Beate Dignas & Engelbert Winter - Kaveh Farrokh

56 1 Political goals
Achaemenid dynasty must have been sparse during the Sasanian period,
the fact that the Western and Eastern traditions agree speaks for itself.
Apparently, immediately after the foundation of the empire in 224 the
Sasanians demanded possession of all of Mesopotamia, Syria, Asia Minor,
Armenia and Egypt as well as control over Arabia and the Red Sea.
These goals conflicted with the claims made by the Roman emperor, who
saw himself as successor to Alexander the Great and wanted ‘to rule the
world’; they deepened the antagonism between the Western and the Eastern
power and led to numerous military confrontations that lasted into
the seventh century. 15 A recurring question throughout this book will be
whether and how far these wide-reaching Sasanian goals were strictly limited
to the context of the foundation of the empire and attempts to legitimise
the rule of their own dynasty, or if Sasanian claims to areas outside
Iran were an ideological premise of a programmatic foreign policy
that lasted significantly beyond early military conflicts between the two
powers.
2: Succession to Achaemenid rule as programmatic foreign policy
The ˇ Sāpūr Inscription on the Ka ba-i Zarduˇst at Naqˇs-i Rustam ( ˇ SKZ ),
§ 1 The Parthian text
I, the Mazdā-worshipping ‘god’ ˇ Sāpūr, King of Kings of the Aryans and non-
Aryans, scion of the gods, son of the Mazdā-worshipping ‘god’ Ardaˇsīr, King of
Kings of the Aryans, scion of the gods, grandson of the ‘god’ Pābag, the King, am
ruler of the Empire of the Aryans.
With regard to our knowledge of Roman–Sasanian relations in the third
century we cannot overestimate the significance of an epigraphic testimony
that dates to the reign of the second Sasanian ruler, ˇ Sāpūr I (240–72),
namely ˇ Sāpūr’s great trilingual inscription on the Kaba-i Zarduˇst (‘Cube
of Zarathustra’) in Naqˇs-i Rustam, near Persepolis (map 5). The inscription
informs us about ˇ Sāpūr’s conception of himself and his political goals,
about the make up of the Sasanian state and about religious matters in the
Sasanian kingdom. By analogy with the Res gestae divi Augusti, the famous
and also epigraphic report of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, the text is
called Res gestae divi Saporis. ˇ Sāpūr I probably composed it himself during
the final years of his life, before his son Hormizd had it inscribed after his
father’s death. Between 1936 and 1939 scholars of the Oriental Institute of
15 Cf. in contrast Strobel 1993: 287–8 and the references in n. 31 below.