Scholarly approaches to the sweeping histories of the Iranian world have shifted dramatically in the last half century, a change that can be characterised most clearly as a growing interest in multivocality. From the advent of the ‘New Achaemenid History’ among specialists on the ancient empire to the popularisation of the term ‘Persianate’ among scholars of the medieval period, researchers have raised questions about how to incorporate multiple voices and perspectives into the study of this complex space. In the case of New Achaemenid History, this work has introduced ‘new’ Near Eastern texts into old arguments based on Greek evidence, while the framework of Persianate studies has widened the sphere of enquiry in order to highlight previously ignored actors and regions, allowing connectivities across the space to come to the fore. Differing in temporal scope, evidentiary basis and intended audience, the volumes reviewed here reflect the promising evolution and expansion of these approaches into other phases of pre-Islamic history. Yet they also highlight the challenges of weaving together fragmentary evidence in the face of insidiously monolithic approaches to the Iranian past, especially in material meant for a general audience.

The first two volumes examine Iranian dynasties that were left out of the first wave of scholarly recalibrations noted above, the Arsacids and the Sasanians, respectively. Arsacids, Romans and local elites: cross-cultural interactions of the Parthian Empire is a slim, edited volume presenting seven papers developed out of a panel held at the American Schools of Oriental Research from 2012–2014. The contributions, reflecting the tendencies of scholarship on the Arsacid Empire more generally, handle a relatively narrow spectrum of sources. Numismatics, Roman textual accounts and sculptural representations all feature prominently. These data, however, are entirely appropriate for exploring the particular type of intercultural communication treated in the volume, what might best be called ‘institutional’ intercultural exchanges, glossed by the editors in the Introduction as “manners of exchange, such as war, diplomacy, art” (p. x) as well as elite interaction.

Diplomacy and its workings are a central focus of Arsacids, Romans and local elites. Contributions by Nabel, Jones and Schlude and Rubin each emphasise the symbiotic development of Roman and Parthian political norms. Importantly, all three papers trace shared exposure among both the Romans and Parthians to Hellenistic patterns of behaviour, calling attention to the many common cultural contexts that flowed across Southwestern Asia and the Mediterranean Basin. The final three papers by Schlude and Overman, Edwell, and Anderson, meanwhile, focus on local elite political negotiations during the centuries of back-and-forth contact along the Roman-Parthian borderlands. These chapters situate the local authorities in Judea, Osrhoene and Hatra as important gatekeepers and interlocutors who were not making simply binary choices between Roman or Parthian domination, but rather were central actors within a wider web of forces—and indeed often were able to exert their own power to shape the developments of the space.

Beyond the perspectival focus on the diverse voices of the ancient Iranian space, Lerner’s sustained and meaningful engagement with key Russian-language scholarship on Parthian archaeology and numismatics introduces another axis of multivocality to this work, that of modern historiographic traditions. For reasons of linguistic accessibility, the serious work of Russophone scholars on the Parthians is often excluded in Western European and Anglo-American scholarship, which is especially problematic given the important Parthian-period excavations conducted in the Soviet period, and the ongoing research in post-Soviet Eurasia. Lerner’s incorporation of this material is valuable not only in terms of his own exploration, but also in that it alerts readers of the volume to the presence of this vast discourse, even if accessibility remains a challenge.

As with the first volume, the second is also a collection of papers that, for the most part, treat a single Iranian dynasty, in this case the Sasanians. Many of the contributions to Sasanian Persia: between Rome and the steppes of Eurasia stem from the research of volume editor Eberhard Sauer’s ‘Persia and its Neighbours’ project, and particularly from a conference associated with it. Contributors reflect the international collaboration of the project’s fieldwork, including numerous scholars affiliated with universities and cultural institutions in Iran, as well as with institutions in the UK, France, Germany, Italy, the USA and Georgia. Again reflecting the nature of the underlying project, the explorations are overwhelmingly archaeological in nature. The intellectual influence of the late Tony Wilkinson is powerful in the volume, with a number of chapters presenting new insights into the diversity of Sasanian landscapes, and the uses to which they were put by their inhabitants. Textual and epigraphic sources, however, anchor the contributions of both Patterson and Greenwood, and stylistic and iconographic analyses feature prominently in Ball’s and Callieri’s chapters. In keeping with the project’s title, the contributions treat not only the Iranian core of the Sasanian Empire, but also adjacent regions. The Caucasus is a particular regional focus, but Morley’s contribution on the Arabian Peninsula and Howard-Johnston’s on southern maritime activity add broader perspectives. Critically, these ‘neighbours’ are framed as spaces of key strategic importance to the functioning of Sasanian power, rather than relegated to the status of peripheries.

Despite the granular nature of the data presented in the volume in both archaeological and historical terms, the work should not be dismissed as a series of reports. Instead, chapter authors repeatedly demonstrate the ability to draw meaningful conclusions even in the face of considerable contradictory pluralisms, to borrow a turn of phrase from Greenwood (p. 200). This is true in the case of the chapters focused on landscape issues, including those by Simpson, Lawrence and Wilkinson, and Hopper, which discuss questions of space use in terms of patterns of urbanism, large-scale infrastructure and movement corridors. A central thematic interest is in the various types of ‘marks’ left by the growth of an empire on the landscape, certainly, but also on the socio-cultural and administrative practices of populations who live in and around its orbit. Discussions of palaeoecological (Shumilovskikh et al.) and archaeozoological (Mashkour et al.) data demonstrate simultaneously the variability of resource management across Sasanian space, and, at the same time, pronounced changes along multiple axes in the period. Considered as a whole, the volume makes a compelling argument for the innovative nature of Sasanian power, and its ability to develop uniquely appropriate strategies that facilitated both the growth and maintenance of its sphere in a wide variety of contexts.

The final volume is of a decidedly different character than the first two, and it raises some important questions for scholars working across the long history of Iran. A slim and readable book published as part of the ‘Lost Civilizations’ series, The Persians aims to present a popular overview of Persian history, beginning in earnest with the Achaemenid Empire, and concluding in the twenty-first century. More than half of the book is devoted to the pre-Islamic periods, and it is on those chapters that I focus. Unsurprisingly, in the face of the sweeping purview of the book and its short length, the historical narrative is both selective and cursory. Unfortunately, the brief treatments simplify the complex historical strands to the point of inaccuracy, while the thin bibliography provides little in the way of direction for the interested reader to pursue. For example, the coverage of Zoroastrianism in the Achaemenid period in Chapter 6 entirely omits the robust debates surrounding the nature of Achaemenid religious affiliation and the development of Zoroastrianism. Indeed, the most successful moments of the book are those that deal with the reception of Persian history in early modern and modern Western scholarship, rather than the discussions of Persia itself.

But the more pressing question is how the scholarly currents of multivocality highlighted at the beginning of this review and seen in both other volumes have filtered into the work or, rather, have failed to do so. Despite a preface that lays out the troubled history of the study of Persia as the ultimate Eastern ‘other’, the authors’ sweeping narrative arc nevertheless subtly reinforces this perspective by presenting ‘Persian-ness’ as an essentialised ethnic identity. Curiously, it is an identity that is denied to one of the longest-lasting imperial formations in the region, the Parthians, who are dismissed as weak Central Asian outsiders with no meaningful connections to either earlier or later iterations of Persian-ness (pp. 96–97). I raise this point not to call attention to the historical inaccuracy of this framing of the Parthians, which was developed on the basis of uncritical readings of both Roman and Sasanian sources, and was common in earlier scholarship. Rather, the treatment of the Parthians is important here because it exemplifies the desire to trace a univocal story of Persian identity, rather than one that embraces the utter complexity of the space. The Parthians are, as demonstrated by the other two works reviewed here, a marvellous example of this complexity, beginning from their (uncertain) nomadic roots, through to their widespread engagement with both Achaemenid and Hellenistic legacies, and their eventual profound impact on Sasanian imperial practices.

It is encouraging that all three volumes reviewed here recognise that narratives about ancient Persia and its neighbours are inherently participants in modern discourses about identity, imperialism and volatility, but that is somehow not quite enough. As I read The Persians and puzzled over it, I was reminded of a significantly apt phrase from one of the contributions to Sasanian Persia authored by Sauer, Nokandeh, Pitskhelauri and Rekavandi. In a chapter on Sasanian military infrastructure, they title a section on the historiography of the question as: ‘Fashionable relativism and persistent Eurocentrism’ (p. 243). These two headwinds of relativism and Eurocentrism remain a central challenge for the studies of pre-Islamic Iran far beyond military infrastructure. A consideration of the three works reviewed here suggests that a central characteristic of the stories of ancient Iran lies in the region’s prismatic diversity and confounding complexity. As hard as they are to capture, it is these traits that we should make central as we expand our scholarly engagements with the space.