Unlike the Parthians, the Sāsānians established their own princes as rulers of the small kingdoms they conquered, except on the frontiers, where they accepted vassals or allies because their hold over the frontier regions was insecure. By placing Sāsānian princes over the various parts of the empire, the Sāsānians maintained more control than the Parthians had. The provincial divisions were more systematized, and there was a hierarchy of four units—the satrapy (shahr in Middle Persian), under which came the province (ōstan), then a district (tassug), and finally the village (deh). In Mesopotamia these divisions were changed throughout Sāsānian history, frequently because of Roman invasions.
Many native tax collectors were replaced by Persians, who were more trusted by the rulers. In addition to the many tolls and tariffs, corvée, and the like, the two basic taxes were the land and poll taxes. The latter were not paid by the nobility, soldiers, civil servants, and the priests of the Zoroastrian religion. The land tax was a percentage of the harvest, but it was determined before the collection of the crops, which naturally caused many problems. Khosrow I undertook a new survey of the land and imposed the tax in a prearranged sum based on the amount of cultivable land, the quantity of date palms and olive trees, and the number of people working on the land. Taxes were to be paid three times a year. Abuses were still rampant, but this was better than the old system; at least, if a drought or some other calamity occurred, taxes could be reduced or remitted. Although information is contradictory, it appears that religious communities other than the Zoroastrian one had extra taxes imposed on them from time to time. This was especially true of the growing Christian community, particularly in the time of Shāpūr II, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
Religious communities became fixed under the Sāsānians, and Mesopotamia with its large Jewish and Christian populations experienced changes because of the shift in primary allegiance from the ruler to the head of the religious group. The exilarch of the Jews had legal and tax-collecting authority over the Jews of the Sāsānian empire. Mani, the founder of the Manichaean religion, was born in lower Mesopotamia, and his religion spread quickly both to the east and west, even before his death. In its homeland, Mesopotamia, it came under severe persecution by the priests of the Zoroastrian religion, who viewed Manichaeism as a dangerous heresy. Christianity, however, was viewed not as a heresy but as a separate religion, tolerated until it became the official religion of the enemy Roman Empire; Christians were then regarded as potential traitors to the Sāsānian state. The first large growth of Christianity in Mesopotamia came with the deportation and resettlement of Christians, especially from Antioch with its patriarch, during Shāpūr I’s wars with the Romans. In a synod convened in 325, the metropolitan see of Ctesiphon was made supreme over other sees in the Sāsānian empire, and the first patriarch or catholicos was Papa. In 344 the first persecutions of Christians began; they lasted with varying degrees of severity until 422, when a treaty with the government ended the persecutions.
The earliest contemporary mention of Christians in Mesopotamia is in the inscriptions of Kartēr, the chief Zoroastrian priest after the reign of Shāpūr I. He mentions both Christians and Nazareans, possibly two kinds of Christians, Greek-speaking and Syriac-speaking, or two sects. It is not known which groups are meant, but it is known that followers of the gnostic Christian leaders Bardesanes (Bar Daiṣān) and Marcion were active in Mesopotamia. By the 5th century the Church of the East dominated Mesopotamia, formally constituting itself in 410 at Ctesiphon. It simultaneously adopted the Nicene Creed, which had been formulated in the Roman Empire under the oversight of Emperor Constantine I, but by 424 it was asserting its autonomy from the Roman imperial church. A few years later the imperial church affirmed a dogmatic teaching that Mary was Theotokos (Greek: “birth-giver of God”). While the Church of the East was not directly involved in that debate, its theological tradition maintained a strict separation of the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ, and, therefore, in its view, Mary could have given birth only to his human nature. The theological division between the two entities would prove decisively divisive. After about 485 the Sāsānian government was satisfied that the church in its domains was not loyal to Constantinople. The Church of the East thereafter received at least some support and recognition from the Sāsānian kings, whose divine right to rule was likewise pronounced by its bishops. Further persecutions were not state-inspired but rather prosecuted by the Zoroastrian clergy. At the end of the Sāsānian period, however, the Church of the East was fighting the miaphysites, now called Jacobites, more than the Zoroastrians. The Jacobites had established a network of monasteries, especially in northern Mesopotamia, introducing institutional competition with the Church of the East.
Ethnicity became less important than religious affiliation under the Sāsānians, who thus changed the social structure of Mesopotamia. The Arabs continued to grow in numbers, both as nomads and as settled folk, and Arabic became widely spoken. King Nuʿmān III of the Arab client kingdom of the Lakhmids of Al-Ḥīrah in southern Mesopotamia became a Christian in 580, but in 602 he was deposed by Khosrow II, who made the kingdom a province of the empire. This act removed a barrier against inroads by Arab tribesmen from the desert, and, after the union of Arabs in the peninsula under the banner of Islam, the fate of the Sāsānian empire was sealed. The Muslims, on the whole, were welcomed in Mesopotamia as deliverers from the foreign yoke of the Persians, but the conversion of the mass of the population to Islam did not proceed rapidly, mainly because of the well-organized Christian and Jewish communities. The arrival of Islam, of course, changed the history of Mesopotamia more than any other event in its history. Richard N. Frye
Citation Information
Article Title: History of Mesopotamia
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 05 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/place/Mesopotamia-historical-region-Asia
Access Date: August 22, 2019
Additional Reading
General works
The Cambridge Ancient History contains much relevant information, especially vol. 1–2, 3rd ed. (1970–75), vol. 3–4, 2nd ed. (1982–88), and vol. 6 (1927); they include lengthy and richly documented chapters covering Mesopotamian prehistory to the time of Alexander the Great’s conquest of the region. Chapters on Mesopotamia under the Seleucids, Parthians, and Sāsānians are included in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3 (1983). Robert McC. Adams, The Land Behind Baghdad: A History of Settlement on the Diyala Plains (1965); Nicholas Postgate, The First Empires (1977); Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq, 2nd ed. (1980); Richard N. Frye, The History of Ancient Iran (1984); Seton Lloyd, The Archaeology of Mesopotamia: From the Old Stone Age to the Persian Conquest, rev. ed (1984); and Michael Roaf, Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East (1990), also provide broad coverage. I.M. Diakonov (ed.), Ancient Mesopotamia: Socio-Economic History, trans. from Russian (1969, reissued 1981), collects representative articles by Diakonov and others on Mesopotamian history, with emphasis on social and economic aspects. A. Leo Oppenheim, Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead Civilization, rev. ed. completed by Erica Reiner (1977), includes some controversial views.