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Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War is a 2007 book of the Osprey Publishing General Military series, dealing with the military history of Persia, written by Kaveh Farrokh (b. 1962). It covers the history of early Iranian peoples as well as that of Iran from the Median Empire until the Islamic conquest of Persia.

Farrokh has a Ph.D. in psychology, obtained in September 2001 from the Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology at the University of British Columbia, where he specialized in the cognitive and linguistic processes of Persian speakers. Shadows in the Desert is his second publication with Osprey, after Sassanian Elite Cavalry AD 224-642 (2005).

Contents

Shadows in the Desert covers the three major empires of Persia before Islam (Achaemenids, Parthians, Sassanids). It tabulates a range of aspects of the pre-Islamic Iranian Culture, in the fields of arts, and architecture, technology, learning, administration, religion (mythology and theology), warfare (heavy cavalry and the associated Pahlavi culture of chivalry), communications, commerce and human rights.

The author attempts to provide a neutral view of Persia’s history, one that includes the weaknesses of Persia before the arrival of Islam. Mention is made for example, of the inequitable distribution of wealth seen between the nobility and the Magi on the one hand versus the peasant and ordinary populations on the other – and the historical consequences of these social dynamics.

Farrokh makes reference to the research of Italian artist Nik Spatari, whose works had remained largely confined to Italian scholarship. Spatari has tabulated the impact of the architecture of pre-Islamic Persia upon Greece and Rome. Farrokh has cited Spatari’s findings for the first time in English-language publications.

Prehistory

Farrokh also extends his discussion to his views on the origins of the Proto Indo-Europeans and their "relationship to the invention of farming" in upper Mesopotamia. For this purpose, Farrokh conflates the Anatolian hypothesis of Colin Renfrew with the Armenian hypothesis of Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and V.V. Ivanov, besides discussing the domestication of the horse in the Pontic steppe.

"The Alexander Mystique"

"The Alexander Mystique", which is presented in the final chapter of the book, is the notion that the Iranians were permanently defeated and superseded by the Greeks, Alexander the Great in particular, and the Romans. This has led, he suggests, to the ignorance in much of western academia as to how and why the post-Alexandrian Seleucids were overthrown by the second empire of Persia, the Parthians. Even less acknowledged he believes, as a consequence of the Alexander Mystique, are the military defeats suffered by Roman armies under the leadership of historical figures such as Mark Antony, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Valerian, and Julian the Apostate.

In the West, we suffer from what I call "The Alexander Mystique". We still believe that the Persians were permanently defeated and superseded by the Greeks and Romans. This misconception is being exasperated by the slow replacement of Persian language and Iranian studies with Arabic at the university level. It’s happening here in a subtle way while in Iran there have been ideologues and theocrats who have been actively disparaging pre-Islamic Iran since the 1970s. Still, there is a growing interest within Iran, especially among the youth, in Iran’s ancient heritage.

Structure

Shadows in the Desert: Persia at War is divided into three parts, each of which contain several sections.

• Foreword: The Mighty Persian Warriors by Richard Nelson Frye
• Introduction: Persia or Iran?
• Chronology
• Part 1: The Achaemenids
  • 1 Before the Achaemenids
  • 2 Cyrus the Great and the early Achaemenids
  • 3 Darius the Great
  • 4 Xerxes and Limits of Empire
  • 5 The Achaemenid Empire from Artaxerxes I to the rise of Macedon
  • 6 Darius III and the fall of the Empire
• Part 2: The Parthians
  • 7 The Seleucids and the rise of the Parthians
  • 8 Parthia challenges Rome
  • 9 Parthia from Mark Antony to the Alan invasions
  • 10 Emperor Trajan's bid to destroy Parthia
  • 11 The decline and fall of Parthia
• Part 3: The Sassanians
  • 12 The rise of the Sassanian Dynasty
  • 13 Shapur II: a new revival of Sassanian Persia
  • 14 The tumultuous Fifth Century
  • 15 The Kavad era
  • 16 Khosrow I, renaissance and revival
  • 17 The final glory and the decline of the Empire
  • 18 Downfall of the Sassanians and the Islamic conquests
  • 19 The legacy of Persia after the Islamic conquests
• Endnotes
• Select bibliography
• Index

Reception

The book was recommended to the World Affairs International Society of Stanford University by Robert Gibbs.

Reviews quoted by Random House included favorable comments by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones of the Department of Classics at the University of Edinburgh and by Patrick Hunt of the Department of Classics at Stanford University. The forward was written by Richard Nelson Frye.

However, Jona Lendering of livius.org, gives a negative review of the book in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review.. Farrokh has been interviewed on a number of media outlets such as The Leonard Lopate Show, We Talk Back, and The Tommy Schnurmacher Show.

Farrokh has been interviewed on Voice of America's Persian service about the legacy of the Achaemenid founder Cyrus the Great. The History Channel has also interviewed him on the topic of technology in ancient Persia for the series Engineering an Empire which aired in 2006.

External links

• Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War at Osprey Publishing

References

1. CV of Gay Bisanz, external reader for Kareh (sic) Farrokh
2. Kaveh Farrokh, 1988. Patterns of adjustment of international students to the University of British Columbia. MA Thesis, 1988, University of British Columbia. ISBN 0315470690
3. Kaveh Farrokh, 2001. The relationships among cognitive processes, language experience and errors in Farsi speaking ESL adults. PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia. ISBN 0612714594
4. quoted after Amapedia
5. [http://www.savepasargad.com/september/Kaveh%20Farrokh.htm "Introducing 'Shadows in the Desert'" by Robert Gibbs
6. Random House Academic Resources
7. Farrokh, Kaveh. Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War. Osprey Publishing, 2007. Foreword page 7
9. The Leonard Lopate Show of New York Public Radio, WYNC FM 93.9, August 20, 2007
10. We Talk Back of Louisiana and Mississippi, KMLB-AM 1440, August 11, 2007
11. The Tommy Schnurmacher Show in Montreal, Canada, CJAD AM 800, August 6, 2007
12. Voice of America, Persian Roundtable
13. Osprey Publishing, Kaveh Farrokh Author Profile

• Articles to be merged from November 2008
• History books