CONSTRUCTION OF IDENTITY AND LEGITIMACY IN EARLY SASANIAN IRAN: HISTORICAL, RELIGIOUS, AND LEGENDARY CONTEXTS AND MOTIVATIONS FOR STATECRAFT IN THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE DYNASTY

Abstract

The shahs of the early Sasanian dynasty faced the challenge of establishing their legitimacy as the rulers of an imperial polity after rising to power through military insurrection. The early shahs of the dynasty sought to locate themselves within the religious, mythic, and historical context to link themselves to the glorious rulers and dynasties of Iranian myth and history, while simultaneously espousing Mazdean virtue. Through the concepts of Eransahr and Farr, the notion of the territorial unity of the Mazda-worshiping peoples prescribed in the Avesta and the divinely-bestowed glory of rulers, respectively, the motivations that underlaid Sasanian statecraft during the first four generations of the dynasty are contextualized. The idea of Eransahr as a sacrosanct territorial delimitation of the homelands of the Mazdean peoples was first employed to validate and legitimize the rebellion of the Sasanians against the Parthian Askanian dynasty. After the civil war that established Ardasir I as Sahansah, the defense of Eransahr as both a tangible expanse of territory and a religious concept was used to justify punitive and retaliatory military action in the west against the Roman Empire, as well as to acquire the Central Asian holdings of the Kushan Empire. The claim to the sole possession of Farr was similarly employed to justify first rebellion, and then conflicts with the Kushan Empire, whose own rulers claimed Farr from Mazdean divinities. Establishing the religious, mythic, and historical contexts to which the early Sasanian dynasts were subject illuminates the motivations for imperial policy and allows the scrutiny of those policies and actions to transcend the biases inherent in non-Iranian sources for the period. Furthermore, privileging autochthonous sculptural, epigraphic, and numismatic productions produces an innovative analysis of early Sasanian statecraft cognizant of, and rooted within, Iranian cultural paradigms.