Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
the Parthian Empire was extremely decentralized, a zone of strong influence rather than of
outright control, which leaned heavily on art, architecture, and administrative practices in-
herited from the Greeks. As for the Iran of today, it is no secret that the clerical regime is
formidable, but demographic, economic, and political forces are equally dynamic, and key
segments of the population are restive.
The medieval record both cartographically and linguistically follows from the ancient
one, though in more subtle ways perhaps. In the eighth century the political locus of the
Arab world shifted eastward from Syria to Mesopotamia: that is, from the Umayyad caliphs
to the Abbasid ones. The Abbasid Caliphate at its zenith in the middle of the ninth century
ruled from Tunisia eastward to Pakistan, and from the Caucasus and Central Asia south-
ward to the Persian Gulf. Its capital was the new city of Baghdad, close upon the old Sas-
sanid Persian capital of Ctesiphon; and Persian bureaucratic practices, which added whole
new layers of hierarchy, undergirded this new imperium. The Abbasid Caliphate became
more a symbol of an Iranian despotism than of an Arab sheikhdom. Some historians have
labeled the Abbasid Caliphate the equivalent of the “cultural reconquest” of the Middle
practices just as the Umayyads, closer to Asia Minor, had succumbed to Byzantine ones.
“Persian titles, Persian wines and wives, Persian mistresses, Persian songs, as well as Per-
helped determine medieval Baghdad's monumental brick architecture and circular ground
plan.
“In the western imagination,” writes Peter Brown of Princeton, “the Islamic [Abbasid]
empire stands as the quintessence of an oriental power. Islam owed this crucial orientation
neither to Muhammad nor to the adaptable conquerors of the seventh century, but to the
massive resurgence of eastern, Persian traditions in the eighth and ninth centuries.” It
wasn't so much Charles Martel at Tours in 732 who “brought the Arab war machine to a
halt,” but the very foundation of Baghdad, which replaced the dynamism of Bedouin cav-
alry with that of an imperial and luxurious Persian administration.
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Not even the thirteenth-century Mongol conquest of Baghdad, which laid waste to Iraq,
and particularly to its irrigation system (as it did in Iran), a devastation from which Iraq
never completely recovered, could halt the vitality of Persian arts and letters. The poetry of
Rumi, Iraqi, Sa'adi, and Hafez all prospered in the wake of Hulagu Khan's assault, which
had reduced Mesopotamia to a malarial swamp. Nostalgic for their Sassanid ancestors, who
had ruled an empire greater than their Parthian predecessors and almost equal to that of the
Achaemenids, Persian artists and scholars embellished the intellectual and linguistic ter-
rain of a succession of non-Persian empires—Abbasid, Ghaznavid, Seljuk, Mongol, and
Mughal. Persian was the Mughal court language, as well as the diplomatic one for the Ot-
tomans. In the medieval centuries, the Persians may not have ruled directly from Bosporus-
