A Modern Archaeology of the Sasanian Period: Former Limitations and New Perspective

The article is dealing with theoretical and methodological issues related to the archaeology of the Sasanian period. Those issues which have been handled, too, have clearly always somewhat suffered from a complex of inferiority to other periods of the history of ancient Iran which are considered by far the most formative and important: the Achaemenid and the Islamic eras. For many scholars the archaeology of the Sasanian period and also that of the early Islamic period has always been considered a part of history, and especially of the history of art. This classification, set in stone, has had a long and respectable tradition so far but at last it has begun to be seen from a different perspective by a growing number of scholars. According to this view, the study of the Sasanian period should be seen as a fully-fledged part of an “archaeological” discipline, and therefore should belong to the history of the archaeology of the ancient Near East , even if of its later periods. We do not need to go into the details of the documentation at our disposal (regarding rural villages, settlements, cities, city layouts, buildings, territorial units of various types, architectural remains, bridges, dams, palaces, rock reliefs) in order to understand without difficulty that the archaeology of the Sasanian period still remains a blank, open page. Of course there were good reasons for the existence of such a low level of knowledge of territorial remains (rural villages, settlements, cities, city layouts, buildings, territorial units of various types), architectural (bridges, dams, palaces) and iconographic monuments (rock reliefs) and art objects (pottery, seals, clay sealings, coins, glass, silver textiles, mosaics, and/or simple items) belonging to this period . Much of this state of affairs, however, is to be considered as due to the methods and approaches which scholars took for archaeological research into the Sasanian period as they developed during the last century. For some reason scholars preferred to focus both on particular macroscopic evidence and on the direct importance of easily discovered self-emergent monumental remains, casual, incidental finds and objects located in museums and private collections. Only recently have all these documents been submitted to detailed scrutiny in order to develop an investigative strategy which is more compliant with a more modern understanding of the context and of the spatial and territorial aspects of individual finds. Studies should have given due consideration to the fact that apart from the dynastic successions, the political events concerned and the amount of official epigraphic, numismatic and sphragistic data, there are also archaeological horizons whose interpretation does not always coincide with the interpretations of data of the former kind. Several attempts to give a true picture were made in the 1970s and 1980s, but they do not appear to have achieved the desired aim, and still recently Whitcomb warned against considering dynastic successions and lists of kings as guiding elements for archaeological research!