Sasanian Society and the Class System

Sasanian society was arranged in a hierarchy of estates (priests, warriors, scribes and commoners) under the king of kings, with a small, powerful nobility at the top and a mass of peasants at the bottom. Birth largely fixed a person’s place, and Sasanian ideology held that keeping each class in its station was the basis of a just order. A surviving 7th-century law book, the Madayan i Hazar Dadestan, shows how property, marriage, slavery and inheritance actually worked in court.

Four estates

The clearest description of the ideal order comes from the Letter of Tansar, presented as a letter written by Ardashir I’s high priest to a provincial king. It survives only in a later Persian version and was probably reworked in the 6th century, but it gives the official view. Society, it says, has four “limbs” with the king at the head: the clergy, the warriors, the scribes, and the farmers and craftsmen. Each has its own rules and its own head, and none should pass into another, except a rare person of exceptional merit, who must first be examined by priests.

The model was older than the Sasanians. Zoroastrian tradition already divided society into priests, warriors and herders. The Sasanians added the scribes, the class of secretaries, accountants and officials that ran the state, and joined artisans to farmers in the fourth estate.

The Shahnameh tells a story that sums up the ideal. When Khosrow I needed money for a war, a rich shoemaker offered to pay, asking only that his son be allowed to become a scribe. The king refused: if the sons of merchants became officials, the sons of nobles would have nothing left. The tale may be invented, but it shows how later Iranians remembered the Sasanian order.

The nobility

A different ladder ran through the court. Shapur I’s inscriptions list the ranks of those around the king: first the kings who governed provinces, often royal princes; then the princes of the blood; then the grandees, heads of the great families; and finally the free nobles, a broad class of lesser aristocrats. Each rank had its own dress, seats at court and signs of honour, such as particular belts, crowns and caps.

The great houses, several of them of Parthian origin, were the real power beside the crown. Families such as the Suren, the Karen and the Mihran held land and followers in the north and east, supplied generals and sometimes decided who would be king. The struggle between the crown and these families runs through the history of the empire, from Yazdegerd I, called “the sinner” by the nobles, to the civil wars of 628–632.

Dehqans and peasants

Below the great nobles stood the dehqans, landholders who controlled villages and collected taxes from them. Their importance grew after the reforms of Khosrow I, which made them the backbone of the paid cavalry and of local administration; see the reforms of Khosrow I. After the Arab conquest, the dehqans kept much of their position and passed on the stories of the old kings. Ferdowsi often names “the dehqan” as the teller of his stories.

Most people were peasants who worked the land of the crown, temples or nobles. They paid land and poll taxes, served in labour gangs on canals and walls, and could be called to serve as infantry. Roman writers describe Persian peasant soldiers as reluctant fighters; the people themselves left few records. Craftsmen and merchants lived in the cities, and some merchants grew very rich from the long-distance trade in silk, spices and silver.

Slaves and captives

Slavery was an accepted part of Sasanian society. The Madayan treats slaves as property that could be bought, sold, given as security or freed, but it also recognises that a freed slave became a free person with rights. Kings settled large numbers of war captives in new cities: Shapur I’s Roman prisoners built Gondishapur and Bishapur, and Khosrow I moved the people of Antioch to a new Antioch near Ctesiphon in 540.

Law and the courts

The Madayan i Hazar Dadestan, compiled around 620 by a jurist named Farroxmard i Wahraman, collects legal decisions and opinions, many of them citing named earlier jurists. It is one of the few surviving Middle Persian books written before Islam rather than edited later. It deals with ownership, debt, contracts, partnerships, guardianship, inheritance and family law. Judges were usually Zoroastrian priests, and the highest judicial authority lay with the senior clergy and ultimately the king.

Family law took up much of the book. A man could have a principal wife of full status and wives of lesser status, and the law spent much effort on who inherited. A distinctive institution was the substitute heir (stūr): if a man died without a son, a relative was appointed to produce an heir in his name so that his line and household continued. Zoroastrian priests also promoted next-of-kin marriage as a religious merit; how often it was actually practised outside the royal family and the clergy is debated. Women’s legal position, which was more complex than the bare rules suggest, is discussed in Women in the Sasanian Empire.

Many peoples, many faiths

The estates scheme described the Zoroastrian Iranian majority, but the empire held many other communities. Mesopotamia, the richest province, was largely Aramaic-speaking. Its Jewish community, led by the exilarch, produced the Babylonian Talmud in the Sasanian centuries; the rabbis of academies near Ctesiphon discussed Persian taxes, courts and customs. Christians formed a large church with its own bishops and law. Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, Baluch and Central Asian peoples lived at the edges. Each community largely judged its own members, under the authority of the king.

An order built to last

The Sasanian ideal of a fixed and just hierarchy outlived the dynasty. Arabic and Persian books of advice for rulers, written under the caliphs and later dynasties, repeated its maxims about the “circle of justice”: no kingdom without an army, no army without money, no money without farmers, no farmers without justice. That legacy is traced in the Sasanian legacy.