Iranian Plateau and Mesopotamia · Late Antiquity
Sassanid Empire
Persia's last great pre-Islamic empire
224 CE – 651 CE · 427 years
The last pre-Islamic Persian empire, whose administrative and artistic traditions deeply influenced its conquerors.
Where it sits on the calendar
Government
Centralized empire
Writing system
Pahlavi script
Estimated peak population
20,000,000
How it ended
Invasion or conquest
Traits
How Sassanid Empire ended
Exhausted by decades of war with Byzantium, it fell to the early Islamic conquests.
See other civilizations that fell the same way →Notable for
- Zoroastrianism as state religion
- Extensive qanat irrigation expansion
- Influential model for early Islamic administration
Who else was alive at the same time
8 other civilizations in this dataset overlap with Sassanid Empire's 427-year span.
See every overlap involving Sassanid Empire →