PERSIANSFaylakan,51 The Persian general called Andarzaghar seems represent-
ative of this class. He was one of the local landowners (A. tunna')
who had been born in the Sawad, and particular mention is made of
the fact that he had neither been born in the capital (Mada'in) nor
raised there.^52 The village lords (Syr. mare qoryi) of upper Iraq were
also largely of Persian descent.^53 At this level, where the dahaqtn
appear to merge with the headmen of villages, this class was not
exclusively Persian, and it is possible to find Aramaean and Arab
dahaqtn at the time of the conquest.
There is also evidence for the presence of Persian villagers and
peasants in late Sasanian Iraq. In upper Iraq, in the heavily Persian
district of Adiabene, Persian villagers were simply a part of the rest
of the Persian population, as in Iran. The village of Beth Ghurbaq near
Nineveh was described as stratified into nobles, dihqans, and freemen
in the late sixth century.54 In lower Iraq, peasants of Persian origin
had been settled as imported labor for the agricultural development
projects of the late Sasanian period. They seem to have been fairly
widespread along the lower Tigris in Kaskar and Maysan,s5 and there
is a reference to an entire village located across the Euphrates from
Anbar in the early seventh century, whose inhabitants were the de-
scendents of people who were brought forcibly from Khurasan.^56 Per-
sian peasants also seem to have lived around the capital. Farriikhzadh
ibn Sumayy has already been noted. At the siege of Behrasir (Veh-
Artakhshatr) by Sa'd ibn AbiWaqqa~ in 637, a large number of Persian
peasants (Ar. 'uluj li-ahli Fars) were rounded up in the villages and
reed thickets outside the city and were only released when Shirzadh,
the dihqan of Sabat, vouched for themP
Thus, by the end of the Sasanian period Persians were to be found
concentrated along the line of the Zagros as an extension of the ethnic
settlement on the plateau; in a defensive perimeter along the southwest
border as garrison troops; in all of the major cities and towns as
51 Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2386; Ya<qiibi, Ta'rlkh, n, 166.
52 Tabari, Ta'rtkh, I, 2029.
53 The notable called Gabriel at the village of Qosh in Beth Nuhadhra was of Persian
descent; see E.A.W. Budge, Rabban Hormizd the Persian (London, 1902), I, 58-59,
67; n, 86-88, 99.
54 Budge, Rabban Hormizd, I, 135, 151; 11, 201, 226.
55 The mother of Ziyad and the parents of al-I:Iasan al-Ba~ri were lower-class Persians
and came from this part of Iraq (Baladhuri, Futub, p. 344).
56 Scher, "Histoire nestorienne," 11(2), 587-88.
57 Tabari, Ta'rlkh, I, 2426, 2427.