Khodadad Rezakhani. Reorienting the Sasanians: Eastern Iran in Late Antiquity. Edinburgh University Press, 2017.Excerpt:
The book is divided into an introduction and nine relatively short and manageable chapters, along with a conclusion and brief epilogue. Rezakhani notes that this region has suffered from the confluence of a few trends. First, the Sasanian Empire has been conceptualized as a Western leaning Empire, mostly invested in Iraq and Khuzistan, less of a reflection of the actual history of the empire than the western-centrism of scholars. Second, as a result of the lack of Sasanian or more local contemporary historical or literary works concerning East Iran, the various barriers to accessing this material and the general disinterest in this area by related fields, most of the studies that have appeared are philologically focused, and do not attempt to provide a larger historical narrative of this region. Rezakhani therefore sets out to fill this desiderata by providing a narrative history of East Iran.
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