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Western scholarship critique

Unfortunately, even these more unified accounts there are lacunae: This one tries to place Rome & Iran in proper balance. Other western works engage in Chinese boosterism (a successor sentiment of Galtono-Needhamism). Like the author here says the chIna-s might have been a comparably rich state as Rome & Iran. However, the chIna-s overlapping with quite a bit of that period were fragmented and defeated by steppe powers. The real powers of note were the Eastern Iranic empire of the kuShANa followed by Indian gupta. One of the notable Sassanian shAh-s was even married to an Indian princess. Clearly, in purely economic terms, the Indian gupta empire was probably on top. What has not been written is placing the Hindu empire of the age in the world setting with the Iranic, Roman and steppe ones. samudragupta’s conquest of the Sassanian clients and emergence of the greater H domain is something that you would never find written by a mlechCha author – perhaps reflective of the fact that a dead civilization is a safe thing. A living one clearly incompatible with your own is not.

In the western accounts there is a tendency to treat Rome in a unitary manner. However, we hold that 2 empires should be distinguished. The Roman empire proper & the Xtian empire that conquered the former from within – complexion of the wars in Augustan period with the Parthians & the post-preta wars with Sassan’s broad were ideologically different.