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defeated by the Arabs. A second battle at Nihavend in A.D. 641, celebrated among Arabs as the Victory of Victories (The Prize, Yergin, p. 710), also resulted in a crushing defeat for the Persians. Yazdagird fled eastward, trying to reassemble Persian forces. His story is a tragic tale of dwindling resources, desperation, and, ultimately, betrayal. He was killed by a local satrap near the city of Merv (Marv) in central Asia, probably near the end of the year A.D. 651. |
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The critical fact, for our purposes, is that Yazdagird was not succeeded by another Sasanid monarch. Although the Islamic calendar was imposed on many areas, it was resisted in Persia, and many areas continued to use the era of Yazdagird, which became a kind of regnal era in perpetuity. The official Zoroastrian church was largely destroyed by the Arab conquest, but the followers of Zoroaster retained the era. At this point, the story of the calendar begins to splinter into several parts, as different groups of people interpreted events in their own fashion: |
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The Zoroastrians who fled to India and became the Parsis continued to use the calendar and the era, beginning with the original epoch of 16 June 632. In A.D. 1006, the epagomenae were moved to the end of the year, by order of a Buyid prince (probably Baha-ad-dawla, according to Taqizadeh [1938, p. 918]). This change was ignored in Khorasan and the Caspian provinces. The Parsis and Persian Zoroastrians seem to have complied, since their epagomenae are placed at the end of the year. |
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Some of the Parsis, the Shahinshah or Rasmi sect, performed the intercalation required by the Zoroastrian calendar around A.D. 1131, with the consequence that their year begins one month later than that of the Persian Zoroastrians and the Parsis of the Kudmi (or Kadmi) sect, who feel that the intercalation was politically, not religiously, inspired. |
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Some Persians felt that the continued use of an era after the death of the king for which it was named was inappropriate and started a variant of the era, which began with the year following the last year of Yazdagird's reign. This era, known as the Magian era, or era Magorum, came to be known as the Tarikh al-majus or Farsiyya among Muslim writers and was in general use in most areas of Persia, as well as among the Zoroastrians of Khorasan and Transoxiania. The era is the same, differing only in the epoch, which is A.D. 652/3. This era was apparently in widespread use in Persia, along side the Yazdagird era, and was still in use by the Zoroastrian community in the 16th and 17th centuries A.D. (according to a postscript in Taqizadeh [1938, p. 922]). Several Pahlavi books use forms such as the year 975, 20 years after Yazdagird, and 978 Parsik after 20 Yazdagird. The actual name of this era was probably Parsik and was expressed as 20 years after Yazdagird. In any event, the era of Yazdagird eventually won preference over the Magian and is used unanimously by Zoroastrians today. |
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