Iraqi History · Chronicle VIII of XII
Late Antique Mesopotamia
Ctesiphon, the Talmud, and the Church of the East in the Persian heartland.
Sasanian EmpirePolitical
Ardashir I overthrows the Parthians and rules his new Persian empire from Ctesiphon on the Tigris.
The Sasanians kept Ctesiphon as their winter capital and the seat of the King of Kings, though their homeland lay on the Iranian plateau. The Mesopotamian province of Asōristān — 'the land of the Assyrians' — became the demographic and economic core of the empire, its canals and cities feeding the Persian state for four hundred years.
Sasanian EmpireMilitary
Shapur I defeats and captures the emperor Valerian, and settles his Roman prisoners in Mesopotamia.
The capture of Valerian was an unheard-of humiliation for Rome, celebrated on Shapur's rock reliefs. His tens of thousands of Roman captives were put to work building cities, bridges, and dams across the empire — labour that enriched Mesopotamia and helped make Ctesiphon one of the great cities of the world.
Sasanian EmpirePolitical
An Arab client dynasty at al-Hira guards the Sasanian desert frontier and becomes a centre of Arab culture.
The Lakhmid kings of al-Hira, on the edge of the southern desert, held back the Bedouin and Byzantium's Arab allies on Persia's behalf. Their court became a famous patron of early Arabic poetry, and al-Hira an early home of Arabic Christianity — a foretaste of the Arab world that would soon engulf Mesopotamia.
Sasanian EmpireReligious
A council at Seleucia-Ctesiphon organizes the Christians of Persia into an independent Church of the East.
Mesopotamia held a large Christian population, and in 410 its bishops recognized the bishop of the capital as their Catholicos. Independent of Rome and Byzantium and later called Nestorian, this Church of the East would carry Syriac Christianity along the Silk Road as far as India and China, with its heart always in Iraq.
Sasanian EmpireReligious
In the great rabbinic academies of Sura and Pumbedita, the scholars of Jewish Babylonia compile the Babylonian Talmud.
The Jewish community of Mesopotamia, rooted there since the Exile a thousand years before, was now the largest and most learned in the world. Its academies produced the Babylonian Talmud, the vast compendium of law and lore that became the foundation of rabbinic Judaism — one of the most influential books ever written, born in Iraq.
Sasanian EmpireCultural
Khosrow I Anushirvan reforms the state and brings Sasanian civilization, centred on Ctesiphon, to its height.
Remembered ever after as the model of the just king, Khosrow reformed taxes and the army, welcomed Greek philosophers fleeing Justinian, and sponsored translations from Sanskrit and Greek. Ctesiphon glittered with the plunder and learning of an empire that once more stretched from the Mediterranean toward India.
Sasanian EmpireCultural
The vaulted throne hall of Ctesiphon, the Taq Kasra, rises as the widest single-span brick arch ever built.
The colossal brick vault of the royal audience hall, some thirty-five metres high, still stands south of Baghdad — the last great monument of Sasanian Ctesiphon and long the largest arch of unreinforced brickwork in the world. Beneath it the King of Kings gave audience under a jewelled crown too heavy to wear, suspended on a golden chain.
The Last Great WarMilitary
Khosrow II overruns Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, carrying the True Cross from Jerusalem back to Ctesiphon.
In the last and greatest of the Roman-Persian wars, Khosrow II seemed to restore the empire of the Achaemenids, seizing the wealthiest Byzantine provinces and threatening Constantinople itself. The plunder of the east flowed into Mesopotamia — but the triumph would prove catastrophically brittle.
The Last Great WarMilitary
The Byzantine emperor Heraclius strikes deep into Mesopotamia and shatters the Persian army near ancient Nineveh.
In a daring winter campaign Heraclius marched into the Persian heartland and won a crushing victory beside the ruins of Nineveh, within reach of Ctesiphon. The war that had drained both empires for a generation was decided — and both Rome and Persia now lay exhausted before a storm gathering in the Arabian desert.
CollapsePolitical
Khosrow II is overthrown and killed, and the Sasanian empire plunges into civil war on the eve of the Arab conquest.
After the disaster, Khosrow's own nobles deposed and executed him, and in four chaotic years a dozen claimants seized and lost the throne at Ctesiphon. The exhausted, divided empire had no strength left to meet the Muslim armies now marching out of Arabia — and Mesopotamia lay open to them.
2 more entries, to AD 628
