian “gatekeepers”, shedu, repeated on a gigantic scale in the “Gateway of All the Nations” at Persepolis, perpetuate many details of the prototype used and transformed by the Iranian sculptors, but here they symbolise an Iranian deity – Gopatshah. This image was also very popular in the applied arts. Above the door of the rock tomb of Darius at Naqsh-e Rustam is a sculptural composition that in effect repeats the throne compositions at Persepolis in which representatives of subjugated nations support the ceremonial dais. Darius himself is shown on a stepped pedestal leaning on a bow with one hand raised towards an altar on which a fire is burning. Above this scene soars the symbol of Khwarnah. This scene soon becomes part of the artistic canon and tombs of later Achaemenid kings repeat it in detail. It also appears on Achaemenid seals.

In the spring of 330 BCE, Alexander the Great burnt down the Apadana of Persepolis; this event was to be a turning point in the history of Iran and of its culture. Alexander’s campaigns in the East began an age usually referred to as the age of Hellenism.[12] Along with Alexander’s phalanxes, the artistic tastes of the Greek world, its craftsmen and its works of art all penetrated Iran.

The efforts of Alexander’s successors, the Seleucids (his generals who became the monarchs of the lands he had subjugated) to create unity throughout lands with varied social conditions, beliefs and customs, complicated by the formation throughout the East of cities granted the right of polis, were simplified by the fact that in theory a social structure and political norms similar to those in Greece had existed in the East even before the arrival of Alexander’s troops. As a result, an ideology of “cosmopolitanism” was to dominate for an extremely long period.

Initially, the Greeks themselves did not attempt to hellenise the conquered lands. Convinced of the superiority of their own political system and way of life, they nevertheless tolerated local cults and even supported them. In the end there was collaboration between the Persians and Greeks. The Persians began to aid the conquerors both in the creation of the machinery of state and in the sphere of religious cults and all of this simplified the process of syncretisation. Despite the shift in power, local rulers preserved the ancient traditions in many of the satrapies.

There is no need to list here the examples of Hellenistic art found on Iranian soil – the Greek inscriptions, the statues of Greek deities or Greek architectural monuments – since there are a number of specialist studies on this subject. The picture became a great deal more complex in the 2nd century BCE when Iran was conquered by a dynasty of eastern Iranian origin, the Parthians, who brought their own culture to Iran, and a new, Parthian, empire arose which was to last for more than 500 years.

Even today the world of Parthian art remains a colourful mosaic of isolated works, varying styles and concepts which it is difficult to amalgamate into a coherent picture. Consequently, it is necessary to bear in mind that Iranian territory during this period is a ‘blind spot’. We know a good deal about many works from Central Asia, Afghanistan, north-western India and Mesopotamia, but hardly anything about Iran itself, since there has been no archaeological research of this period. One could, of course, gloss over this period, uniting, say, the art of Mesopotamia with that of Central Asia and Eastern Turkestan. One would then find that this art (as opposed to Greek or Achaemenid art) is characterised by refinement of form, a wealth of symbolism and frontal representation. In addition there is greater movement and space, and a more illusionistic approach than is seen in Achaemenid art.

The process of artistic syncretism, especially as one era ends and another begins, is, of course, linked to definite social, economic and political changes. The rulers of both empires – the later Seleucids and the Parthians – tried to embody their own divine reflection in the form of single deities and nearly every religious system in the East of that time aspired to the role of world religion. In the early Hellenistic period a common religious language appeared. The cult of a sun deity, under various names – the Semitic gods Bel (in Elam) and Aphlad (in Syria), the Iranian Ahura Mazda and Mithras – spread across the whole Parthian empire. The same happened with the cult of the god of victory (the Iranian Verethragna and the Greek Heracles) and with the cult of the mother-goddess or goddess of fertility, called Anahita by the Iranians, Nanai or Atargatis by the Semites and who was compared to the Greek Artemis or the Cybele of Asia Minor. It is easy to imagine how many new features the religious art of the Parthian period had to absorb. There is much greater thematic variety than in Achaemenid religious art.

Imam Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.

Minaret of Imam Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.

During this very period some Iranian deities were endowed with an anthropomorphic aspect. It has been established[13] that an enormous role was played at the courts of the Parthian rulers by gosans or minstrels who sang the epic ballads celebrating the exploits of the ancient Iranian heroes, the Kayanids (the kings who first embraced the Iranian faith of Zoroastrianism), or of heroic warriors battling with demons such as Thraetaona, the dragon-slayer, or Zarer, the conqueror of nomads.

These traditions were more secular than religious and formed an extremely important part of Parthian dynastic doctrine, for the Parthian kings traced their lineage back to these ancient epic heroes. Dynastic legitimacy was founded on the epic. The epic justified the divine right of the Parthians to the throne of Iran, the epic was Iranian dynastic history. Fragments of it survive in sacred texts often preserved by Zoroastrian priests. But the Iranian epic tradition, which was vitally important for Persian art of all ages up to the 19th century, was born in north-eastern Iran and came to the Iranian plateau by the north-eastern Iranians led by the Parthians.

This epic tradition gave rise to such essential themes of Iranian court art as the depiction of hunts, battles and feast scenes. The epic cycles may have been illustrated in polychrome wall-paintings in palace. Archaeologists have found such wall-paintings, together with clay sculpted portraits of noble ancestors – on the north-eastern frontiers of Iran, particularly in Parthia, whereas in Iran itself no wall-paintings or other depictions have yet been found clearly representing such scenes, with the exception of some wall-paintings of dubious date at the palace of Kuh-e-Khwaja in Seistan.

We may, however, safely assume that these themes, so decisive for Persian art, appeared during the Parthian period under the influence of the art of the north-eastern provinces (Central Asia and Afghanistan).

Towards the end of the existence of the Parthian state, Christianity arose and spread across its western boundaries. In the state of Kushan, on the eastern borders of Parthia, at approximately the same time, one of the most important Buddhist movements was taking shape – the doctrine of the Mahayana. In Parsa, in the south of Iran, Zoroastrianism was developing into a state religion. Syncretism and the common religious language that had arisen in the Hellenistic period were giving way to the search for a dogmatic religion.

Some knowledge of the Iranian religion, Zoroastrianism, is necessary as it formed the ideological basis of Iran’s art for at least two millennia. Its name comes from that of its prophet – Zarathustra (subsequently transmitted to Europe in its Greek form as Zoroaster). Zarathustra was evidently a real figure, as is corroborated in particular by his “peasant” name meaning “owner of an old camel”; he was a member of the Spitama tribe and probably lived in the 7th century BCE. He was expelled from his community for having preached doctrines to which its priests objected and went away into the east of Iran, to Bactria or Drangiana, where he was received by a king belonging to the ancient dynasty of the Kayanids, Wishtaspa (Hystaspes), who was the first to be converted to his faith. Zoroastrianism is known primarily in its later, Sassanian version. At its heart lies a dualism: this asserts that there are two principles in the world – Good and Evil – and the essence of existence is the struggle between them. At the same time Zoroastrianism is a monotheistic religion, for Ahura Mazda (Iater Ormazd) is the one god, a god of goodness and light, whilst his antithesis, “the lord of darkness” Angra Mainyu (literally “evil intent”, later Ahriman) and his forces, are fiends (daevas).

According to this doctrine, space and time are infinite. Space is dual – “the kingdom of good” and “the kingdom of evil”. Within infinite time (zrvan akarana) Ahura Mazda creates a finite, closed period which lasts 12,000 years. The concept of cyclical development is fundamental to Zoroastrian philosophy. Thus, according to sacred texts, the first 3,000 years of this period were devoted to an “ideal creation” of the world, the world of ideas; in the second 3,000 years the material world was created. Here the struggle between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu takes place (everything good is created by Ahura Mazda, everything evil by Angra Mainyu). The following 3,000 years is the history of the struggle between the two forces before the appearance of Zarathustra. Finally, the last 3,000 years is “our time” in which Zarathustra appears and three “saviours” (Saoshyants) are awaited, who will announce the decisive moment in the struggle between the forces of light and darkness. The forces of darkness will suffer a final defeat and the world will be purified by fire.

A distinctive feature of Zoroastrianism is its assertion of man’s active role in confessing the good faith of a worshipper of Mazda and thus contributing towards the final victory of good.

Zarathustra’s doctrine and his preaching, as well as numerous pre-Zoroastrian religious hymns and liturgies and a plethora of ancient Iranian myths, were brought together in the Avesta, the sacred texts, which were, however, written no earlier than the 5th century CE, in a very complicated alphabet created especially for that purpose by the Zoroastrian priesthood. For more than 1,000 years before this the priests had learned the texts by heart.

Apparently no more than a quarter of what once made up the Avesta has survived. Its foundation is the Gathas, the preaching of Zarathustra himself, and the Yasna, hymns to the gods. After its codification in the 5th century, parts of the Avesta were translated into Middle Persian and the Zend, an extensive commentary on it, was written. The liturgical texts (Yasna) have, of course, survived longer than anything else, and although they as well as their supplement (Vispered) and the priestly codex (Videvdat) are in the main monotonous incantations to the gods, they contain a number of myths and legends of great antiquity. The gods of the Avesta are not as a rule given human form in the sacred texts.

The single exception is the goddess Anahita, who, in one of the Yashts, is described as a beautiful woman dressed in a silver beaverskin cloak and wearing various ornaments. But many of the Zoroastrian deities are personified mainly as various animals or birds which serve as complete representations of these deities. The evil daevas have a single personification.

These are such evil deities as Azhi Dahaka, a three-headed snake, or the daeva of plague and death, Nasu, represented as a fly coming from the North, or the demon of laziness, the long-armed Bushyasta.

During the Achaemenid period there also existed the Mazdaism of the Magi (an ethical and religious doctrine) and the religion of the Achaemenid kings, which in many ways differed both from the doctrine of the Magi and from ancient Iranian beliefs (thus, for example, in the official texts of the Achaemenid kings the name of Zarathustra does not occur and Ahura Mazda is not the only god but simply the supreme one).

Consequently one can say that in the late sixth and early 5th centuries BCE, Zoroastrianism was only just beginning to assert itself in Iran and the Achaemenid kings, whilst valuing the superiority of Zarathustra’s doctrine as their new official religion, nevertheless did not cast aside the cults of the ancient tribal gods. At the same time Zoroastrianism had not yet become a dogmatic religion with firmly established norms and there were slight modifications as the doctrine developed. Zoroastrianism was widespread in the Parthian empire: for example, shards from the wine store of Mithradatkirt (discovered during excavations at Nisa in Turkmenistan) bear more than 400 proper names of various people, of which a third, the so-called theophoric ones, are given in honour of Zoroastrian deities. However, symbols and religious formulae are lacking on Parthian coins, whilst at Mithradatkirt works of art used in the funerary cult of kings display an abundance of typical Hellenistic imagery.

Only in one province of Iran, in Parsa, are the old Achaemenid traditions preserved. Here a local dynasty was in power, and although very few works from this province have survived (its capital, Istakhr, situated not far from Persepolis, has still not been excavated), from about the 2nd century BCE its rulers issued coins bearing their Zoroastrian (even Achaemenid) names, the symbol of the royal Khwarnah and the symbols of Zoroastrianism – an altar with a blazing fire and a Zoroastrian temple (possibly a temple of the goddess Anahita).

The Sassanian state, formed in the 3rd century CE, began with the creation of a strong centralised power which fairly soon united the whole of Iran under the control of the Sassanid monarchs.

The province of Parsa was the centre of the development of this state and its historical and cultural nucleus for the entire duration of its 400-year existence, and the Sassanids themselves were hereditary priests of the Temple of Anahita, one of the Zoroastrian holy places of Parsa.

Consequently, the keyword in the unification of the country was the “renaissance” of Iran’s ancient grandeur and the ancient grandeur of the Iranian religion. Before long, the Sassanid monarchs were starting to trace their lineage back to the Achaemenids. It is natural, therefore, to regard the history and culture of this period as a nationalist Iranian reaction to Hellenism. The first works of the Sassanian period seem in fact to be totally unlike works from the age of Hellenism or the few that have reached us from the Parthian age.

Above all, the thematic restrictiveness of Sassanian works of art is striking. Monumental reliefs depict nothing but scenes of the king’s investiture by a deity, military triumphs, single combat or the king of kings and his courtiers. In the main, carved gem-seals reproduce official portraits of civil servants and priests, whilst metalwork items show scenes of kings and courtiers hunting or again display official portraits. Such was the art of Iran during the course of the 3rd century CE, and although new themes can be distinguished here in comparison with Achaemenid art – military triumph, tournaments, hunting scenes – it seems as if we are, in fact, faced with a rebirth of ancient Persian art, evident in the symbolism of the scenes, in a particular sort of extended narrative quality, in the emphasis on the divine essence of royal power, even in the choice of location for the largest reliefs which were carved into the same rocks out of which the tombs of the Achaemenids were hewn.

Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.

Once again, we are confronted with an artform that aims to reflect the specific ideological principles of a new state. Once again we are confronted with an “imperial style”, with a strict canon and a comparatively narrow choice of themes reflected in all branches of art, from reliefs to carved gem-seals.

This period must be regarded as the closing stage in the development of ancient Persian art. The art is characterised in particular by naturalism in the portrayal of iconographic details such as the insignia of power of the shahanshah (king of kings) – a crown and ornaments, a particular type of dress, the exact rendering of weapons, or horse harness. Such iconographic details vary only slightly as a result of variations in the material.

For example, all the basic elements of the individual crowns of the shahanshahs are portrayed absolutely identically whether on colossal rock reliefs and on miniature gem-seals, in soft stucco and in silk textiles. Until the end of the Sassanian period each shahanshah was portrayed on such works wearing an individual crown of a pattern that was unique to him and with the symbols of his own guardian deities.

A few palace ruins have survived from the Sassanian period (Firuzabad, 3rd century CE; Sarvistan and Ctesiphon, 5th-6th centuries CE, and others), a few Zoroastrian temples, the so-called chahartaqs – domed constructions with a windowless central space, which became widespread throughout Iran probably in late Sassanian times – and a few towns, in general still unexcavated. The outstanding works of art of this period are the numerous works of applied art, above all metalwork but also carved gem-seals, textiles, ceramics and glass, which are to be found in various of the world’s museums. The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg justifiably prides itself on possessing the largest collection of such pieces in the world. These works recreate the image of a state which was one of the great powers of the East from the 3rd-7th centuries CE and a centre of learning and culture; a state which not only left as its heritage one of the first medical academies and one of the first universities of the Near East, but also the first authentic chivalrous romance and the first authentic record of the codification of the ancient Iranian encyclopaedia – the Avesta.

Sheikh Lotf Allah Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.

In almost all fields of culture of the Sassanian era one can discern clear links with the culture of previous periods – not only with that of the Achaemenids but also the Hellenistic period. The artistic imagery and ideas of Sassanian works exerted a perceptible influence over a vast territory from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and in turn one can distinguish features from the art of the Caucasus, Central Asia, Eastern Turkestan, even China, in works of art from Iran.

The dominant theme of early Sassanian art (3rd-4th centuries CE was the proclamation of the state’s power. From the very beginning of the Sassanian era official portraits of the Sassanid shahanshah and his courtiers as well as his military triumphs were the images most often seen. In essence, Sassanian art begins with the creation of the iconography of the official portrait and the triumphal composition.

Religious art also follows the same line as official art. From the very beginning its basic subjects were anthropomorphic portrayals (also, in their way, official portraits) of the major Zoroastrian deities – Ahura Mazda, Mithras and Anahita, depictions of the interior of the monarch’s coronation temple and portrayals of the shahanshah’s investiture by these main deities. Such works of art reflected the fundamental, divine nature of power cherished by lran’s rulers in a language of clearly understood symbols. The scene of the divine investiture, the handing over of the insignia of power to the shahanshah by Ahura Mazda, Mithras or Anahita, was mainly sculpted in reliefs, but also featured on the reverse of early Sassanian coins and on early Sassanian gems. The canonic form of the interior of the king’s coronation temple shows an altar on which a fire blazes, sometimes flanked by the figures of the king and a deity, the design being almost the same as in Achaemenid reliefs; the altar is occasionally on the dais of a throne constructed just like those of the Achaemenid rulers. This altar appears on reliefs and coins as well as on gems.

These official works reflected the initial period of development of the Sassanid monarchy’s state ideology; they emphasised the real political successes of the first shahanshahs and proclaimed their faith, Zoroastrianism. The religious theme becomes more complex at the end of the 3rd century CE, as if it had become obscured by the introduction into the official portrait iconography of incarnations of Zoroastrian deities of a lower order (in the beginning, it is true only of one deity the companion of Mithras, the god of victory Verethragna). The main incarnations of Verethragna are a wild boar, a horse, a bird, a lion and the fabulous Senmurv (half-beast and half-bird), and they appear in depictions of the shahanshahs’ crowns and the headdresses of princes and the queen of queens. Strictly speaking, the emergence of such imagery marks the beginning of a new theme, that of Zoroastrian symbolism. The earliest pieces only present these incarnations themselves or their protomes, but very soon they give way to a different type of composition, above all to scenes of the royal hunt which are also widespread at the end of the 3rd century CE.

Subsequently all three themes that followed developed along different lines. At the end of the 4th century CE the state political theme gradually loses its significance. Rock reliefs, the chief monuments exhibiting this theme, are no longer produced: thirty reliefs are attributed to the period from c. 23 °CE to the beginning of the 4th century, but only two to the period from the first decade of the 4th century to the beginning of the 6th century. The official portrait of the shahanshah appears primarily on coins, the official portraits of courtiers mainly on gems.

Zoroastrian symbolism, with various symbols of the guardian deities, occupies an ever greater place on the crowns of the shahanshahs. The scene of the altar flanked by the figures of the king and a deity on the reverse of Sassanian coins gradually becomes a canonical image, but one which has already lost its meaning. Zoroastrian symbolism, on the other hand, seems to overwhelm various branches of art. Incarnations of many Zoroastrian deities and symbolical compositions become the main subject of gems and are often depicted on stucco decoration and on textiles.

However, the initial meaning of this theme is also lost. The symbols of the Zoroastrian deities – various birds, beasts and plants – become benevolent. Imagery that is foreign to the Sassanians makes its appearance, borrowed from the West and in the main connected with Dionysian beliefs. Having been subjected to a Zoroastrian interpretation, not always of any great profundity, it is included in Zoroastrian benedictory or celebratory compositions. Such a subject as the royal hunt loses its initial, strictly symbolical, meaning and a new, narrative, theme arises in Sassanian art on its foundation; the symbolical composition simply turns into a literary subject.

All these processes had already begun in the 4th century CE and were, of course, linked to definite changes both in dynastic doctrine and in the Zoroastrian canon, although there was no such hard and fast correspondence between the two as there was between official ideology and official art during the first stage.

In the 6th and 7th centuries CE, art as a whole was characterised by a flowering of the narrative theme and benedictory subjects, although in some works political and religious themes did reappear. There was even an emergence of what might be termed narrative-Zoroastrian themes – various Avestan myths were illustrated in works of art.

The link with ancient Persian art is particularly significant for Sassanian religious iconography. The portrayal of Zoroastrian deities in the form of their hypostases or personifications is a device with which we are already familiar and which was encountered in the art of both the Medes and the Achaemenids. Several such hypostatic images were passed on to Sassanian art. Amongst them one finds the already familiar Gopatshah who has the Assyrian shedu as his prototype, winged and homed lions, winged griffins, the scene of a lion attacking a bull and even such ancient images as a stag, a panther and a vulture. The changes are truly of great significance.

We have already referred to the creation of anthropomorphic images of the main Zoroastrian deities. It is true that they repeat the real iconography of royal portraiture. Ahura Mazda, in the dress and insignia of lran’s shahanshah, is depicted on the same pattern as the Khwarnah of the Achaemenids, except that the dress of the Achaemenid king is exchanged for that of a Sassanid king; Anahita is depicted in the dress and insignia of lran’s queen of queens; Mithras is also in royal dress, but with a radiant crown around his head.

The link with Achaemenid culture is apparent in many spheres. One could point out, for example, that in official manifestos of the Sassanid shahanshahs the standard formula of Achaemenid royal inscriptions is employed. Nowadays it has become evident that Sassanian state Zoroastrianism was initially nothing but the Zoroastrianism of Parsa of the Parthian, or even the late Achaemenid, age. In the formation of Sassanian art the Parthian contribution was no less important than that of the Achaemenids and of post-Achaemenid Parsa. A certain number of reliefs and wall-paintings, as well as coins of the Parthian age, have the same composition and sometimes the same portrait iconography. The contribution of the late Hellenistic art of Mesopotamia to Sassanian art is also extremely significant.

Vessels of precious metal play an important role in Sassanian art. Such vessels were used at royal feasts, but the feasts themselves also had particular significance. Herodotus wrote that the Persians decided all their most important questions of state at feasts. Precious vessels were offered to the kings of neighbouring states as valuable gifts; they served as rewards to courtiers for outstanding exploits.

They were valued for their marvellous craftsmanship and for their imagery, but the metal of which they were made was itself of no small value in Sassanian times. According to the Sassanian Code of Law, for example, “worthy” provision for a free citizen of the empire consisted of 18 silver drachmae a month (about 75g of silver); the silver bowls in the State Hermitage Museum weigh at least ten times that amount. The earliest of the silver ceremonial bowls which have come down to us date from c. 270–29 °CE.

Late Roman art and especially late Roman silver “portrait” vessels heavily influenced Sassanian metalwork during its early stage. Apparently under their influence this traditionally Persian art form was reborn. The vessels were of prestigious or propagandistic significance and their simple ceremonial role was merely secondary. At first, such vessels featured official portraits of the Iranian kings, employing the same iconography as on reliefs and coins. Fairly soon, within fifty years or so, the portraits depicted on the vessels were no longer of shahanshahs, but of great courtiers and priests. Towards the middle of the 4th century such vessels disappear completely. The first known plate bearing a depiction of kings and incarnations of Zoroastrian deities also dates from the c. 270–290.

The first known plate depicting a hunting scene was produced at about that time. This form of art was new to the Sassanians and exhibits some innovations. First of all, there is a wealth of Zoroastrian symbolism (other objects of this period presented only what might be termed basic symbols).

At this point, it is necessary to summarise briefly what little we know about the hypostases or incarnations of Zoroastrian deities, from the Yashts of the Avesta. The first of the yazads, Mithras, according to the Mihr Yasht a sun deity of victory, royal majesty and justice, does not have an earthly incarnation, but even in the Achaemenid age a lion was the symbol of the sun and royal majesty. In the Mihr Yasht, the deity of victory Verethragna, in the form of a boar with sharp tusks and iron claws, flies in front of Mithras as he defeats his enemies. In other Yashts Verethragna appears before the hero-kings in different guises: in the form of a bull, a camel, the bird of prey Varaghna, a white steed, Senmurv, a ram, an ibex, a bear and a beautiful youth. The deity of fate, success and “royal predestination”, Khwarnah, appears in the Yashts in the form of the bird Varaghna, a fish, a gazelle (?), Senmurv and a large ram. In the Avesta Mithras is extremely closely linked to Verethragna and Khwarnah. The bull was also revered (the deity of the “soul of the bull” and Gopatshah, the man-bull) as was the star Sirius (Tishtrya) which appeared in the image of a steed, a golden-homed bull and a youth. This covers almost the entire animal repertory of early Sassanian art.

Fragments of eastern Iranian epic cycles are preserved in the Avestan texts, where they narrate the struggle of the hero-kings to acquire the qualities of these deities – strength, invincibility and success. The visible incarnation of the deity had to be literally captured or seized. Not only the hero-kings of the Iranian epics but also the founder of the Sassanian state, Ardashir, had to first obtain possession of the “good fortune of Khwarnah of the Kayanids” in the form of a large ram, according to the account in the romance devoted to him (The Book of the Deeds of Ardashir, Son of Papak).

This solves the mystery of the symbolism of the hunting scenes on Sassanian silver plates. The three divine qualities of a true, legitimate ruler of Iran, granted to him by the god Mithras, by Verethragna and by the deity of royal predestination, constitute the sole symbolism found on ceremonial royal metalware of the early Sassanian era, presented in strict, exact compositions repeated without alteration from one object to another.

Imam Mosque. Isfahan, Iran.

Columns topped with Persian horses.

These pieces were fashioned in a central royal workshop up to c. 480. Divine essence and the legitimacy of royal power are symbolically represented by the “capture” of Khwarnah in the form of the most popular hypostasis, a mountain ram, the strength of this power by the struggle with the lion, and its triumph by the struggle with the wild boar. Silver plates bearing such compositions were essentially for propaganda purposes.

By the end of the 4th century, however, scenes of royal hunts on silver plates were gradually giving way to depictions of the heroic or epic victory of the king of kings. Of course, one cannot say that the Zoroastrian symbolical composition in its pure sense was no longer recognised – it still occurs on 5th-century objects – but the range of buyers for metalwork had widened and this, it seemed, had somewhat altered the repertory of subjects. This development of iconography is characteristic of the evolution of all Sassanian art; it is a movement from orthodoxy to the everyday subject requiring no religious interpretation.

The theme of the heroic hunt flourished especially in the 5th century. Later, this subject, too, was reduced to a simple genre scene, or even to the level of literary illustration of some particular hunting story. Royal horsemen were already being depicted wearing, as a rule, standard “impersonal” crowns.

Three silver plates – two in The State Hermitage Museum, one in a private collection in the USA – provide examples of such a hunting story, representing one of the exploits of Prince Varahran.

These depictions are the first and possibly the only clear examples of genuine illustrations of oral or written tales of the skill and valour of an Iranian knight. But in the sparse Sassanian literature of the 6th-7th centuries that has reached us we find tales of skill and prowess in chivalrous sports (hunting, polo, the mastery of various weapons and especially skill at archery) and also of proficiency in games (at chess, shatrang, and backgammon, nevartashir). One of those works, Khusrau, Son of Kavadh, and His Page, tells the story of the beautiful women who played the chang and who accompanied kings on their hunts; they are often depicted, for example in hunting scenes of the Shahanshah Khusrau II (reliefs at Taq-e Bostan). Judging by the story of Firdawsi, a woman playing chang also took part in the marvellous gazelle hunt of Bahram Gur, though on silver vessels showing this scene she has no instrument in her hands. A host of such beauties with harps, flutes and changs are depicted on silver vessels – ewers, flasks, deep hemispherical bowls and shallow dishes.

These vessels also show various birds and beasts, including fabulous ones, genre scenes, depictions of architectural monuments (which have not survived), illustrations of myths that are not fully comprehensible, plant motifs, flowers, trees, etc.

This group of Sassanian metalwork, unlike silver plates portraying Sassanid shahanshahs, can only be dated with difficulty (apparently most of these festive utensils relate to the 5th-7th centuries). It is even more difficult to interpret their subject-matter. The very fact that we are dealing with festive dishes may, in many respects, call into question any interpretation of them as religious and symbolical images. The Dionysian background of the main characters and most of their attributes are indisputable. The origin and prototypes of the iconographic details can, for the most part, be traced back to the West and in this sense the entire group is comparable to those few Sassanian dishes on which a western subject is reproduced in full by Iranian craftsmen – the dish with the Triumph of Dionysus from Badakhshan (now in The British Museum, London), later replicas in the History Museum in Moscow and the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Bellerophon dish in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and several other vessels. In all probability such vessels were used at banquets during Zoroastrian festivities, the most sacred of which were Nawruz, the celebration of the New Year (meant to coincide with the vernal equinox), Mihragan, the autumn harvest festival dedicated to Mithras, and Sadeh, the winter festival dedicated to the divine fire.

Judging from accounts in written sources, the climax of all these festivals was a ceremonial banquet, which took place after a special service in the fire temple, and various rites (the offering of water, wine, etc.) in which silver vessels were used. The Nawruz-nama (The Book of Nawruz), a work on ancient Iranian customs ascribed to Omar Khayyam, contains the following passage:

“The king said: this [water] has been stolen from two who are blessed and highborn. [This refers to two amashaspands, Haurvatat and Ameretat.] And they adorned the neck of the jug with a necklace of olivines and chrysolites strung on a golden thread. [The necks of some silver flasks are decorated with convex “pearls” in imitation of such beads.] And girls alone stole water for the New Year ritual from beneath water-mills and out of canal cisterns”.

The depictions on ceremonial vessels may be linked to rituals whose details remain unknown to us. It can, however, be gathered from written sources that various contests and exchanges of gifts took place during these festivities, and that musicians, dancers, and girls who served wine and water in special vessels took part in them. These festivities and the carnival processions did, of course, have a definite religious symbolism and ritual significance, but evidently they were taken over by ancient folk customs and their symbolism. The longer this continued the farther religion receded into the background. Thus, the Muslims of 9th-century Baghdad wholeheartedly celebrated several Zoroastrian festivities, and as late as the 10th century the Muslim rulers of Iran delighted in celebrating the Zoroastrian feast of Sadeh which, moreover, coincided with Christmas. On that night they would light bonfires and drive wild beasts into them, release birds into the flames and sing around the fires.

We can clearly see how the themes of Sassanian metalwork gradually change. The theme of state propaganda is very short-lived and soon changes into the religious propaganda of Zoroastrian symbolism in its “pure” phase, but both themes have a comparatively brief existence and eventually heroic and narrative themes predominate. All this can be demonstrated from stage to stage in the development of the royal hunt motif, which may well be the only motif in metalwork that relates directly to the art of official propaganda.

Of course there are vessels which employ only Zoroastrian symbolism or illustrations of Zoroastrian myths; there are also vessels portraying the “wonders of the world” or “marvels” like the complicated clockwork mechanism that once decorated the throne of one of the Sassanid shahanshahs, and depictions of subjects that were exotic or foreign to Sassanian society.

All this variety, initially clearly differentiated in terms of iconography and subject-matter, becomes confused towards the end of the Sassanian period, its previous exactness and rigour of selection seeming to break down. Judging by those Sassanian items known to us today, it is possible to state that all art of this period, and not just metalwork, follows this line of development, a process by which themes of a propagandist nature die out, and heroic and epic, benedictory and everyday themes come to dominate.

This is one of the fundamental reasons why a wide range of similar compositions subsequently pass into Islamic, Umayyad and early Abbasid art. For it is Sassanian jugs of wine, and bowls served by Zoroastrian girls, that are mentioned in these verses of the famous Arab poet Abu Nuwas (died in the 9th century):

She is a Zoroastrian, her blouse complains it has no room because of the twin pomegranates of her breasts.

Her chief business is to bow down to the first ray of the rising sun when it appears.

She gives wine in marriage to water [mixes wine with water] in golden bowls whose interiors

Are filled, girdled with images that do not heed the caller and do not speak.

Before the figures of Papak’s sons [the Sassanid shahanshahs] between whom a moat is trenched.

When the wine is above them they are as batallions of an army drowning in the depths.

The bowl described here is apparently a boat-shaped vessel with deep fluting at the bottom and images on the internal surface, so that there really does appear to be a moat trenched “between Papak’s sons”. In recent times such vessels have been found in north-western Iran during unsupervised excavations of Sassanian sites of the 6th and 7th centuries.

The Zoroastrian girl mentioned by many Persian and Arab poets of the Middle Ages is of particular interest. She would usually be serving them wine, which was forbidden by Islam, in taverns or among the ruins of a temple. Are these not fragmentary survivals of rituals connected with wine from Zoroastrian feasts, and is this not the reason why there are so many girls with wine and vines and other attributes of the “Dionysian background” both on these Sassanian silver vessels and on early Islamic ceramics?

Thus, looking at Sassanian art as a whole, one reaches the conclusion that it began with a fairly limited range of themes strictly stratified according to genre, as an art that was, so to speak, “conceptual”, or at any rate subject to an absolutely specific interpretation, and “imperial”, an instrument for political and religious propaganda. In late Sassanian art, however, genres blend; complex religious symbolism changes into benedictory symbolism; the symbolic banquet, battles and hunting scenes become ordinary tales of hunting exploits, many feasts and chivalry.

The further art develops, the more all these initial, symbolic scenes and compositions become either illustrations or mere ornamentation. One could go so far as to say that towards the end of the Sassanian period the illustrative and ornamental themes played the main role in art, although, of course, the propagandist themes of the “imperial style” also survived until the very end of the period, especially in official works of art (rock reliefs, palace decorations, coins and gems). In discussing the illustrative aspect of late Sassanian art one cannot avoid mentioning Sassanian literature.

About a hundred titles of various religious, literary and scientific works of this time are known from different sources. A few dozen books of various kinds have reached us, mostly via translations into Arabic and later also into Persian, a hundred or more years after the fall of the Sassanian state, or even in revised versions of a comparatively late date. It is difficult to distinguish between their various accretions from different periods, to make any sense of the blending of various styles and genres. In the course of translation from Middle Persian a sort of compendium was usually produced.

In official manifestos of the shahanshahs and rock inscriptions (3rd century) mention is made of official state records, statutes and codices produced under each king. This is also reported by much later foreign sources relating the history of the Sassanids. Probably it was these official state-records that were reported by the Arab historian al-Mas’udi, who in 915 CE saw a manuscript in Istakhr which contained the history of the Sassanids – all twenty-seven shahanshahs who had ruled, as the manuscript stated, for 433 years, one month and seventeen days.

All these kings were portrayed in the manuscript. Another medieval historian, Hamza Isfahani, saw just such a manuscript (or perhaps the very same one). He left a description of the portraits of “kings and courtiers, famous guardians of the fire, all priests and others noted among the Persians”. These illustrations were typical official portraits. The crown was precisely depicted, the kings stood or sat on their throne. The manuscript was translated from the original into Arabic for the Caliph Hisham. It was completed in 731 CE and this is probably the earliest record of the translation of Middle Persian works.

Portal and minarets, Masjid-e-Jāmeh Yazd. Yazd, Iran.

The Gate of All Nations, c. 470 BCE. Persepolis, Iran.

A few compendiums of the 10th-12th centuries preserve fragments of similar translations and they confirm that in terms of their content such books were records of state affairs, arranged not by year but by separate reigns. Around the 4th century comes the first reliable report of literary works being among such records, and of their being collected into specific anthologies, their abundant subject-matter relating as a rule to distant antiquity. We know in particular of one such story, Rast-sukhan (The Truthful Word).

The story has not survived, but apparently it contained the legendary history of the founder of the Sassanian state – Ardashir, the son of Papak – and was similar to the Book of the Deeds of Ardashir, known in a late Sassanian version (4th century). It is possible that both these works were combined into one text in the 6th century. Despite the fact that it recounts various stories in terms of feats of chivalry – the struggle with a fabulous “serpent”, the freeing of beautiful women, tournaments, miraculous portents, military stratagems and so on – this story was indisputably semi-official insofar as it defends the legitimacy of the Sassanid rulers’ power, asserting that they are descended from the ancient Iranian kings. It is curious that at the same time an “anti-romance” also existed and was widely known in certain circles opposed to the dynasty. In it, Ardashir turns out to be the son of a soldier called Sasan and of the wife of a cobbler called Papak (Papak, it is true, was a sorcerer).

Fragments of eastern-Iranian myths about the hero-kings, the Kayanids and Peshdadians, survive in isolated Yashts of the Avesta, written in the alphabet specially created for it in the 5th century, and subsequently glossed and partly translated into Middle Persian (the language of the Avesta is very archaic). Names of heroes and various of their feats are mentioned (for example, their battles or their victory over the forces of evil), but not a single more-or-less complete myth has reached us.

These legends became especially popular in the 5th century, perhaps as a result of the Sassanids’ capture of the city of Balkh in eastern Iran – according to legend the very city once ruled by the Kayanids. This was the period when the Sassanids began tracing their lineage back to these epic hero-kings. At the same time, epic poems dating from the Parthian era were being recorded.

Only one of them has survived, The Chronicle of Zarer, relating the Iranians’ struggle for the Zoroastrian faith against their famous enemies, the “Turanians” (in the Sassanian version they are called Chionites, but that is a prose retelling). Even later, in the 6th and early 7th centuries, there were cycles written about individual Sassanid shahanshahs, such as the conqueror of the Turks and the usurper of the throne, Varahran Chobin. Apparently there were also books in existence at that time concerning the “wonders of the world”, similar to the stories of Sinbad the Sailor, and there was a geographical literature and stories of the exploits of holy men. It is well known that in the 6th century a collection of edifying novella-type tales, Kalila and Dimna (or Pañchatantra), was translated from Sanskrit into Middle Persian. This book was by no means mere light reading – it was valued as “a book full of wise thoughts”.

Thus, towards the end of the Sassanian period several literary genres already existed as well as official history and religious works. Tradition relates that the last of Iran’s shahanshahs, Yazdegerd III, commissioned a scholar called Daneshvar to compile a dynastic history.

This book, the Khwataw-namak (Book of Rulers), grouped together myths, historical romance and royal records in a single cycle. This marked the beginning of a written tradition, although one must bear in mind that such works would hardly have found a wide readership. Written Middle Persian was extremely complicated and hard to understand. It involved a vast quantity of heterograms and in addition the lack of vowel points and the enormous polysemy of individual signs made the writing so difficult that contemporaries had good reason to name it “the devil’s script”. When reading these books, dabirs (scribes) and priests often had to “translate” them into spoken Persian.

To make this clearer (for the problems of literature and language will play an important role later on in this account), we will cite the literal translation of one section from the Sassanian romance, Book of the Deeds of Ardashir:

“(1) In the book of the deeds of Ardashir, son of Papak, it is thus written that after the death of Alexander Rumi in the kingdom of Iran there were 240 rulers of principalities. (2) Isfahan, Parsa and the adjacent provinces were under the hand of the governor Ardawan. (3) Papak was marzban and governor of Parsa and was among those designated by Ardawan. (4) Ardawan sat at Istakhr (5) and Papak did not have any son to bear [his] name. (6) And Sasan was shepherd to Papak and always to be found among the sheep, but [he] was of the line of Darius.”

Everything underlined in this text was written in heterograms. And this is one of the easiest texts! Consequently, as previously under the Parthians, the basic literary works – epics, folk tales and true histories – were recited by poets and gosans, versifiers of epics, at courts and the castles of “knights”. Their names have survived and in later works there are a number of stories about their talent and their outstanding role in court life, for example the story of Barbad, the gosan of the shahanshah Khusrau II. We know only four lines from one of his poems, but these are the oldest verses at present known in the Dari language – the spoken language of late Sassanian Iran, which was to become the Iranian literary language two centuries later. They were preserved by the Arabic-speaking historian, Ibn Khurdadhbih: “Caesar [here the Byzantine emperor] is like the moon, but Khakan [king of the Turks] is like the sun. But my lord [Khusrau II] is a mighty cloud [Khusrau II was called Parwiz, “cloud”]. When he wishes he will cover the moon; when he wishes, the sun”.

These unsophisticated verses are one of the first examples of the ruba’i, the quatrain, a literary form that was to become extremely widespread in the Iran of the age of Islam.

It is beyond the scope of this study even to draw up a brief list of the problems connected with the new Islamic religion, which has been the dominant ideology in Iran from the 7th century to the present day.

However, one of its aspects is of great importance. From the very beginning, Islam rejected figurative representation, or more exactly the depiction of living creatures, as a means of propagating its ideas. In this respect Islam differed from Buddhism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, which made widespread use of figurative representation and had for a long time anthropomorphised their deities. This hostile attitude towards the depiction of living creatures – though in essence only towards anthropomorphic representation as an object of worship – had a number of consequences that were decisive for the development of art in Iran.

Firstly, it caused a gradual decline of monumental art forms such as rock reliefs, stucco panels and wall-painting (although we know that the latter existed in eastern Iran up to the 13th century, and in central and western Iran up to the 17th century).

Secondly, it diminished the status of the artist, at any rate during the first centuries of Islam when it expelled him from the ranks of those creating works pleasing to God, and transformed his occupation into something not entirely commendable from the point of view of religious morality.

Thirdly, it narrowed the range of new themes that could emerge, above all the religious ones which were central to all Christian and Buddhist art – the depiction of God and his deeds, the stories of prophets and saints – everything on which an artistic impression of the world was founded in non-Muslim cultures during the Middle Ages. The reasons why anthropomorphic representation was unnecessary in the propagation of Islam are complex and have not been satisfactorily elucidated. We will examine a few of them here.

Theology, in the true sense of the word, took shape very late in Islam. Early Islam was interested only in external ritual observance and it elaborated questions of religious law, but despite this, in the 8th century, as Vasily Bartold writes, in Islam “the same disputes about God and his relationship to man were arising as in Christianity; apart from the direct influence of Christian dogma on that of Islam, this can be explained by the identical conditions in which both religions found themselves”.[14]

Especially important is the school of theology of the Mutazilites (from the Arabic for “separatists”). This school, which created Islam’s first carefully elaborated theological system, made widespread use of Greek devices and achievements in logic and philosophy, particularly those of Aristotle. Its fundamental thesis was “the cognition of the divine unity”.

The Mutazilites resolutely opposed the concept of God in human form and of his attributes or qualities which were invented by man, even those such as “omnipotent” or “all-seeing”, for these are “conceivable” categories. According to the doctrine of the Mutazilites, God is a unity that is pure, undefinable in human terms and unknowable.

It was during the flourishing of the Mutazilites that the following hadiths (traditions of the words and deeds of the prophet Muhammad) first gained popularity: “artists will be tormented on the Day of Judgement […] and they will be told: bring your own creations to life”.

But one must bear in mind that from the point of view of its structure Islamic theology was in no way comparable to, say, that of Christianity. Firstly, though it became a state religion, even the dogmatic theology of the Mutazilites remained such for only a few decades. Secondly, Islamic law pervaded all aspects of social life (even contracts for buying and selling had to be agreed upon in the presence of a religious judge, a qadi), yet it was not founded on any absolute and clearly formulated law, but had four bases: the Koran, the hadiths, ijma – consensus of opinion between the faqihs (the authoritative theologians), and qiyas – the method of analogy with the Koran or the hadiths.

In consequence, one can fully understand why the faqihs held various opinions on the subject of the “hadiths of the artists”, but views such as the following, expressed by Abu al-Farisi in the mid-10th century, were more or less general:

But if someone should say: “surely it is said in the hadith, “the artists will be tormented on the Day of Judgement”, and in other hadiths, “and they will be told: bring your own creations to life”, then the words “the artists will be tormented” relate to those who depict Allah in the flesh. And as far as any addition to that is concerned, these are communications of isolated individuals who are unworthy of trust. And as we have noted, the ijma does not dispute this opinion.[15]

Oleg Bolshakov, who has studied the known sources on this question, formulates his conclusions as follows: “Defining the permissibility of this or that depiction, the jurists proceeded first of all from the consideration of the extent to which they are dangerous as potential objects of worship. Disagreement between the various scholars arose over the attempt to define this very matter.”[16]

But the existence of persistent disagreements even between the faqihs did not, and never could, give rise to any official and general prohibition. Of course, in the history of Muslim theologians’ attitudes towards figurative art there have been periods when a more rigorous attitude prevailed, and even periods of persecution and extreme reaction (not until the 17th and 18th centuries, it is true, and then only in individual Islamic countries), but one thing is clear: the question was always one of religious anthropomorphism – and of that alone.

The Gate of All Nations, c. 470 BCE. Persepolis, Iran.

Therefore there is absolutely no reason to see figurative art in Islamic culture as the perpetual overcoming of a prohibition existing within the religion. On the other hand, the arrival of Islam in Iran brought about the abolition of other restrictions which had an important bearing on the development of art.

By the 8th century the Islamic state, the Caliphate, included not only the whole territory of Iran but also part of Byzantium, North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, Central Asia and Afghanistan, and it subsequently extended even further; yet this state was by no means a world empire like the empires of the Achaemenids or the Sassanids. Its ruler, the caliph (from the Arabic “successor” or deputy of the prophet Muhammad), inherited from the prophet the Imamate, the spiritual leadership of the Muslim community, and the Emirate political power. According to Islamic law, he either had to be elected by the whole community (this was, of course, only in theory), or appoint a successor during his lifetime, with the approval of the faqihs (this latter requirement was also not followed in practice). And although it was considered that the power of the caliphs had been established by God, the Islamic state was theocratic but far from despotic.

In theory, the Islamic state was considered to be a state of equals and the basic confrontation within it was not in terms of estates or between the nobility and the oppressed, but in terms of Muslims and infidels. In Sassanian Iran, and this was especially noticeable towards the end of the Sassanian period, divisions in society were strictly upheld – they were specifically sanctioned by Zoroastrianism. Priests, warriors, scribes and the common people each formed separate “estates” and movement from one estate to another was impossible or at least extraordinarily difficult. In artistic terms, this social system fostered the creation not only of a hierarchy of forms and themes but also of a hierarchy of individual types of art (“prestigious” and “non-prestigious”). The Islamic conquest swept away the social system of castes and estates and in so doing significantly changed the hierarchy in subject-matter and the branches of the fine arts. The Sassanian royal and “chivalric” culture was destroyed.

Lastly, it is necessary to say something about the conception of a world culture which also suffered notable changes after the arrival of Islam in Iran. Mention has already been made here of this conception as understood by the Achaemenid and Hellenistic eras. Its character during the Sassanian period is described thus by Vasily Bartold:

The world situation of the Sassanian state in the 6th and 7th centuries clearly had an even greater effect on the success of imperialism (Bartold uses this term only in the narrow political sense of the “creation of empires”) in individual countries than did the formation of Alexander’s empire in its time. This was the period of the unification of China under the rule of the Suis dynasty (589–618 CE), followed by the T’ang dynasty (618–907 CE), with their extensive claims in Central Asia; of the might of the kings of Kannauj on the Ganges, considered to be the imperial city of India during the first centuries of Islam; of the unification under the power of a Turkish dynasty of nomads from China to India, Persia and Byzantium. These events formed the basis of the Buddhist concept of four world monarchies at the four corners of the world: the empire of the king of elephants in the south, the king of treasures in the west, the king of horses in the north and the king of people [because of the vast population of the Chinese empire] in the east. With a few alterations, this same concept was transmitted to Muslim authors: the king of elephants was also called the king of wisdom because of a fascination for Indian philosophy and science; the king of people was the king of state government and industry because of a fascination for Chinese material culture; the king of horses was the king of beasts of prey; in the west two kings were differentiated – the king of kings, that is the king of the Persians and then of the Arabs, and the king of men, because of a fascination for the racial beauty of the [Byzantine] empire’s population.[17]

The Islamic modifications are of interest here. In Sassanian Iran the conception of the “four kingdoms” manifested itself as a concept of Greater Iran as a centre of civilisation surpassing, or at least equal to, other nations in terms of its culture. Islamic “democracy”, on the other hand, stresses the differences and the specific contributions of individual civilisations towards the single world of culture created by them, for the theory was that the Islamic state should in the end become worldwide and integrate all these achievements, since, after all, the “infidels” had been conquered by the Muslims.

Thus the Islamic conquest swept away a number of restrictions within Iranian culture, and not only religious ones but also those relating to estates. The Zoroastrian or state propagandist interpretations were eliminated from all artistic forms, themes and compositions which had been developed in Sassanian Iran; kings finally became simply kings; heroes, warriors and hunters simply themselves; beasts, birds, flowers and plants simply beasts, birds, flowers and plants. And this repertory, which included a great number of images and compositions imported from other cultures, passed into the art of medieval Iran, developing along the same general lines which characterised medieval art, such as an intensification of decoration and a striving towards abstract compositions.

And yet the art and culture of Iran did not fuse into a general Islamic culture. On the contrary, after the Iranian renaissance (10th-11th centuries) the Modern Persian language became the language of Islam together with Arabic and under the influence of the Iranians, Islam itself became a multilingual, multinational culture and religion. In the words of one contemporary historian: “Iranian civilisation played the same role in the development of Islamic culture as Greek civilisation did in the formation of Christianity and its culture.”[18]

From the 7th-9th centuries the eastern province of Iran, Khurasan, was of special significance in the founding of the new culture (in the Middle Ages it encompassed the north-east of present-day Iran, the south of present-day Turkmenistan and the north-west of present-day Afghanistan).

In the 6th-7th centuries the situation there resembled that of Syria, for example, in the 2nd century, in terms of the intensity of its conflict of ideas. In the Marv region, archaeologists have discovered a Christian monastery and cemetery; there was a large Jewish community which buried its dead in day ossuaries bearing Hebrew inscriptions; a Buddhist monastery was situated there, as was one of the most ancient and revered Zoroastrian temples. In 651 CE the last Sassanid shahanshah, Yazdegerd III, met his death here whilst fleeing from the Arabs. Medieval historians relate that his death was shameful: he was robbed and murdered in his sleep, his body was thrown into a river, and afterwards he was buried by the Christian bishop of Marv, Elijah.

The Gate of All Nations, c. 470 BCE. Persepolis, Iran.

Bas-relief with Persian soldiers.

One immediate consequence of the Arab conquest of Iran was an influx of Arabs settling in many cities or setting up military camps which soon became cities. This Arab immigration was on a mass scale; in the 10th century, for example, the Arab population already constituted a majority in the city of Qum.

The second consequence was the spread of Islam and of Arabic. During the first two centuries of Islam in the territory of Khurasan, the religion of the Arabs underwent an intensive process of transformation into the religion of the entire Caliphate, whilst the language of the Koran and various Arab tribes developed into an Arab literary language; in all of this the Persians, who had converted to Islam, played no small part. It was here that Shi’ism, one of Islam’s most important movements, developed, and in particular its extreme faction, Ismailism, and other doctrines that were to serve as rallying points for many national uprisings.

Thus during the early Islamic period (under the Umayyad Caliphate), Khurasan was a stronghold of Islamic science and Arab literature. It was here too, in Khurasan, that the anti-Umayyad rising began, instigated by Abu Muslim, leader of a political and religious party supporting the Abbasid family.

The common people were widely involved in the rising: peasants, craftsmen, and also the Khurasan dihqans, descendants of the Sassanian nobility. There were also Muslims and Zoroastrians amongst the rebels. Having established themselves on the caliph’s throne, the Abbasids were naturally quick to settle with all the dissatisfied. One of the consequences of the Abbasid victory was a complete “Iranisation” of the Caliphate. The Abbasids offered a number of high positions in the state to the Iranian nobility that had helped them to seize the Caliphate. The state system of their Caliphate followed the Sassanian pattern.

There was yet another important consequence of the change of power. Before the Abbasid age the Islamic community of Iran had consisted primarily of Arabs and only afterwards of Persians converted to Islam, who were considered as clients (mawali) of the Arab families and tribes and did not possess equal rights with true Arabs. The Abbasids ended this division and in the same period many dihqans, who had preserved or even raised their social status, adopted Islam. This Iranian elite did a great deal for Islam.

The supporters of the Iranophile cultural movement, the so-called Shuubiyya, wrote their works in Arabic. This movement flourished especially in Khurasan under the Abbasids, and despite the fact that it inculcated into an Islamic culture the pre-Islamic ideas, traditions and customs of Sassanian Iran, in objective terms it led to the enrichment and widening of Islam itself and to a rejection of the provincial narrowness of Muslim culture. In the court of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun (813–833 CE) translation in particular blossomed: works of many types were translated into Arabic – ethical and didactic (andarz), historical (numerous “Histories of the Kings of Fars” linked to the Khwataw-namak cycle), literary (such as Kalila and Dimna) and many others. At the same time scientific tracts and parts of religious and philosophical books were translated. It is interesting to note that at approximately the same period a Zoroastrian orthodoxy, that was not in any way prohibited by Islam, held power in Fars; basic Zoroastrian works such as the Denkart were written here. In honour of the arrival of al-Mamun in Marv (809 CE), a certain Abbas-i Marwazi delivered the first verses in the Modern Persian language.

These were all the first steps of the “Persian Renaissance” leading to a flowering of Modern Persian literature by the 10th century and, in the final analysis, to that of the Iranian cultures of Firdawsi, Nizami, Sa’di and Hafiz.

The creation of Modern Persian literature was also a factor of the utmost importance for medieval Persian art, for it was this which was to serve as the basis of figurative art. The essential preconditions already existed.

The illustrative quality and the variety of forms within late Sassanian art, the rich artistic traditions of wall-painting in eastern Iran and Central Asia and the no less rich traditions of Christian art in the eastern provinces of Byzantium, etc. But before discussing what happened to Persian art in the early Middle Ages, it is necessary to know something of the “Persian Renaissance” which flourished in eastern Iran, mainly during the rule of its Samanid dynasty – a line of Iranian nobles who claimed descent from the Sassanian general and usurper Varahran Chobin.

Modern Persian literature began as courtly literature. At that period the demotic language in the whole of Iran, Khurasan and Central Asia had for a long time been Dari, or what was to be Modern Persian. The Arabs themselves promoted the spread of Dari over a vast territory and its transformation into a language of communication between different ethnic groups; they used it to communicate with the local population in Iran, Khurasan and Central Asia.[19] The adoption of Arabic script (more convenient than Middle Persian or Sogdian) for the Dari language was a natural process. In 982 CE a geographical treatise, Hudud al-’alam (The Limits of the World), was published, and in 100 °CE, the medical treatise Kitab al-Tasrif was completed by al-Zarhawi. But the first prose work in Modern Persian was a compilation of “universal history” (from various Arabic translations of the Sassanian Khwataw-namak), produced in 959 on the order of the ruler of the city of Tus, Abu Mansur Muhammad ibn Abd al-Razzaq, by four Zoroastrians (to judge by their names), “scholars of the past of the Persian kings”.

In lyrical poetry, the famous poets of the “Persian Renaissance”, Rudaki, Daqiqi and others, comprehensively exploited all the achievements of Arabic literature, but also utilised non-Arabic verse forms which were evidently still Sassanian or were re-created on the basis of Sassanian verse.

Their work was founded on oral tradition, the poetry of those same gosans who, in the courts of local rulers during the early Islamic era, continued to be “…entertainers of king and commoner, privileged at court and popular with the people; present at the council and at the feast; eulogists, satirists, story-tellers, musicians; recorders of past achievements, and commentators in their own times”.[20]

The greatest literary achievement of this period was the Iranian national epic, the Shahnama of Firdawsi, who wrote this long poem on the glorious past of his country. Although he undoubtedly considered his subject matter as history, he wrote it in the form of a narrative poem, creating characters and combining various events from different periods or episodes from various legends around them so that the acts of his heroes and their ethical and moral, or even political consequences should stand out in sharp relief. Firdawsi’s poem, like Iranian poetry of that period in general, could be said to “discover” the individual as an independent, creative being, as a personality and as the creator of his own fate and history. Man as an individual, and not as a typical representative of an estate, caste or class – it could be said that this is the leitmotif of Persian literature and social life at the time of the “Persian Renaissance”.

It is clearly unnecessary to discuss the social and economic basis of this process at any length – it is completely comprehensible and has frequently been described. This, incidentally, was the golden age in the development of cities, but they differed from those of Western Europe, above all, in that their citizens had no special class privileges. The city was simply a conglomerate of manufacturing, territorial, religious and other self-governing corporations under the aegis of a civil service. Like the poets at court, the cities’ craftsmen were bound together by close ties. All of these highly important circumstances bear witness to the enormous changes taking place in society, its social structure and its psychology.