1. He had previously served as the bishop of the northern Mesopotamian town of Lashom: Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 474–81; History of Sabrisho, 289–301.
2. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 482–85; History of Sabrisho, 306; P. Wood 2013, 194–96. The term Iran always appears as a shorthand for the Iranian Empire, or Ērānšahr, a Middle Persian concept whose significance is discussed later in the introduction.
3. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 487–91.
4. Ibid., 489. For the experience of the court, see A. de Jong 2004a; Canepa 2009, 138–44; Azarnouche 2013a.
5. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 488.
6. Ibid., 489.
7. Becker 2009, 326. See Garsoïan 1984 on the parallel situation in Armenia.
8. Lukonin 1969, 27–50; Huff 2008.
9. Howard-Johnston 1995b, 180–97; Haldon 2010.
10. Pourshariati 2008, 37–59; Mosig-Walburg 2010a.
11. For a critique of the application of modern liberal concepts and ideals to Iranian political culture, see Becker 2014.
12. Gnoli 1980; 1989.
13. Daryaee 2005.
14. Canepa 2009, 59–68, 100–110; Overlaet 2013.
15. Macuch 1994; 2004, 188–95.
16. For a critical overview, see Mahé 2002.
17. See chapter 5.
18. Gruzinski 1999, 33–57; Stewart 1999. The terms syncretism and hybridity will be avoided for their positive connotations in contemporary liberal political discourse. The term mixture has the advantage of comparative neutrality in the present and, most important, of evocation of the cosmological language of Iranian discourse. It is thus best suited to capture the “tense, contradictory and unstable field of conflictual engagement, in which every signifier is a site of encounter, maneuver, advance, retreat and negotiation,” that is the subject of the best studies of syncretism (Lincoln 2001, 457).
19. Wiessner 1967a.
20. Labourt 1904: 98; Sachau 1916, 969–73; Fiey 1968; Fiey 1969a; Fiey 1971; Fiey 1973a; Fiey 1973b; Gyselen 2003, 163.
21. For the state of the Sasanian period in twentieth-century archaeological scholarship, see Hauser 2001a; Hauser 2001b; Whitcomb 2007.
22. Hauser 2007a, 95–96.
23. Simpson 2005; Gaibov and Koshelenko 2006, 143–53; Hauser 2007a, 96–104; Hauser 2008; Amen Ali 2008; Toral-Niehoff 2014, 180–83; al-Kaʻbi 2014. For archaeological evidence of Christian communities in Central Asia beyond the limits of Iran, see Semenov 1996, 57–68; Naymark 2001, 81–90.
24. Cassis 2002, 67–68, 76–78.
25. Ibid., 68; Hauser 2008, 40–42.
26. Steve 2003, 87–130; Carter 2008; Payne 2011b.
27. Bayly 1983, 141–42.
28. Harrak 2002.
29. Hunter 1995. For historical reconstructions of the earliest Christian communities, see Chaumont 1988; Koshelenko, Bader, and Gaibov 1995.
30. See chapter 2.
31. Hopkins 1998; Bagnall 2003, 278–85.
32. Labourt 1904, 87–99; E.K. Fowden 1999, 52–54.
33. Synodicon Orientale, 17/254; McDonough 2008b, 130. The contemporary Ethiopian negus was similarly represented in Constantinian terms as “victorious”: Bowersock 2010.
34. The contested nature of ecclesiastical structures is a leading theme of chapter 3.
35. The Christianization of the Roman imperial apparatus gave bishops a potentially destabilizing role in its operation: Drake 2000, 393–440.
36. Brock 1982, 15.
37. On the inappropriateness of the label Nestorian as a description of East Syrian doctrine and on the role of Nestorius in its articulation, see Brock 1985; Brock 1996; Pinggéra 2004; Seleznyov 2005, 35–58. Lange 2012, 490–516, provides a helpful overview of the development of East Syrian Dyophysite theology in the context of the sixth- and seventh-century Christological controversies.
38. Sachau 1907, 79; Selb 1981, 164–65.
39. Morony 1974; 1984, 364–72.
40. Brock 1982, 12; Frye 1988; Daryaee 2005, 127.
41. Russell 1987; Garsoïan 1996; Garsoïan 1997.
42. Hewsen 1997.
43. S.H. Rapp 2001; Martin-Hisard 2008; S.H. Rapp 2009.
44. Gafni 2003, 140–61; Elman 2007; Herman 2013. See also chapter 3 on the hazards of Zoroastrian feasts.
45. Herman 2005; Kiperwasser and Shapira 2008; Secunda 2014, 115–43.
46. Berger and Luckmann 1966, 65–109; Douglas 1986; Swidler 2001, 160–80.
47. Gignoux 1979; Shayegan 2003. For an overview of Middle Persian epigraphic and documentary texts, see Huyse 2009, 90–105.
48. Graus 1965, 60–61.
49. Wiessner 1967b, 9–10.
50. Peeters 1950; Brock 1994; Taylor 2002; Dickens 2009.
51. Asmussen 1984; Orsatti 2003; Panaino 2007; Sims-Williams 2009, 267–70; Dickens 2013.
52. Sims-Williams 2009, 271–87.
53. On the reorientation of research in Syriac hagiography, see Debié 2012, 28–39.
54. Patlagean 1968.
55. Concise accounts of martyrs and martyrologies likely already circulated in the fourth century: Brock 1978. For the influence of third- and fourth-century Syriac accounts from Edessa on early East Syrian literary production, see Rist 2009.
56. Baumstark 1922, 55–57; Peeters 1925; Wiessner 1967b, 10–20.
57. See chapter 1.
58. Hagiographers tended to obscure their identities out of humility: Krueger 2004, 3–9.
59. P. Brown 1971; P. Brown 1995, 59–65; P. Brown 1998; Cameron 1999; Castelli 2004, 25–28; Moss 2012, 8–18.
60. Graus 1965, 68–69; P. Brown 1983.
61. Sizgorich 2009.
62. Krueger 2004, 94–109.
63. Kreiner 2014, 16.
64. Fouracre 1990, 6–8. Bowersock 1995, 27–28, demonstrates the reliability of the historical details, if not the narratives, of some early accounts of Roman martyrs.
65. Selb 1981, 63–66.
66. Wickham 2005, 384–85.
67. Cantera 2004, 207–20; Elman 2010, 22–25; Secunda 2012.
68. Yarshater 1983; Shahbazi 1990; Daryaee 1995; Macuch 2009, 172–81.
69. Rubin 2005; Rubin 2008a; Rubin 2008b; Pourshariati 2010a; Pourshariati 2010b. Shayegan 2012, 109–55, shows how the discourses of royal inscriptions and Firdawsī’s version of the Xwadāy-nāmag overlap in significant ways.
70. Rubin 1995; Rubin 2004; Rubin 2007; Pourshariati 2008, 13–17; Howard-Johnston 2010b, 341–53.
71. Greenwood 2002, 330. See also Kreyenbroek 2013.
1. Grenet 1990; Gignoux 1991, 17–32; Huyse 1998.
2. Kerdir, Inscription at the Kaʻaba-ye Zardosht, 46/69–70 (modified translation). On the identity of these groups, see Blois 2002, 5–11. The Nazarenes and Christians are unlikely to have been distinct religious groups. The latter term is merely a polemical epithet for the former: C. Jullien and F. Jullien 2002b.
3. Asmussen 1962, 2–3; Chaumont 1988, 111–20; Schwaigert 1989, 42–44; Rist 1996, 26–29; Gignoux 2001b, 99–100; Stausberg 2002, 243; Bruns 2008, 85–91; Daryaee 2009, 77.
4. See Kalmin 2006, 127–29, for the lack of evidence for Jewish persecution in the third century.
5. A. de Jong 2004b, 51. For amiable early Sasanian relations with Christians, see Wiesehöfer 2007b, 167–68. Mani, unlike his Christian and Jewish counterparts, explicitly framed his religion in Iranian terms and worked to supplant Zoroastrianism in elite circles and even at the court: Hutter 1993. Manichaean communities were likely more robust in Iranian society throughout the Sasanian period than has been assumed, as the History of Karka d-Beit Slok and Its Martyrs, discussed in chapter 4, suggests. See also Lieu 1992, 106–11; Colditz 1992.
6. Mackenzie 1971, 51; Gignoux 1972, 26.
7. Boyce 1970, 331–36.
8. Wiesehöfer 1993, 380; Williams 1996, 38–41; Baum and Winkler 2000, 10; Rubin 2000, 650–51; Stausberg 2002, 239–41; A. de Jong 2004a, 347–48; Daryaee 2010a, 95–96; Wiesehöfer 2010, 132–33; McDonough 2011a, 303–5; Herman 2012, 39–49.
9. Some recent characterizations of Zoroastrians as intolerant and/or of kings of kings as variably tolerant and intolerant: Morony 1984, 332–33, 342; Wiesehöfer 1993, 377; Walker 2006, 109–12; Jany 2007, 360; McDonough 2011a, 291; Herman 2012, 42–49.
10. Garnsey 1984; P. Brown 1995, 29–54; Ando 2012. For a critique of tolerance that undermines its ethical as well as analytical value, see W. Brown 2008.
11. Nirenberg 1996, 227–30.
12. For the centrality of cosmogony in Zoroastrian political thought, see now the case studies of Lincoln 2012. Shaked 1994, 5–26, has a survey that restores religious and intellectual dynamism to Zoroastrian cosmogony in the Sasanian period. See chapter 2 for a critical consideration of the so-called Zurwanite cosmogony that is often supposed to have rivaled this account.
13. Shaked 1971, 70–72.
14. Kellens 2009, 41–43. The alternative, four-age schema appears to have been an innovation of the early Islamic period: Vevaina 2011, 245.
15. Bundahišn, 20–31.
16. Ibid., 46–53; Wizīdagīhā ī Zādspram, 34–39. If Ahreman worked through material creations, Zoroastrian scholars denied materiality to evil: Shaked 1967.
17. Bundahišn, 272–83.
18. MacKenzie 2002; Vevaina 2011, 254–55.
19. Bundahišn, 292–99; Dādestān ī Dēnīg, 40–42; Wizīdagīhā ī Zādspram, 56–61; Gnoli 1989, 144–48.
20. Dēnkard V, 32–34.
21. Dēnkard VII, 10–12.
22. Perikhanian 1983b, 9.
23. Shaked 2008, 106, 109; 2010a, 332.
24. The argument of Daryaee 2010a, 103–6, that Christians could become ēr, based on a Middle Persian inscription at Constantinople, downplayed its ninth-century date. Once Zoroastrianism lost its imperial foundations, its institutions, including its political vocabulary, were open to appropriation.
25. Dēnkard VI, 14–15, defines religion as “that which one always does” (dēn hān ī hamē kunēd).
26. Ibid., 100/101.
27. Dēnkard VII, 4–6.
28. For Mašyā and Mašyānē’s fall into sin, see Shaked 1987, 244–47; Choksy 2002, 52–55.
29. Shaked 1994, 39; Stausberg 2009, 232–33.
30. A. de Jong 2005, 203.
31. Bartholomae 1904, 44–45; Lankarany 1985, 62, 170–71. The term continued simultaneously to designate the psychopomp of individual souls: Gignoux 2001b, 12–16.
32. Boyce 1970, 326–28.
33. MacEvitt 2008, 21–25.
34. Ibid., 21, distinguishes tolerance as a practice from ideologically grounded means of including religious others.
35. Dēnkard III, 24/46, 29/51.
36. Forrest 2011, 44–82.
37. Choksy 1989; A. de Jong 1999; Choksy 2002, 58–64.
38. A. de Jong 1997, 432–44; Meytarchiyan 2001, 54–64.
39. Meytarchiyan 2001, 65–101; Huff 2004.
40. Huff 1989; Hauser 2007a, 105; Hauser 2008, 43–44.
41. Martyrdom of the Ten Martyrs, 187–88.
42. Simpson and Molleson 2014, 78.
43. Herman 2010, 37–52; Payne 2011a, 94. On the Christianization of burial practices more generally, see A. Schmidt 1994, 46–62.
44. Brody 1990, 58; Kalmin 2006, 138; Herman 2010, 52. See Shaked 1994, 41–42, for a critique of such views.
45. Forrest 2011, 54.
46. Ibid., 55.
47. Elman 2005, 16–17.
48. Widēwdād, 179/149; Elman 2005, 18.
49. Elman 2005, 18; Widēwdād, 180/149.
50. For an overview, see Boyce 1975a, with Gnoli 1980, 221–22, and Schilling 2008a, 99–109. Although images and statues were present in Zoroastrian shrines of the Achaemenian and Parthian periods, these do not appear to have played a central role in their cults: A. de Jong 1997, 350–52.
51. Mēnōg ī Xrad, 34–35/23–24.
52. Russell 1987, 123–24; A. de Jong 2006, 235–37.
53. Hazār Dādestān (MHD), 594; Boyce 1975a, 107.
54. History of Karka, 516.
55. The deities of Babylon, Borsippa, and elsewhere continued to be associated with the sites of their temples, even if these were no longer functioning: Müller-Kessler and Kessler 1999, 68–84.
56. History of Karka, 510.
57. Stavisky 1993–94; van Bladel 2011, 49–57.
58. Crone 2012a, 30–32, 36–37.
59. Martyrdom of Peroz, 256–57.
60. Molé 1960–61.
61. See, e.g., Dādestān ī Dēnīg, 42–43.
62. Sīrat Ānūširwān, 188–89/16–17.
63. Ibid., 191–92/18–19. See also Dēnkard III, 218–19/11; Grignaschi 1966, 32.
64. Al-Ṭabarī, Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, vol. 2, 894/149, vol. 2, 897/155; Ibn Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 182–83; Crone 1991, 23.
65. Letter of Tansar, 22/47.
66. Shaked 2010a, 332–33, 339.
67. Mēnōg ī Xrad, 64/56.
68. Ibid., 29/21.
69. Pursišnīhā, 68.
70. Ibid., 58.
71. Widēwdād, 100/97. See also Elman 2005, 18.
72. Kalmin 2006, 121–48.
73. See Brock 2008a, 78–81, for a list of surviving accounts.
74. Martyrdom of Aqebshma, 361–62.
75. Wiessner 1967b, 169–75; Gignoux 1983, 256.
76. Schwaigert 1988; Wiesehöfer 1993, 379; Walker 2012, 1000–1002. A recent survey regards the violence under Shapur II as “the bloodiest persecution of Christians in all of antiquity”: Hage 2007, 273. Similar views appear in recent popular syntheses: Baumer 2006, 68–71; Wilmshurst 2011, 14–17.
77. Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. “persecution.”
78. Labourt 1904, 43; Christensen 1944, 267–68; Fiey 1970a, 87–88; Boyce 1979, 119; Brock 1982, 7–10; Widengren 1984, 25; Schwaigert 1989, 120–14; Baum and Winkler 2000, 10–11; Stausberg 2002, 237; McDonough 2005, 246–51; Daryaee 2009, 77–78; Walker 2012, 1000. Asmussen 1962, 9–10, provides a dissenting view that has gone unappreciated, and Wiesehöfer 1993, 373–77, stresses internal political factors.
79. Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine, 466–71; Barnes 1985, 130–33; Frendo 2001; E.K. Fowden 2006, 389–90.
80. History of Simeon, 782–83/70.
81. Martyrdom of Baboi, 631–34. See also the nearly contemporaneous case of the scholar Narsai, who fled to Antioch after being accused of sedition: Barhadbeshabba Arbaya, Ecclesiastical History, 612–14.
82. Mosig-Walburg 2007, 174–76.
83. Wiessner 1967b, 178–98.
84. Ibid., 166–67.
85. Mosig-Walburg 2007, 178–82; Smith 2011, 265–73.
86. History of Simeon, 790–91/76.
87. Martyrdom of Simeon, 726–38/14–24; Smith 2011, 244–53. The Maccabees were also adopted as a literary model in fifth- and sixth-century Armenia: Thomson 1982, 137.
88. Christensen 1944, 234–36; Mosig-Walburg 2002. The political position of Shapur II was highly vulnerable: Pourshariati 2008, 56–57.
89. Schindel 2004, 219–39.
90. Metzler 1977, 219–33, 239–59; Pourshariati 2008, 38–43.
91. Whitcomb 1984; Gyselen and Gasche 1994, 26; Daryaee 1999b; Daryaee 2003b.
92. Schwaigert 1989, 22–33, 109.
93. Martyrdom of Pusai, 210.
94. Macuch 1987b, 177; Rubin 1995, 255–56.
95. History of Simeon, 793/78.
96. Smith 2011, 273–76.
97. Ishoyahb III of Adiabene, Correspondence, 268–69; Payne 2009, 400–401.
98. Schwaigert 1989, 135–36, 147.
99. History of Simeon, 779–82/68. For the date, see Stern 2004.
100. Seleucia-Ctesiphon: Martyrdom of Shahdost, 278–79; Martyrdom of Barbashmin, 296–97; Martyrdom of Azad, 253–54. Kashkar: Martyrdom of the Forty Martyrs, 337–39. Arbela: Martyrdom of Barhadbeshabba, 314; Martyrdom of 111 Men and Women, 291; Martyrdom of Zebina and Companions, 50; Martyrdom of Badai the Priest, 163; Martyrdom of John the Bishop and Jacob the Priest, 128; Martyrdom of Bishop Abraham, 130; Martyrdom of Jacob the Priest and Azad the Deacon, 137–38. Karka d-Beit Slok: History of Karka, 512–15; Martyrdom of Narsai and Joseph, 284. Khuzestan: Great Slaughter of Khuzestan, 246–47. The northern Mesopotamian hagiographical traditions—discussed further in chapter 4—are distinct from the Simeon cycle and lack their historically verifiable content: Wiessner 1967b, 276–88.
101. See Peeters 1925, 297–98, and Fiey 1964b, 203–8, for favorable opinions of the reliability of the northern Mesopotamian martyrologies. These collections would repay reconsideration.
102. Secular elites were comparatively rare among fourth-century martyrs and tended to be close associates of martyred bishops and priests: History of Simeon, 878–90/142–54; Martyrdom of Hnanya the Worldly, 131; Martyrdom of Pusai, 225–29. The last text is dependent on the Simeon cycle: Wiessner 1967b, 96–98. For the development of narratives of the two eunuchs both known as Guhishtazad, see Peeters 1910.
103. Griffith 1995, 229–34.
104. McDonough 2005, 284.
105. Garsoïan 1973–74; Sako 1986, 71–89; McDonough 2005, 273–84; McDonough 2008a.
106. For the development of anti-Zoroastrian polemics, see chapter 2.
107. Brock 1982, 5; Schrier 1992, 77–78; van Rompay 1995; Rist 1996, 32–33. Roman sources represent acts of violence against Christians in Iran as part of general persecutions for their own political purposes: Holum 1977, 155–56.
108. The Romans only gradually introduced religious rhetoric into the Iranian wars: Holum 1977, 162–67; Millar 2006, 68–76; Weisweiler 2009.
109. Grenet 2002; Howard-Johnston 2010a, 41–46; Payne 2014.
110. Martyrdom of Jacob the Notary; Labourt 1904, 113–17.
111. History of Karka, 521–27; McDonough 2006.
112. For the Armenian perception of the Central Asian frontier as a “distant foreign land,” see Ełiše, Vardan and the Armenian War, 9/63.
113. History of Karka, 518–19.
114. Garsoïan 2009a.
115. Christensen 1944, 272–73; Devos 1966, 219–20; van Rompay 1995, 365–67; F. Jullien 2011a; P. Wood 2013, 39–44.
116. Martyrdom of Mar Abda, 251, 252.
117. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Ecclesiastical History, 490–91; van Rompay 1995, 367.
118. Devos 1966, 218–19; van Rompay 1995, 367–68; P. Wood 2013, 44–46.
119. Martyrdom of Narsai, 172–73.
120. Ibid., 174.
121. Macuch 2004, 189–93.
122. Sizgorich 2009, 108–43; Lopez 2013, 102–26.
123. Kristensen 2009.
124. Ascetics acting independently of the state could nevertheless invoke its laws: Emmel 2008, 178–81.
125. Theodoret of Cyrrhus, Ecclesiastical History, 490–91; Gaddis 2005, 198.
126. The sole subsequent Sasanian narrative of the destruction of a fire temple, in the late sixth- or early seventh-century History of Mar Qardagh (67–68/53), projects the event into a distant, legendary past. Nathaniel of Shahrazur was the only historical East Syrian to destroy a fire temple in the early seventh century, a deed that earned him execution, like the abovementioned martyrs: Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 520. P. Wood 2012, 68, and P. Wood 2013, 48–50, importantly emphasize the opposition between the actions of the martyrs and the political interests of the catholicate. Herman 2014, 88–89, suggests that the author of the Martyrdom of Narsai sought to minimize the influence of Narsai’s actions.
127. Peeters 1910. Ascetics were supposedly executed for proselytism in fourth-century Fars: Martyrdom of Bar Shebya, 281.
128. Martyrdom of Shapur, 125–27; Martyrdom of the Ten Martyrs; Herman 2013, 122; van Rompay 1995, 369–70; Devos 1965, 312–14.
129. For a Roman perspective, see John of Ephesus’s account of those whom Simeon of Beit Arsham reportedly converted during the reign of Kawad I: Lives of the Eastern Saints, 140–41.
130. See Bruns 2008, 90, for a critical discussion.
131. Martyrdom of Peroz, 257–58; Martyrdom of Jacob the Sliced, 541–42.
132. For the pedagogical and ritual aspects of conversion, see Schwartz 2013, 17–25.
133. Martyrdom of Narsai, 171–72.
134. Mēnōg ī Xrad, 48/36.
135. History of Yazdpaneh, 414–15. Rabban Mar Saba, discussed later, also escaped prosecution and execution.
136. Hērbedestān, 62/63; Hazār Dādestān (MHD), 303/319.
137. East Syrian authors focused almost exclusively on cases of apostasy from the latter half of the fifth century onward: C. Jullien 2010, 282–84.
138. History of Yazdpaneh, 397–98; Martyrdom of Anastasios the Persian, 56–59; Babai the Great, History of George the Priest, 520–22. See the discussion of the latter two in chapter 5. The idea of voluntary martyrdom was well established in late Sasanian hagiography: History of Saba Pirgushnasp, 227–29.
139. History of Rabban Mar Saba, 636–39.
140. Ibid., 644–46.
141. History of Gregory the Commander, 350–51. Rayy was a stronghold of the Mihranids: Christensen 1944, 105.
142. Becker 2009, 305–8.
143. History of Gregory the Commander, 362.
144. Ibid., 367.
145. Martyrdom of Shirin, 113–14/17–18; Devos 1994, 6–15.
146. Martyrdom of Shirin, 119–21/22–23.
147. Babai the Great, Martyrdom of Christina, 206–7; Binder 2012, 18.
148. Ishoyahb III of Adiabene, History of Ishosabran, 510–11.
149. Ibid., 516.
150. See, e.g., History of Yazdpaneh, 414–15.
151. Brock 1982, 5.
152. Sīrat Ānūširwān, 191–92/18–19.
153. Wikander 1966; Sundermann 1976, 173.
154. Letter of Tansar, 16/41.
155. Ibid., 16–17/42; Jany 2007, 360.
156. Martyrdom of Pethion, Adurohrmazd, and Anahid, 563.
157. History of Gregory the Commander, 353–54.
158. Martyrdom of Shirin, 118/21.
159. Ishoyahb III of Adiabene, History of Ishosabran, 511–12.
160. For the date, see F. Jullien 2004, 172.
161. See, e.g., Kolesnikov 1970, 45, on the antiaristocratic violence during the reign of Ohrmazd IV (r. 579–90).
162. Christensen 1944, 313; MacMullen 1986.
1. Luschey 1996a.
2. Al-Muqaddasī, Aḥsan al-taqāsīm fī maʻrifat al-aqālīm, 353.
3. Markwart 1931, 70–71. For the continued veneration of the mountain into the Sasanian period, see Boyce 1991a, 91–99; for open-air liturgies, see Boyce 1975a, 94–95.
4. Azarpay 1982; Movassat 2005, 19–62, 136–43; Gall 1990.
5. For the identification of the temple at Kangavar with Anahid, see Lukonin 1977; Russell 1986. For its late Sasanian date, see Azarnoush 2009.
6. Gropp 1995, 159–61; Boyce 1967; Boyce 1975b, 464; Russell 1987, 164. On the development of the fire temple, see Choksy 2007, 251–62; Schippmann 1971, 499–514. Minov 2013, 255–57, suggests that the representation of paradise as a mountain encountered in the Syriac exegetical tradition was produced under the influence of Zoroastrian models.
7. Supplementary Texts to the Šāyast-nē-Šāyast, 79. See also Hōm Yašt, 83–85.
8. Martyrdom of Pethion, Adurohrmazd, and Anahid, 628.
9. For the route of the road, see Levine 1974, 100–101; Kleiss 1977. On its Achaemenian origins, see Graf 1994.
10. Frankfurter 2003, 364–67; Caseau 2001a; Caseau 2001b.
11. Gyselen 1989, 61.
12. Fiey 1995, 333–34; Devos 1965, 315.
13. For the place of fire temples in the landscape and their connections with aristocratic houses, see the case study of Huff 1995.
14. Sims-Williams 1985, 31–68.
15. On account of the author’s creativity, the text has been dismissed as “epic” rather than historical: Devos 1966, 221; Fiey 1970a, 92.
16. For the importance of Karka d-Beit Slok as a literary center, see chapter 4.
17. Cantera 2004, 11.
18. Martyrdom of Pethion, 584, 599; Ciancaglini 2008, 209, 148. Gippert 1993, 345–350, argues that such Iranian administrative terminology entered Georgian directly from Middle Persian, without Armenian intermediaries, suggesting that even in a comparatively distant province, encounters with imperial authority were conducted in Middle Persian.
19. For Syriac–Middle Persian bilingualism, see Ciancaglini 2008, 19–20; Gignoux 2011.
20. P. Brown 1995, 69.
21. Sachau 1916, 961–65; Chaumont 1988, 54–160. An archaeological survey in the region has revealed the concentration of settlement in urban centers that could have included captives like the counterparts of those in Khuzestan: Abdi 1999, 41.
22. Pigulevskaya 1963b, 125; Metzler 1977, 213–33; Morony 2004a; Canepa 2009, 27–28, 55.
23. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 1, pt. 1, 220–21; Chaumont 1988, 71–83.
24. Morony 2004a, 167–69.
25. Mosig-Walburg 2010b, 130–44.
26. Sachau 1916, 964; Peeters 1924; Schwaigert 1989, 19–23. The conquest of Antioch appears to have taken place in 253, not 260 as has usually been stated: Barnes 2009.
27. Guidi 1889, 407–14; Sachau 1916, 969–71; Wiessner 1967a.
28. Gyselen 2003, 163.
29. Schwaigert 1989, 45–102; Tubach 1997. See also chapter 3.
30. Martyrdom of Miles, 266–67.
31. Like the History of Simeon, on which its author depended, the text insists on Christian loyalty to the king of kings while recounting violence at his hands: Wiessner 1967b, 97.
32. Martyrdom of Pusai, 209. See also Mosig-Walburg 2010b, 150–53; C. Jullien 2011, 287–88. For the foundation and its economic functions, see Gyselen and Gasche 1994.
33. Lieu 1986, 484.
34. Smith 2011, 292–320.
35. Martyrdom of the Captives, 316–18.
36. Macuch 2010c, 199.
37. Gnoli 1989, 151.
38. Bogolyubov 1971; Blois 1990.
39. Martyrdom of Pethion, 560.
40. Widengren 1967a, 64–95; Bedrosian 1984.
41. For Christian nobles and notables in Beit Lapat, see Martyrdom of Peroz, 255, 257; Martyrdom of Badma, 347.
42. Martyrdom of the Captives, 324. See Fiey 1970c, 372–73, on the region and its Christian communities.
43. Martyrdom of Pethion, 562.
44. Gignoux 2001a; Gignoux 1998; Bruns 2009c. For a post-Sasanian East Syrian defense of ascetic specialization in medicine, see History of Mar Yonan, 473–75. The East Syrian monks of Turfan possessed a pharmacological treatise, composed in New Persian in Syriac script: Sims-Williams 2011, 361–67.
45. For the functions of these officials, see Gyselen 1989, 34–35; Macuch 1981, 15.
46. Martyrdom of Pethion, 617.
47. Williams 1996, 39; Gignoux 2001b, 100; Walker 2012, 1004. McDonough 2011a, 303, encapsulates the literature in speaking of “the inexorable spread of Christianity.”
48. Kreyenbroek 1985, 101–2, offers a discussion of the term kilīsyāg.
49. For an overview of the legal benefits that conversion brought, see Cantera 2010.
50. Hērbedestān, 62/63 (modified translation). See also Macuch 2005a, 94; Shaked 2008, 107.
51. Hērbedestān, 80/81 (modified translation). See also Secunda 2005; 2014, 47–50.
52. Such statements provide context for the efforts of the sixth-century court to restrict access to the hērbedestān: Rezania 2012, 486–87.
53. On Abarag as a fifth-century scholar, see Macuch 1993, 13; Elman 2010, 23–24. Xrad ī ahlawān involved the study of ritual power (nērang): Nērangestān, Fragard 2, 280–81.
54. Hērbedestān, 62/63 (modified translation). The reading of tarsāgīh is not without ambiguity but finds support in the subsequent reference to kilīsyā.
55. Ishodenah of Basra, Book of Chastity, 23/21. As there is no mention of schools in the History of Bar Shabba, about Merv’s legendary first bishop, of the fourth century, the Bar Shabba in question seems to have been the bishop who appeared at the Synod of 424: Brock 1995; Brock 2011; Synodicon Orientale, 43/285.
56. Husraw and the Youth, 51/64. See Azarnouche 2013b for the techniques of memorization and recitation in hērbedestān. The question of the frequency of literacy in Iranian society remains unexplored. But Weber 2010 presents materials for a study of the teaching of dibīrīh. Christian Arab elites in sixth-century al-H.īra were known to have acquired literacy in Middle Persian in Zoroastrian schools: Toral-Niehoff 2010, 332.
57. Elman 2006, 27.
58. Potter 1993; Bowersock 1995, 41–57; Buc 1997, 73–80.
59. Widengren 1956, 122–36.
60. Christensen 1944, 15–17; Blois 2003; Colditz 2005.
61. Menasce 1956, 424–26.
62. Macuch 1993, 346; Perikhanian 1983a, 634.
63. Zand ī Wahman Yasn, 138.
64. Pigulevskaya 1963b, 150; Macuch 1981, 79–84.
65. Wonders and Magnificence of Sistan, 261–63.
66. Chaumont 1974, 82–84.
67. Huff 1999, 27–28, considers the ancestral tombs of an unidentified “Dynastie lokaler Kleinfürsten” in the region in the late Parthian and the Sasanian period.
68. Kawami 1987, 160–62; Gall 1996. A Parthian inscription identifies the ruler: Gropp and Nadjmabadi 1970, 200–201.
69. Martyrdom of Pethion, 574–76.
70. See chapter 4.
71. Martyrdom of Pethion, 594.
72. Caseau 2001b, 43.
73. Markus 1994; Sotinel 2005, 420–21.
74. Martyrdom of Pethion, 598.
75. Ibid., 623–24.
76. Ibid., 627.
77. Ibid., 599–600.
78. Ibid., 602.
79. See C. Jullien and F. Jullien 2010 and F. Jullien 2013, 344–49, on the idea of ḥnana and its associated practices.
80. Macuch 2003; Moazami 2005.
81. Insects harmful to agriculture are a common theme in Christian hagiography: P. Brown 1995, 61. Egyptian saints similarly demonstrated their prowess over animals traditionally regarded as demonic, such as crocodiles: Frankfurter 2003, 372–74.
82. Martyrdom of Pethion, 601.
83. Ibid., 626–27.
84. Martyrdom of Miles, 275. See Brock 2008c, 185–86, for the disarmingly early date of the text and Sundermann 2002 for its influence.
85. Martyrdom of the Captives, 323–24.
86. For examples of cults of water and rainmaking in the Iranian highlands, especially at the recently excavated site of Čāle Ğār, see Overlaet 2011.
87. Walker 2004; Walker 2006, 166–72; Tubach 1998, 414–15; Bruns 2014.
88. Becker 2006b, 33.
89. After Nöldeke (1893) translated the relevant cosmological expositions, discussed later in this chapter, studies of Zurwanism continually interpreted them in this way.
90. Martyrdom of Pethion, 565.
91. Ibid., 589.
92. See Gignoux 1976, 106–8, and Gignoux 2005 on such compound names.
93. Martyrdom of Pethion, 588; Boyce 1967, 36.
94. Martyrdom of Pethion, 577. See also Nöldeke 1893, 35–36.
95. Martyrdom of Pethion, 592. See also Nöldeke 1893, 36.
96. Nyberg 1931, 87; 1937, 427.
97. Rezania 2010, 281–315.
98. Shaked 1992, 226–27.
99. Nyberg 1937, 424–34; Widengren 1965.
100. Christensen 1944, 435; Zaehner 1955; Boyce 1957b, 306–8; Morony 1984, 288–91; Hutter 1993, 10–12; Boyce 1996, 15–17; Blois 2000, 5–7; Stausberg 2002, 247. See Molé 1959, Frye 1959, and Menasce 1962 for early criticisms of this literature, which went largely unheeded.
101. Rezania 2010, 12–24, and A. de Jong 1997, 330–38, provide critical surveys.
102. Shaked 1992, 228.
103. See the response of Boyce 1996 to Shaked 1994.
104. A. de Jong 1997, 68; Boyarin 2007.
105. Eznik of Kołb, Treatise on God, 156–59; Mar Aba, Regulations of Marriage, 264–66/265–67. Chapter 3 considers the latter in greater detail.
106. Mariès 1924, 41–47; Nyberg 1929, 238–41; Asmussen 1962, 12.
107. Photios, Bibliotheca, 187. See also A. de Jong 1997, 337.
108. Becker 2006a.
109. Van Rompay 1984.
110. Shaked 1992, 235; Shaked 2008, 111; Rezania 2008.
111. The problem of time suffused Zoroastrian cosmological speculation in the Sasanian period: Rezania 2010, 105–48.
112. Sundermann 1979, 112; Hutter 1993, 10–11; Colditz 2005, 20.
113. Becker 2006b, 32–33. See Debié 2010a, 338–41, for the theme elsewhere in East Syrian hagiography.
114. Assmann 2008, 53–75, 83–86.
115. Skjærvø 2007.
116. Nau 1927, 184–90, argues on the basis of the Martyrdom of Pethion’s references to the Avesta that there was no written version in the fifth century. For its redaction in the sixth, see Cantera 2004, 135–62; Huyse 2008, 145–46.
117. Martyrdom of Pethion, 572.
118. Bailey 1943, 39–40.
119. Martyrdom of Pethion, 577.
120. Ibid., 580.
121. The frog too was a xrafstar allied with Ahreman: Bundahišn, 184–85.
122. Martyrdom of Pethion, 578–79; Nöldeke 1893, 36–37.
123. Menasce 1937–39, 591.
124. Bundahišn, 70–81.
125. Shaked 2004, 339. See also Menasce 1962, 184, on Kerdir’s anxieties about the possibility of worshiping demons.
126. Nērangestān, Fragard 2, 230–31.
127. Dēnkard III, 297/283.
128. Ardā Wirāz Nāmag, 78. See also Shaked 1999.
129. For the role of such spiritual journeys in Zoroastrian thought and literature, see Gignoux 2001b, 65–68.
130. Forrest 2011, 55–60. See Lincoln 2009, 53–54, for the intellectual anxieties of the scholars who worked to reconcile evil forces lacking in existence with such irruptions in the material world.
131. MacMullen 1986.
132. Gobrecht 1967, 397–403; Perikhanian 1979; Macuch 1993, 133–36.
133. Macuch 1987a; Cantera 2004, 120–22.
134. Ardā Wirāz Nāmag, 79.
135. Dēnkard V, 70–71.
136. Dēnkard VII, 62–63.
137. C. Jullien 2004 provides a useful overview of the modalities of torture in East Syrian martyrs’ accounts without considering their dependence on Roman hagiographical models.
138. Shaw 1996.
139. For the penitential and punitive functions of beating with the srōščaranām, “belt of obedience,” see Nērangestān, Fragard 2, 52–53, 54–57, 234–35; Widēwdād, 112–26/107–13. For punishment in Iranian law more generally, see Jany 2007.
140. Martyrdom of Dado, 220–21; Martyrdom of Gubralaha, 154; Gignoux 2000.
141. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 1, pt. 2, 164–66.
142. Martyrdom of Pethion, 613.
143. Ibid., 614–15.
144. Ibid., 616.
145. Dēnkard III, 399/372–73; Bailey 1934, 282–83.
146. Boyce 1991b, 284; MacKenzie 1971, 58.
147. Ātaxš Niyāyišn, 106–9. For the role of this hymn in the Yasna, see Kotwal and Boyd 1991, 119.
148. Martyrdom of Pethion, 617–18.
149. Ibid., 613.
150. Fiey 1970c, 374, mistakenly locates the river farther north, in the vicinity of modern Sanandaj, too far from the royal road that the text describes.
151. Ardā Wirāz Nāmag, 85.
152. Buc 1997, 92, argues that the discrediting of social and political rituals was a basic function of hagiographical polemics, a project that could involve the subordination of the transcended ritual: “Les auteurs et les metteurs en scène tenteront de satelliser le ritual de l’autre, de lui imposer une place subordonnée dans leur propre rituel, ou de faire comprendre qu’il n’est intelligible que dans un cadre qu’ils définissent grâce à leur maîtrise de l’interprétation.” Land-sustaining rights here become “satellites” of a Christian imaginary.
153. On the possibility of cross-pollination in the realm of ideas, see Asmussen 1968, 170–77; Asmussen 1975; Sundermann 2008.
154. See Huff 1995, 73, for an illustration.
155. Martyrdom of Pethion, 571, 574.
1. Labourt 1904, 178–80; Peeters 1951, 137; Williams 1996, 50–51; Rist 1996, 38–39; Panaino 2004, 817; Bruns 2008, 107. Mar Aba is, moreover, commonly included in the ranks of the East Syrian martyrs, even though he perished of natural causes in the custody of the court: Brock 1982, 5–6; 2008a, 83.
2. The charges of conversion and proselytism were juxtaposed to other accusations: History of Mar Aba, 228–29, 237–38.
3. Ibid., 233–34.
4. Ibid., 235–36.
5. Ibid., 228–29.
6. By contrast, Hutter 2003, 171–72, views the regulation of these practices as evidence for a “Zoroastrianized Christianity,” without considering their social and political dimensions. Elsewhere these practices appear primarily as markers of identity: Walker 2012, 1004–5; P. Wood 2013, 94.
7. History of Mar Aba, 224–25.
8. Gutas 1998, 40–45; Hartmann 2007; van Bladel 2009, 27–57.
9. Peeters 1951, 125–33; Pigulevskaya 1979, 207.
10. History of Mar Aba, 217–18; Pigulevskaya 1948. Kosmas Indicopleustes famously identified the scholar as his teacher: Kominko 2013, 16–17.
11. History of Mar Aba, 210–11, 215–16.
12. Peeters 1951, 121. See chapter 4 for administrative developments.
13. Reinink 1995; Becker 2006b, 77–97. For a survey of the development of East Syrian asceticism, see Griffith 1995. Husraw I endowed a xenodocheion in Nisibis, a possible site of medical study in connection with the School of Nisibis: Reinink 2003, 165–67.
14. Weitz 2013, 38–46. On the reception and diffusion of Theodore’s works, see Becker 2006a; 2006b, 117–18.
15. Becker 2006b, 36–37; History of Mar Aba, 211–14.
16. Morony 1984, 340–41. For ascetic training as an increasingly common prerequisite for spiritual leadership, see C. Rapp 2005, 100–152.
17. Fiey 1965, 55–62; Bettiolo 2007; Camplani 2007.
18. Barhadbeshabba Arbaya, Ecclesiastical History, 605–8; Gero 1981a, 60–67.
19. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 1, 148–49; Labourt 1904, 160–62.
20. Synodicon Orientale, 70.
21. On the East Syrian theologies that underpinned ideas of ecclesiastical unity, see Vries 1955, 39–67, 122–35, 144–49, 151–53; Tamcke 1988, 31–37.
22. Blum 1980.
23. Synodicon Orientale, 20, 23, 26–27.
24. Fiey 1967a; Abramowski 2011, 18–31.
25. Martyrdom of Miles, 266–68.
26. Schwaigert 1989, 45–102; Schwaigert 1990; Sundermann 2002.
27. Gero 1981a, 74–76.
28. Sachau 1916, 969–75; Tubach 1997; C. Jullien and F. Jullien 1999; C. Jullien and F. Jullien 2003, 102–6; C. Jullien 2006; P. Wood 2010, 110–17.
29. Chronicle of Arbela, 43/65. The work is here cited as a medieval compendium of ecclesiastical traditions, not as a modern forgery. See the discussion in C. Jullien and F. Jullien 2001.
30. History of Karka d-Beit Slok and Its Martyrs, 512–13.
31. Synodicon Orientale, 69–70/320. This was possibly an evocation of a legend that Cyrus had foreseen the birth of Christ: Schilling 2008a, 184–86. Rabbis contemporary with Mar Aba, on the other hand, took a negative view of the Achaemenian: Mokhtarian 2010.
32. Synodicon Orientale, 70–73/321–24. The catholicos was unable to secure the obedience of Nisibis, however, on account of the city’s opposition: Synodicon Orientale, 93/349; Delly 1957.
33. Synodicon Orientale, 77/329.
34. Synodicon Orientale, 81/334, 86/340, 94/350, 540/551; Peeters 1951, 138.
35. History of Mar Aba, 227.
36. Ibid., 228–34.
37. Peeters 1951, 145–59. Azerbaijan was a major center of imperial administration: Ghodrat-Dizaji 2010, 88.
38. His activities in exile included the production of texts and consultation with ecclesiastical leaders visiting from sees throughout the empire: History of Mar Aba, 247–48; Peeters 1951, 147. Athanasius of Alexandria had a similarly prodigious literary output during his third exile in the Egyptian desert: Brakke 1995, 129–40.
39. Synodicon Orientale, 527/533–34; Gero 1981a, 51–52.
40. Mar Aba tended to respect a distinction between canons (qanone) and laws (namose), using the former term only for decisions made at synods, but he also eroded the distinction by referring to all principles and decisions to which Christians should adhere as “laws.” For the use of canon to refer to a synodal decision, especially from the fifth century onward, and the abiding confusion of kanon and nomos, see Ohme 1998, 380–83, 539–42.
41. On the introduction of Western—including some Chalcedonian—canons, see Pigulevskaya 1979, 206; Selb 1981, 104–5.
42. Garsoïan 1998, 1104.
43. Gero 1981b, 25; C. Jullien and F. Jullien 2002b.
44. Synodicon Orientale, 82.
45. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 1, 99, 148–49, 157. See also Selb 1981, 148, and Morony 1984, 341–42, neither of which discusses the riš d-mhaimane.
46. Chronicle of Khuzestan, 21; Ishoyahb III of Adiabene, History of Ishosabran, 577. Gignoux 1999, 85, argues that the term designates Yazdin’s role as a tax collector for all Christians, but there is no evidence that Sasanian taxation was levied according to religious affiliation: Goodblatt 1979.
47. Ishoyahb III of Adiabene, Correspondence, 98–100.
48. Synodicon Orientale, 82/334–35.
49. Martyrdom of Barbashmin, 297. The catholicos Aqaq was related to his predecessor, Babowai: Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 1, 112.
50. Even in the Roman world, where ecclesiastical offices were not normally familial institutions, the appointment of bishops for life exacerbated interelite tensions: Van Dam 2003, 59–63.
51. It has long been argued, most recently in Erhart 2001, 118–19, that the marriage of bishops was a concession to Zoroastrian norms. But the practice was instead rooted in East Syrian tradition: Gero 1981a, 45–47; Gero 1983; Bruns 2005. Some East Syrian leaders argued that episcopal wives could assist in the practice of pastoral care: Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 1, 137.
52. Synodicon Orientale, 56–59/303–6, 63/312.
53. Payne 2011a, 97–102.
54. Synodicon Orientale, 543–44/554. See Selb 1981, 122–24, on Mar Aba’s arrangement and on the different solutions developed by the synods of Joseph and Ishoyahb I later in the sixth century.
55. Synodicon Orientale, 79–80/331–32. For the Syrian qarugbed/Middle Persian kirrōgbed as “master of the artisans,” see Pigulevskaya 1963b, 161; Ciancaglini 2008, 251.
56. Synodicon Orientale, 82.
57. Sachau 1907; Perikhanian 1983b, 265; Müller 1975; Morony 1974; Erhart 2001. Early articulations of this view depend on the so-called Syro-Roman law book, now known to have entered East Syrian communities only in the eighth century: Selb and Kaufhold 2002. For the possible influence of Roman law on East Syrians, see Monnickendam 2012.
58. History of Mar Aba, 234. For the term bōxtnāmag, see Shaked 1975, 216–17.
59. Perikhanian 1979, 192. The costs of justice prevented most Romans from procuring the services of their courts: Kelly 2004, 138–45.
60. Herman 2012, 202–4. Even in formulating specifically Jewish laws, the rabbis imagined that Shapur I had sanctioned their legal authority: Mokhtarian 2012, 165–66.
61. Kerdir, Inscription at the Kaʻaba-ye Zardosht, 46–47/68–69.
62. Shaked 1990. For the Hazār Dādestān as a historical source, see Macuch 2009, 185–90; Corcoran 2011. On later continuities of the titles and powers enjoyed by Kerdir, see Gignoux 1986.
63. Macuch 2005b; Jany 2006.
64. Macuch 1981, 5, 150–51.
65. Perikhanian 1983b, 9–10.
66. Hazār Dādestān (MHD), 409/415. See also Macuch 2010c, 202–3.
67. Macuch 1999; Macuch 2002; Elman 2003; Macuch 2008; Macuch 2010a; Simonsohn 2011, 44–52; Secunda 2014, 90–100.
68. Payne 2015.
69. Pigulevskaya 1958a; Menasce 1985; Macuch 1999. For the bishop in his early Abbasid context, see Weitz 2013, 73–79.
70. Hazār Dādestān (MHDA), 51/190.
71. History of Mar Aba, 232.
72. Synodicon Orientale, 83/336, 84/336, 549–50/561.
73. Armenian Book of Canons, 444–46; Mardirossian 2004, 234–45.
74. History of Sabrisho, 300–301; Simonsohn 2009, 196–98. For the development of the East Syrian judge, see Kaufhold 1984.
75. Lamoreaux 1995, 150–56.
76. Gagos and van Minnen 1994; Harries 2003; Humfress 2014.
77. Simonsohn 2009, 194–96; Humfress 2011.
78. Synodicon Orientale, 220/485, 623/624; Simonsohn 2009, 200–203.
79. Synodicon Orientale, 82–85/335–37, 549–50/561.
80. Ibid., 623–24; Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 1, 100.
81. Macuch 1991; 2010b.
82. See Hübner 2007 for the rarity of actual incest—as opposed to marriages of fictive kin—in ancient Mediterranean societies.
83. Goody 1983, 204–5. Goody oversimplified a complex process, in which worldly Christians often accepted and even advocated restrictions on the range of permissible marriages, as M. de Jong 1989 shows.
84. The Israelites of the Pentateuch are prominent in the writings of Thomas of Edessa, a close associate of Mar Aba at the School of Nisibis: Hainthaler 2006, 83.
85. The treatise explicitly identifies the Canaanites with the “Persians”: Mar Aba, Regulations of Marriage, 262/263. Because of Mar Aba’s exegetical method, there is little continuity between his work and the Didascalia, which uses the Pentateuch to counter the Christian observance of Mosaic law: van Unnik 1983; Visotzky 1990; Fonrobert 2001. For the use of the Pentateuch as a source of Christian law in the early medieval West, see Kottje 1965.
86. Mar Aba, Regulations of Marriage, 258/259.
87. Martyrdom of Simeon, 738/26; History of Simeon, 818/94.
88. Such Levitical modeling was also used to augment ecclesiastical power in post-Sasanian Armenian and East Syrian communities: Mardirossian 2004, 255–68; Payne 2009, 401–2.
89. Silk 2008.
90. The Pentateuch was also a common source for sexual slander in late antiquity: Knust 2006, 58–59.
91. Mar Aba, Regulations of Marriage, 264–66/265–67.
92. Macuch 1991, 151; Panaino 2008, 74–76.
93. Pahlavi Rivāyat Accompanying the Dādestān ī Dēnīg, 51/11; Skjærvø 2004; König 2010, 284–353.
94. Mar Aba, Regulations of Marriage, 280–82/281–83. A text that emerged from the milieu of late Sasanian ascetic bishops considers Arabs “a barbarian people” (gensa barbaraya): History of Sabrisho, 321. Zoroastrians frequently represented Arabs, Huns, and Turks as Ahremanic, inferior humans: Lincoln 2010; Cereti 2010. For more on nomads and Arabs in Syriac texts, see Segal 1984; Bruns 2003, 61–62; Pietruschka 2009.
95. Mar Aba, Regulations of Marriage, 280–82/281–83; Crone 2012, 400–405b. The Iranian historiographical tradition represents polyandry as sodomy: al-Ṭabarī, Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, 873/110.
96. Macuch 1985; 2006a.
97. Macuch 2006b.
98. On Iranian patriliny, see Perikhanian 1968a; 1983a.
99. Hopkins 1983, 31–119; Scheidel 1999; Hübner and Ratzan 2009. These general demographic constraints—rather than a late Sasanian demographic crisis, as Elman 2003 argues—formed the background for the development of stūrīh.
100. Macuch 1981, 7–10; Carlsen 1984; Macuch 1993, 74–76, 345–46; Hjerrild 2003, 15–18; Hjerrild 2006; Hjerrild 2007.
101. Macuch 1995.
102. Synodicon Orientale, 82/335; Ishobokht, Book of Judgments, 36–37.
103. Weisberg 2000; Satlow 2001, 188.
104. Mar Aba, Regulations of Marriage, 278/279.
105. Ibid., 274/275.
106. Payne 2015.
107. Ishobokht, Book of Judgments, 8.
108. On post-Sasanian East Syrian judges, see Rücker 1908, 7–21; Selb 1981, 176–77; Tamcke 2008; Payne 2009; Ioan 2009, 32–34, 83–86.
109. For partible inheritance practices that militated against the development of patrimonies in Roman society, see Saller 1994, 155–80; Hopkins 1983, 74–78; Arjava 1996, 70–75.
110. Simeon of Revardashir, Ecclesiastical Judgments, 245.
111. Henanisho, Judgments, 18.
112. Klingenschmitt 1967; Perikhanian 1968b; Macuch 1981, 85–86.
113. Henanisho, Judgments, 48–50/49–51; Simeon of Revardashir, Ecclesiastical Judgments, 247/246. The possibility of granting daughters inheritances equivalent to those of sons did exist in Iranian law: Hazār Dādestān (MHD), 311–12/327–28.
114. Ishobokht, Book of Judgments, 94.
115. Ishoyahb III of Adiabene, Correspondence, 153–54.
116. Simeon of Revardashir, Ecclesiastical Judgments, 235.
117. Ibid., 235, 247.
118. Ishobokht, Book of Judgments, 100.
119. Timothy, Correspondence, 50, 68–69, 79, 105.
120. History of Rabban Mar Saba, 644; Ishoyahb III of Adiabene, History of Ishosabran, 516.
121. Henanisho, Judgments, 34–38.
122. History of Mar Aba, 229. See also Hutter 2003, 170.
123. History of Mar Aba, 238.
124. Ełiše, Vardan and the Armenian War, 20/73–74; History of Rabban Mar Saba, 644.
125. Boyce and Kotwal 1971.
126. Gignoux 1994, 20–30; A. de Jong 1997, 357–62; A. de Jong 2002; Daryaee 2012.
127. Dēnkard V, 94–97.
128. Hōm Yašt, 110.
129. Shaked 1991.
130. Inostrancev 1909; A. de Jong 1997, 371–86. For the role of the court in establishing a calendar of feasts, see Boyce 1970; 2005.
131. Synodicon Orientale, 158/417–48.
132. See Becker 2009, 324–25, for its participation in the discourse of fear, deḥlta, as a way of conceiving true religion in contrast to rivals, prominent in the writings of Mar Aba’s circle.
133. Taqizadeh 1940, 633–37.
134. Sūr ī Saxwan, 27–49.
135. Daryaee 2007.
136. Morony 1976, 53; Canepa 2009, 11–15.
137. History of Gregory the Commander, 354–55.
138. Martyrdom of Yazdbozid, 125.
139. Martyrdom of Eustathius of Mtskheta, 876–77. See Martin-Hisard 1998 for its context.
140. History of Gregory, 355.
141. Shaked 2010b; Herman 2012, 239–57.
142. History of Mar Aba, 234. Mar Aba’s advocate, Abrodaq, was widely celebrated in reformist circles for his patronage of ecclesiastical institutions: History of Yazdpaneh, 410–11; Payne 2011a, 104–5.
143. Ishoyahb III of Adiabene, Correspondence, 225–28; Payne 2009, 407–8. For the Israelites more generally as the model of righteous community in Syriac literature, see Morony 2005, 6.
144. Brock 2008b.
145. Gabriel of Basra, Collection of Laws, 177/176.
146. History of Mar Aba, 263–64; Firdawsī, Šāhnāme, vol. 7, 148–57; al-Dīnawarī, Kitāb al-akhbār al-t.iwāl, 69–70; Peeters 1951, 157–59; Pigulevskaya 1979, 206; Bonner 2012, 50–55; P. Wood 2013, 113–14.
147. Pigulevskaya 1963b, 221–28.
148. Rubin 2004.
149. Bonner 2012, 55. See chapter 5 for legendary accounts of the Christianization of the Sasanian dynasty.
150. Firdawsī, Šāhnāme, vol. 7, 155.
151. Ibid., 152–53.
1. For a contemporaneous description of the commemoration, see Martyrdom of Shirin, 123–24. The shrine was in a monastery constructed in the late fifth century: History of Karka d-Beit Slok and Its Martyrs, 530–31. A tenth-century reconstruction of the shrine complex survived until its destruction during the First World War: Bell 1913, 100–103; Bachmann 1913, 18; Monneret de Villard 1940, 27.
2. History of Karka, 514.
3. Ibid., 532.
4. Walker 2006, 249–59; 2006–7.
5. Wiessner 1971; Walker 2006, 121–63, quote on 149. See also Bruns 2009a.
6. Synodicon Orientale, 106–7.
7. History of Karka, 531; Fiey 1964b, 216–18.
8. Walker 2006, 277–78.
9. Fiey 1964b, 219–22. On account of its mixing of myths, martyrology, and history, Peeters 1925 regards the History of Karka as the work of “un faussaire ou un compilateur peu scrupuleux” (270). A recent attempt to categorize the work as historiography rather than hagiography downplays the themes, conventions, and structures derived from the latter genre that pervade the text: Debié 2010c, 60–61. Van Uytfanghe 1993 and Lifshitz 1994 enjoin historians not to allow modern literary classifications to pigeonhole highly creative hagiographers. On account of its chronological distance from the late Sasanian texts, the medieval Chronicle of Arbela is not considered here, although it exhibits features similar to those of the History of Karka: C. Jullien and F. Jullien 2001, with Walker 2006, 287–90.
10. For the episcopal archive at Karka d-Beit Slok, see History of Karka, 531. Episcopal diptychs were fundamental sources of ecclesiastical history: Wiessner 1967b, 240–56; Menze 2008, 26–86. According to Gabriel of Basra, Collection of Laws, 233/232, the diptychs of both the living and the dead are to be recited at feasts but only those of the living on Sundays.
11. Walker 2004; 2006, 164–205.
12. Peeters 1950, 49–70.
13. Greatrex and Lieu 2002, 62–181; Gyselen 2003.
14. Kister 1968; Braund 1994, 268–314; Morony 2001–2; Rubin 2007.
15. Thomson 2000, 673; Garsoïan 2009b, 72–76.
16. Thomson 2004, 376–78; Garsoïan 2009a, 81–83.
17. Toral-Niehoff 2010; 2014, 68–74. For more on the political history of the Lakhmids, the Arab tribe whose capital was al-H.īra, see Fisher 2011, 91–95, 184–86.
18. Hunter 2008; Toral-Niehoff 2014, 183–94; P. Wood 2014.
19. Book of the Himyarites, 14/cix–cx.
20. Rothstein 1899, 20–27, 139–43; Pigulevskaya 1964, 274–83; Toral-Niehoff 2014, 199–208.
21. Payne 2013.
22. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 458; Christensen 1944, 451; Fiey 1968, 23–38; Pigulevskaya 1979, 211–12; Flusin 1992, 246–54. The sources disagree on the extent of his authority.
23. Thomas of Marga, Book of Governors, vol. 1, 63–64/vol. 2, 112–16.
24. Gyselen 2007, 9–15.
25. Lerner 1977, 8–30; Shaked 1977, 18–24; Gignoux 1980; Gyselen 2006, 30–39; Hauser 2008, 46–49.
26. Gyselen 2006, 40.
27. Ibid., 39–40; Gyselen 2007, 78–79.
28. Gyselen 2007, 40–41; 2009, 169–70.
29. On animals such as the ram, a manifestation of xwarrah, as political symbols, see Simpson 2013.
30. Gyselen 2006, 29–30, 54–55. For the possibility of reading yazdān as a singular, see Shaked 1977, 21.
31. Lukonin 1969, 37. Ardashir, the brother of Shapur II, ruled Adiabene as a subkingdom, the way that Armenia and a handful of other regions were ruled: Martyrdom of the Forty Martyrs, 333. The royal house of Adiabene plays an important role in the Babylonian Talmud with no connection to the contemporaneous history of the region: Kalmin 2010.
32. See Chaumont 1982, 173, and Reade 1998, 71–72, on the decline of Greek in the region.
33. Beyer 1998, 11–25. See also chapter 1 on the Great Persecution.
34. Morony 1976, 41.
35. History of Saba Pirgushnasp, 224; al-Ṭabarī, Taʼrīkh al-rusul waʼl-mulūk, vol. 1, 62–63; al-Dīnawarī, Kitāb al-akhbār al-t.iwāl, 50–51.
36. See later in the chapter and Babai the Great, Martyrdom of Christina, 207, for the genealogies of nobles at Karka d-Beit Slok who emphasized their origins in Fars.
37. For the military administration, see Kolesnikov 1981; Gignoux 1984b; Gyselen 2004.
38. See Morony 1984, 181–213, for an unsurpassed survey of the evidence of “Persians” in northern Mesopotamia that nevertheless treats Iranian elites as a virtually autonomous “ruling minority.”
39. Kennedy 2006, 11–14; 2011, 54–58.
40. Pigulevskaya 1958b; Banaji 2009, 78–86.
41. Colditz 2000, 123–34; Macuch 2002.
42. History of Karka, 516; Thomas of Marga, Book of Governors, vol. 1, 79/vol. 2, 177; Pigulevskaya 1963b, 139.
43. History of Karka, 516.
44. History of Saba Pirgushnasp, 224.
45. Kröger 1982, 187–88.
46. History of Sultan Mahduk, 3.
47. Ishodad of Merv, Commentary on the Old Testament, 157; Synodicon Orientale, 247/518.
48. Such private cults were common among late Roman elites, who were often at the vanguard of Christianization and thus in a sometimes uneasy relationship with their bishops: Bowes 2008. For East Syrian elites as the organizers of cults, see Payne 2011a, 102–8.
49. Bosl 1965; Prinz 1967; Noble 2007.
50. Pratsch 2005, 56.
51. The text has nevertheless generally been regarded as historically reliable: Pigulevskaya 1963b, 39–45; Fiey 1964b, 191–94; Chaumont 1982, 160–61; Chaumont 1988, 97–99.
52. See Harrak 2001 on accounts of Sennacherib in Syriac.
53. For the commemoration of this fast at Karka, see Krüger 1933, 32–38.
54. History of Karka, 510.
55. Ibid.
56. Pigulevskaya 1963b, 44–45.
57. History of Karka, 509.
58. Ibid., 510.
59. Ibid., 511. Seleucus is commonly encountered as a personal name in Iranian inscriptions: Bivar 1990; Frye 1966, 85–87.
60. History of Mar Qardagh, 13/20.
61. History of Karka, 517. This reference suggests that Manichaeism endured beyond the fourth century, which is when scholars typically argue the religion disappeared from Iran: Hutter 2000. The anti-Manichaean polemics of the History of Mar Mari also point to its continued importance in sixth-century Mesopotamia: C. Jullien and F. Jullien 2003, 73–102.
62. Ishodenah of Basra, Book of Chastity, 26–27/24.
63. Martyrdom of Shapur of Beit Niqator, 55; Martyrdom of Jacob; Martyrdom of Aqebshma, 380; History of Karka, 515.
64. History of Karka, 521–27.
65. History of Mar Qardagh, 100–102/67–68.
66. History of Karka, 526–27.
67. C. Jullien and F. Jullien 2002a, 164, dates the arrival of Theocritus, Karka’s first bishop, to the 180s, identifying him with a known bishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia.
68. History of Karka, 515–16. The text gives the position of Aqeblaha’s father as redya d-bazdai, a corrupted and indecipherable rendition of a Middle Persian title. See Gignoux, Jullien, and Jullien 2009, 85, for the name of the house.
69. History of Karka, 513.
70. Ibid., 515–16.
71. Ibid., 518. See also Pigulevskaya 1963b, 184–85; Bruns 2009c, 51–56. For the diffusion of xenodocheia, see Horden 2005; see also ch. 3, n. 13.
72. History of Mar Qardagh, 62–68/51–53.
73. Börm 2007, 115–32; Gyselen 2008; Pourshariati 2008, 83–160; Gyselen 2009, 173–78.
74. See, most recently, Rubin 2000; Pourshariati 2008.
75. Gyselen 2007, 11–13, 51–52.
76. Gyselen 2002.
77. The skepticism of Rubin 1995 and Rubin 2000, 657, concerning the efficacy of these reforms downplays the combined numismatic, sigillographic, and literary evidence for fiscal intensification: Kolesnikov 1998a, 234–47; Banaji 2006, 274–76.
78. For Rubin 2004, 252, the late Sasanian administrative reforms faltered on account of a failure to create a service aristocracy, while Wiesehöfer 2007a, 71, and Wiesehöfer 2010, 122–23, argue that they depended on a newly created Dienstadel. Börm 2010 helpfully suggests that such a new elite could have coexisted with a well-established, economically autonomous nobility on the basis of a comparison with the later Roman Empire.
79. Howard-Johnston 1995b, 220.
80. Zakeri 1995, 22–31; Colditz 2000, 66–75.
81. Wiessner 1967b, 173–78; Blois 1985.
82. Tafazzoli 2000 and Wiesehöfer 2010, 122, argue for the emergence of the dahigān in the sixth century.
83. For the aristocracies of the Caucasus, see Toumanoff 1963, 108–44.
84. Nöldeke 1920, 8.
85. Christensen 1931; Yarshater 1983; Daryaee 1995. See also chapter 1. Kayanian mythical history was first propagated in the context of Iran’s fifth-century wars with the Huns: Payne 2014.
86. Yarshater 1983.
87. Yarshater 1971; Huyse 2002; Canepa 2010. It is not accidental that Alexander the Great’s rival Darius III was the only member of the dynasty to find his way into the tradition, given Iranian interest in historical accounts of Alexander: Gignoux 2007. Daryaee 2006a, 496–500, nevertheless seeks to locate the source of Achaemenian history in the Hebrew Bible, of which Jewish—or Christian—scholars were the possible intermediaries.
88. Shahbazi 1993; Pourshariati 2008, 116–18.
89. Boyce 1957a.
90. For the work of Łazar Pʻarpecʻi as a Mamikonean history and other so-called princely biographies in Armenian, see Thomson 1996, 502–4; Greenwood 2002, 355–58.
91. Łazar Pʻarpecʻi, History of the Armenians, 167/228.
92. Crone and Cook 1977, 62–65; P. Wood 2010, 178–83.
93. Younansardaroud and Novák 2002; Walker 2006–7. The History of Mar Behnam, which has often been invoked in discussions of Assyrian continuity, is a thirteenth-century work: Wiessner 1978; Younansardaroud 2002. See also Salveson 1998 on ancient Mesopotamian elements in Syriac literature. Despite the scholarly emphasis on the oral transmission of this ancient past, authors writing in Greek and Aramaic in Roman Syro-Mesopotamia in the first two centuries CE made extensive use of the Assyrian past to define their communities in relation to Greek culture and Roman imperialism: Andrade 2014.
94. See the identification of the site of Assur in the medieval History of Mar Behnam, 407.
95. Becker 2008 emphasizes the importance of the Hebrew Bible as a source for the literary reinvention of the Assyrian past. See Drost-Abgarjan 2006 for the Armenian version of the Chronicle of Eusebius as a translation from Greek and Debié 2006 for its influence on Syriac literature. Even if the Armenian version was translated directly from the Greek, East Syrians might have facilitated its transmission. Although this is often neglected, northern Mesopotamia was an important zone of Armenian—East Syrian interaction: Garsoïan 1999, 45–47.
96. Elias of Nisibis, Chronology, 99. See also Witakowski 1987, 78; Fiey 1968, 23, 90.
97. Eusebius of Caesarea, Chronicle, 25–28.
98. History of Karka, 507–8.
99. Ri 2000, 336–37.
100. Ephrem, Commentary on Genesis, 65/52; Cave of Treasures, 216–17. On the Iranian context of the West Syrian Cave of Treasures, see Minov 2012.
101. Theodore bar Koni, Book of Scholia, 112/126; Ishodad of Merv, Commentary on the Old Testament, 133–34.
102. Chronicle of Khuzestan, 35.
103. John Malalas, Chronographia, 18/47; Walker 2006–7, 502; S.H. Rapp 2009, 653–54.
104. Al-Ṭabarī, Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, vol. 1, 205; al-Dīnawarī, Kitāb al-akhbār al-t.iwāl, 6; al-Thaʻālibī, Ghurar akhbār mulūk al-Furs wa sīyarihim, 10; Ibn Miskawayh, Tajārib al-umam, 55.
105. For early Islamic attempts to synchronize the biblical and Iranian traditions, see Savant 2013, 138–58.
106. Ishodenah of Basra, Book of Chastity, 6/7, 64/54.
107. Bulliet 2009, 17–20. The practice was common in northern Mesopotamia: History of Karka, 516; Thomas of Marga, Book of Governors, vol. 1, 79/vol. 2, 177; Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 474.
108. History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 85/30; Schilling 2008a, 182.
109. Payne 2012.
110. By contrast, Wiessner 1971, 151–52, argues that the History of Mar Qardagh allows that aristocratic converts remained ēr.
111. History of Mar Qardagh, 13/20.
112. History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 92/39. See also Greenwood 2002, 347–50.
113. History of Mar Qardagh, 13–15/21–22, 58–67/49–53.
114. Walker 2006, 121–63, quote on 122. See also Zakeri 1995, 1–12, on Iranian aristocratic conceptions of manly valiance.
115. History of the Monastery of Sabrisho, 196.
116. History of Mar Qardagh, 11/19.
117. Greenwood 2002.
118. Shahbazi 1990.
119. Cereti 2010.
120. Cantera 2004, 162–63, 201–20; Cereti 2008; Huyse 2008; A. de Jong 2009.
121. Cantera 2004, 160–62; Rezania 2012.
122. Crone 1991, 24–25.
123. Rubin 2000, 657; Pourshariati 2008, 82–83. Neither of these works takes into consideration the foundational disentangling of traditions concerning Kawad and Mazdak in Crone 1991, nor does Gil 2012, which reproduces the fantasies of the medieval Muslim heresiographical imagination.
124. Crone 1991, 26–30; 1994.
125. History of Karka, 517.
126. Letter of Tansar, 19/44; Macuch 2010c, 204–5.
127. Sundermann 1976. The “poor” (Middle Persian škōh, driyōš) were the agriculturally productive population in imperial ideology: Colditz 2000, 204–5. See Marlow 1997, 66–90, for the development of late Sasanian ideologies of social order and reciprocity.
128. Sīrat Ānušīrwān, 189–90/17–18, 194–95/20–21, 200–202/25–28. The title “advocate of the poor” was a Zoroastrian honorific that Armenian bishops maintained: Shaked 1975, 213–16; Garsoïan 1981; Gyselen 1989, 31–33.
129. History of Karka, 517.
130. Letter of Tansar, 20/44.
131. History of Karka, 510.
132. Greenwood 2000, 84–104; Howard-Johnston 2010b, 105–8.
133. Bunyatov 1965, 38–59.
134. For the provincial houses of the region, see Toumanoff 1963, 257–59, 476–81.
135. Movses Daskhurantsʻi, History of the Albanians, 106–7/61–62.
136. Agatangełos, History of the Armenians, 34–53. See also Thomson 1996, 498–501.
137. Daryaee 2006a, 498–500; Weber 2009; van Bladel 2009, 58–62.
138. History of Karka, 509.
139. Ibid., 510. Such continuities in religious practice are well known, if still poorly understood: Morony 1984, 384–430; Müller-Kessler and Kessler 1999.
140. History of Karka, 510–11.
141. Canepa 2010.
142. History of Karka, 526.
143. History of Mar Qardagh, 15/22.
144. Garsoïan 1984–85, 75–79; Kennedy 2006, 14. For two excavated examples of an aristocratic rural estate, see Azarnoush 1994; Berghe 1990.
145. Metzler 1977, 198–206. The city was reportedly the site of the reformed fiscal administration: Sīrat Ānušīrwān, 194/20.
146. See Kervran 1985, 98–99, for elite residences at Susa.
147. Gyselen 1989, 28–40.
148. Adams 1965, 72–75; Adams 1981, 179–85. See also Morony 1994; Howard-Johnston 1995b, 198–205; Whitcomb 2007; Haldon 2010. See Alizadeh and Ur 2007 for the intensification of settlement in Azerbaijan.
149. History of Karka, 508–9.
150. Ibid., 508.
151. History of Mar Qardagh, 15/22 (modified translation).
152. East Syrian hagiography also reports these “cities” as the centers of ancient kingdoms: History of Mar Mari, 22–23; History of Sultan Mahduk, 3; C. Jullien and F. Jullien 2003, 13–14. For the location of Hirbet Glal, see Hoffmann 1880, 261–62; Fiey 1968, 130–38.
153. For the interdependence of symbolic and material elements in defining ancient cities, see Wickham 2009; Haldon 1999a.
154. Martyrdom of Narsai and Joseph; History of Mar Mari, 22.
155. History of Karka, 511; Pigulevskaya 1963b, 159–69.
156. Nováček, Amin, and Melčák 2013 provides an overview of scholarship on Arbela.
157. Simpson 1996, 95–98.
158. Hauser 1994, 502–7.
159. A similar assertion of authority, rooted in aristocratic genealogies, over a precisely defined territory is made in a roughly contemporaneous hagiographical work from Nisibis: History of Saba Pirgushnasp, 222–24.
160. Morony 1984, 132–33.
161. See Gyselen 1989, 78–79, on the tendency of the two regions to overlap.
162. Cities of Iran, 8–23.
163. Ibid., 11, 21.
164. The compilation was, however, not comprehensive: Gyselen 1988.
165. Cities of Iran, 13, 16.
166. History of Karka, 531.
167. History of Mar Mari, 22–25; F. Jullien 2006.
168. Their vision of the interdependence of aristocratic houses and episcopal sees approaches the Armenian model of rooting episcopal authority in the houses of nakharars rather than cities: Garsoïan 1984–85, 79–81; Hewsen 1997, 102–8.
169. Payne 2009, 404–7.
170. The Karka martyrs were commemorated on the tell outside Kirkuk into the twentieth century: Galletti 2002. The shrine at Melqi endured at least until the thirteenth century: Walker 2006, 279.
171. Richardson 2014.
1. Michael Whitby 1988, 296–67; Schilling 2008a, 251–61.
2. Schilling 2008a, 247–51.
3. Gregory the Great, Correspondence, 242/243.
4. Chronicle of Fredegar, 7–9.
5. History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 69/9. See also John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History, 316.
6. John of Nikiu, Chronicle, 154; Schilling 2008a, 185–89.
7. Schilling 2008a, 91–96. On accounts of the New Testament Magi more generally, see Witakowski 2008; F. Jullien 2014.
8. Daryaee 1997; Tyler-Smith 2004, 43–45.
9. Kolesnikov 2002. Iberian princes subject to the Sasanians also experimented with Christian crosses on drachms: S.H. Rapp 2001, 103.
10. At the same time, the sculptures appropriate Roman imagery to produce a “cosmopolitan visual culture of royalty”: Canepa 2009, 221.
11. Christensen 1907, 55–73; Michael Whitby 1988, 297–304; Frendo 2008, 224–26.
12. Howard-Johnston 2010b, 436–45; Wiesehöfer 2013.
13. Hutter 1998, 373–77. Shirin enjoyed a long afterlife in Iranian literature: Baum 2003, 76–100.
14. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 466–67; Agapius of Manbij, Universal History, 447; Flusin 1992, 99–102; Garsoïan 2012, 27.
15. His monumental complex was never finished: Luschey 1996b; Howard-Johnston 2004, 94–96.
16. Al-Ṭabarī, Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, vol. 2, 991/298. East Syrian authors generally regarded Ohrmazd IV as a patron: Pigulevskaya 1946, 237–38; Kolesnikov 1970, 45; Schilling 2008a, 209–13.
17. On the development of throne imagery, see Gall 1971.
18. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 1, 196.
19. Shaked 1994, 112. Schilling 2008a, 214–16, argues that the account originated in the anti-Sasanian propaganda of the usurper Wahram Chobin.
20. Martyrdom of Anastasios the Persian, 84–85; Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 524–25.
21. Firdawsī, Šāhnāme, vol. 8, 73–74, 122–23. See also al-Ṭabarī, Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, vol. 2, 1000/313; al-Dīnawarī, Kitāb al-akhbār al-t.iwāl, 90; History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 77–79/20–22. For the Armenian tradition’s celebration of his service, see Greenwood 2002, 353.
22. History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 96/43–44; Garsoïan 2012, 25–27.
23. Dal Santo 2011; Haldon 1990, 281–96.
24. H.J.W. Drijvers 1998, 18–19.
25. Cameron 1978; 1979, 18–24.
26. History of Sabrisho, 301–3; Tamcke 1988, 30.
27. Klein 2004b.
28. History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 98–99/46–47. The description of the silver box that held the relic corresponds with known early examples of reliquaries of the True Cross: Klein 2004a, 100–103.
29. History of Mar Qardagh, 61–62/50. See also Walker 2006, 150–51.
30. History of Mar Qardagh, 66/52.
31. Haas 2008.
32. See Greatrex 2009 for historiographical traditions of the siege. The predominantly West Syrian region’s relations with Constantinople were uneasy: Harvey 1987, 57–75.
33. Pseudo-Zachariah, Chronicle of Pseudo–Zachariah of Mytilene, 25/237.
34. Ibid., 28/240–41.
35. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 1, 132–33.
36. Pseudo–Joshua the Stylite, Chronicle, 58/71.
37. E.K. Fowden 1999, 67–92.
38. Ibid., 133–41.
39. Theophylact Simocatta, History, 188–89/132–33.
40. Ibid., 213–15/151–52.
41. Peeters 1947; Higgins 1955; Olajos 1988, 146–47; Michael Whitby 1988, 235–36.
42. Theophylact Simocatta, History, 213/150; Evagrius Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History, 235/311.
43. Theophylact Simocatta, History, 214–15/152. Evagrius recorded an almost identical account: Ecclesiastical History, 236–38/312–14.
44. For possible echoes of Sergius in courtly historiography, see Scarcia 2000; 2003.
45. According to the History of Sabrisho, 302, the patriarch had also been invited to court during the reign of Ohrmazd IV.
46. Chronicle of Khuzestan, 17.
47. Tamcke 1988, 29–31; Flusin 1992, 104–6; Hutter 1998, 376–77.
48. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 481–83.
49. Chronicle of Khuzestan, 16.
50. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 499–501.
51. Ibid., 500.
52. Howard-Johnston 2008a, 82; Chronicon Paschale, 709/161–62. See also Kaegi 2003, 83–86.
53. Flusin 1992, 70–93; Greatrex and Lieu 2002, 182–97.
54. Foss 2003.
55. Kaegi 2003, 76–78; Olster 1993, 82–97.
56. Hendy 1985, 172; Altheim-Stiehl 1991.
57. Antony of Choziba, Life of George of Choziba, 128/62.
58. Payne 2013.
59. Daryaee 2006b; Shayegan 2011, 21–29.
60. Olster 1993, 49–65.
61. Chronicle of Khuzestan, 25; Chronicle of 1234, 220–21/121–22; Theophanes Confessor, Chronicle, 291/418–19; Rubin 2005, 82. The Iranian court also sought to recover the territory lost to Maurice in 591: Shahid 2004, 226; Sarris 2011, 236.
62. Shahid 2004, 226–27, 238–43. The Sasanians, however, did not self-consciously imitate the Achaemenians, as Shahid argued, as we saw in chapter 4.
63. Chronicon Paschale, 704/156. See also Strategius, Capture of Jerusalem, 19–27.
64. Foss 1975, 742–46; Sāwīrus b. al-Muqaffaʻ, History of the Patriarchs, 484–85; Agapius of Manbij, Universal History, 451.
65. Avni 2010, 36–40; Strategius, Capture of Jerusalem, 18. Bowersock 1997, 9, distinguishes Strategius from the Antiochus with whom he has often been associated.
66. Foss 1975; Foss 1997, 261–63; Pottier 2004; Holum 1992, 74; Stoyanov 2011, 12–23; Sarris 2011, 247–48.
67. Magness 2011.
68. Avni 2010; Dauphin 1998, 352–60.
69. Piccirillo 2011.
70. Haldon 1999b, 18–21.
71. Theophanes Confessor, Chronicle, 298/427.
72. Cameron 1979, 5–6; Cameron 1978; Howard-Johnston 1995a.
73. Stoyanov 2011, 61–75; McDonough 2011b.
74. Booth 2013, 94–100.
75. Theophanes Confessor, Chronicle, 298/427.
76. Howard-Johnston 2010b, 20–25; Mary Whitby 1994.
77. Theophanes Confessor, Chronicle, 310–11/442–43. See also Kaegi 2012, 18; Stoyanov 2011, 61.
78. J.W. Drijvers 1992, 81–117.
79. Speck 1997; Frendo 2008, 226–28.
80. Strategius, Capture of Jerusalem, 37.
81. Ibid., 44.
82. Ibid., 38.
83. Chronicle of Khuzestan, 25. See also al-Ṭabarī, Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, vol. 2, 1002/318.
84. Chronicle of Khuzestan, 25. This work stands out in the East Syrian tradition for its systematic inclusion of political history alongside ecclesiastical history: Pigulevskaya 2000, 322–24; Robinson 2004; F. Jullien 2009, 160–61.
85. Chronicle of Khuzestan, 25. The Martyrdom of Anastasios the Persian, 47/46, also describes the public delivery of the cross to the king of kings, which inspired its namesake cavalryman to convert.
86. Flusin 1992, 170–71.
87. Klein 2004b, 33–39.
88. One Roman account of the conquest describes the transfer of marble from Roman cities to adorn Seleucia-Ctesphon: Agapius of Manbij, Universal History, 451.
89. Al-Thaʻālibī, Ghurar akhbār mulūk al-Furs wa sīyarihim, 701–2, records an account according to which Husraw II constructed two treasuries for Roman objects, including the True Cross.
90. Fiey 1967b, 417; Fiey 1967c, 10; J.H. Schmidt 1934, 2. Christian objects have been found at the site: Kröger 1982, 40–42.
91. Foss 2003, 156, 159–61; Sāwīrus b. al-Muqaffaʻ, History of the Patriarchs, 485.
92. Weber 2007; 2013. See Weber 2010 for fragments of scribal training exercises in Middle Persian from Egypt.
93. Foss 2002; Banaji 2006, 274; Sänger 2011.
94. Chronicle of 1234, 221–24/122–24. See Segal 1970, 126–27, on the family and Debié 1999–2000 on the distinctive Edessene historiographical tradition that has preserved their history.
95. Howard-Johnston 2004, 103.
96. Börm 2006 shows how Husraw I self-consciously occupied the position of the Roman emperor in the hippodrome of Apamea during the invasion of Syria in 540.
97. E.g., Kaegi 2003, 97.
98. Flusin 1992, 173–77; Frendo 2008, 231–32.
99. History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 116–18/70–72.
100. Mango 1992.
101. History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 116/70; Chronicle of Khuzestan, 27.
102. Dagron and Déroche 1991, 26, argues that Modestos was the architect of a rapprochement between Iranian and Roman Christian elites.
103. Jacobs 2004, 139–99.
104. Dagron and Déroche 1991, 18–32; Olster 1994, 84–92; Cameron 1994.
105. Dagron and Déroche 1991, 29; Stoyanov 2011, 68–69. See Dauphin 1998, 330–32, on the Roman decrees, and Drijvers 1992, 143–44, on anti-Jewish elements in the cult of the cross.
106. Jacobs 2004; Sivan 2008, 194–200.
107. Dagron and Déroche 1991, 29.
108. Déroche 1999, 143–45; Wheeler 1991.
109. Sivan 2000; 2004.
110. Sivan 2004, 88–92.
111. Chronicle of Khuzestan, 26–27.
112. History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 116/70.
113. Menze 2008, 145–93.
114. John of Ephesus, Lives of the Eastern Saints, 153–57; Hainthaler 2002. Husraw I reportedly took an interest in Christian doctrinal controversies as well: John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History, 316–18.
115. Fiey 1970a, 113–43; F. Jullien 2011b, 53–57.
116. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 126.
117. Hutter 1998, 378–83.
118. Frend 1972, 336–38; Flusin 1992, 112–14.
119. Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, vol. 4, 390–91/vol. 2, 380–81.
120. P. Wood 2010, 209–56.
121. Ibid., 229.
122. Sāwīrus b. al-Muqaffaʻ, History of the Patriarchs, 482.
123. Frend 1972, 338; Flusin 1992, 106–12; Hutter 1998, 379–81; Greatrex 2003, 81–82; Greatrex 2006, 49–50; Binder 2013, 80–89.
124. Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 530–32.
125. Babai the Great, History of George the Priest, 505–13; Chronicle of Khuzestan, 23. For Gabriel as a Constantine, see Denha, History of Maruta, 76; Reinink 1999, 177–91.
126. Flusin 1992, 114–18; Lange 2012, 510–13.
127. Babai the Great, History of George the Priest, 513–14. For Babai as a hagiographer, see Walker 2010.
128. Babai the Great, History of George the Priest, 516.
129. Denha, History of Maruta, 76.
130. Michael the Syrian, Chronicle, vol. 4, 391/vol. 2, 381.
131. Gariboldi 2009, 339.
132. Christensen 1907, 5–9.
133. Schilling 2008b, 99–101.
134. Rubin 2004, 267; Schilling 2008b, 96–97.
135. Rubin 2004, 263–73.
136. Ibid., 254–63; Pourshariati 2008, 122–30; Christensen 1907, 9–18.
137. Rubin 2005, 82–86; Howard-Johnston 2010b, 82–85, 367–68.
138. The account that follows, including all of the quotes, is in Firdawsī, Šāhnāme, vol. 8, 158.
139. Ibid., 251.
140. Ibid., 255.
141. Ibid., 256–57.
142. Ibid., 159.
143. Ibid., 160.
144. Ibid., 162.
145. History of Rabban Mar Saba, 667–69. Such accounts were increasingly common in the course of the seventh century: see, e.g., History of Mar Yonan, 481–82.
146. History of Sabrisho, 306–7.
147. Daryaee 2013, 93, an apparent reversal of the view expressed in Daryaee 2003a, 198.
148. Widengren 1965, 283; Wiessner 1971. Even a historian sensitive to the appeal of Zoroastrianism has claimed that “spiritually dissatisfied upper-class Zoroastrians defected to Nestorian Christianity”: Choksy 1997, 70.
149. Brock 2008a, 83–84.
150. Walker 2006, 206–45.
151. Bruns 2009b.
152. Flusin 1992, 118–27, deconstructs the image of Husraw II as a persecutory king of kings. See also Binder 2013, 72–77.
153. F. Jullien 2004, 172; Flusin 1992, 126.
154. Martyrdom of Anastasios the Persian, 46–53.
155. Ibid., 56–67, 70–71.
156. Babai the Great, History of George the Priest, 520–22; Chronicle of Khuzestan, 23; Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 537–38; Flusin 1992, 124–26.
157. Babai the Great, History of George the Priest, 522–26.
158. Ibid., 536–37; Chronicle of Khuzestan, 23; Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 539. For the identification and site of the city, see Hauser 2008.
159. C. Jullien 2004, 260. The imagery of the cross in the Martyrdom of Christina—composed, like the History of George the Priest, by Babai the Great—suggests that she was crucified: Binder 2012, 19–23. See also the crucifixion of Nathaniel of Shahrazur in the 610s: Chronicle of Khuzestan, 21.
160. Martyrdom of Anastasios the Persian, 76–87; Babai the Great, History of George the Priest, 520–37; Ishoyahb III, History of Ishosabran, 518–20, 530–50.
161. History of Pseudo-Sebeos, 85/29. See also Fiey 1970a, 98; Flusin 1992, 100.
162. History of Sabrisho, 307. Al-Ṭabarī described a decree allowing conversion with the important provision that Zoroastrians were forbidden from converting to Christianity: Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, vol. 2, 1000/314.
163. There is even an East Syrian account of the king of kings having a convert to Zoroastrianism killed: Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 467–68.
164. Babai the Great, Martyrdom of Christina, 204; Binder 2012, 14–15.
165. Mango 1985. At the same time, the emperor sought diplomatically and doctrinally to unify the imperial and East Syrian Churches: Seleznyov 2012; Lange 2012, 553–87.
166. Mango 1985, 110.
167. See G. Fowden 1993, 100–137, for Roman pretensions to a Christian “commonwealth.”
168. Mango 1985, 112–14; J.W. Drijvers 2002, 177–78.
169. Daryaee 1999a, 79–80; Panaino 2006.
170. Daryaee 2006–7, 26.
1. Kolesnikov 1982, 131–43; Pourshariati 2008, 260–71; Daryaee 2010b, 51–52. His descendants took refuge at the court of the Tang dynasty: Compareti 2003; Daryaee 2006–7, 25–26.
2. Firdawsī, Šāhnāme, vol. 8, 468.
3. Ibid., 469.
4. Al-Thaʻālibī, Ghurar akhbār mulūk al-Furs, 747–48, includes a highly condensed version of this account, which is absent from other narratives, notably the East Syrian histories: see al-Ṭabarī, Taʼrīkh al-rusul wa al-mulūk, vol. 2, 1067/409–11; Ḥamza al-Iṣfahānī, Taʼrīkh sinnī mulūk al-ard., 55; Chronicle of Khuzestan, 30–31; Chronicle of Seert, vol. 2, pt. 2, 581.
5. Bogolyubov 1971; Blois 1990.
6. Kreyenbroek 1987; Choksy 1997, 93–106.
7. Simonsohn 2011, 103–14; Payne 2015.
8. Kolesnikov 1998b; Gyselen 2000, 66–68, 120, 168–75.
9. Ibid., 177.
10. Henanisho, Judgments, 6–22.
11. Robinson 2000, 107.
12. There were some significant conversions from Zoroastrianism at the time of the conquests, but the ninth century was the tipping point: Choksy 1997, 80–93; Bulliet 2009, 30–32; Savant 2013, 62–69. The Iranian aristocracy played a fundamental role in the development of Islamic imperial structures, elite culture, and even doctrine: Morony 2004b; Khan 2007; Kennedy 2009; Pourshariati 2009.
13. Gropp 1970; Cereti, Olivieri, and Vazhuthanapally 2002, 293–301.
14. Lieu 2012, 27. The self-proclaimed identification of eighth-century Chinese East Syrians with Da Qin, the name of the Roman Empire in Chinese historiography, was likely an attempt to present the religion as favorably as possible to Confucian bureaucrats, for whom Da Qin was a land with “utopian living conditions and the highest standards of morality”: Lieu 2013, 132; see also Barrett 2002, 557–59. This identification also obscured the links of the church with the patriarch in the caliphate, with which the Tang dynasty was on uneasy terms: Hunter 2009, 82.
15. Saeki 1916, 167–74.
16. Cereti 2009; Malekandathil 2010, 39–47.