Persian luxury was famous; even then, they put carpets on the ground that others would have prized as blankets or wall coverings. In the negotiations before the Battle of Qadisiyah, Arabs had taken pains to ruin any carpets they were invited to stand on as emissaries. They cut holes and slashed them, just to show their disregard for whatever the Persians considered valuable. But when the cities and country manors were thrown open for looting, the valuable things looked different.
Sa’d’s men chased the retreating Persians and sometimes recovered more treasures, including the royal armor and robes. Gems encrusted anything valuable, gems that the Arabs had never seen. They scooped up a lot of armor, not just the royal set, and many weapons. In the tents, there were rich pillows and blankets and clothes made of silk and spun gold. In houses, they found ceramics from China, and camphor, the precious scent of the Persian court. They found furniture that they didn’t know what to do with, like beds and sofas and chairs. Of course, they also found wine and rich food. Some mistakenly cooked the camphor.
There was a massive carpet in the palace, reportedly 30 meters square. The Arabs somehow transported it to Medina on camels, where it was handed to Umar. He ordered it cut into pieces and shared out with the other Muslim leaders, who mostly sold their pieces. There were countless treasures like this, none of which were prized as they would be now. Nobody had a sense of history, nor even of preserving something as massive as a carpet that required a special one-use loom and hundreds of craftsmen.
The people who were left behind from the Emperor’s retreat were rounded up as booty, too. The Muslims had a firm rule about all booty being shared out by a central arbiter, rather than grabbing whatever any man could take, but women were easily handed out as shares. The first Arab-Persian infants were born soon after, founding a generation that would become extremely important in the development of Arab sciences.
The land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers was called in Arabic “the Island,” or the Jezirah. This land was richer than anything the Arabs had ever seen, since it was built of alluvial deposits for thousands of years. It was filled with farms, towns, churches and monasteries, most of which were left alone on the condition that they pay tribute.
A second military wave moved through the southern river region and into the land beyond. Caliph Umar’s concern was that Arab tribesmen were quite capable of raiding and seizing on their own, and he wanted conquests to be in Medina’s name and under central control. There was a growing problem of having way too much booty to keep track of. It was just so much stuff, now liberated from its former buildings. The Arabs scrambled to find literate men who could keep accounting records of all the treasure and coin flowing south.
On the other side of the Tigris River was an Iranian province called Khuzestan. Now Arabs led by a veteran of Qadisiyah moved into this territory. It was the former land of the Elamites, mentioned in the Bible. One vast ziggurat still stood from the Bronze Age. Khuzestan was a rich farming country of hills and valleys, very green with many streams. It was beyond imagining to desert-born eyes. They grew rice and sugar, cotton and linen. There were a number of cities, mostly Christian as in Mesopotamia.
Without imperial military backing, the region had little defense against the new onslaught. There’s a Muslim anecdote about the capitulation of the city of Jundishapur, home of Persia’s greatest doctors. The city was keeping up its defense in a siege as best it could, but then one day the city fathers opened the gates and came out to surrender. It transpired that they thought the Muslims had shot an arrow in with a message, promising mercy if they surrendered. The Muslim commanders knew nothing about it, but they found that an enslaved Persian had sent the message. Perplexed, they sent a rider to ask Caliph Umar what to do. Umar told them to uphold the apparent promise and accept tribute. Again, there was much tribute, much wealth to distribute.
The city of Susa was the ancient Persian capital containing the Tomb of Daniel. It had been sacked and plundered by Alexander the Great, and again by the current Persian dynasty in the 4th century, but its wealth was again great. It resisted for a few days, but the Muslims forced the gates and killed all the Persian nobles.
The Tomb of Daniel was a problem. Daniel had been a prophet, but the Quran did not mention him, so the Muslims at first did not recognize him as anything special. The tomb was broken open; there had been silver and gold stored there since Darius and Cyrus. They found a silver coffin with a mummy, perhaps Daniel’s. Since they did not recognize Daniel as a prophet, they buried the body in the river bed and looted the treasures. Over time, though, the Tomb persisted as an institution, and eventually it was revered by Muslims, too.
The last city of Khuzestan was Tustar (or Shushtar), guarded by a castle and a massive dam built in 260 by Roman prisoners of war (during one of the early Roman vs. Persian wars). The Roman engineers had cut tunnels into the rock, too, for irrigation. The whole installation was one of the engineering wonders of the world, at the time. It was greater than the Marib Dam, the largest previously known to the Arabs. The moats, dams and natural rivers guarded the city of Tustar so that the Persian commander was able to hold the city against the Arabs for two years. Finally, treachery allowed the Arabs to tunnel under the walls; sieges were usually ended by treachery, more often than by brute force.
During this relatively long period when a Muslim army was invested in the siege of Tustar, Persian soldiers defected to the Muslim side. It was very clear that momentum was on the Muslims’ side of the long, wide war, and soon holdouts would be isolated so that even if they won, they could not continue to live independently. Some of the Persian units that defected were elite, well-trained, well-armed cavalry or other special forces. Emperor Yazdgerd still had eastern lands to live in, and cities still under his rule, but nobody could see a real comeback any time soon.
- The War of the Three Gods, by Peter Crawford.
- The Great Arab Conquests, by Hugh Kennedy