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Ancient Man and His First Civilizations

Elam-5

Modern Iran

When last we left Elam, the Sassanian Persians had ascended, and are making war against Rome.

The end of Elam and Persia

Wars with Rome continued, and by about 560 A.D, a new people, that of the "Gokturks" (of central Asia), had emerged in the east. "Khosrow I" was now king of Persia, and he concluded an alliance with a Turkish leader called Sinjibu, after which a common frontier between the Turkish and Sassanian empires was established (area of Afghanistan). The agreement was not a good one however, as sometimes the Turks acted as allies of Rome against Persia.

In 623 A.D. the Byzantine emperor Heraclius reversed previous Persian successes over the Roman army by capturing Jerusalem in 614 A.D. and winning at Chalcedon in 617 A.D. The Persian king Khosrow Parviz, died in 628 A.D. and left Persia prey to a succession of puppet rulers who were frequently deposed by a combination of nobles and Zoroastrian clergy. Thus, when Yazdegerd III, Persia's last Sassanid and Zoroastrian sovereign came to the throne in 632 A.D, the year of Muhammad's death, he inherited an empire weakened by the Byzantine wars and internal dissension.

The Arabs

For centuries before: The Arab Lakhmid had been Sassanian Persian vassals and the Arab Ghassanids were vassals of the Byzantine Empire. They acted as frontier guardians of the two empires against fellow Arabs: While the Meccan and Medinese Arabs of Arabia had established commercial connections with both the Byzantines and Sassanids Empires.

Seeing the problems of Yazdegerd III's Persia Empire; These former Arab vassals on the empire's southwestern and western borders realized that their moment had arrived; they launched raids into Sassanian territory and were quickly joined by Muhammad's caliphs in Arabia — Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab — making it a Muslim and Christian - Pan-Arab attack on Persia.

An Arab victory at Al-Qadisiyyah in 637 A.D. was followed by the sack of the Sassanian winter capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris. The Battle of Nahavand in 642 A.D. completed the Sassanids' defeat. Yazdegerd fled to the empire's northeastern outpost of Merv, whose Marzban, or March-lord named Mahuyeh, soon became soured by the imperious and expensive demands of Yazdegerd III. Mahuyeh turned against his Emperor and defeated him with the help of Hephthalites from Badghis. {The Hephthalites were a powerful nomadic confederation of White Huns from Central Asian. The Hephthalites had troubled the Sassanids since at least 590 A.D, when they had sided with Bahram Chubin, Khosrow Parviz's rebel general}. A Miller near Merv murdered the fugitive Emperor Yazdegerd III for his purse.

Pictured below: Sassanian kings as depicted on ornamental plates.

With the fall of the empire, the fate of its religion was also sealed. The Muslims officially tolerated the Zoroastrian faith, though persecutions were not unknown. But little by little, it vanished from Persia. It is said that some Zoroastrians immigrated to western India, where they are now chiefly concentrated in Mumbai (Bombay). There they are known as Parsi, {descriptions of these people in the 1831 book "The Modern Traveler", by Josiah Condor, suggests that they may not be purely Persian}, they have preserved only a relatively small portion of their sacred writings, but they still number their years by the era of Yazdegerd III, the last king of their faith and the last Sassanian sovereign of Persia. It can be assumed that eventually, descendents of the Arian tribe gained hegemony in Persia. Hence the name change to, "Iran" - meaning; land of the Arians.

Coins of the Sassanian Kings

The Arabs - continued

Soon After their victory; factionalism was growing among Arabs, partly the result of the jealousies and rivalries that accompanied the acquisition of new territories and partly the result of the competition between first arrivals in Persia and those who followed.

In Persia the first Arab conquerors had concluded treaties with local Persian magnates who had assumed authority when the Sassanian imperial government disintegrated. These notables—the marzbans and landlords (dehqans)—undertook to continue tax collection on behalf of the new Muslim power. The advent of Arab colonizers, who preferred to cultivate the land rather than campaign farther into Asia, produced a further complication. Once the Arabs had settled in Persian lands, they, like the Persian cultivators, were required to pay the kharaj, or land tax, which was collected by Persian notables for the Muslims in a system similar to that, which had predated the conquest. The system was ripe for abuse, and the Persian collectors extorted large sums, arousing the hostility of both Arabs and Persians.

Another source of discontent was the jizyah, or head tax, which was applied to non-Muslims of the tolerated religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. After they had converted to Islam, Persians expected to be exempt from this tax. But the Umayyad government, burdened with imperial expenses, often refused to exempt the Persian converts.

The tax demands of the Damascus government were as distasteful to those urbanized Arabs and Persians in commerce as they were to those in agriculture, and hopes of easier conditions under the new rulers than under the Sassanids were not fully realized.

The Umayyads ignored Persian agricultural conditions, which required constant reinvestment to maintain irrigation works and to halt the encroachment of the desert. This no doubt made the tax burden, from which no returns were visible, all the more odious. Furthermore, the regime failed to maintain the peace so necessary to trade. Damascus feared the breaking away of remote provinces where the Arab colonists were becoming assimilated with the local populations. The government, therefore, deliberately encouraged tribal factionalism in order to prevent a united opposition against it.

In 750 A.D. Umayyad power was destroyed, and the revolution gave the caliphate to the 'Abbasids. Hejazi commercial interests had in a sense overcome the military party among leading Muslim Arabs. Greater concern for the east was manifested by the new caliphate's choice of Baghdad as its capital—situated on the Tigris a short distance north of Ctesiphon and designed as a new city, to be free of the factions of the old Umayyad garrison cities of Al-Kufah, Wasit, and Al-Basrah.

Despite the development of a distinctive Islamic culture, the military problems of the empire were left unsolved. The 'Abbasids were under pressure from the infidel on several fronts—Turks in Central Asia, pagans in India and in the Hindu Kush, and Christians in Byzantium. War for the faith, or jihad, against these infidels was a Muslim duty. But, whereas the Umayyads had been expansionists and had seen themselves as heads of a military empire, the 'Abbasids were more pacific and saw themselves as the supporters of more than an Arab, conquering militia. Yet rebellions within the imperial frontiers had to be contained and the frontiers protected.

Rebellion within the Arab empire took the form of peasant revolts in Azerbaijan and Khorasan, coalesced by popular religious appeals centered on men who assumed or were accorded mysterious powers. Abu Muslim — executed in 755 by the second 'Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, who feared his influence — became one such messianic figure. Another was al-Muqanna' (Arabic: “the Veiled One”), who used Abu Muslim's mystique and whose movement lasted from 777 to 780. The Khorram-dinan (Persian: “Glad Religionists”), under the Azerbaijanian Babak (816–838), also necessitated vigorous military suppression. Babak eluded capture for two decades, defying the caliph in Azerbaijan and western Persia, before being caught and brought to Baghdad to be tortured and executed. These heresiarchs revived such creeds as that of the anti-Sassanid religious leader Mazdak (died 528 or 529), expressive of social and millenarian aspirations that were later canalized into Sufism on the one hand and into Shi'ism on the other.

The Saffarids

Over-exploitation of agriculture by Arab governors had debilitated rural life, and Kharijites (puritanical Arabs), who found refuge in Sistan (Persia's southeastern border area) from the Umayyads, organized or attracted bands of local peasants and vagabonds who had strayed south from Khorasan. Kharijite bands isolated the cities and threatened their supplies. Sistan needed an urban champion who could come to terms with the Kharijites and divert them to what could legitimately be termed jihad across the border, forming the gangsters into a well-disciplined loyal army. Such a man was Ya'qub ibn Layth, who founded the Saffarid dynasty, the first purely Persian dynasty of the Islamic era, and threatened the Muslim empire with the first resurgence of Persian independence.

Ya'qub ibn Layth seized Baghdad's breadbaskets—Fars and Khuzestan—and drove the Tahirid emir from Neyshabur. His march on Baghdad itself was halted only by the stratagem devised by the caliph's commander in chief: who inundated Ya'qub's army by bursting dikes. Ya'qub died soon after, in 879. He had made an empire, minted his own coinage, fashioned a new style of army loyal to its leader rather than to any religious or doctrinal concept, and required that verses in his praise be put into his own language—Persian—from Arabic, which he did not understand. He began the Persian resurgence.

The collapse of the Tahirid viceroyalty left Baghdad faced with a power vacuum in Khorasan and southern Persia. The caliph reluctantly confirmed Ya'qub's brother 'Amr as governor of Fars and Khorasan but withdrew his recognition on three occasions, and 'Amr's authority was disclaimed to the Khorasanian pilgrims to Mecca when they passed through Baghdad. But 'Amr remained useful to Baghdad so long as Khorasan was victimized by the rebels Ahmad al-Khujistani and, for longer, Rafi' ibn Harthama. After Rafi' had been finally defeated in 896, 'Amr's broader ambitions gave the caliph al-Mu'tadid his chance. 'Amr conceived designs on Transoxania, but there the Samanids held the caliph's license to rule, after having nominally been Tahirid deputies. When 'Amr demanded and obtained the former Tahirid tutelage over the Samanids in 898, Baghdad could leave the Saffarid and Samanid to fight each other, and the Samanid Isma'il (reigned 892–907) won. 'Amr was sent to Baghdad, where he was put to death in 902. His family survived as Samanid vassals in Sistan and were heard of until the 16th century. Ya'qub remains a popular hero in Persian history.

The Samanids

There was nothing of the popular hero in the Samanids' origin. Their eponym was Saman-Khoda, a landlord in the district of Balkh and, according to the dynasty's claims, a descendant of Bahram Chubin, the Sassanian general. Saman became Muslim. His four grandsons were rewarded for services to the caliph al-Ma'mun (reigned 813–833) and received the caliph's investiture for areas that included Samarkand and Herat. They thus gained wealthy Transoxanian and east Khorasanian entry-port cities, where they could profit from trade that reached across Asia, even as far as Scandinavia, and from providing Turkish slaves—much in demand in Baghdad as royal troops—while they protected the frontiers and provided security for merchants in Bukhara, Samarkand, Khujand, and Herat. With one transitory exception, they upheld Sunnism and at each new accession to power paid a tribute to Baghdad for the tokens of investiture from the caliph whereby their rule represented lawful authority.

The Turks

Thus, legal transactions in Samanid realms would be valid, and Baghdad received tribute in return for the insignia prayed over and signed by the caliph. This tribute took the place of regular revenue, so that it represented a solution of the taxation problems and consequent resentments that had bedeviled the Umayyad regime. In modern assessments of imperial power, Baghdad may seem to have been politically the weaker for this type of arrangement, but ensuring the reign of Islam in peripheral provinces was important to the caliphs. To insure Islam's portals to East Asia were adequately guarded, the supply of Turkish slaves essential for the caliph's bodyguard was maintained, and Turkish pagan tribes were converted to Islam under the Samanids.

The Ghaznavids (Islamic Dynasty of Turkish slave origin)

Rudaki, in a poem about the Samanid emir's court, describes how “row upon row” of Turkish slave guards were part of its adornment. From these guards' ranks two military families arose—the Simjurids and Ghaznavids—who ultimately proved disastrous to the Samanids. The Simjurids received an appendage in the Kuhestan region of southern Khorasan. Alp Tigin founded the Ghaznavid fortunes when he established himself at Ghazna (modern Ghazni, Afghanistan) in 962. He and Abu al-Hasan Simjuri, as Samanid generals, competed with each other for the governorship of Khorasan and control of the Samanid Empire by placing on the throne emirs they could dominate. Abu al-Hasan died in 961, but a court party instigated by men of the scribal class—civilian ministers as contrasted with Turkish generals—rejected Alp Tigin's candidate for the Samanid throne. Mansur I was installed, and Alp Tigin prudently retired to his fief of Ghazna. The Simjurids enjoyed control of Khorasan south of the Oxus but were hard-pressed by a third great Persian dynasty, the Buyids, and were unable to survive the collapse of the Samanids and the rise of the Ghaznavids.

The struggles of the Turkish slave generals for mastery of the throne with the help of shifting allegiance from the court's ministerial leaders both demonstrated and accelerated the Samanid decline. Samanid weakness attracted into Transoxania the Qarluq Turks, who had recently converted to Islam. They occupied Bukhara in 992 to establish in Transoxania the Qarakhanid, or Ilek Khanid, dynasty. Alp Tigin had been succeeded at Ghazna by Sebüktigin (died 997). Sebüktigin's son Mahmud made an agreement with the Qarakhanids whereby the Oxus was recognized as their mutual boundary. Thus the Samanids' dominion was divided and Mahmud was freed to advance westward into Khorasan to meet the Buyids.

The Buyids

The homeland of the Buyids was Daylam, in the Gilan uplands in northern Persia. There, at the end of the 9th century, hardy valley dwellers had been stirred into martial activity by a number of factors, among them the rebel Rafi' ibn Harthama's attempt to penetrate the region, ostensibly with Samanid support. 'Amr ibn Layth had pursued the rebel into the region. Other factors had been the formation of Shi'ite principalities in the area and continued Samanid attempts to subjugate them. After the Tahirid collapse, the lack of stability in northern Persia south of the Elburz Mountains attracted many Daylamite mercenaries into the area on military adventures. Among them Makan ibn Kaki served the Samanids with his compatriots, the sons of Buyeh, and their allies the Ziyarids under Mardavij. Mardavij introduced the three Buyid brothers to the Persian plateau, where he established an empire reaching as far south as Esfahan and Hamadan. He was murdered in 935, but his Ziyarid descendants sought Samanid protection. They adhered to Sunnism and maintained themselves in the region southeast of the Caspian Sea.

Mardavij's expansionism south of the Elburz was taken up by his Buyid lieutenants: the eldest brother, 'Ali, consolidated power for himself in Esfahan and Fars and obtained the caliph's recognition; another brother, Hasan, occupied Rayy and Hamadan; and the youngest brother, Ahmad, took Kerman in the southeast and Khuzestan in the southwest. The caliphs al-Muttaqi and al-Mustakfi of the 940s were at the mercy of the Turkish slaves in their palace guard. The generals of the guard competed with each other for the office of amir al-umara' (commander in chief), who virtually ruled Iraq on behalf of the caliphs. When Ahmad gained Khuzestan, he was close to the scene of the amir al-umara' contests, which he chose to settle by himself.

The other Turks

Although the Buyids were careful to avoid sectarian strife, family quarrels weakened them sufficiently for Mahmud of Ghazna to gain Rayy in 1029. But Mahmud (reigned 998–1030) went no farther: his dynasty paid great deference to the caliphate's legitimating power, and he made no bid to contest the Buyids' role as its protectors. Mahmud's agreement with the Samanids' Ilek Khanid successors, that the Oxus should be their mutual boundary, held, but south of the river the Ghaznavids had to contend with their own distant relatives, the Oguz Turks. Contrary to the sage counsel of Persian ministers, Mahmud and his successor Mas'ud (reigned 1031–41) permitted these tribesmen to use Khorasanian grazing grounds, which they entered from north of the Oxus. United under descendants of an Oguz leader named Seljuq, between 1038 and 1040 these nomads drove the Ghaznavids out of northeastern Persia. The final encounter was at Dandanqan in 1040.

After their defeat by the Seljuqs, the Ghaznavids, patrons of Islamic culture and letters, were deflected eastward into India, where Mahmud had already conducted successful raids. The raids took the form of jihad (or holy war), and the Ghaznavids carried Islam and Persian Muslim art to the Indian subcontinent. In Persia it was the Seljuqs' turn to create a new imperial synthesis with the 'Abbasid caliphs. Toghril Beg, the Seljuq sultan, entered Baghdad in 1055, and Buyid power was terminated, thus ending what Vladimir Minorsky, the great Persiaologist, called the “Persian intermezzo.”

Turkish Rule

The Seljuqs
Toghril I had proclaimed himself sultan at Neyshabur in 1038 and had espoused strict Sunnism, by which he gained the caliph's confidence and undermined the Buyid position in Baghdad. The Oguz Turks had accepted Islam late in the 10th century, and their leaders displayed a convert's zeal in their efforts to restore a Muslim polity along orthodox lines. Their efforts were made all the more urgent by the spread of Fatimid Isma'ili propaganda (Arabic da'wah) in the eastern Caliphate by means of an underground network of propagandists, or da'is, intent on undermining the Buyid regime, and by the threat posed by the Christian Crusaders.

The Buyids' usurpation of the caliph's secular power had given rise to a new theory of state formulated by al-Mawardi (died 1058). Al-Mawardi's treatise partly prepared the theoretical ground for Toghril's attempt to establish an orthodox Muslim state in which conflict between the caliph-imam's spiritual-juridical authority on the one side and the secular power of the sultan on the other could be resolved, or at least regulated, by convention. Al-Mawardi reminded the Muslim world of the necessity of the imamate; but the treatise realistically admitted the existence of, and thus accommodated, the fact of military usurpation of power. The Seljuqs' own political theorist al-Ghazali (died 1111) carried this admission further by explaining that the position of a powerless caliph, overshadowed by a strong Seljuq master, was one in which the latter's presence guaranteed the former's capacity to defend and extend Islam.

See: Additional Material Menu - for Persepolis, Apadana, and pictures of the people of the Persian Empire.

The Ottoman Empire

The fall of the last Persian Empire, also marks the end of rule by the Ancients in the West. However there are still a few ancients left in the East, so let's see what they are doing.