Sasanian Empire

Rome's only peer, and the last Persian empire before Islam. Ardashir I overthrew the Parthian Arsacids in 224 and founded a state that was deliberately more centralised, more Persian and more ideological than what it replaced, claiming descent from the Achaemenids and making Zoroastrianism an organised state religion with a priestly hierarchy and a fixed canon. For four centuries the Sasanians and the Romans fought over Mesopotamia, Armenia and the Caucasus without either being able to finish the other: Shapur I captured the emperor Valerian in 260 and carved the humiliation into the rock at Naqsh-e Rostam, and Julian died invading in 363. Khosrow I in the sixth century reformed the land tax and the army, patronised philosophers expelled from Athens, and had Indian and Greek works translated into Middle Persian. The empire ran a sophisticated irrigation economy in Mesopotamia and controlled the silk and spice routes between China and the Mediterranean. Its final war with Byzantium, from 602 to 628, reached the walls of Constantinople and ended in total exhaustion for both. Arab armies destroyed the state within twenty years, killing the last king, Yazdegerd III, in 651. Its administrative practice, court ceremony and art were absorbed wholesale by the caliphates. Zoroastrian communities fled to India and became the Parsis. Ctesiphon on the Tigris was the capital, and its great vaulted hall still stands. The empire's official language was Middle Persian, written in Pahlavi script. Its rock reliefs at Naqsh-e Rostam and Bishapur are its chief monuments. Chess reached Persia from India during this period. Gundeshapur housed a celebrated medical academy.

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