Ricerc@Sapienza

Throughout the course of the Sasanian period, the region of Adiabene constantly played a strategic role thanks to its geographic location; at the same time, the literary evidence concerning Adiabene potentially offers a unique insight into the area, on its heterogeneous society and on the way the central administration coped with its particular circumstances. In the last decade a renewed interest in the frontier areas of Late-Antique Upper Mesopotamia has fostered the appearance of studies specifically devoted to this remarkable region

This paper deals with the excavation of the trench carried out at Istakhr in 2012, to the west of the site of the mosque. The results of the excavation, compared with Herzfeld’s archaeological tests dating to 1932, provided new insights into the arrangement of the buildings in the area and, more generally, the planning of this sector of the city during the early Islamic period.