The Empire of the Persian Caesars, Saber El-Beltagy

This book deals with the political and cultural history of the Persian emperors' state, and their relations with the Arabs, Romans, and Turks, during the Sassanid era. In this book, we have relied on two main types of sources: Arab historical sources and Persian archaeological evidence. This study is considered a building block in reconciling source texts and material archaeological evidence. In this book, we have reviewed the political and cultural conditions during that period, which preceded the advent of Islam, and in which the Sassanid state represented a transitional evolutionary stage between the end of an old era and the beginning of a new era. We have also shed light in this book on all aspects of the cultural activities of the Persians under Sassanid rule, and how they excelled in more than one cultural field, after they developed what they borrowed from the cultural activities of previous peoples and states. This book also represents a comprehensive study of all aspects of the relations that existed between the Sassanid Persian emperors on the one hand, and their three neighbors (the Arabs, Romans, and Turks) on the other hand. And how these relations had a great impact on the internal conditions in the Sassanid state itself, whether political and security conditions, or economic and social conditions. In this book, we have reviewed how Persia represented one of the major challenges for the emerging Islamic state, but a set of factors, especially religious factors, - and the reader of this book can observe how the Islamic conquest of those lands and the entry of Islam into them had its civilizational impact on the Persians, just as this conquest had its role in helping Muslims to know Persian political and civilizational systems. And to borrow from them what suits the Islamic entities that arose later; that is, the influence was mutual between the two parties. Despite that, and in the opposite direction, this book reviewed the negative cultural influences of Persia on Islamic societies and entities, as many anomalous Persian ideas that conflict with the Islamic religion and its limits, and at the forefront of them, of course, the ideas of Shu'ubiyyah and Zandaqa, crept into these societies.