4

AfarinNameh
Essays on the Archaeology of Iran in Honour of Mehdi Rahbar
Edited by: YOUSEF MORADI
With the assistance of Susan Cantan, Edward J. Keall and Rasoul Boroujeni

Tehran
The Research Institute of
Cultural Heritage and Tourism
(RICHT)

2019
AfarinNameh
Essays on the Archaeology of Iran in Honour of Mehdi Rahbar
Edited by: YOUSEF MORADI
With the assistance of Susan Cantan, Edward J. Keall and Rasoul Boroujeni

The Research Institute of

Cultural Heritage and Tourism
(RICHT)

2019
 Table of Contents
Travels in the East with Herodotus and the Persians: Herodotus
(4.36.2-45) on the Geography of Asia ..................................... 13
Antigoni Zournatzi
From Mithradat I (c. 171-138 BCE) to Mithradat II (c. 122/1-91
BCE): the Formation of Arsacid Parthian Iconography........... 25
Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis
The Elymaean bratus: A Contribution to the Phytohistory of
Arsacid Iran .............................................................................. 31
D.T. Potts and R.P. Adams
Anthrosol Detection in the Plain of Izeh ................................. 39
Vito Messina and Jafar Mehr Kian
Some Remarks on the Monumental Parthian Tombs of Gelālak
and Susa ................................................................................... 49
Rémy Boucharlat
Power Fluctuations in Parthian Government: Some Case
Examples .................................................................................. 59
Edward J. Keall
Hellenistic Impact on the Iranian and Central Asian Cultures:
The Historical Contribution and the Archaeological Evidence 73
Bruno Genito
A Fountain of Sasanian Age from Ardashir Khwarrah ............. 93
Pierfrancesco Callieri
The Gravity of New City Formations: Change in Settlement
Patterns Caused by the Foundation of Gondishapur and Eyvan-e
Karkheh.................................................................................. 101
Behzad Mofidi-Nasrabadi
The Land behind Rishahr: Sasanian Funerary Practices on the
Bushehr Peninsula .................................................................. 111
St John Simpson
Playing in the Temple: A Board Game Found at Mele Hairam,
Turkmenistan ......................................................................... 125
Barbara Kaim
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The Great Walls of the Gorgan Plain Explored via Drone
Photography ........................................................................... 129
Eberhard W. Sauer, Hamid Omrani Rekavandi, Jebrael Nokandeh and Davit
Naskidashvili
The Berlin Bottle with Water Birds and Palmette Trees ......... 171
Jens Kröger
Once more on the Bandiān Inscriptions ................................ 141
Carlo G. Cereti
East and West: Some Remarks on Intersections in the Ceramic
Repertoires of Central Asia and Western Iran ....................... 149
Gabriele Puschnigg
“Persian Textiles” in the Biography of He Chou: Iranian Exotica
in Sui-Tang China ................................................................. 157
Matteo Compareti
Sasanian Contacts with the Vakatakas’ Realm with Special
Reference to Nagardhan ......................................................... 165
Ritvik Balvally, Virag Sontakke, Shantanu Vaidya and Shrikant Ganvir
The Ritual Drama of the High Priest Kirdēr.......................... 179
Antonio Panaino
Khusrow Parwēz and Alexander the Great: An Episode of imitatio
Alexandri by a Sasanian King ................................................ 191
Touraj Daryaee
Do You Not Consider How Allāh ... Made the Sun a Burning
Lamp? ..................................................................................... 195
Maria Vittoria Fontana
Analysis of Two Mortar Samples from the Ruined Site of a
Sasanian Palace and Il-Khānid Caravanserai, Bisotun, Iran203
Jonathan Kemp and John Hughes
 Khusrow Parwēz and Alexander the Great:
An Episode of imitatio Alexandri by a Sasanian King
Touraj Daryaee
University of California, Irvine

Abstract: This article discusses a new form of imperial propaganda espoused by Khusrow
II against the Romans in the seventh century CE. According to Theoyphylactus
Simocatta, Khusrow II aspired to take over the world as Alexander the Great had done
a millennium before. This is not the traditional propaganda used by the Sasanians, as
they claimed to be the descendants of Iraj and were attempting to reconquer the world.
New evidence from seventh century Pahlavi papyri from Egypt suggests that the idea of
Alexander as being a legitimate ruler in Iran predates the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi and
was known already in the late Sasanian period. Hence, the use of Alexander as model
for an Iranian world conqueror was espoused by Khusrow II.
Keywords: Khusrow II, Xwadāy-nāmag, Šāhnāmeh, Alexander, Pahlavi Papyri, imitatio
Alexandri.

political propaganda under Emperor Trajan

T here are a number of studies about Roman
political propaganda and the invocation
of Alexander the Great as a model conqueror
for late antiquity. There is also no shortage of
Roman emperors and generals who moved to the
East simply to reach Mesopotamia to battle the
Arsacids or the Sasanians, then go back to take
on the honorifics of “Parthicus” or “Persicus”.
For example, in the second decade of the third
century CE when Emperor Caracalla attacked
the Arsacid Empire (Heichelheim 1944: 113-115;
Dignas & Winter 2007: 15), he took the same route
that Alexander had taken, seemingly trying to
imitate Alexander in deeds and manners (Historia
Augusta 2.I-II). Caracalla had asked for the hand
of the daughter of Ardawān IV, the Arsacid king.
When this request was refused, he launched
an invasion and as punishment desecrated the
royal tombs of the Arsacids in Adiabene (Dio
Cassius LXXIX.I.I-2). The Romans continued their
when during his invasion of the Arascid Empire,
Alexander the Great was again invoked. One
of his officers, Arrian, wrote an entire tome
about the career of the Macedonian king, which
spurred intense interest in Alexander in the
Roman world (Nabel 2018: 202-203). When the
Sasanians came to power, the Romans believed
that their Persian opponents were also creating
their own propaganda, claiming Achaemenid
territory as rightfully theirs (Wiesehöfer 2017:
381-392).
In this essay in honor of my esteemed
colleague, Mehdi Rahbar, someone who has
worked on many Arsacid and Sasanian sites
and whose discoveries have brought a new
understanding to late antique Iran, I would like
to focus on a curious episode in Sasanian history
which may cause us to pause and rethink our
understanding of the role of Alexander and the
 Khusrow Parwēz and Alexander the Great: An Episode of imitatio Alexandri by a Sasanian King
Fig. 1 Silver coin of Khusrow II.
production of royal propaganda in the Iranian
world. In this interesting episode under study
Alexander is not seen as a destroyer of Iran
(Wisehöfer 2011: 113-132), as is often found in
the Zoroastrian Middle Persian texts (Daryaee
2007: 89-97), but rather as a heroic conqueror
which is echoed in the Šāhnāmeh of Ferdowsī.
The event in which Alexander is invoked takes
place in the seventh century CE.
Khusrow Parwēz (590-628 CE) was one of
the longest ruling Sasanian kings (Fig. 1), whose
empire reached Africa and the gates of
Constantinople in Europe, before its eventual
collapse, when Muslim victories occurred in
the Arab regions and that of Iran in less than
a decade. The material culture, mainly the
coinage of Khusrow II presents him as a loyal
Zoroastrian, who took on such titles as hū-dēn
(Good Religion) (Gyselen 2004: 126-127), i.e.,
supporter of the Zoroastrian religion, but also as
the šāhān šāh (King of Kings) of Ērānšahr. But
other sources depict Khusrow II as a Christian,
and there are traditions even suggesting that he
may have converted to Christianity, because
of his interest in that religion, or due to the
influence of his favorite wife, Šērīn (Dignas &
Winter 2007: 228-229).
Theophylactus Simocatta (v.15.9-10) has an
interesting report about the meeting of a Roman
envoy—a Christian bishop in Ctesiphon which
is of interest for us:
“Chosroes had him summoned to the palace
192
where, bathed in sweat, he demanded of the
priest to see an image of the Mother of God.
So the priest, who carried with him her
likeness on a tablet, granted a view of it to
the Persian king. He worshipped the panel,
and declared that its archetype had stood
beside him and told him that the victories of
Alexander of Macedon would be bestowed
on him” (Theophylact Simocatta 1986: 9-10).
How can we interpret Khusrow Parwēz’s
curious statement that in his dreams the Virgin
Mary had told him that she would grant him
the victories of Alexander the Great? What did
Khusrow Parwēz in the seventh century know
that may have been in the Persian Books (Greek
Persikai bibloi) (Agathias IV: 30.2), or the royal
annals, the Book of Lords (Middle Persian
Xwadāy-nāmag) about the past events and the
position of Alexander in Iranian and world
history? Curiously, one of the recensions of
the Sasanian Xwadāy-nāmag, the 11th century
Šāhnāmeh of Ferdowsī, makes Alexander a half-
brother of Dārā, i.e., Darius III the last of the
Achaemenid Persian Kings.
Paul Briant has succinctly discussed the
historiography and longue dureé view of Darius
III / Dāra from the Classical sources to the time
of Classical Persian literature (Briant 2015). I
have also briefly touched upon the importance
of Alexander as pivotal in Iranian history, using
various political and ideological reasons (Daryaee
2018a: 207-215). In the Šāhnāmeh, Alexander
 Touraj Daryaee
the Great is very much an Iranian king and his
co-option and the time that this tradition took
place is of interest. The logical answer to such
co-option would be that after a generation of
Irano-Macedonian unions, Seleucid kings who
were bi-cultural and bi-racial had to come to
terms with their identity and their past histories
while ruling over the Iranian Plateau. Since
we are mainly dependent on Greek sources,
we tend to receive the Hellenistic version of
Seleucid and later Arsacid cultural heritage
and its propaganda. But it is plain to see that
there was also an Iranian version of this story.
This interpretation was to invent the idea that
Dārā / Darius III and Iskandar / Alexander half-
brothers who had a quarrel, with Alexander
seizing power. This then became part of the
Iranian view of the past (Omidsalar 2012:
39). When did such a definition of Alexander
the Great appear in the Iranian world and its
literature? Usually, this tradition of Alexander as
a legitimate ruler of Iran is associated with the
medieval Islamic period.
However, Alexander as a king of Iran may be
an older tradition. To push back the date of such
an invented tradition to the seventh century
CE, we can look at the Pahlavi Papyri from the
Sasanian occupation of Egypt (619-628 CE).
The surviving papyri mainly deal with food
rations for the army, military ranks, the names
of generals and other administrative issues
concerning the Iranian authorities. However,
there are a few pieces that deviate from such
a categorization. Dieter Weber has recently
studied one such papyri fragment which was
first read by Olaf Hansen (1936; 1938), but
has now been corrected by Weber, providing
fascinating evidence for the history of Iranian
literature and history (Weber 2009: 307–318).
Weber has also made the important observation
that this text is in the form of an āyādgār—that
is a memorandum (Weber 2009: 309). I provide
the corrected version by Weber and add the
transcription:
Timaios hrōmāyīg ēn xwadāy ō Aleksandr Kēsar
goft ud Aleksandar Kēsar xēšm nē grift bidaxš ō
Tiamaios goft kū … (Weber 2009: 310-312).
Tiamaios the Roman said to this Caesar Alexander,
and the Caesar Alexander did not become angry.
The Bidaxš said to Tiamaios that …
193
The significance of this Papyrus is self-evident
in that Alexander who is called hrōmāyīg
“Roman,” matches the Sasanian tradition of
portraying Alexander in Middle Persian texts.
He also has the title of Kēsar or Caesar, which
can be associated with the Roman world,
hence we can surmise that there is also some
influence from Hellenistic Egypt. In this papyrus
fragment, it appears that rather than Alexander
being associated with the “seed of wrath” (xēšm-
tohm), which is his epithet in Middle Persian
texts (Daryaee 2015: 9), he is holding back his
anger. The title Bidaxš is somewhat problematic
in its etymology, but we know that this is an old
Persian title which was in use in the late Sasanian
period, as Procopius mentions it in Greek as
pituaxēs (Procopius, 1.13.16, 14.32, 38,), having
the sense of authority (Sundermann 1989). It
should also be mentioned that there is a Middle
Persian text the Ardā Wīrāz Nāmag (Vahman
1986: 78) that calls Alexander a resident of Egypt
(Muzrāyīg-mānišn). The dating of the text, of
course is difficult, but this Pahlavi text being a
late Sasanian work does match the content of
the Egyptian Pahlavi papyrus. Was the book of
Ardā Wīrāz Nāmag influenced by this Sasanian
Persian presence in Egypt in the seventh century
CE? Certainly, this suggestion seems to be a
possibility, although we are dealing with one
single fragment of a papyrus.
I believe that there are two important pieces of
evidence. First, there is the encounter—as reported
by Theophylactus Simocatta—between the bishop
and Khusrow II who reported he had a vision about
conquering the world like Alexander the Great
had done. Second, the Pahlavi papyrus fragment
from Egypt can also be dated to late antiquity,
providing us with a novel vision of kingship and
imperial propaganda in late Sasanian Iran. Here,
we can see that Khusrow II very much is playing
into the Šāhnāmeh narrative, which was held to
be the production of later tradition. In fact our
two sources from late antiquity provide the logic
of viewing the story of the half-brother of Dārā/
Darius and Iskandar/Alexander as having already
existed at the time of Khusrow II. One can also
surmise that Khusrow II, knew very well the story
of Alexander’s exploits, but opted not to harp on
Iranian—historical grievances—towards the West.
He then used a later Persian vision of Alexander
and placed himself as the inheritor of Alexander the
 Khusrow Parwēz and Alexander the Great: An Episode of imitatio Alexandri by a Sasanian King
Great’s tradition. Consequently, when he did take on
the conquest of the Eastern Roman Empire, he had
another tool of propaganda in his attempt to unify
the world of late antiquity.
It is certainly interesting that a Persian king
would be using such tradition to his advantage,
but the idea of imitatio Alexandri was clearly
understood by the Romans. In a way Khusrow
II may have been feeding the Romans their
own propaganda. One must put this event in
the context of Khusrow’s propaganda to gauge
its significance for the period. We do know
that in the seventh century CE when Heraclius
was on the attack against Khusrow II and his
empire, he baptized his soldiers and promised
them eternal paradise if they laid their lives
on the line for the Cross and their religious
duty (Stoyanov 2011). However, Khusrow II’s
interest in bringing the Cross to the Sasanian
Empire was probably to appease the Nestorian
Christians in his own empire, not to belittle
Christianity (Mashayekh 2017). Thus, beside the
known Iranian notion of the unification of the
three world kingdoms of the Romans, Iranians
and the Turks/Chinese (Daryaee 2018b: 65-78),
as it had been at the beginning of time in Iranian
history, there appears to have been alternative
propaganda current in the late Sasanian period.
The imitation of Alexander was well-understood
by the Romans, but it is probable that it had also
become part of the Iranian epic world-view as
contained in the Šāhnāmeh of Ferdowsī. Thus,
we can hazard a guess that the Xwadāy-nāmag
tradition (Hoyland 2018: 6-23) already contained
the nativization of Alexander the Great and co-
option into the Iranian tradition.
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