The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia: From the Pre-Islamic to the Islamic Period

By D. G. Tor

This volume examines the major cultural, religious, political, and urban changes that took place in the Iranian world of Inner and Central Asia in the transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic periods.

One of the major civilizations of the first millennium was that of the Iranian linguistic and cultural world, which stretched from today’s Iraq to what is now the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. No other region of the world underwent such radical transformation, which fundamentally altered the course of world history, as this area did during the centuries of transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period. This transformation included the religious victory of Islam over Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity, and the other religions of the area; the military and political wresting of Inner Asia from the Chinese to the Islamic sphere of primary cultural influence; and the shifting of Central Asia from a culturally and demographically Iranian civilization to a Turkic one. This book contains essays by many of the preeminent scholars working in the fields of archeology, history, linguistics, and literature of both the pre-Islamic and the Islamic-era Iranian world, shedding light on some of the most significant aspects of the major changes that this important portion of the Asian continent underwent during this tumultuous era in its history. This collection of cutting-edge research will be read by scholars of Middle Eastern, Central Asian, Iranian, and Islamic studies and archaeology.

Contributors: D. G. Tor, Frantz Grenet, Nicholas Sims-Williams, Etsuko Kageyama, Yutaka Yoshida, Michael Shenkar, Minoru Inaba, Rocco Rante, Arezou Azad, Sören Stark, Louise Marlow, Gabrielle van den Berg, and Dilnoza Duturaeva.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780268202088

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Cover: The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia by D. G. Tor and Minoru Inaba.

The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia

The History and Culture of Iran and Central Asia

From the Pre-Islamic to the Islamic Period

Edited By

D. G. Tor and Minoru Inaba

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Notre Dame

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021948795

ISBN: 978-0-268-20209-5 (Harback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20211-8 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-20208-8 (Epub)

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

chapter 1.The Enduring Significance of the Iranian World in the First Millennium CE: Transformation and Continuity

D. G. Tor

Part I. Iranian Central Asia in Late Antiquity

chapter 2.Types of Town Planning in Ancient Iranian Cities: New Considerations

Frantz Grenet

chapter 3.The Proto-Sogdian Inscriptions of Kultobe: New Fragments and New Reconstructions

Nicholas Sims-Williams

chapter 4.Xian Temples of the Sogdian Colonies in China: A Study Based on Archaeological Material

Etsuko Kageyama

chapter 5.Three Scenarios for the Historical Background of the Xi’an Sino-Pahlavi Inscription: Post-Sasanian Zoroastrian Traders?

Yutaka Yoshida

Part II. From the Pre-Islamic to the Islamic

chapter 6.The Arab Conquest and the Collapse of the Sogdian Civilization

Michael Shenkar

chapter 7.Central Asia in the Mid-Eighth Century: Wukong’s Itinerary toward India

Minoru Inaba

chapter 8.Evolution of the Habitat in Paykend

Rocco Rante

chapter 9.Notes on Islamization Narratives in the Faḍāʾil-i Balkh

Arezou Azad

Part III. The Transformation of the Pre-Islamic Past

chapter 10.The New Garden of the Amīr: Sāmānid Land Development at the Fringes of the Bukhārā Oasis

Sören Stark

chapter 11.Al-Thaʿālibī’s Iranian Past: Assimilation and Aesthetics

Louise Marlow

chapter 12.Representations of the Pre-Islamic Past in Early Persian Court Poetry: The Art of Celebration

Gabrielle van den Berg

chapter 13.From Turkistan to Tibet: The Qarakhanids and the Tsongkha Kingdom

Dilnoza Duturaeva

Contributors

Index

Figures

figure 2.1.Persepolis as a multicentered settlement (© Rémy Boucharlat).

figure 2.2.Pasargadae (© Sébastien Gondet).

figure 2.3.Dahaneh-i Ghulaman (© Arta 2012.001).

figure 2.4.Koktepe (© Claude Rapin/MAFOUZ de Sogdiane).

figure 2.5.Afrasiab (ancient Samarkand), topographic plan of 1885 supplemented by the results of the excavations (© Claude Rapin/MAFOUZ de Sogdiane).

figure 2.6.Ai Khanum (© Claude Rapin).

figure 2.7.Old Nisa (© Archive of CRAST—Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino).

figure 2.8.Old and New Nisa in their context; adapted from V. N. Pilipko, Staraia Nisa (Moscow, 2001), fig. 99.

figure 2.9.Ai Khanum, survey of the suburb (adapted from Gardin 1998,fig. 3.4A).

figure 2.10.Akchakhan-kala (© Alison Betts).

figure 2.11.Dzhanbas-kala (adapted from Tolstov 1948, fig. 29).

figure 2.12.Kampyr-tepe, remaining part (adapted from Bolelov 2013, fig. 1).

figure 2.13.Kampyr-tepe, part of lower town; adapted from Materialy Tokharistanskoi Èkspeditsii, Vol. 7 (Tashkent, 2009), fig. 37.

figure 2.14.Dil’berdzhin; adapted from Drevniaia Baktriia 2. Materialy Sovetsko-Afganskoi arkheologichekoi èkspeditsii (Moskva, 1979), 121, fig. 1.

figure 2.15.Tappeh Hegmataneh (ancient Ecbatana), excavated sector (© Rémy Boucharlat).

figure 2.16.(A) Toprak-kala, surface survey; from S. P. Tolstov, Po sledam drevnekhorezmiiskoi tsivilizatsii (Moskva, 1948), fig. 43/1; (B) plan of excavated parts, palace not included (Nerazik and Rapoport 1981, fig. 2).

figure 2.17.Toprak-kala, palace intramuros (top) and buildings in chahār-bāq, reconstruction (Rapoport 1996, fig. 25).

figure 2.18.Panjikent, plan with attempted rendering of the zoning; from F. Grenet, Le Grand Atlas de l’Archéologie (Paris: Encyclopaedia Universalis, 1985), 235.

figure 2.19.Panjikent, military barracks in disused city wall (Semenov 1996, fig. 11).

figure 3.1.Kultobe fragment K2. Reproduced by permission of A. Podushkin.

figure 3.2.Coin of Chāch with reverse legend naming Wanōn-khwar, (leader) of the people of Chāch. After Rtveladze 1998, 327; reproduced by permission.

figure 3.3.Map showing Kultobe and the cities mentioned in the inscriptions. Drawn by François Ory. After Sims-Williams, Grenet, and Podushkin 2009, 1007.

figure 3.4.Kultobe fragment K4. Reproduced by permission of A. Podushkin.

figure 3.5.Kultobe fragments K1, 3, 10, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17. Reproduced by permission of A. Podushkin.

figure 4.1.Temple for the goddess Nana, a panel of the funerary couch in the Miho Museum, late sixth century. Juliano and Lerner 1997, 254.

figure 4.2.God sitting below an arch; wall painting from Kala-i Kakhkakha I, mid-eighth century (partial reconstruction).

figure 4.3.(A) Goddess Nana on the lion and a female harpist (caryatid), wall painting from Pendzhikent, mid-eighth century; (B) reconstruction.

figure 4.4.Sarcophagus of Wirkak, from Xi’an, 580.

figure 4.5.Carved relief on the beam of Wirkak’s tomb, from Xi’an, 580.

figure 4.6.Carved relief on the back side of the sarcophagus base of Wirkak, from Xi’an, 580.

figure 4.7.Entrance to the inner court of Temple II at Pendzhikent (proposed reconstruction).

figure 4.8.Clay decoration at the entrance to the inner court of Temple II at Pendzhikent, sixth century.

figure 4.9.Four-armed demon wearing the crown with a pair of hands and a skull, wall painting from Pendzhikent, first half of the eighth century.

figure 4.10.Statue of Bhairava, from Sarnath, sixth century.

figure 5.1.Xi’an Sino-Pahlavi Inscription (photograph). After Kyōto Bunkahakubutsukan Gakugei Dainika, ed., Daitō Chōanten (Kyoto: Kyōto Bunkahakubutsukan, 1994), 155.

figure 5.2.Xi’an Sino-Pahlavi Inscription (rubbing). After Kyōto Bunkahakubutsukan Gakugei Dainika. ed., Daitō Chōanten (Kyoto: Kyōto Bunkahakubutsukan, 1994), 155.

figure 5.3.Table comparing the previous readings of the Pahlavi version.

figure 5.4.dtmyn

figure 5.5.bgpw(ḥ)l

figure 5.6.štrd(’l)

figure 5.7.syr-lyn

figure 5.8.m(’)[hdw]hš

figure 5.9.ZNH whšpwn’

figure 6.1.Map of Māwarāʾnnahr showing major Sogdian cities. After Karev 2015, fig. 2.

figure 6.2.Reconstruction of the paintings on the southern wall of the Ambassadors Painting, Afrasyab. Drawing by François Ory.

figure 6.3.Royal procession from the Sino-Sogdian sarcophagus in the National Museum of China. After Ge Chengyong 2016, fig. 9.

figure 6.4.Scene of royal reception from Panjikent XXV/28, southern part of the eastern wall. After Marshak and Raspopova 1990, fig. 29.

figure 6.5.General plan of Panjikent showing excavated areas (1948–2017). Courtesy of Pavel Lurje. Drawing by Alexey Akulov.

figure 6.6.Room 2, Area XXX, Panjikent, showing traces of burning caused by the fire of 722. Photo courtesy of Pavel Lurje.

figure 6.7.Reconstruction of a typical Reception Hall from Panjikent. After Marshak 2002, fig. 10.

figure 7.1.The itinerary of the Chinese mission.

figure 7.2.Routes connecting China and northern India.

figure 7.3.Wukong’s return itinerary.

figure 8.1.Map of Iran and Central Asia, Esri Imagery 2017.

figure 8.2.Map of the Bukhara oasis and its eight generation paleochannels (Fouache and Rante 2016).

figure 8.3.Geomorphological Map of the Bukhara oasis (Fouache et al. 2016).

figure 8.4.Human occupation dynamics following the transformation of the Bukhara oasis (Rante 2016).

figure 8.5.Map of the landscape of Paykend, Esri Imagery (Rante 2017).

figure 8.6.Topography of Paykend (Rante and Rilievi srl 2012).

figure 8.7.Plan of the dwelling, phase 1, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Le Maguer, Rante, and Rilievi srl 2017).

figure 8.8.Cross section of the east–west ditch-street, Paykend (Vincent Bernard 2010).

figure 8.9.Plan of the dwelling, phase 2, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Le Maguer, Rante, and Rilievi srl 2017).

figure 8.10.Dwelling of Paykend, šahrestan 1, photo from the east (Rante 2016).

figure 8.11.Plan of the dwelling, phase 3, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Le Maguer, Rante, and Rilievi srl 2017).

figure 8.12.Cross section of the door between rooms E4 and F4 (Le Maguer, Rante, and Rilievi srl 2017).

figure 8.13.Dwelling of Paykend, šahrestan 1, photo from the southeast of the ninth century phase (Rante 2016).

figure 8.14.Plan of the dwelling, phase 4, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Le Maguer, Rante, and Rilievi srl 2017).

figure 8.15.Photo of a door of the Islamic period (Rante 2014).

figure 8.16.Plan of the dwelling, phase 5, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Dantec, Rante, and Rilievi srl 2017).

figure 8.17.Photo of the cocciopesto wall, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Dantec 2011).

figure 8.18.Photo of the cocciopesto wall, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Dantec 2011).

figure 8.19.Plan of the dwelling, phase 6, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Dantec, Rante, and Rilievi srl 2017).

figure 8.20.Cross section of the southern area of the dwelling, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Dantec, Rante, and Rilievi srl 2017).

figure 8.21.Plan of the dwelling, phase 7, šahrestan 1, Paykend (Dantec, Rante, and Rilievi srl 2017).

figure 8.22.Some house comparisons: (A) Paykend; (B) Siraf; (C) Nishapur.

figure 10.1.Settlements in the Bukhārā oasis appearing in the nisbas of scholars of the first two centuries AH (© Sören Stark).

figure 10.2.The oasis of Bukhārā during the tenth to twelfth centuries CE (© Sören Stark).

figure 10.3.The site of Khodja-Kul-tepa. View from the shahristān (in the foreground) toward the citadel (© Sören Stark).

figure 10.4.The site of Khodja-Parsan-tepa. Map of the site in the 1930s (after Шишкин 1963, fig. 74) and current satellite view (© Sören Stark).

figure 10.5.Glass finds from Khodja-Kul-tepa (© Sören Stark). (a–c) Fragments of glass vessels; (d) glass ingot.

figure 10.6.(a) Fragment of decorative brick from Khodja-Kul-tepa; (b) Sāmānid Mausoleum. Detail of the southern portal (© Sören Stark).

figure 10.7.Micro-oases around Khoja-Parsan-tepa and Khodja-Kul-tepa on Corona scenes. (a) Corona image from March 1970; (b) Visualization of settlement areas and water courses/field plots (© Sören Stark).

figure 10.8.Current Quickbird scene showing feeder canal, secondary/minor canals, and field plots near Burana-tepa (© Sören Stark).

Acknowledgments

The editors are deeply grateful to the many organizations and individuals that made possible the scholarly exchange both of the conference and of this volume. The fruits of this project are the outcome of the scientific cooperation agreement signed in 2016 between Kyoto University and the University of Notre Dame. Without the generous support of the Medieval Institute and the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, and of Kyoto University’s Institute for Research in Humanities and Graduate School of Letters, this undertaking would never have been realized. One of us, D. G. Tor, is also indebted to generous fellowship funding provided by the American Council of Learned Societies.

We are above all grateful to both the original conference participants and to the contributors to this volume, whose groundbreaking scholarship constitutes the heart of this endeavor.

Chapter 1

The Enduring Significance of the Iranian World in the First Millennium CE

Transformation and Continuity

D. G. Tor

One of the most formative times and places in world history was the Iranian linguistic and cultural world of the first millennium CE. This cultural zone comprised what one might call Greater Inner Asia: roughly, the classical lands of Iran, including Khurāsān, to the end of the Iranian Plateau in the west; the ancient lands of Bactria and Soghdia, which include all or part of today’s Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tājikistān, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan, to the east and north; and the adjacent nomadic steppes that were under their influence, up to the borders of China in the east. In fact, proportionally to its historical significance, Iranian Inner Asia in this period is probably the least known and most grossly understudied time and place in world history.

Indeed, the Iranian civilizational world at this time was comparable in size, scope, cultural creativity, and influence to the Roman one; yet today only a greatly truncated and diminished remnant of it survives: the Islamic Republic of Iran, along with Afghanistan and Tājikistān. For among many other historically significant events, this time and place produced great movements of people, goods, ideas, and religions, from the Soghdians¹ to the Huns and Hephthalites—some of which eventually reached Western Europe²—and also marked the heyday of trans-Eurasian trade.³ One of the greatest transformations resulting from this ferment was the beginning of the end of Iranian cultural hegemony over Inner Asia, brought about by the successive waves of Turco-Mongol migration, followed by full-scale invasion, which completely transformed Iranian Inner Asia culturally, ethnically, and linguistically.⁴

This transformation from Iranian to Turkic predominance was a protracted, centuries-long process. The end and culmination of it—the Seljuq, Mongol, and Timurid conquests of all of the lands that had once constituted the Iranian cultural world—falls outside the scope of the millennium covered in this volume, but the first stage of the process of the transformation of Central Asia from a civilizationally Iranian population to a Turkic one, including the beginning of the conquest stage, signaled by the Qarakhanid Turkmen conquest of Transoxiana in 999, certainly falls within its purview.⁵

The second of the greatest transformations that took place was religious and cultural. The victory of Islam over Buddhism and Christianity in Iran and the steppes⁶ melded the Iranian world with the Mediterranean for the first time since Alexander of Macedon’s era a millennium earlier, and turned the steppes away from China and toward the lands of Islam and Western Asia. Culturally, some of the significant transformations that took place in Iran and Iranian Central Asia during this era were the production of many of the writings seminal to the shaping of the religions of Zoroastrianism,⁷ Judaism in its rabbinic form,⁸ and classical Islamic civilization,⁹ culminating in the emergence of Khurāsān as the powerhouse—culturally, religiously, and militarily—of the Sunni Islamic world.¹⁰

Iranian Inner Asia in the first millennium also produced some of the greatest empires the world has known, from the Hephthalite Empire to the Sasanian Empire—which was the most formidable enemy of the Roman Empire¹¹—to the ʿAbbāsid Caliphate of Islam, all of which profoundly affected not only every surrounding civilization, but also those much farther afield, throughout the continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.

This last historical occurrence in particular, the ʿAbbāsid Revolution, was of incalculable importance to subsequent world history. Taking place around AD 750, the ʿAbbāsid dynasty, heading a messianic movement whose headquarters were located in Marw, in today’s Turkmenistan, and whose armies came from Khurāsān (today’s Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and parts of both Iran and Turkmenistan),¹² overthrew the original dynasty that had ruled the Islamic world for nearly a century from today’s Uzbekistan to the Atlantic Ocean: the Umayyads of Syria.¹³ ʿAbbāsid dynastic rule, which survived for more than five hundred years, not only conquered the newly formed Islamic empire and shaped its cultural and religious institutions, but also, in AD 751, at the outset of ʿAbbāsid rule, defeated a Chinese army in Central Asia, thus determining that the Islamic empire, rather than China, would be the dominant power in, and influence upon the tribes, of the steppes west of the Ti’en Shan Mountains, opening the path for the territorial expansion of Islam eastward, northward, and southward into the Indian subcontinent.¹⁴

Despite the astonishing richness, historical importance, and cultural fecundity of the Iranian world in the first millennium, and the fact that it is vital to understanding world history in both Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the Iranian world of this era has been, and still is, woefully understudied; due, no doubt, to the very high scholarly demands required for such study of Iranian Central Asia in particular. Such an attempt requires not only collaboration among historians, philologists, paleographers, archaeologists, and numismatists, but also the knowledge of many different languages, some archaic, ranging from Bactrian and Soghdian to classical Arabic, Persian, and Chinese. When one undertakes to examine change and transformation from the pre-Islamic period of late antiquity through the early Islamic period (up until the eleventh century, when Turkic political domination entered a new phase), matters become even more complex and the obstacles more formidable, since it requires full mastery of both civilizational worlds.

The rationale behind this volume, therefore, is that such an undertaking can only be accomplished collaboratively, by bringing together the various experts on these two completely different eras and the discrete linguistic areas: no one can possibly be a real master of all of the various demanding areas of study. This kind of collaborative effort to cast light on the transition from pre-Islamic to Islamic Iran and Inner Asia is therefore also, unfortunately, rare, since the resources required for bringing the various experts together from the far-flung corners of the earth are considerable. Such an enterprise, in fact, has been undertaken only thrice before the present volume, and the aim of the present work is to extend a bit farther the trailblazing path laid out by those works.¹⁵

The approach we have adopted is slightly different, however, from those three previous efforts, which both involved much narrower foci of inquiry: respectively, the Islamization of Central Asia; the role of nomads from pre-Islamic into Islamic times; and material culture of the period. The present volume, though it obviously contains chapters by some of the same scholars (inevitable in a field such as, for instance, Bactrian, in which the number of experts worldwide can be counted on the fingers of one hand), has not limited the scope of its investigation to any one subtopic or type of historical source, but rather asked participants to focus on any particular aspect of life and human civilization in which either important change took place during the transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period; or where, conversely, one finds the creative reuse of the pre-Islamic past. Its topic is therefore the much broader one of change and continuity over time in Iran and Central Asia, during the long transition from the pre-Islamic to the Islamic period.

Some of the chapters herein thus offer a wide vision of the longue durée, for instance, the archaeological examinations by Frantz Grenet (chapter 2) of the design, structure, and characteristics of Iranian towns, and by Rocco Rante (chapter 8) of the oasis of Bukhara, and how these changed and developed over time; Sören Stark (chapter 10) provides a similar analysis for early Islamic Bukhara, also utilizing archaeological evidence.

Four of the chapters (3 through 6), by Nicholas Sims-Williams, Etsuko Kageyama, Yutaka Yoshida, and Michael Shenkar, provide fascinating illuminations of Sogdian culture and influence—in Sogdia, China, and points in between, both at specific moments in time and over the course of the transition to the Islamic period after the Arab conquest.

Minoru Inaba (chapter 7) and Arezou Azad (chapter 9) examine Bactria and beyond. Inaba examines the eight-century narrative of the member of a Chinese diplomatic mission that traveled through Central Asia en route to India at the time of the ʿAbbāsid Revolution and the battle at the Talas River, returning from India forty years later, and what the mission’s travel account reveals about trade routes, the state of the Islamic conquests, and the eastern borders of the caliphate over that forty-year period; while Arezou Azad analyzes the view of Islamization contained in the literary sources, in this case, the important surviving local history of Balkh.

The final three chapters (11, 12, and 13), by Louise Marlow, Gabrielle van den Berg, and Dilnoza Duturaeva, all involve investigations of culture, using very different and less usual kinds of sources than either historical chronicles or archaeology. Marlow examines the literary reflections of an important Iranian author, writing in Arabic in the late tenth and early eleventh century, but musing on the Persian language and also the pre-Islamic Iranian past. Van den Berg also utilizes the literary record, but of a different sort—Persian poetry of early Islamic times—in order to capture how the Iranian pre-Islamic past was viewed and used by Muslims of the time. Finally, Duturaeva, treating the eastern end of the Iranian world, adduces Chinese records in order to illuminate the Qarakhanid attempt to establish themselves as middlemen between the Turko-Islamic and the Sino-Tibetan worlds, and to illuminate the developments undergone by the Silk Road trade at this time.

Of course, numerous aspects of the transformations that took place in the Iranian world remain to be explored, and no volume ranging over a world so dazzlingly fecund and encompassing such a vast quantity of material, both temporally and spatially, can even aspire to be in any way comprehensive; but it is the hope of the editors and contributors to this volume that it will have cast a little more light on this particular, vibrant corner of the dark backward and abysm of time.

Notes

1. An exposition of whose historical importance may be found in Étienne de La Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History, trans. James Ward (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

2. See, e.g., E. A. Thompson, The Huns (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), and Hyun Jin Kim, The Huns (London: Routledge, 2016); Denis Sinor, The Hun Period, in The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia, ed. D. Sinor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 177–205; Peter B. Golden, Central Asia in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

3. Richard E. Payne, The Silk Road and the Iranian Political Economy in Late Antiquity: Iran, the Silk Road, and the Problem of Aristocratic Empire, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 81 (2018): 227.

4. Yuri Bregel, Turko-Mongol Influences in Central Asia, in Turko-Persia in Historical Perspective, ed. Robert Canfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 53–77.

5. On which, see, most recently, Ömer Soner Hunkan, Türk Hakanlığı (Karahanlılar) (Istanbul: IQ Kültür Sanat Yayıncılık, 2011), 110–36, and the several articles by Jürgen Paul, Serguey Kliachtorniy, and Boris Kotchnev, in Études karakhnides (Tashkent: Institut Français d’Études sur l’Asie central, 2001).

6. E.g., Svat Soucek, A History of Inner Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 51–69.

7. Touraj Daryaee, The Sasanian Empire, in The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History, ed. Touraj Daryaee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 187–207.

8. Shai Secunda, The Iranian Talmud: Reading the Bavli in Its Sasanian Context (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014).

9. E. Yarshater, The Persian Presence in the Islamic World, in The Persian Presence in the Islamic World, ed. R. Hovannisian and G. Sabagh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4–125.

10. D. G. Tor, The Importance of Khurāsān and Transoxiana in the Classical Islamic World, in Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate World: Iranian Tradition and Islamic Civilisation, ed. A. C. S. Peacock and D. G. Tor (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 1–12.

11. On the Sasanian Empire generally, see Touraj Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2010), and Ze’ev Rubin, The Sasanid Monarchy, in The Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 14, Late Antiquity: Empire and Successors, AD 425–600, ed. Averil Cameron et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 638–61; on Roman–Sasanian relations specifically, 638–44.

12. For Wellhausen’s opinion that this Khurāsānī revolution was composed primarily of ethnic Iranians, see Julius Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall, trans. Margaret G. Weir (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1927), 492–566; for Sharon’s view that the leaders, at least, together with a core of renegade Umayyad forces, were Iranized Arabs who had been long resident in the province, see Moshe Sharon, Black Banners From the East: The Establishment of the ʿAbbāsid State: Incubation of a Revolt (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1983), 51–71, 155–238). For a thoughtful evaluation of this controversy, see the review article by Elton Daniel, Arabs, Persians, and the Advent of the ‘Abbāsids Reconsidered, Journal of the American Oriental Society 117 (1997): 542–48; and, for what seems the most likely solution to the problem, Étienne de La Vaissière, The ʿAbbāsid Revolution in Marw: New Data, Der Islam 95, no. 1 (2018): 110–46.

13. For the most recent work on the Umayyads, see now Andrew Marsham, The Umayyad Empire (644–750 CE) (Edinburgh; Edinburgh University Press, 2019), and Marsham, The Umayyad World (London: Routledge, 2020).

14. H. A. R. Gibb, The Arab Conquests in Central Asia (London: The Royal Asiatic Society, 1923); Golden, Central Asia in World History, 58–62.

15. Étienne de La Vaissière, ed., Islamisation de l’Asie central: Processus locaux d’acculturation du VIIe au XIe siècle (Paris: Association pour l’Avancement des Études Iraniennes, 2008); Jürgen Paul, ed., Nomad Aristocrats in a World of Empires (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2013); and, on material culture, see M. Alram, D. Klimburg-Salter, M. Inaba, and M. Pfisterer, eds., Coins, Art and Chronology, Vol. 2, The First Millennium C.E. in the Indo-Iranian Borderlands (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2010). The recent special issue Cities of Medieval Iran, edited by David Durand-Guédy, Roy P. Mottahedeh, and Jürgen Paul, Eurasian Studies 16, no. 1-2 (2018), is also germane in this context; although this issue does contain articles that treat the pre-Islamic period (most notably Rocce Rante’s and Donald Whitcomb’s archaeological articles), the rest of the issue was limited to the Islamic period, with many of the articles moreover focusing on a fairly late period (from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries). Mention should also be made of the important volume by Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas, eds., Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, ca. 250–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), which does not, however, treat the Islamic period or the Islamic empire and civilization.

Part I

Iranian Central Asia in Late Antiquity

Chapter 2

Types of Town Planning in Ancient Iranian Cities

New Considerations

Frantz Grenet

Considerable progress has been made recently in the knowledge and interpretation of town planning in Iran and Central Asia over the course of the centuries, partly from large-scale archaeological excavations, partly from more sophisticated technologies of geomagnetic detection and remote sensing. In order to fully appreciate this progress, it will be necessary to consider also periods earlier than the chronological limits of the present volume. I will therefore survey the fundamental characteristics of towns in the Iranian cultural world, from Achaemenid times through the emergence of the classical type of Iranian towns, which appeared in the medieval period and lasted, in some areas, almost to the present day.

The Loose Achaemenid Imperial and Provincial Capitals

As the evidence accumulates, it appears more and more clearly that the Achaemenid towns both in Iran proper and in Iranian Central Asia can be separated into two broad categories.

One is represented by political centers that appear as a loose distribution of official buildings. I quote here Rémy Boucharlat: A diffused, unfortified urban structure, replaces the Mesopotamian model of the walled city hierarchically organized around the zone of the monuments of political and/or religious power.¹ On the other hand, we already notice in this period, and increasingly more so in the subsequent ones, small or middle-size fortified settlements also established by the state but that look like compact clusters of barracks. Neither variant really calls to mind what in our Western education we are used to calling a town, even less so a city or a polis, nor do these resemble the image we have of the later medieval towns in these same areas. For the necessity of demonstration, I shall select the most representative examples and try to simplify the evidence. There are hybrid or transitional cases, which I shall also address in this survey.

Concerning the Achaemenid political centers, the main focus of attention is of course Persepolis (fig. 2.1). Was the town mentioned in Greek sources under the names Parsa and Persepolis limited to the palace complex on the Terrace, or did it extend on the plain of the Marv Dasht? Recent geomagnetic surveys carried out by Sébastien Gondet,² and limited excavations by Chaverdi Askari and Pierfrancesco Callieri,³ have confirmed what Giuseppe and Ann Tilia had already suspected thirty years ago: there are several clusters of habitations far and wide in the plain, up to seven kilometers west of the Terrace, and one, at least, situated under present Bagh-e Firuzi, included monumental buildings with stone columns. So far there is no evidence of a fortification wall in the plain. The triple wall mentioned by Diodorus Siculus (17.71) might refer only to the outer walls of the Apadana, the Terrace, and the Kuh-i Rahmat, in which case the outer enclosure would have encompassed the two others only partly. This question remains, however, disputed.

A map, scaled from 0 to 1 kilometer, shows the town of Persépolis.

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Figure 2.1. Persepolis as a multicentered settlement (© Rémy Boucharlat).

The picture is richer for Pasargadae, as here the outer limits appear more or less, but also for the main unfortified (fig. 2.2). The inner space is structured almost everywhere by irrigated rectangular gardens in which parade buildings, some with columns, are distributed loosely but in strict accordance with the orientation of the gardens.⁴ It is not at all certain that any of these buildings was permanently inhabited. There are also some isolated monumental structures, probably religious, but the only one clearly identified is the Tomb of Cyrus. The northern part of the site presents a different character, with a monumental stone platform (the Tall-i Takht), unfinished and of uncertain destination, and a separate enclosure where air photographs have recently revealed a cluster of monocellular dwellings organized according to an orthogonal grid.⁵ They are tentatively identified as a garrison, for which a post-Achaemenid date is not excluded. A fortification wall, not excavated but surveyed to the north and west of this northern part of the city, and apparently not existing elsewhere, could also indicate a recentering of the site after the Macedonian conquest, with a different type of occupation. Future excavations might provide some further clues. For our present purpose, it is important to note a combination of the two urbanistic types I have proposed to define at the onset.⁶

A map, scaled from 0 to 1000 meters, plots the town plan of Pasargadae.

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Figure 2.2. Pasargadae (© Sébastien Gondet).

Moving from imperial capitals to centers of satrapies in the East, we first encounter Dahaneh-i Ghulaman, probably to be identified with Zarin, the main seat of Achaemenid power in Drangiana-Sistan (fig. 2.3).⁷ Twenty-seven monumental buildings, built of baked and mud bricks, most of them square with a central courtyard and considered either religious or palatial, dominate the landscape along a one-kilometer canal linking two large pools, with modest mud-brick houses in between, also square in plan with a small courtyard. Two kilometers more to the south another pavilion has recently been discovered by teledetection. It is the largest of them all and the most similar to palatial structures known at Pasargadae and Persepolis (four square towers at the angles, four porticos in between). Nowhere on the site has evidence of a fortification wall been found.

A map, scaled from 0 to 250 meters, plots the town plan of Dahaneh-i Ghulaman.

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Figure 2.3. Dahaneh-i Ghulaman (© Arta 2012.001).

Contrary to the open imperial cities we have just examined, all those situated in the northeastern satrapies were walled in. A possible reason for this difference is that these areas were on the steppe frontier or not remote from it, while capitals in the heartland of the empire were not expected ever to be attacked. Balkh (Bactra) was certainly the main Achaemenid stronghold north of the Hindukush, but at the moment little is known of the Achaemenid period, except that the town or part of it was set in an oval fortification (ca. 100 ha).⁸ To the north and west of Balkh other towns with a very regular circular shape and regularly spaced towers, mainly Altyn-dil’iar-tepe (15 ha), Emshi-tepe (18 ha),⁹ Bargah (8.5 ha), Dzhagat-tepe,¹⁰ have not been excavated but seem not to have been densely built.

Twenty kilometers to the south of Balkh, the recently discovered site of Cheshme Shafa is more promising, as occupation ceased after the Greek conquest.¹¹ It comprises two areas, each with its own rampart. One lies along the river and includes a rectangular settlement, geometrically planned, still unexcavated; the teledetection suggests a large central building and wide open spaces. The second one is on the hill, with a religious structure from which a monumental stone fire altar survives, the only one known anywhere in the Achaemenid Empire.

Sogdiana does not have for this period regular circular enclosures, perhaps because of the lack of broad even surfaces between the river and torrent beds. Kyzyltepa, the only urban Achaemenid site in southern Sogdiana substantially explored so far (more by remote sensing than by excavations) has an irregularly shaped enclosure, a fire temple subsequently enclosed in a citadel, and the rest appears not densely built.¹² Koktepe, the site that preceded Samarkand thirty kilometers to the north, is typically polynuclear, with two separate enclosures inside the circuit wall (fig. 2.4). The central enclosure (A on the plan), with towers, probably sheltered one or several religious buildings; the other one (B), without towers, was probably dedicated to storage and administrative buildings.¹³ In a later phase, but still in the Achaemenid period, each enclosure was replaced by a structure set on a pyramidal basement. There is very little evidence for ordinary dwellings at that time, but there is for the pre-Achaemenid period. In the plain, an advanced shield wall probably existed only on the northern side, the one exposed to attacks.

A topographical map, scaled from 0 to 250 meters, plots the town plan of Koktepe.

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Figure 2.4. Koktepe (© Claude Rapin/MAFOUZ de Sogdiane).

As for Samarkand, there is little information for the Achaemenid period, except for the circuit wall that dates from the very foundation of the town, probably under Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE), and the citadel on an artificial platform in the northern part (fig. 2.5).¹⁴ As at Koktepe, the earliest circuit wall was massive—six meters thick—and built by an accumulation of rather irregular raw-earth bricks without the use of any frames, which is typical for nonskilled mass labor. On both sites, each brick, however, carried a finger-made mark, with only one mark per section. This indicates brigades working simultaneously on respective assigned sections of the wall, and having to justify a certain amount of production. Most probably the workers in these brigades were gathered from all the villages in the plain. To what extent this system implied sheer constraint or, on the contrary, labor voluntarily invested on an equalitarian basis (also justifying control marks) in a potential shelter for people and flocks in times of danger, is, of course, impossible to determine. All we can say is that, as at Koktepe, the fortified area, here 220 hectares, was obviously not densely built. The only excavated building dating from the Greek period is a huge granary (40 x 40 m), suitable for sustaining a siege. The layout of the water system supply on the plateau, with three fan-shaped canal branches and many basins, was never compatible with any general town planning. In fact, compact orthogonal dwelling quarters are not documented before the seventh century CE and, because of the many basins, they occupied limited surfaces and were not contiguous to each other.¹⁵

A layout of the ancient city of Samarkand, originally drawn in 1885, during a topographical survey.

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Figure 2.5. Afrasiab (ancient Samarkand), topographic plan of 1885 supplemented by the results of the excavations (© Claude Rapin/MAFOUZ de Sogdiane).

The Non-Hippodamian Hellenistic Cities of Central Asia

Because of these constraints, it is no surprise that Hippodamian town planning was not introduced in Samarkand during the Greek period, but its absence is also remarkable at Ai Khanum, the capital of Eucratides (ca. 171–145 BCE) (fig. 2.6), and also at Old