The Lost Treasures Persian Art. Vladimir Lukonin
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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