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 over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 2.

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The Ancients · Shapur I: Rome's Greatest Enemy? · 9 Aug 2026 podcast

Um so that's super interesting.

And then there is one of the most incredible rock reliefs that we have from the Sasanian period.

From Afghanistan that gives us much more concrete evidence of the

place in which a Sasanian king put himself as a conqueror.

And it's from a place uh a a site that's called Ragi Bibi, not far from um Herat.

And it's uh it's a rock relief that shows a Sasanian king who is hunting a white rhinoceros and attended by m people dressed in traditional Kushan wear.

So it's this mix again of the King of Kings imagery, although it's quite

destroyed because it was

Um the Taliban actually destroyed Raggi Bibi in the early late 90s, I think it was, or early 2000s.

Um and so it's it's not as well preserved as it was, but we have people who drew it a little bit before.

But um yes, we have the um remains of a a king of kings on horseback and part of the white rhinoceros he's hunting, and this scene.

So we see that the society.

are imposing this idea of their visual imprint of power onto the region as far away as Afghanistan.

Absolutely, and it's so easy to overlook this because we have so much Roman history written about the Roman and Persian Wars and the Roman and Parthian Wars.

But there's no question that the eastern and northeastern part of the Sasanian Empire is as important, as wealthy, and as developed for the Sasanians as the West.

And the whole time, and we we don't see it so clearly in microhistory as we do say for the Parthian king Mithridates II, we have these amazing Babylonian calendrical diagrams.

Diaries almost that tell us, like in one year, that he he travels fifteen, sixteen hundred kilometers to the east of his kingdom and then has to come back into Babylon really quickly because there's a rebellion.

And so we can trace his movements over thousands of kilometers.

in a year or two trying to do exactly what Shapur and Ardeshore and er every other Sasanian king would have to do is control this huge area.

So when we talked already about Trajan and uh the sort of the s uh Roman emperors who followed had um imposed themselves across the Euphrates numerous times.

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