Iran in World History

The Roman emperors Valerian and Philip the Arab surrender to Shapur I, who 
sits erect on his horse. Philip ceded Armenia to Shapur in 244 along with an 
indemnity of half a million gold coins. In 260 the Roman army under Valerian 
was roundly defeated at Edessa in northern Mesopotamia; the emperor along 
with tens of thousands of Roman soldiers and craftsmen were captured and 
taken to live permanently in Iran, where they were put to work building the 
new city of Bishapur as well as dams and other infrastructure throughout the 
country. 
Naqsh-e Rostam, near Persepolis, photo by Manya Saadi-nejad

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Babylonia, the most productive and populous part of the Sasanian 
Empire, was a highly cosmopolitan region where multifarious ver-
sions of Judaism, Christianity, and local religions were practiced. 
Within this cultural complex the new, highly syncretistic religion of 
Manichaeism emerged.
The founder of this new faith, Mani, was an ethnic Parthian, 
raised in Mesopotamia by his father in an all-male religious com-
mune whose members believed in salvation through special knowl-
edge (Gnosticism) and were staunchly anti-materialist. Their principal 
ritual was baptism. At the age of twenty-four, Mani founded his own 
religion, drawing on aspects of Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and the 
Gnosticism he was raised on. He soon embarked on a mission to north-
western India, where he acquired and incorporated Buddhist-Jainist 
notions as well. The core of Mani’s teaching was the goal of escaping 
material existence through purification rituals, but he adapted his 
message to whatever symbols and stories were most familiar to his tar-
get audience. “The ancient books have added to my writings,” Mani 
acknowledges in one of his works, but “They did not write nor did 
they unveil the books the way that I, I have written it.”
3
Mani was able to obtain an audience at the imperial court and win 
Shapur’s protection—indeed, he even seems to have converted several 
members of the royal family. Thanks to this state support Mani was 
able to spread his teachings widely by employing a sophisticated net-
work of multilingual missionaries. Manichaeism spread rapidly, not 
just throughout the Sasanian lands but across the Roman Empire as 
well. The Roman Catholic theologian Augustine of Hippo spent a num-
ber of years as a Manichaean novice before embracing Christianity in 
his early thirties. Part of Manichaeism’s success was that Mani pre-
sented his religion not as something new, but as a “perfected” form 
of whatever religion his audience already practiced, be it Christianity, 
Zoroastrianism, or Buddhism.
At the time, Christian, Jewish, Zoroastrian, and Buddhist com-
munities were plagued by doubts of textual authenticity and torn 
from within by theological controversies. Mani cleverly staved off 
such arguments within his own church by insisting that all true divine 
scriptures were received directly by him and transmitted to writing 
by his own hand. Indeed, by creating his own authoritative scriptural 
canon, Mani was very likely instrumental in forcing other religions 
to establish unambiguous canons of their own. This consolidation of 
doctrinal authority had not yet taken place within Judaism, Buddhism, 
Zoroastrianism, or Christianity, and in each case the field was wide 

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open to whatever teachings individual religious figures chose to prop-
agate. Moreover, most people of the time were illiterate, and ideas 
traveled by word of mouth rather than via established texts. Mani suc-
cessfully addressed this reality by adopting the strategy—subsequently 
taken up by Christianity and Buddhism—of conveying his message 
through vivid paintings illustrating religious themes, using his unri-
valed skills as an artist to reach his largely unlettered audience.
Mani’s public popularity and the favor he enjoyed at court raised 
the ire of the Mazdaean priests, the Magi, who had been lobbying to 
make Zoroastrianism the official religion of the Sasanian state. Led by 
the zealous chief priest Kerdir (Kartir), the Magi intrigued endlessly 
against Mani at court and beyond, but they were not successful as long 
as Shapur remained alive. Following Shapur’s death in 270, however, 
Kerdir’s faction orchestrated the succession of Bahram I who imprisoned 
Mani and permitted the suppression of his followers. Facing violent per-
secution in Iran, and soon in the Roman Empire as well, Manichaeism 
began to spread eastward along the Silk Road. Transmitted to Central 
Asia by Sogdian merchants, Manichaeism was adopted as the official 
state religion by the Uighur Turks for almost a century beginning in 763, 
and it survived in southeastern China as late as the seventeenth century.
Due to the Sasanian Empire’s multinational character and unevenly 
distributed population—which was heavily weighted toward the pre-
dominantly Christian and Jewish Mesopotamia in the west—the 
majority of its subjects remained non-Iranian and non-Zoroastrian 
even after the Mazdaean priesthood succeeded in crushing the 
Manichaean threat. Unique for a non-royal, Kerdir left four rock in-
scriptions throughout the realm, in which he boasts of suppressing all 
the religions that were present in Iran: “Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, 
Greek and Syriac Christians, Baptists, and Manichaeans were struck 
down, idol temples were destroyed.”
4
Kerdir goes on to say that while 
many of the empire’s Iranian subjects still believed in the old deities 
(
dev
s), he turned them to the right path of Mazda-worship. Despite the 
priest’s claims, Zoroastrianism never fully eliminated rival practices 
even among ethnic Iranians, and competing forms of Iranian religiosity 
persisted throughout the Sasanian era and beyond.
Because Mani and many other religious figures presented themselves 
as authentic purveyors of Iranian religion, Mazdaean priests referred 
not only to Manichaeism but to all manner of alternate teachings as 
zandika
, literally “[unauthorized] commentary [on the Avesta].” This 
terminology makes it difficult to get a true picture of the range of Iranian 
religions during the Sasanian period, since only the Zoroastrians left 

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texts, and these often do not differentiate between the various “heresies” 
they oppose. This fact continues to lead scholars even today to lump 
together a wide range of Iranian religious-based resistance movements 
as “Manichaean,” whereas in fact they were usually something else.
Priestly power during the Sasanian period seems to have been ac-
companied by a surge in patriarchal attitudes. In the Middle Persian 
Zoroastrian texts, women are described mainly in negative terms, 
leading righteous men astray and polluting the world through men-
struation; the highest virtue to which they can aspire is obedience. 
Upper-class women could exercise a measure of agency, but commoners 
were essentially the property of their husbands, with little or no legal 
capacity of their own.
Women’s sexuality was something to be feared and firmly con-
trolled. In the text known as the