Review: The Iranian Expanse: Transforming Royal Identity through Architecture, Landscape, and the Built Environment, 550 BCE–642 CE

Matthew P. Canepa’s The Iranian Expanse, winner of the James R. Wiseman Book Award from the Archaeological Institute of America, deals with the Iranian expanse from the rise of the Achaemenids in the sixth century BCE to the fall of the Sasanians in the seventh century CE. It is articulated in four parts and divided into seventeen chapters. With the concept of “expanse,” the author wants to consider not only a geographical area (the Achaemenid Empire stretched from the Indus to the Nile), which was almost always acquired through military enterprises (think of those of Cyrus the Great or those of Shahpur), but also a cultural one related to royal identity, which includes transformations through architecture (palaces, bridges, gardens, religious buildings, and so on), landscape (mountains, river water), and environmental constructions (rock relief first and foremost).

Most of the concepts expressed in the volume, some of which serve as chapter headings, have been elaborated previously by the author in some of his fundamental works on the topic; they find their most extensive, somewhat conclusive synthesis in this book. The approach that Canepa follows in organizing his book is one of the most difficult and risky in the long tradition of studies linked to ancient Iran, and is based on the author’s desire to reconcile some of the premises and purposes of Iranian studies with archaeological, architectural, and art historical ones. This method is rather difficult because Iranian studies are mostly made up of data coming from philology, linguistics, and literature; it is also risky because it tries to frame the ancestral Iranian ideological-religious background in the rather poorly preserved, albeit macroscopic, set of material, architectural, and art historical data, which is spread more or less equally throughout the chronological span of ancient Iranian civilization. Though other scholars (historians especially) have attempted this approach, Canepa proves himself more capable than his predecessors of combining the two sets of data in a way that is convincing and persuasive.

This successful synthesis happens because Canepa, originally an art historian, is adept at moving among materials, be they architectural or artistic. There are, however, here and there, some small contradictions, but they do not detract from the immense quality and quantity of the work. For example, it is extremely difficult to relate material forms mentioned in Avestan texts, such as the “paradise garden,” “hunting enclosures,” “royal cities,” and “sanctuaries,” to the scant and unreliable archaeological evidence. Likewise, the author’s assessment of the discontinuity and continuity in the dynastic history of ancient Iran leaves some issues unresolved. Canepa emphasizes dynastic continuity, rightly, when he wants to highlight the diversity, cultural complexity, and socioterritorial dynamism that was widespread after Alexander the Great. But he focuses on discontinuity when he wants to underline the uniqueness of Iranian cosmological concepts and ritual practices, which were present without interruption from the Achaemenid to the early Islamic era.

Unlike other scholars, the author makes the choice to analyze the “natural and built environments” of power in Persia (i.e., the palaces, paradise gardens, hunting enclosures, “royal cities,” sanctuaries, landscapes, rock art, and ritual activity) as representative of different ancestral conceptions by different dynasties. Examination of the way in which these elements would have transformed previous Iranian cosmologies and existing royal identities is one of the most significant aims of the book. Previous studies on the matter, as Canepa himself notes, have often described these cultural elements as continuous between the first dynasty and others, almost ignoring the period between Alexander’s time and the rise of Islam. According to the author, the Iranian expanse instead shows evidence of how the Seleucid (late fourth century BCE to mid-third century BCE), Arsacid (mid-third century BCE to mid-third century CE), and Sasanian (mid-third century CE to mid-seventh century CE) dynasties realized a transformation of Iranian royal culture that had impacts on early Islam and the Persianate world as well. The kingship, expressed in inscriptions or in artistic productions in Persepolis, Naqsh-e Rostam, Susa, Bishapur, and elsewhere, would represent an image of the ancestral Iranian cosmology as well as the king, thus claiming the king as one of the Ahura Mazda’s creations and presenting his political domain as the means through which God exerted his will on earth. The Sasanians considered the period from the Achaemenids onward as full of chaos, fragmentation, and illegitimacy, because they tried to downplay the role of the Arsacids (even though some of their kings appear in national histories and Zoroastrian religious literature). Although the decline of their political power began only half a century after the founding of Seleucia, the Seleucid dynasty had firmly established itself as the most important dynasty in Western Asia. After their final dissolution, the Arsacids brought a new vision of kingship, and when the Sasanians, in turn, succeeded them, they quickly and radically reshaped Mesopotamia and the Iranian Plateau to set up their new ideology of kingship. The Sasanians established new settlements that controlled the agricultural hinterland militarily and economically, expanding and renovating the cities of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, for example.

Canepa correctly emphasizes that alongside the affirmation of Zoroastrianism there was no unified development of temple architecture, unlike in many other ancient religious traditions of West Asia. After two decades of warfare following Alexander’s death, West Asia experienced a period of flowering with Seleucus I, whose construction of temples played a key role in his ambitious and successful program to reclaim and reshape the political landscape. The dynasty appropriated ancient cultural traditions, building new temples for worship, a pattern that was repeated with the continuation of the use of important sanctuaries of the ancient Greek world as well, and exerted influence on rulers through dynastic marriages and periodic military pressure.

The Achaemenid Persians introduced a powerful and enduring tradition of architecture, but they referenced or employed architectural forms, and even labor, derived from their conquests. These works made an imperial statement, and Achaemenid funerary monuments were unique in conception and practice, integrating Elamite traditions of sacred spaces and Mazdean concepts of purity, death, and resurrection. The archaeological remains of the monuments of the Persian kings are grouped in Fars, Naqsh-e Rostam, and Persepolis. To mention Dahāne-ye Gholāmān in Sistan as a potential vehicle of more historical-religious information does not correspond exactly to its greater extraordinary importance as the only city of the Achaemenid period.¹

The Sasanian kings understood that their dynasty originated in southwestern Iran, the former homeland of the Achaemenids, whose ruined palaces, sacred sites, and tombs still loomed over the physical and ideological horizons of Fars long after their fall. The Persians did not build temples, and their palaces constituted the architectural materialization of divine and royal power. With their new urban topography of power and temple architecture, the Seleucids took inspiration from the earlier Achaemenids, and instead of simply restoring or replicating their palaces, they pursued a calibrated strategy of appropriating the ruins. Besides Christianity and Zoroastrianism, sacred kingship was another kind of great religion of late antiquity, whose liturgies the Sasanians developed in competition and, at times, even in unison with the Romans. In the late empire, the Sasanians articulated a “political theology” of sacred kingship, and the way land was shaped, controlled, and made to flourish played a central role in the formation of Iranian kingship. There is a large scholarly literature on the Achaemenid paradise, but much less archaeological evidence for the period between Alexander’s time and Islam, which saw great changes and innovations in the traditions of Iranian gardens and hunting lodges.

To sum up, Canepa presents in The Iranian Expanse a new approach to understanding Iranian kingship, cosmology, and identity, between space, time, and memory. In doing so he investigates the development of the landscapes, cities (when present), sanctuaries (when present), palaces, paradise gardens (when present), and rock art where the cosmologies formulated and promoted by royal elites were explicitly and tangibly experienced. “Natural and built environments of power,” “sacred spaces,” “landscapes of time and memory,” “topography of power,” “real identities,” and “sacred and funerary landscapes” are all concepts that allow the author to chart a new approach to the universal history of the ancient Persians.