of Maurice in 602 impelled him to a war of revenge against Rome, in the course of which his armies—in 608 and, again, in 615 and 626—penetrated as far as Chalcedon opposite Constantinople, ravaged Syria, reduced Antioch (611), Damascus (613), and Jerusalem (614), and carried off the holy cross to Ctesiphon; in 619 Egypt was occupied. Meanwhile, the Roman Empire was at the lowest ebb. The great emperor Heraclius, who assumed the crown in 610, took years to create the nucleus of a new military power. This done, however, he took the field in 623, and repaid the Persians with interest. Their armies were everywhere defeated. In 624 he penetrated into Atropatene (Azerbaijan), and there destroyed the great fire-temple; in 627 he advanced into the Tigris provinces. Chosroes attempted no resistance, but fled from his residence at Dastagerd to Ctesiphon. These proceedings, in conjunction with the avarice and licence of the king, led to revolution. Chosroes was deposed and slain by his son Kavadh II. (628); but the parricide died in a few months and absolute chaos resulted. A whole list of kings and pretenders—among them the General Shahrbaraz and Boran, a daughter of Chosroes—followed rapidly on one another, till finally the magnates united and, in 632, elevated a child to the throne, Yazdegerd III., grandson of Chosroes. In the interval—presumably during the reign of Queen Boran—peace was concluded with Heraclius, the old frontier being apparently restored. The cross had already been given back to the emperor.
Thus the hundred years’ struggle between Rome and Persia, which had begun in 527 with the attack of the first Kavadh on Justinian, had run its fruitless course, utterly enfeebling both empires and consuming their powers. So it was that room was given to a new enemy who now arose between either state and either religion—the Arabs The Arab Conquest. and Islam. In the same year that saw the coronation of Yazdegerd III.—the beginning of 633—the first Arab squadrons made their entry into Persian territory. After several encounters there ensued (637) the battle of Kadisiya (Qadisiya, Cadesia), fought on one of the Euphrates canals, where the fate of the Sassanian Empire was decided. A little previously, in the August of 636, Syria had fallen in a battle on the Yarmuk (Hieromax), and in 639 the Arabs penetrated into Egypt. The field of Kadisiya laid Ctesiphon, with all its treasures, at the mercy of the victor. The king fled to Media, where his generals attempted to organize the resistance; but the battle of Nehaveud (?641) decided matters there. Yazdegerd sought refuge in one province after the other, till, at last, in 651, he was assassinated in Merv (see Caliphate: § A, § 1).
Thus ended the empire of the Sassanids, no less precipitately and ingloriously than that of the Achaemenids. By 650 the Arabs had occupied every province to Balkh and the Oxus. Only in the secluded districts of northern Media (Tabaristan), the “generals” of the house of Karen (Spahpat, Ispehbed) maintained themselves for a century as vassals of the caliphs—exactly as Atropates and his dynasty had done before them.
The fall of the empire sealed the fate of its religion. The Moslems officially tolerated the Zoroastrian creed, though occasional persecutions were not lacking. But little by little it vanished from Iran, with the exception of a few remnants (chiefly in the oasis of Yezd), the faithful finding a refuge in India at Bombay. These Parsees have preserved but a small part of the sacred writings, but to-day they still number their years by the era which begins on the 16th of June A.D. 632, with the accession of Yazdegerd III., the last king of their faith and the last lawful sovereign of Iran, on whom rested the god-given Royal Glory of Ormuzd.
Authorities.—Besides the works on special periods quoted above, the following general works should be consulted: Spiegel, Eranische Altertumskunde (3 vols., 1876 sqq.); W. Geiger and Ernst Kuhn, Grundriss der iranischen Philologie herausg., vol. ii. (Literature, History and Civilization, 1896 sqq.); G. Rawlinson, The Five Great Monarchies, The Sixth Monarchy, The Seventh Monarchy. Further the mutually supplementary work of Th. Nöldeke, Aufsätze zur persischen Geschichte (1887, Medes, Persians and Sassanids), and A. v. Gutschmid, Geschichte Irans von Alexander d. Gr. bis zum Untergang der Arsaciden (1888). A valuable work of reference is F. Justi, Iranisches Namenbuch (1895).
The most important works on the monuments are: Flandin et Coste, Voyage en Perse (6 vols., 1840 sqq.); Texier, L’Arménie, la Perse, et la Mesopotamie (2 vols., 1842); Stolze, Persepolis (2 vols., 1882); Sarre, Iranische Felsreliefs (1908).
For works on the external history of Persia see those quoted under articles on Persian kings; also Rome; Greece; Egypt; Syria; &c. (Ed. M.)
B.—Transition Period: from the Fall of the Sassanid Dynasty to the Death of Timur (1405).
With the final defeat of the Sassanids under Yazdegerd III. at the battles of Kadisiya (Kadessia) (637) and Nehavend (641), Persia ceased to exist as a single political unit. The country passed under a succession of alien rulers who cared nothing for its ancient institutions or its religion. For about 150 years it was governed, first from Alien Rulers. Medina and afterwards from Bagdad, by officers of the Mahommedan caliphs whose principal aim it was to destroy the old nationality by the suppression of its religion. The success of this policy was, however, only apparent, especially in Iran, the inhabitants of which adopted Islam only in the most superficial manner, and it was from Persia that the blow fell which destroyed the Omayyad caliphate and set up the Abbasids in its place (see Caliphate). Even before this event adventurers and dissatisfied Moslem officers had utilized the slumbering hostility of the Persian peoples to aid them in attacks on the caliphs (e.g. Ziyad, son of Abu Sofian, in the reign of Moawiya I.), and the policy of eastern expansion brought the Arab armies perpetually into the Persian provinces. In the reign of Merwan I. the Persians (who were mostly Shiʽites) under a Moslem officer named Mokhtar (Mukhtar), whom they regarded as their mahdi, vainly attempted to assert their independence in Kufa, but were soon defeated. This rising was followed by many more (see Caliphate § B) in which the caliphs were generally successful, and Abdaimalik (d. 705) considerably strengthened the Moslem power by instituting a thorough system of Moslem coins and enforcing Arabic as the official language throughout the empire. In the succeeding reign Persia was further subdued by the great conqueror Qoteiba (Qotaiba) b. Moslim, the Arabic governor of Khorasan. Omar II., however, extended to non-Arabic Moslems immunity from all taxes except the zakat (poor-rate), with the result that a large number of Persians, who still smarted under their defeat under Mokhtar, embraced Islam and drifted into the towns to form a nucleus of sedition under the Shiʽite preachers. In the reign of Yazid II. (720–724) serious risings took place in Khorasan, and in spite of the wise administration of his successor Hisham (d. 743), the disorder continued to spread, fanned by the Abbasids and the Shiʽite preachers. Ultimately in the reign of Merwan II.the non-Arabic Moslems found a leader in Abu Moslim, a maula (client) of Persian origin and a henchman of Ibrahim b. Mahommed b. Ali, the Shiʽite imam, who raised a great army, drove the caliph's general Nasr b. Sayyar into headlong flight, and finally expelled Merwan. Thus the Abbasids became masters of Persia and also of the Arab Empire. They had gained their success largely by the aid of the Persians, who began thenceforward to recover their lost sense of nationality; according to the Spanish author Ibn Hazm the Abbasids were a Persian dynasty which destroyed the old tribal system of the Arabs and ruled despotically as Chosroes had done. At the same time the Khorasanians had fought for the old Alid family, not for the Abbasids, and with the murder of Abu Moslim discontent again began to grow among the Shiʽites (q.v.). In the reign of Harun al-Rashid disturbances broke out in Khorasan which were temporarily appeased by a visit from Harun himself. Immediately afterwards Rafiʽ b. Laith, grandson of the Omayyad general Nasr b. Sayyar, revolted in Samarkand, and Harun on his way to attack him died at Tus (809). Harun's sons Amin and Mamun quarrelled over the succession; Amin became caliph, but Mamun by the aid of Tahir b. Ḥosain Dhu ’l-Yaminain (“the man with two right hands”) and others succeeded in deposing and killing him. Tahir ultimately (820) received the governorship of Khorasan, where he succeeded in establishing
