How the Sasanians Saw the Late Antique World: A Persianate View of the Interconnectedness of Eurasia

For Peter Brown, whose work introduced the period known as “Late Antiquity” to many, the late antique world begun in the third and lasted till the end of the seventh century CE. Scholars working on this period in the eastern Mediterranean have largely accepted this historical periodization, but mainly within the geographical boundaries of their own areas of interest. Scholars are now increasingly in agreement with Brown that the Near East and at least part of Central Asia should also be counted as part of this historical paradigm. Michael Morony was the first scholar to put forth a solid case for why the Sasanians should be included in the study of the late antique field. There are, however, some scholars who believe that Late Antiquity is only the purview of the Mediterranean world, and that Sasanian Iran should not be included in the field, mainly because the religious and structural makeup of the Mediterranean world appears to them to be quite distinct from that of the Sasanian Near East.
In this paper, I will discuss how the Sasanians themselves saw the period and whether they perceived a significant shift in the area that they ruled (Iranshahr) at this time. Furthermore, while most scholars of Late Antiquity view the geographical boundaries of the field as the two great empires (Eastern Roman and Sasanian Persian), the Middle Persian and Persian sources provide us with a differing world view than that of modern scholars. I will suggest that the Sasanians had a much more holistic and inclusive view of their late antique world; that is, while historians of the Eastern Roman Empire held a bi-partite vision of the period, the Sasanians perceived a tri-partite division of the late antique world, which for them stretched all the way from China to the Eastern Roman Empire. I will argue that we should also be much more inclusive and take the interconnectedness of the late antique world as the Sasanians saw it into account in our contemporary approaches to the period.