Persian Empire
Deep Dive 10 min read

Shapur I: The Sasanian Conqueror of Valerian

The Res Gestae Divi Saporis — the great trilingual inscription of Shapur I at Naqsh-e Rajab — begins: “The Mazda-worshipping god Shapur, king of kings of Iran and Aniran, whose lineage is from the gods, son of the Mazda-worshipping god Ardashir…” The inscription is Shapur’s own account of his reign: his lineage, his wars with Rome, his buildings, his fire-temples. It was carved into the rock at Naqsh-e Rajab, a site a few kilometres north of Persepolis, in three languages — Middle Persian, Parthian, and Greek — in the 260s CE. It is the most important Sasanian royal inscription to survive, and the only substantial piece of prose in Old Persian that we have from a Sasanian king. (The other Old Persian texts are the Achaemenid inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes, a thousand years earlier; the language had changed substantially in the interval, and the Sasanian Middle Persian of Shapur is not the same as the Old Persian of Darius.) It is also a document of the first importance for the early Sasanian state.

This article is about the king who wrote it, and the state he built.

The man and the sources

Shapur I was the son of Ardashir I, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, and his queen (or consort) Lady Rodak. The date of his birth is not known, but his accession in 240/241 CE is well established. He succeeded his father as the Sasanian king of kings and was crowned at the Sasanian capital, probably Ctesiphon. His legitimacy rested on his descent from Ardashir I, and through Ardashir I from the Sasanian family of the temple of Anahita at Istakhr. The Sasanian dynasty claimed descent from the Achaemenids, and Shapur styled himself as successor to the Achaemenid imperial tradition. Whether the claim had any historical substance is one of the standard questions of Sasanian historiography. I doubt it; the genealogy is too tidy and the missing thousand years too convenient.

The principal witnesses for Shapur’s reign are unusually abundant. The Res Gestae is the Sasanian voice. The Roman sources are Herodian (whose History of the Roman Empire since Marcus Aurelius covers the period 180–238 and spills into Shapur’s early years), the Historia Augusta (a fourth-century compilation of uncertain reliability), Lactantius (whose De Mortibus Persecutorum is the source of the most lurid stories of the capture of Valerian), and Zosimus (a fifth-century Greek historian working from earlier sources). The Syriac and Armenian ecclesiastical sources add a third perspective, and the Sasanian rock reliefs at Naqsh-e Rajab, Bishapur, and Naqsh-e Rostam are the visual counterpart to the textual record. The combination is unusual for a Sasanian king, and it makes Shapur the best-documented ruler of pre-Islamic Iran.

The three Roman wars

Shapur fought three major wars with Rome. The first opened in 242 CE, when the young Roman emperor Gordian III invaded the Sasanian state from Syria. The campaign went badly. Gordian’s forces were defeated in Mesopotamia — the details are obscure, but the Roman sources agree that the campaign ended in disaster — and the emperor was murdered by his own soldiers in 244. The new Roman emperor, Philip the Arab, made peace with Shapur later that year. The terms are recorded on the Sasanian rock reliefs and in the Res Gestae: the Romans agreed to pay 500,000 denarii, to evacuate several frontier posts, and to acknowledge the Sasanian annexation of Armenia and Mesopotamia.

A second war broke out in 252 CE, after a Sasanian invasion of Roman Syria. The Roman emperor Valerian, who came to the throne in 253 CE, decided on a major counter-invasion. The campaign was a Roman disaster. In 259 or, more likely, 260 CE, the Roman army was defeated at the Battle of Edessa, and Valerian was captured. The Roman sources — Lactantius, De Mortibus Persecutorum 5; Zosimus 1.27; the Historia Augusta — preserve the Sasanian version with appropriate outrage. According to Lactantius, Valerian was paraded in chains through the Sasanian empire and was used as a footstool by Shapur when he mounted his horse. Lactantius adds that Valerian died in captivity and that his skin, stuffed with straw, was displayed in a Sasanian temple. The Sasanian sources neither confirm nor deny the most lurid details; the Res Gestae simply records the capture of the Roman emperor as a major victory. The story is a Roman construction designed to drive home the moral of the dangerous East, but the underlying fact — that a Roman emperor was taken alive by a foreign enemy, the first time in Roman history — is not in doubt.

Shapur used his victory to expand the Sasanian state considerably. According to the Res Gestae, the Sasanian armies conquered the Roman provinces of Syria, Cilicia, Cappadocia, and parts of Pontus; took the great cities of Antioch, Tarsus, and Caesarea; and pushed the Sasanian frontier as far west as the Aegean coast. The conquests did not all hold. A series of Roman counter-attacks in the 260s and 270s, culminating in the campaigns of the emperor Aurelian (r. 270–275 CE), recovered most of the lost territory. The Sasanian-Roman frontier settled back on the Euphrates, and the Sasanian state retained its conquests in northern Mesopotamia. The Roman province of Mesopotamia, which Trajan had briefly established in 116 CE and Septimius Severus had more permanently established in 198 CE, was permanently lost to the Sasanians. Erich Kettenhofen’s Die römisch-persischen Kriege des 3. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. (1982) is the indispensable German treatment of the wars; the English-language treatment is in Dariusz Szymczak’s The Battle of Edessa (2018) and in the relevant chapters of The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. III(1).

The rock reliefs

The reign of Shapur I is associated with some of the most impressive monuments of Sasanian art. The most famous are the so-called Investiture of Shapur, a great rock relief at Naqsh-e Rajab (not, as is sometimes claimed, at Naqsh-e Rostam), which shows Shapur I on horseback receiving the ring of kingship from the supreme god Ahura Mazda, and the great equestrian relief at Naqsh-e Rostam, which shows the triumph of Shapur I over the Roman emperor Valerian. The Res Gestae Divi Saporis, the great trilingual inscription at Naqsh-e Rajab, is the Sasanian king’s own account of his reign.

The reliefs of Bishapur, in the mountains of Fars, are equally impressive. The most famous of these is the so-called Victory Relief of Shapur, which depicts the triumph of Shapur I over the Roman emperor Valerian. The relief shows Shapur on horseback, with the Roman emperor Valerian kneeling before him, and with the Roman emperor Philip the Arab paying homage. The relief is a remarkable statement of Sasanian military success, and it was a powerful propaganda statement. The rock reliefs of Shapur I are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site (as part of the broader “Sassanid Archaeological Landscape of Fars” inscription, 2018) and are among the most visited tourist sites in modern Iran.

The reliefs are not, however, what they appear to be at first glance. The “Victory Relief” at Bishapur, for example, is not a documentary record of a specific event; it is a constructed image that compresses three separate events (the submission of Philip in 244, the capture of Valerian in 260, and a third encounter, possibly at the Battle of Edessa) into a single composition. Matthew Canepa’s The Two Eyes of the Earth (2009) is the best treatment of the reliefs as a coherent system of Sasanian royal imagery, and his reading has been broadly accepted.

The city of Bishapur

Shapur I was one of the great builders of late antiquity, and his reign saw the construction of several major monuments. The most famous is the city of Bishapur, in the mountains of Fars, which was founded as a showcase of Sasanian imperial architecture. The city was planned on a grid pattern, with a great palace, a great fire temple, a hippodrome, and a series of bridges and dams. The great ayvan, or vaulted hall, of the Bishapur palace — a barrel-vaulted iwan about 24 metres long — is one of the masterpieces of Sasanian architecture. The Bishapur site has been excavated by a French-Iranian team (R. Ghirshman in the 1930s and 1940s, then a series of successors) since the 1990s, and the finds have substantially altered our understanding of Sasanian urbanism.

Shapur also founded the city of Veh-Antiok-Shapur, the “Sasanian Antioch,” in Mesopotamia near the modern town of Anbar. The city was founded on the model of the Roman Antioch and was inhabited in part by Roman prisoners of war who had been deported to the Sasanian empire after the capture of Valerian. The city was a major commercial and cultural centre and played an important role in the Sasanian administration of Mesopotamia. The Sasanian kings of the fourth and fifth centuries used the city as a royal residence, and the city was finally destroyed in the Arab conquest of the seventh century.

The Zoroastrian revival

Shapur was a major patron of Zoroastrianism, and his reign saw a major revival of the Zoroastrian religion. The Avesta, the sacred scripture of Zoroastrianism, was codified in his reign (or in the reign of his successors; the chronology is debated; Mary Boyce’s History of Zoroastrianism, vol. II, 1982, and vol. III, 1991, is the working reference); the Zoroastrian priesthood was reorganised as a state church; and a network of fire temples, religious schools, and priestly colleges was established across the empire. The Sasanian state, under Shapur and his successors, supported the Zoroastrian church financially and gave it substantial judicial authority. The Zoroastrian revival under Shapur was a major factor in the development of the Pahlavi literary tradition; many of the great Zoroastrian texts, including the Denkard and the Bundahishn, were compiled in the Sasanian period (although the date of compilation is debated, and some of the texts may be later than Shapur).

The Zoroastrian revival under Shapur was not exclusive. The Sasanian state also patronised other religious communities, including the Manichaeans. Mani, the prophet of Manichaeism, was born in Mesopotamia in 216 CE. He presented himself as the last in a line of prophets that included Zoroaster, Buddha, and Jesus, and his religion was a synthesis of Zoroastrian, Christian, and Buddhist elements. Shapur is said to have been initially tolerant of the Manichaeans, and Mani himself reportedly travelled to the Sasanian court. The Manichaean religion, however, soon came into conflict with the Zoroastrian priesthood. The Zoroastrian church, with the support of the Sasanian state, turned against the Manichaeans under Bahram I (r. 273–276 CE); Mani was executed c. 274 CE, and the persecution of the Manichaeans continued under Bahram II.

The administrative reform

Shapur I was also a serious administrative reformer. The Sasanian administrative system, which had been inherited in part from the Arsacid empire, was reorganised under Shapur and his successors. The reforms are described in the Kar-Namag i Ardashir i Papakan (the Acts of Ardashir), a late Sasanian text that, although nominally about Ardashir I, is generally understood to reflect the administrative system of Shapur’s reign. The reforms included a comprehensive cadastral survey of the agricultural land of the empire, a standardisation of the tax rates, a centralised system of tax collection, and a system of state granaries. The system was inspired, in part, by the Roman and Hellenistic traditions, and is an important example of the long exchange of administrative ideas between the Sasanian and Roman worlds.

The verdict

Shapur died in 272 CE. His reign was followed by a long period of Sasanian history that included the reigns of Hormizd I, Bahram I, Bahram II, Narseh, and the great Shapur II. The Sasanian state that Shapur built, and the imperial ideology that he embodied, would shape the political, cultural, and religious traditions of the Near East for centuries. The Sasanian rock reliefs, the Sasanian cities, the Sasanian administrative system, and the Sasanian tradition of Zoroastrian state patronage were all established under Shapur and his successors, and they all survived the Arab conquest to shape the Islamic world. The memory of Shapur I has been preserved in a rich body of sources. The Greek, Latin, Syriac, Armenian, and Middle Persian traditions all preserve versions of his story. The Shahnameh of Firdowsi treats Shapur I as one of the great kings of pre-Islamic Iran, the equal of his father Ardashir and the model for his successors.

For further reading

  • Daryaee, Touraj. Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009).
  • Canepa, Matthew P. The Two Eyes of the Earth (2009).
  • Schippmann, Klaus. Grundzüge der Geschichte des sasanidischen Reiches (1980).
  • Kettenhofen, Erich. Die römisch-persischen Kriege des 3. Jahrhunderts n. Chr. (1982).
  • Boyce, Mary. A History of Zoroastrianism, vol. II (1982).