Epilogue

The Iranian Expanse has presented a new approach to understanding Iranian kingship, cosmology, and identity. Its chapters have explored the role of highly significant spaces and places in constructing, maintaining, and transforming the identity of their patrons and viewers. In the course of doing so this book has investigated the development of landscapes of power and memory, cities, sanctuaries, palaces, and paradise estates in Persia and across the wider ancient Iranian world. At these sites imperially and religiously formulated cosmologies promoted by royal elites were most explicitly and tangibly experienced. Putting ancient Iranian theories of mind and matter into dialogue with contemporary theoretical debates, I have argued that Iranian sovereigns sought to reshape the “conceptual” (Av. ...