style="font-size:15px;"> This group of Sassanian metalwork, unlike silver plates portraying Sassanid shahanshahs, can only be dated with difficulty (apparently most of these festive utensils relate to the 5th-7th centuries). It is even more difficult to interpret their subject-matter. The very fact that we are dealing with festive dishes may, in many respects, call into question any interpretation of them as religious and symbolical images. The Dionysian background of the main characters and most of their attributes are indisputable. The origin and prototypes of the iconographic details can, for the most part, be traced back to the West and in this sense the entire group is comparable to those few Sassanian dishes on which a western subject is reproduced in full by Iranian craftsmen – the dish with the Triumph of Dionysus from Badakhshan (now in The British Museum, London), later replicas in the History Museum in Moscow and the Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Bellerophon dish in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and several other vessels. In all probability such vessels were used at banquets during Zoroastrian festivities, the most sacred of which were Nawruz, the celebration of the New Year (meant to coincide with the vernal equinox), Mihragan, the autumn harvest festival dedicated to Mithras, and Sadeh, the winter festival dedicated to the divine fire.
Judging from accounts in written sources, the climax of all these festivals was a ceremonial banquet, which took place after a special service in the fire temple, and various rites (the offering of water, wine, etc.) in which silver vessels were used. The Nawruz-nama (The Book of Nawruz), a work on ancient Iranian customs ascribed to Omar Khayyam, contains the following passage:
“The king said: this [water] has been stolen from two who are blessed and highborn. [This refers to two amashaspands, Haurvatat and Ameretat.] And they adorned the neck of the jug with a necklace of olivines and chrysolites strung on a golden thread. [The necks of some silver flasks are decorated with convex “pearls” in imitation of such beads.] And girls alone stole water for the New Year ritual from beneath water-mills and out of canal cisterns”.
The depictions on ceremonial vessels may be linked to rituals whose details remain unknown to us. It can, however, be gathered from written sources that various contests and exchanges of gifts took place during these festivities, and that musicians, dancers, and girls who served wine and water in special vessels took part in them. These festivities and the carnival processions did, of course, have a definite religious symbolism and ritual significance, but evidently they were taken over by ancient folk customs and their symbolism. The longer this continued the farther religion receded into the background. Thus, the Muslims of 9th-century Baghdad wholeheartedly celebrated several Zoroastrian festivities, and as late as the 10th century the Muslim rulers of Iran delighted in celebrating the Zoroastrian feast of Sadeh which, moreover, coincided with Christmas. On that night they would light bonfires and drive wild beasts into them, release birds into the flames and sing around the fires.
We can clearly see how the themes of Sassanian metalwork gradually change. The theme of state propaganda is very short-lived and soon changes into the religious propaganda of Zoroastrian symbolism in its “pure” phase, but both themes have a comparatively brief existence and eventually heroic and narrative themes predominate. All this can be demonstrated from stage to stage in the development of the royal hunt motif, which may well be the only motif in metalwork that relates directly to the art of official propaganda.
Of course there are vessels which employ only Zoroastrian symbolism or illustrations of Zoroastrian myths; there are also vessels portraying the “wonders of the world” or “marvels” like the complicated clockwork mechanism that once decorated the throne of one of the Sassanid shahanshahs, and depictions of subjects that were exotic or foreign to Sassanian society.
All this variety, initially clearly differentiated in terms of iconography and subject-matter, becomes confused towards the end of the Sassanian period, its previous exactness and rigour of selection seeming to break down. Judging by those Sassanian items known to us today, it is possible to state that all art of this period, and not just metalwork, follows this line of development, a process by which themes of a propagandist nature die out, and heroic and epic, benedictory and everyday themes come to dominate.
This is one of the fundamental reasons why a wide range of similar compositions subsequently pass into Islamic, Umayyad and early Abbasid art. For it is Sassanian jugs of wine, and bowls served by Zoroastrian girls, that are mentioned in these verses of the famous Arab poet Abu Nuwas (died in the 9th century):
She is a Zoroastrian, her blouse complains it has no room because of the twin pomegranates of her breasts.
Her chief business is to bow down to the first ray of the rising sun when it appears.
She gives wine in marriage to water [mixes wine with water] in golden bowls whose interiors
Are filled, girdled with images that do not heed the caller and do not speak.
Before the figures of Papak’s sons [the Sassanid shahanshahs] between whom a moat is trenched.
When the wine is above them they are as batallions of an army drowning in the depths.
The bowl described here is apparently a boat-shaped vessel with deep fluting at the bottom and images on the internal surface, so that there really does appear to be a moat trenched “between Papak’s sons”. In recent times such vessels have been found in north-western Iran during unsupervised excavations of Sassanian sites of the 6th and 7th centuries.
The Zoroastrian girl mentioned by many Persian and Arab poets of the Middle Ages is of particular interest. She would usually be serving them wine, which was forbidden by Islam, in taverns or among the ruins of a temple. Are these not fragmentary survivals of rituals connected with wine from Zoroastrian feasts, and is this not the reason why there are so many girls with wine and vines and other attributes of the “Dionysian background” both on these Sassanian silver vessels and on early Islamic ceramics?
Thus, looking at Sassanian art as a whole, one reaches the conclusion that it began with a fairly limited range of themes strictly stratified according to genre, as an art that was, so to speak, “conceptual”, or at any rate subject to an absolutely specific interpretation, and “imperial”, an instrument for political and religious propaganda. In late Sassanian art, however, genres blend; complex religious symbolism changes into benedictory symbolism; the symbolic banquet, battles and hunting scenes become ordinary tales of hunting exploits, many feasts and chivalry.
The further art develops, the more all these initial, symbolic scenes and compositions become either illustrations or mere ornamentation. One could go so far as to say that towards the end of the Sassanian period the illustrative and ornamental themes played the main role in art, although, of course, the propagandist themes of the “imperial style” also survived until the very end of the period, especially in official works of art (rock reliefs, palace decorations, coins and gems). In discussing the illustrative aspect of late Sassanian art one cannot avoid mentioning Sassanian literature.
About a hundred titles of various religious, literary and scientific works of this time are known from different sources. A few dozen books of various kinds have reached us, mostly via translations into Arabic and later also into Persian, a hundred or more years after the fall of the Sassanian state, or even in revised versions of a comparatively late date. It is difficult to distinguish between their various accretions from different periods, to make any sense of the blending of various styles and genres. In the course of translation from Middle Persian a sort of compendium was usually produced.
In official manifestos of the shahanshahs and rock inscriptions (3rd century) mention is made of official state records, statutes and codices produced under each king. This is also reported by much later foreign sources relating the history of the Sassanids. Probably it was these official state-records that were reported by the Arab historian al-Mas’udi, who in 915 CE saw a manuscript in Istakhr which contained the history of the Sassanids
