53

 In a sense, ideology was the driving force for the Sasanians and the rasion d’être for what came to be called Iranshahr or the “Empire of the Iranians.” This vision of Iranshahr or its truncated form Iran was an invention of the Sasanians that did not exist in the preceding Arsacid or Achaemenid Empires. This invention is manifest from the fact that neither before the Sasanians nor after their demise at the hands of the Muslims did their neighbors call this territory as such, and instead used the traditional designation of Persia, Fars, or Persis. The idea of Iranshahr came with religious and ideological trappings that necessitated the unification of locations associated with Iranian habitation. This complex construction of an imperial ideology, with the notion of kingship, religion, and a territory, was based on the Hellenistic, Mesopotamian, and Iranian worldviews, combined together with the local tradition of the Persian lords in the province of Fars (Daryaee 2014, 12).