SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 105unity. This unity was nevertheless briefly brought about—before the Arabs—
by the last great Sasanian monarch Khosrow II in the second and third de-
cades of the seventh century. By taking Asia Minor, Khosrow bid for control
of the Eastern Mediterranean basin as well. As ruler of Iran too, he briefly
restored the Achaemenid Empire “from Sind to Sardis”^52 as it had been at its
apogee under Darius I (d. 486 BCE).
Such political arrangements were transitory compared to the durable
trans- Euphratene contacts enjoyed by Jewish communities in Mesopota-
mia and Palestine, or the Syriac Christian Churches. To grasp the historical
functioning of the Eurasian Hinge, we need to look at its cultural as well as
political role. Grosso modo, the Iranian plateau can be associated with the
successive Iranian empires, Achaemenid, Arsacid, and Sasanian. The East
Mediterranean was Rome’s for two- thirds of our First Millennium. And the
Mountain Arena became the heartland of the Umayyad Caliphate and—on
its Mesopotamian side—of the Abbasids too. We have already encountered
these three imperial traditions; but it will help us appreciate the immense
and diachronic cultural interactivity of the space they occupied if we con-
sider that, as well as empires with their apparently firm frontiers, we also find
human networks which may be political as well as cultural, but are markedly
less inflexible than the vast and autocratic states from which they often de-
rive. We may call these networks commonwealths. Each of the empires we
are concerned with—Iran, Rome, and the Caliphate—came to be associated
with one. Our empires could not necessarily embrace the whole of the Eur-
asian Hinge—Rome never subdued the Iranian plateau, nor did any Muslim
state take root in Asia Minor before the Second Millennium. But the com-
monwealths were cultural, therefore more pervasive.
I have already noted the achievement of the early Achaemenid Empire in
unifying virtually the whole Eurasian Hinge, excluding the Balkans, in the
early fifth century BCE. Several Greek and Roman writers asserted that the
Sasanians consciously and explicitly aimed to reinstate this vast Iranian do-
minion by force of arms. Whether they were right is debated in current
scholarship.^53 One thing is certain, though, namely that the Sasanians came
very close to achieving such a restoration during Shapur I’s campaigns in the
250s, and actually did so in the 610s and 620s. The pre- Islamic world can,
then, as instructively be viewed looking west from Fars or Khurāsān as east
from Greece or Italy. And if Iran temporarily lost its political independence
to the Arabs, it reemerged as a major force, both political and cultural, in the
52 R. G. Kent, Old Persian (New Haven 1953^2 ) 136–37 (a text of Darius I).
53 In favor: G. Fowden, Empire to commonwealth (Princeton 1993) 27–36. Against: K. Mosig-
Walburg, Römer und Perser vom 3. Jahrhundert bis zum Jahr 363 n. Chr. (Gutenberg 2009) 12–13, 19–
21, 326. Z. Rubin, “The Sasanid monarchy,” in CAH 14.645–47, argues that glorification of the Ach-
aemenids was more for foreign than internal consumption.