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Multiple sources, both textual and pictorial, document banquets and feasting in late antique Iran. At the court and among the local notables of Iranshahr (Empire of the Iranians), the banquet, which in Persian is called bazm, created solidarity among the elites and imposed itself culturally among the populace. But to eat at the table of the ruler also symbolized one’s status in an empire that stretched from Balkh to the Euphrates and from the Caucasus to Arabia. The sharing of food with the king at his table meant one was held in the highest esteem and implied the distribution of the king’s glory, power, and beneficence to those seated with him. In this program, professor Touraj Daryaee will discuss the forms and ways of feasting that took place at the court of the king of kings, which reached its zenith in the sixth century CE.
Touraj Daryaee is the Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies & Culture and the director of the Dr. Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies & Culture at the University of California, Irvine. His work revolves around the history of the Sasanian Empire and the Iranian world. He is the author of Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (I.B. Tauris, 2009) and is the editor in chief of the E.J. Brill Ancient Iran Series. He is also the editor of Sasanian Studies (Harrassowitz, 2022) as well as Dabir, an online journal at UC Irvine.
Image: Hemispherical bowl, Iran, Sasanian period or later, 7th–8th century, silver and gilt, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Collection, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Arthur M. Sackler, S1987.105
