Sassanid fire temple discovered in central Iran

ardashir
restore it! this is our heritage!
4 days ago, 5:43:36 AM
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[This user is an administrator] Basiji_e Amaleh
Destroy it. Believing that once upon a time there was a religion called Zaratostra is a Khorafat and a propaganda made by Zionistis. There was no history before Islam.

Destroy it as it might slow down the emergence of Emam_e Zaman.
4 days ago, 4:32:05 AM
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ardashir
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If the Emam_e Zaman will fill the earth with equity and justice where it was before filled with oppression and tyranny, won't that probably include the oppression and denial of history? Withiout what went before, how can we appreciate equity and justice or even understand it?
4 days ago, 9:06:06 AM
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I alweays loved learning about the Sassanians, even more than the Achameninds. Iranians revere Cyrus more than any Sassanian leader which is justified however, Sassanian kings such as Shapure, defeated 3 Roman Emperors (Valerian, Georgian III, and Philip the Arab).



To: SunkenCiv
The Sassanids exhausted themselves fighting the Byzantines and were conquered by the Arabs in an astonishingly small period of time.
6 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 3:47:50 AM by colorado tanker
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To: colorado tanker

The caliph who was running the Arab conquests at that time was also one of those rare geniuses from Moslem history; he planned the entire set of campaigns that conquered Iran, and never left his dining room. But it’s also true that the Byzantines had been getting the better of the Sassanids, and that kinda knees the groin of the “died in the plague” school of thought regarding the decline of the Byzantines. Had they joined forces, the Sassanids and Byzantines might have stopped the Muzzie cutthroats at some battle in Mesopotamia. They did not, or could not, and then it became a piecemeal conquest.

7 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 7:58:09 AM by SunkenCiv ("Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others." -- Otto von Bismarck)
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To: SunkenCiv
This is from Wiki and I haven't fact checked it, but it sounds about right:

While originally seeming successful at a first glance, the campaign of Khosrau II had actually exhausted the Persian army and Persian treasuries. In an effort to rebuild the national treasuries, Khosrau overtaxed the population. Thus, seeing the opportunity, Heraclius (610–641) drew on all his diminished and devastated empire's remaining resources, reorganized his armies and mounted a remarkable counter-offensive. Between 622 and 627 he campaigned against the Persians in Anatolia and the Caucasus, winning a string of victories against Persian forces under Khosrau, Shahrbaraz, Shahin and Shahraplakan, sacking the great Zoroastrian temple at Ganzak and securing assistance from the Khazars and Western Turkic Khaganate.

In 626, Constantinople was besieged by Slavic and Avar forces which were supported by a Persian army under Shahrbaraz on the far side of the Bosphorus, but attempts to ferry the Persians across were blocked by the Byzantine fleet and the siege ended in failure. In 627-628, Heraclius mounted a winter invasion of Mesopotamia and, despite the departure of his Khazar allies, defeated a Persian army commanded by Rhahzadh in the Battle of Nineveh. He then marched down the Tigris, devastating the country and sacking Khosrau's palace at Dastagerd. He was prevented from attacking Ctesiphon by the destruction of the bridges on the Nahrawan Canal and conducted further raids before withdrawing up the Diyala into north-western Iran.

The impact of Heraclius's victories, the devastation of the richest territories of the Sassanid Empire, and the humiliating destruction of high-profile targets such as Ganzak and Dastagerd, fatally undermined Khosrau's prestige and his support among the Persian aristocracy. In early 628, he was overthrown and murdered by his son Kavadh II (628), who immediately brought an end to the war, agreeing to withdraw from all occupied territories. In 629, Heraclius restored the True Cross to Jerusalem in a majestic ceremony.[56] Kavadh died within months, and chaos and civil war followed. Over a period of four years and five successive kings, including two daughters of Khosrau II and spahbod Shahrbaraz, the Sassanid Empire weakened considerably. The power of the central authority passed into the hands of the generals. It would take several years for a strong king to emerge from a series of coups, and the Sassanids never had time to recover fully.

Heraclius' health was declining when the Arab invasion began so he couldn't lead the campaign or he might have whooped them too.

These two enemies had been fighting for centuries and hated each other, but it is one of the interesting thought experiments in history to think what might have happened had the Byzantines and Sassanians joined forces against the Arabs. Islam would have remained a backwater religion restricted to the Arabian Peninsula.
8 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 8:10:30 AM by colorado tanker
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To: colorado tanker

Instead, Islam remains a backwater religion.

9 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 10:00:14 AM by SunkenCiv ("Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others." -- Otto von Bismarck)
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To: colorado tanker; SunkenCiv

>>>”The Sassanids exhausted themselves fighting the Byzantines and were conquered by the Arabs in an astonishingly small period of time.”

While this is true, I also think this is a rather one dimensional and simplistic view of how & why the Bedouin Arabs defeated the Sassanids. There were definitely other important contributing factors to the fall of the Sassanid Empire.

I recommend reading this book:

Shadows in the Desert: Ancient Persia at War (General Military)

http://www.amazon.com/Shadows-Desert-Ancient-General-Military/dp/1846031087

Also see “Customer Reviews” in the above link.

Other related readings:

Genocide of “Zarathushtis” (”Zoroastrians” in Iran)

http://ahura.homestead.com/files/GENOCIDEofZarathushtiesWEBJULY07_2_.pdf

History of Jihad against Zoroastrians of Iran:

http://historyofjihad.org/persia.html

P.S. – I often read and hear about how “Arabs” contributed so much to “Islamic” Architecture, literature, poetry, paintings and generally what has been coined as the “Islamic Civilization” particularly in the middle ages in the ME and North Africa (even in Southern Spain for instances). This view is often highly distorted, misrepresented and inaccurate.

Persians, Egyptians and North Africans (Carthagians i.e. current Tunisians) all had cultured and civilized pre-Islamic pasts. When the mentioned nations, particularly Iranians, were militarily defeated and, in many instances, forcibly converted to Islam, they brought in cultured traits and a tradition of learning into Islam.

In fact, the first codified grammar of Arabic was written by a Persian. The Arabs were unlettered, Mohammed himself was completely illiterate, in addition to being cruel, cunning and ruthless.

Therefore, the much vaunted Islamic Renaissance & Golden Age was, in essence, a renaissance of the Persian (Zoroastrian) converts to Islam beginning during the second Arab rulers of Iran [Abbasiad Caliphate].

During the first four caliphs Abba (Abu) Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali (the last three who were murdered by other Muslims in cold blood) and the Ummayad caliphate (the first Arab rulers of Iran) at Damascus and Iraq, there was no such thing as the Islamic Renaissance.

It was the Persians, North African and Egyptian converts who had a pre-Islamic legacy of being civilized, which they carried forward after being converted to Islam. In fact, Islam attempted to smother all pre-Islamic legacy of culture and civilization, and so it was only after the initial flush of Islamic savagery had passed over, that the newly converted people could - after a generation or so - pick up the threads of a civilized life.

10 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 12:40:09 PM by odds
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To: odds

Enjoyed reading the PS comments.. spot on! Now, would you mind passing this detailed account to the man in the WhiteHouse? Remind him too, Islam/muslims only came into being after 632AD(death of their so called messenger)& when Arabs and Islam swept through the Middle East in 630 A.D., they encountered 600 years of Assyrian Christian civilization, with a rich heritage, a highly developed culture, and advanced learning institutions. It is this civilization that became the foundation of the Arab civilization. Secondly... once the Christian Assyrian & other communities were drained of its population through forced conversion to Islam, the communities dwindled below a critical threshold, it ceased producing the scholars that were the intellectual driving force of the Islamic civilization, and that is when the so called “Golden Age of Islam” came to an end (about 850 A.D.). Since this time, the islamic civilization had produced nothing great by itself.

11 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 9:12:23 PM by SIRTRIS
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To: SIRTRIS

>>>”Now, would you mind passing this detailed account to the man in the WhiteHouse?”

Unfortunately, I have no influence with “the man in the Whitehouse”. But, recently learned that “the man in the Whitehouse” actually was an avid advocate of what I said about the False Arab contribution to the so-called Islamic Civilization ... …. As an optimist, I’d like to believe he is extremely misinformed - alternatively, he is selling a political package to certain audiences.

Also, just to share something with you from my personal childhood experience and observation in Iran during the latter days of the Shah’s government - regarding the Assyrian community (in Iran) - I do remember that many Iranian-Zoroastrians (and those from the Parsi community in Iran who had moved to Iran) felt more, culturally, comfortable with the Iranian Assyrians and/or Armenians than with many Muslims.

I don’t mean this as disrespect or a bias towards the Muslims born Iranians at the time; after all many were/are just muslim born and simply accepted being “Moslems” even if they didn’t practice or believe in it. The Moslem/Islam type of issues that we are now facing often didn’t exist or were significantly toned down in those days.

12 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 9:54:10 PM by odds
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The Parsi Zoroastrian Community is known to traditionally reside in India. Although many moved back to Iran during the Pahlavi Dynasty.

13 posted on Friday, July 09, 2010 9:57:07 PM by odds