RESOURCESterpretive themes which have been emphasized with regard to the
cultural history of western Asia during Late Antiquity and in early
Islamic history. Since much of their content pertains directly to Iraq,
they are also useful sources for bibliography.Surveys and General Works
The same can be said of a number of general works which provide
an interpretive outline and structure for understanding Iraq in this
period. Although this study was not concerned primarily with survivals
from ancient Iraq, some aspects of indigenous administrative and re-
ligious tradition proved to be of great antiquity or were worth com-
paring with ancient native precedents. A convenient introducation to
the earliest literate culture in Iraq with translations of some of its
literature is provided by S. N. Kramer's The Sumerians: Their History,
Culture and Character (Chicago & London, 1963). Ancient Iraq (Har-
mondsworth, Middlesex, 1964) by G. Roux is still a useful survey
down to the Neo-Babylonians (or Chaldaeans) and has a bibliography
by chapters. L. Oppenheim's Ancient Mesopotamia: Portrait of a Dead
Civilization (Chicago and London, 1964) is also considered to be a
good introduction with a rather critical interpretation.
There is no literature on the Sasanian period which deals with Iraq
as such. Cultural uniformity throughout the Sasanian empire during
its entire four-hundred-year existence appears to be assumed by most
scholars; so the available information on Iraq is put into a general
Sasanian context. The classic treatment of the Sasanian period is
A. Christensen's L'Iran sous les Sassanides (Copenhagen, 1944). After
thirty-five years of subsequent research it is now badly out of date.
Unfortunately no single work of comparable status has replaced it and
it continues to be treated as authoritative (including Christensen's own
mistakes and the French misspelling of Sasanid). The value of F. Alt-
heim and R. Stiehl's Ein asiatischer Staat, Feudalismus unter den Sa-
saniden und ihren Nachbarn (Wiesbaden, 1954) is compromised by
Altheim's obsession with feudalism, but it must be consulted. It is
balanced by N. Pigulevskaja's Les villes de !'etat iranien aux epoques
parthe et sassanide (Paris, 1963) whose main thesis, put in a Marxist
framework, is that Sasanian Iran had a slave rather than a feudal
economy (she may be right, but her evidence is slim). R. N. Frye's
The Heritage of Persia (London, 1962) is a survey of the pre-Islamic
history of Iran to A.D. 640. Although the book is mostly concerned
with ancient dynasties, pages 207 to 255 cover the Sasanians and the