Doug Metzger
speaker
2,647 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2026
last heard 11 Sep
Doug Metzger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
The founder of the Sasanian Empire was King Ardashir I.
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And in a document written long after Ardashir I's reign, the founding father is said to have stated
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Know that kingship and religion are twins, one cannot exist without the other, for religion is the foundation of royalty, and the king is the defender of religion.
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Close quote.
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A generation after King Ardashir, one of the most famous Zoroastrian priests in history, came to power.
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His name was Kyrdir, and he partnered with several Sasanian kings between 240 and 290.
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Kirdir, according to recorded inscriptions, he painstakingly left behind, was a zealot.
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He trumpeted his efforts to persecute Jews, Buddhists, Brahmins, Christians, and Manichaeans, and eventually saw to the imprisonment and
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And death of the prophet Manny himself.
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Thus, important evidence from the 200s suggests that a muscular partnership between church and state existed from the outset of the Sasanian Empire, and that between 224 and 651, non-Zoroastrians were second-class citizens there, if they were even permitted in
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In the first place.
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This model of church-state partnership is easy enough to understand.
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However, a higher preponderance of historical evidence suggests that, far from being religiously unitary, the Sasanian Empire practiced a range of Zoroastrianisms, and that religious tolerance and religious indifference were generally more.
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prevalent than persecution.
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As scholar Parvane Porchariadi puts it, the image of Sasanian kings of kings, partnering with Zoroastrian priests of priests, quote,
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reflects more the propagandistic endeavors of the clergy and the monarchy, articulated late in the Sasanian and early in the post conquest period, than the reality of the religious landscape in Iran during the Sasanian period.
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Close quote.
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In other words, in the twilight of Persian dominance of Iran, pious Persian historians and theologians wrote revisionist history, saying that late antique Iran had been Zoroastrian through and through.
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In actuality though, Late Antique Iran, like Late Antique everywhere else, was a religiously heterogeneous place.
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There is a massive amount of evidence that to quote the same historian again, political expediency and not adherence to any particular religious dogma dictated the Sasanian monarch's relationship vis a vis other faiths through most of their history.
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Showing 2541–2560 of 2,647 · page 128 of 133
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