British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Politics, myths and literature: the idea of kingship in Iran
Dr Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis (The British Museum) and Dr Charles Melville (Cambridge University) on behalf of the British Institute of Persian Studies
This presentation explores the idea of kingship in the material culture and literature of pre-Islamic and Islamic Iran.
The British Institute of Persian Studies provided the funding for scanning of Sasanian coins in the National Museum of Iran and the British Museum, the training of Iranian collaborators in the UK and the development of databases in the UK. It has also supported the creation of an electronic concordance of the main editions of the Persian text of the ‘Book of Kings’.
For further information, visit: www.bips.ac.uk; http://shahnama.caret.cam.ac.uk/
Summary
The visual arts of pre-Islamic Iran concentrated on royal imagery, which was predominantly concerned with the idea of kingship and the ruler’s divine protection. This was complemented by royal Persian inscriptions of the 6th -4th centuries BC, which emphasised the role of the king as the chosen one of Ahuramazda, God. Soon after the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander, the notion of divine kingship 
was revived by two major Iranian dynasties: the Parthians and the Sasanians. A carefully manipulated iconography emphasised the closerelationship between kingship and divine protection and a western inspired iconography was now used for the Iranian/Zoroastrian concept of kingship. Under the Sasanian dynasty, when Zoroastrianism became the state religion of Iran in the fourth century, the God-given concept of kingship was closely related to the holy Zoroastrian books and was also introduced into the official history of this period, the early version of the Book of Kings.
The image of Sasanian kingship retained its power after the Islamic conquests of the 7th century. This started as a largely nostalgic memory, though Iranian historians and authors of Mirrors for Princes and other ethical works used examples of pre-Islamic practice to underline the splendour of the ancient rulers and their ideal concepts of justice and wisdom. Firdausi’s epic masterpiece, the Shahnama or ‘Book of Kings’, completed around A.D. 1010, was the most explicit and influential literary expression of these ideals. References to the past became more direct and immediate after the Mongol conquests of the 13th century, when once more an independent empire took control of the Iranian plateau. Since then, there has been a continuous tension between the competing sources of political authority, polarised between the concept of sacral kingship on one hand and the assertion of the supremacy of Islamic holy law, and other forms of spiritual authority, on the other.