Ottomans and Iranians at Ctesiphon

On the first page of his 1921 book on the triumphs of the Ottoman army in Iraq during the First World War, Mehmed Emin [Yurdakul], a Turkish nationalist poet and politician who had been stationed in Mosul, connected two points in the history of Ctesiphon, an ancient ruin located in the southern deserts of Baghdad. ¹ He made a direct connection between Ottoman history and early Islamic history, centering Ctesiphon as a site where Muslims had triumphed over two powerful "infidel" empires: that is, the Sasanians in 637, and the British in 1915. ² The cover of his book also emphasized the many histories of this place, depicting Ctesiphon alongside the tomb of Selman-ı Pak (Fig. 1). Selman was the only Persian companion of the Prophet, who is remembered as participating in the conquest by inviting the local population to Islam. ³ His tomb is, in this sense, a constant reminder of the Islamic history of this site, even if one is unaware of how Ctesiphon has been remembered in Perso-Islamic historiography.

In this article, I consider the meanings that the history of Ctesiphon evoked during the late nineteenth century, particularly between the Ottomans and Qajar Iran—both of whom had a shared understanding of the history of the place through the shared heritage of Perso-Islamic history. Though immensely important for the engagement of the Ottomans, the Qajars, and the local Iraqi population with the past of the region, Ctesiphon did not garner as much attention

Figure 1.

Cover of Selman-ı Pak Meydan Muharebesi – Ktesifon ve Zeyli by Mehmed Emin, published in Istanbul by Matbaa-yi Askeriye in 1921.

from Europeans. ⁴ This was because it was not a Biblical site, the main object of nineteenth-century European archaeology in Ottoman Iraq. ⁵ By moving away from how Europeans told histories of the place, I demonstrate the old and new ways that the Ottomans and Iranians engaged and contested ancient history and sites in service of their own imperial aims.

Ctesiphon's initial importance in Islamic history lies in the fact that it was the site of the last battle between the Sasanians and the Muslims, in which the Sasanian Empire fell and the Muslims became triumphant over a vast and powerful state. But Ctesiphon looms much larger in Islamic history because it was deemed as a site of miracle by Muhammad. In Perso-Islamic historiography, the great Arch of Ctesiphon cracked on the occasion of the birth of the Prophet. ⁶ As described in the fourth Baghdad salname, published in 1883 in Baghdad by the provincial administrative elite of the province, the second miracle was that the building did not collapse and had withstood for the past "thirteen hundred years" despite the crack. ⁷ The crack, which was supposedly visible even in 1883, was a harbinger of the Muslim triumph achieved eighty years after its appearance.

The Sasanians were an ancient Persian or Iranian Empire, but the Ottomans considered themselves as an inheritor of this Perso-Islamic past. This was clearly demonstrated in the Baghdad salnames , which contain tables of important events and dynasties as well as narrative histories putting the Ottomans into a clear and continuous line of kingship encompassing all the ancient Iranian empires, including those before the Sasanians. ⁸ The Ottomans emulated the empires before them and incorporated Sasanian history and its sites in such a way as to be both considered as inheritors of that heritage but also triumphant over it. ⁹

The narrative history presented in the fourth Baghdad salname, which included the history of Ctesiphon, was translated into Persian for the Qajar court in Tehran. ¹⁰ This was part of the Iranian court's compilation of knowledge to produce a comprehensive geographical encyclopedia of the "Iranian lands" called Mira't al-Buldan (Mirror of the Lands), which included lands outside of the Qajar domains, such as Baghdad and Ctesiphon, within its scope. ¹¹ The history of Ctesiphon was told in a separate entry on "iwan" or iwan-i kasra, and...