Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire

Touraj Daryaee is a historian of ancient Iran, and this I.B. Tauris book is his general academic history of the Sasanian Persian empire, covering its rise, its centuries as a major power alongside Rome and Byzantium, and its eventual fall to the early Islamic conquests. Its strength is accessible synthesis of Sasanian history grounded in the available Persian, Greek and Arabic source material, giving a period that receives less popular attention than Achaemenid Persia or the Roman world a clear connected narrative treatment. Its limit is that, as a general history covering several centuries in one volume, it moves quickly across any single reign or topic, so a claim needing detailed treatment of one specific Sasanian king's religious policy, for instance, is better served by a focused study of that reign than by this broad survey alone.