Place · Sasanian capital · Iraq
Ctesiphon
Also known as Tisfun, Taq-i Kisra
The Sasanian winter capital on the Tigris, with the largest single-span brick vault ever built still standing, and the court at which Persian scholarship absorbed Indian astronomy, medicine and the game of chess in the sixth century.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Parthian / Sassanian
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 33.096, 44.581
Worth knowing
Khosrow I's physician Burzoe is said to have been sent to India to find a herb of immortality and to have come back instead with the Panchatantra, which he translated into Middle Persian. From that version came the Arabic Kalila wa Dimna and, through it, most of the fable literature of Europe.
Connections (4)
- TransmissionPanchatantra
Khosrow I's physician Burzoe was sent to India, Persian tradition says, to find a herb of immortality, and came back instead with the Panchatantra, which he rendered into Middle Persian about 570. That version is lost, but Ibn al-Muqaffa's Arabic Kalila wa Dimna made from it survives and is the ancestor of the Syriac, Hebrew, Greek, Latin and European versions. A Sanskrit manual of statecraft for princes became the standard fable literature of three continents.
- TransmissionChaturanga / Chess
Chaturanga went to the Sasanian court as chatrang, is named in the Middle Persian Wizarishn i Chatrang, and passed from there to the Arabs as shatranj and into Europe with them. The same court and the same century that took the Panchatantra took the game, which is the pattern: Ctesiphon is the relay for almost everything Indian that reached the Mediterranean.
- Ruled fromKhosrow I Anushirvan
Khosrow I Anushirvan ruled the Sassanian empire from Ctesiphon between 531 and 579 CE and ran its most consequential cultural programme — the expansion of Jundishpur, Burzōe’s mission to India, the translation of the Pañcatantra and the arrival of Chaturanga.
- Court associationPulakeshin II
Pulakeśin II sent a formal embassy to the Sassanian emperor Khosrow II (Parvīz) at Ctesiphon around 625 CE and received a return Persian embassy at Vatapi; the reception of the Persian embassy is traditionally identified with the painted procession of foreign dignitaries in Cave 1 at Ajanta.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ctesiphon”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
Open Ctesiphon in the repository →