Dr. Eve MacDonald
speaker
1,045 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 13 Sep
Dr. Eve MacDonald’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 Aug 2026 with 2.
Appearances
So there is part of the story actually is really interesting because it it takes place in the court of the old kingdom, in the Parthian court.
And Ardashir either woos a servant or a daughter of the old king and they run away together.
And if it's the servant story, she takes the treasury and the keys to basically the kingdom with her and they run away and she becomes pregnant.
And so, in order to ensure that the baby is born, she's isolated.
And in fact, there's an amazing story that has to do with a self-castration of an attendant to guard her and make sure that nobody interferes with her and she is actually giving birth to this heir.
So there's there's a lot of myth and sort of mayhem about um the birth.
Of Shapur himself, but to me that just perhaps tells us that there's so much construction of their legitimacy.
There's a really great scholar of ancient Iran named Khodadad Reza Khani, who I think you've spoken to.
I think you've spoken to the other.
And he he does he's done some interesting stuff around the fact that the whole Sasanian house, the house of Sasan, is actually from a
Completely different region and not Persian at all.
And that they come from Sakhistan and they come from the borderlands between India and Iran.
Yeah.
There's different names for it.
And that they um they work very hard to construct these really formal legitimacies.
And the reason we have so much confusion around who Sassan was, around Ardashir's birth, around Shapur's birth, is because of this.
Because we have all these mixed um stories and myths, is because they're from outside of the legitimate line itself, and so they've imposed themselves locally.
locally as well.
No, it's a really interesting question actually.
And something that we we
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