In the middle 20th century research on the landscape and archaeology of western Asia, the Iranian plateau and the regions of Mesopotamia, clearly defined that one of the most successful ways of accessing information about the Sasanian Empire and the dynasty that ruled during the 3rd to 7th century CE is through archaeology and landscape analysis.[1] There have been great advances in the technologies available for analysis of landscapes since the middle 20th century and this has seen a correlating rise in the number of studies available that can advance our knowledge of a period where the historical sources often lead us astray or, in many cases, are completely silent. As written by Habibi, the book reviewed here is a regional study of the Central Zagros, a strategic area of ancient (and modern) Iran that runs along the Iran/Iraq border and equates to the current Iranian provinces of Kermanshah, Hamadan, Kurdistan, Lorestan, Ilam and Chaharmahal va Bakhtiyari (see map 1.1, p.3). The aim of the book is to fill a gap in our knowledge by presenting a landscape and ceramic study on a less well-known region of Iran, and to attempt a socioeconomic analysis of this region that lay at the heart of Eranshahr, the land of the Iranians, during the rule of the Sasanian dynasty. This has been achieved through an interdisciplinary approach based on landscape, climate, survey and ceramics studies.
The overall structure of the book works well. Habibi is deeply embedded in the archaeological landscape of Iran and has carried out extensive surveys on the regions discussed. The book begins very broadly with an introduction to the region and its human geography and then develops into a very useful historical analysis (Chapters 1 and 2) of the Central Zagros. The presentation of such a wide chronological framework that extends back into the 2nd / 1st millennium BCE and forward to the late Sasanian period (7th century CE) allows for a much-needed perspective on this strategic region and its history over time. More and more, we understand that the local and regional economies and material cultures were of surprisingly long duration in many areas of the ancient Iranian worlds. It is often in the interplay between the long continuities in landscape use and shifting perspectives of governing power that we can understand the economic and social changes that took place in different regions and how, or if, these were being driven by the policies of one or another power.
The book offers an excellent integration of ancient and medieval texts with core site analyses and these two different aspects of the study (textual and material) are then integrated with the long durée story of landscape use and change. The issues of the reducing effect of the historical primary sources and the overlay of the early Islamic historians of the Sasanian world is addressed here by combining the bigger picture landscape analysis with historical realities. The book captures the geography of the place and its topography, assessing what that meant throughout its history. The identification of a combination of ‘ways of life and modes of subsistence’ and how these interacted with larger historical narratives help to present some insights into the construction of successive imperial landscapes. The case for this interplay is most strongly made at the end of chapter two with the assessment of the strategic importance of Bisotun and the Great Khorasan Road over the thousand years from the Elamite to Sasanian period (p.71). Continuities in traditions are again emphasized and the book presents an analysis that encompasses strategic choices made by the diverse groups of people living in the region and the ways that later Sasanian rulers chose to invest and interact in it.
The book then focusses in on two case studies that look at smaller, lesser known, regions within the larger area of the central Zagros to provide a close analysis of the human and natural geography. Chapter Three looks at one particular county within one of the modern provinces of Ilan, called Abdanan, as a kind of pilot study for site identification and spatial modelling. Up until very recently there was almost no information on the archaeological potential and occupation of Abdanan, with very little published of what was known. The author used Arch GIS to evaluate environmental variations and the location of the 106 identified sites of Sasanian occupation in the different zones of the county, which include highland and lowland regions presenting very diverse long term settlement patterns. The results are quite remarkable and illustrate just how much there is left to do within the study of Sasanian archaeology. From this relatively unknown region of Iran comes new knowledge that outlines and maps elite manor houses and fire temples from the Sasanian period and analyses their spatial distribution across this landscape.
Another case study (Chapter 4) provides an analysis of Farsan county, a region within the province of Chaharmahal va Bakhtiyari and presents a close examination of the highland environment that has existed in a long tradition of pastoral nomadic subsistence. The implications from this study, that show a distinctive shift in Farsan from the c. 6th century CE onwards, with increasingly marginal lands used for agriculture and increased densities of settlements, sits well within the known structural reorganization of the Sasanian state in the latter 5th and 6th centuries. The book’s strength here is the presentation of material on the ground, giving a firmer evidentiary basis to what we understand were significant changes in the way the Sasanian dynasty used the western regions of the Empire after the loss of territory in the east in this period.
The book is published in the series, The Edinburgh Studies in Ancient Persia, that seeks to present the research of scholars of ancient Iran, from Elamite to Sasanian, and increase the available data upon which further research will be built. The volume reviewed here is a publication with an enormous amount of data that is of great value, and more studies like this need to be carried out (and are being carried out) on all the administrative regions of the Sasanian empire to help us more fully comprehend the lived experience during the rule of the dynasty, the last pre-Islamic power to govern Eranshahr.[2] There are excellent maps (although some with very small text making them almost unreadable but perhaps in an e-book edition would be more accessible) and tables of data provided in three appendices that include a site gazetteer (appendix 1 and 2) and catalogue of the ceramics from the case studies (discussed in chapter 5 and presented in appendix 3). This presentation of the archaeological data will be extremely useful for researchers looking to develop further studies on the material of the central Zagros and to collate this regional study with results of other research. There are few errors and omissions, but it is worth noting that pp. 165-167 are blank.
To sum up, Hossein Habibi has presented us with an insightful, deeply researched study that is informative on a macro and micro level. The book contributes to an ever-increasing pool of data on the Sasanian period that is helping to add nuance to the larger and largely external historical narrative of the landscape and the humans who lived in it. For anyone who is interested in the study of Sasanian archaeology, the study provides a template for further and future analysis, and a local perspective of larger geo-political shifts in the late Sasanian Empire. The result is an important contribution to the knowledge and understanding of the Central Zagros itself and a methodological presentation of the ways in which we can approach the human geography of the Sasanian world.
Notes
[1] There is now a long bibliography but perhaps starting with Robert McC. Adams, Land Behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.
[2] There are landscape studies ongoing in many regions of the Sasanian world and published surveys reflecting work over the past 20 years, e.g., Dan Lawrence and Tony Wilkinson, ‘The Northern and Western Borderlands of the Sasanian Empire: Contextualizing the Roman/Byzantine and Sasanian Frontier’ in E. Sauer (ed.), Sasanian Persia: Between Rome and the Steppes of Eurasia, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 1-27; Jason Ur and Karim Alizadeh, ‘The Sasanian Colonization of the Mughan Steppe, Ardebil Province, Northwestern Iran’, Journal of Iranian Archaeology, 4, 2013: 98-110. Worth reading is the assessment by Joseph Wiesehöfer ‘The Iranian Period in the Near East: A Landscape Studies Approach’ in Annette Haug, Lutz Käppel, and Johannes Müller (eds), Past Landscapes: The Dynamics of Interaction between Society, Landscape and Culture, Leiden, Sidestone Press, 2018: pp. 277-290.