Rethinking History: From the Gavbara to Khurshid

The history of Iran, the former territories of the Sasanian Empire, after 637 CE is often told by Islamic sources from the viewpoint of the Caliphate, gazing east from Kufa, Damascus, or Baghdad. In these narratives, very little information is transmitted about the history of the central regions of Iran (Sasanian Ērānšahr) after the Battle of Nihawand and prior to the rise of the Abbasids. Of these regions, the history of Tabarestan, southeast of the Caspian Sea, receives little attention until the so-called Rebellion of Khurshid in the early 760’s. However, a surprising cache of Pahlavi documents from this region, immediately preceding the reign of Ispahbed Khurshid, promise to bring us much new information about this region in the first Islamic century. Studied alongside local sources such as the History of Tabarestan of Ibn Isfandiyar and archaeological and numismatic evidence, this archive serves to shed an unprecedented light on the history of the Iranian world in the post-Sasanian period and help us understand both continuities and change in the transition from the Sasanian to the Islamic period.

Khodadad Rezakhani is a global historian of the first millennium Central and West Asia, working on the social and economic history of the Sasanian and post-Sasanian period. He is the author of ReOrienting the Sasanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and the co-editor of the forthcoming “Companion to War in Ancient Iran” (Brill 2024). He is currently the Principal Investigator of the Gerda Henkel Stiftung funded project, Memory of Ruins: Ctesiphon and Baghdad and a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at Leiden University, the Netherlands.