ReOrienting the Sasanians: East Iran in Late Antiquity

Accounts of the Sasanian Empire have often looked west, toward Rome and the long rivalry between the two great powers of Late Antiquity. Khodadad Rezakhani turns the map around. His focus is East Iran and the political worlds that connected the Sasanians to regions beyond the empire’s better-known western frontier.

That shift in perspective changes the questions being asked. Political geography, regional powers and the eastern Iranian lands move to the centre of the story, revealing a Late Antique world that cannot be understood only from the Mediterranean. Rezakhani’s study is specialist, but its argument is larger: where we choose to look can fundamentally alter the history we think we are seeing.