Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 67.101.41.245 (talk) at 23:12, 3 December 2008 (→Contents: I'm not sure we can tell what an author attempts). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

It has been suggested that this article be merged with Osprey_Publishing#General_Military. (Discuss) Proposed since November 2008.

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. It covers the history of early Iranian peoples as well as that of Iran from the Median Empire until the Islamic conquest of Persia. 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 mentions 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which is presented in the final chapter of the book, is the notion that the Iranians were permanently defeated and superseded by the Greeks, Alexander the Great in particular, and the Romans.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.

This is at odds with the observation by other writers that academic mainstream has portrayed Alexander in a less than sympathetic light recently.

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

Awards

The book has received the WAALM (World Academy of Arts Literature & Media) Gold Lioness history award for the year 2008..

Reception

Reactions to the book have been mixed. Jona Lendering in Bryn Mawr Classical Review was strongly negative, arguing that it was an "exceptionally bad book". While acknowledging that the book was attractive in its presentation, (a view mirrored by Fred Rhodes in Middle East), the reviewer was critical of the coverage – both in terms of what was (and was not) included in the work and the author's approach to the sources. Nevertheless, other reviewers had a different response. Rhodes, in his short review, wrote that it offered a "comprehensive history of Persia's wars", while Higham, writing in Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, argued that it provided balance to the stories about Persia written by "Greek and Roman observers and historians". In addition, an anonymous "collective of graduate students, researchers, scholars and writers of Iranica" wrote a reply to Lendering's review, in which they responded to the criticisms leveled by Lendering.

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

The "about this book" section on its Random House profile quotes sympathetic 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. Richard Frye notes:"In this book Dr. Farrokh has given us the Persian side of the picture as opposed to the Greek side and Roman viewpoint which has long dominated our understanding of these wars. It is refreshing to see other perspectives, and Dr. Farrokh sheds light on many Persian institutions in this history, such as the Sassanian elite cavalry, the "saravan". Osprey Publishing is to be congratulated for publishing Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War, which presents another aspect of wars between East and West in ancient times".

External links

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

References

1. quoted after Amapedia
2. Betsy Carpenter (November 22 2004). "Alexander's New Look" (LexisNexis reprint), U.S. News & World Report
3. BBC Persian: November 05, 2008.
4. ^ Lendering, Jona (2008). "Kaveh Farrokh, Shadows in the Desert. Ancient Persia at War". Bryn Mawr Classical Review. 62 (9). Retrieved December 2, 2008.
5. ^ Rhodes, Fred (May 2007). "Shadows in the Desert Ancient Persia at War". Middle East (378): pp. 65–67. {{cite journal}}: |pages= has extra text (help)
6. Higham, R. (February 2008). "Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War". Current Reviews for Academic Libraries. 45 (6): 1034–1034.
7. "Let's Abandon the Distortions of Achaemenid Studies". Rozaneh. Fall, 2008. Retrieved December 2, 2008. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
8. [http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/wais/cgi-bin/?p=11367 "Introducing 'Shadows in the Desert'" by Robert Gibbs
9. Random House Academic Resources
10. Farrokh, Kaveh. Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War. Osprey Publishing, 2007. Foreword page 7

• Articles to be merged from November 2008
• History books