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The Arsacids - Epic Iranian Music
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The instrumentation is centered around the kamanche, the main bowed instrument of Iranian music, and it’s accompanied by a tanbour, a tar, and daf percussions, as well as the ney flute. Exceptionally, I’ve used a duduk here. I absolutely cannot stand the usage of the duduk in “historical music,” whether on YouTube or in film soundtracks: it’s the go to lazy solution for any composer without knowledge of Middle-Eastern music to evoke a “Middle-Eastern sound,” that is, the Middle-Eastern sound that Western film composers have made up in lieu of actually studying the region’s tradition. The duduk is principally an Armenian instrument, and its use is relegated to the region of Armenia, East Anatolia and Azerbaijan. In this case though, I used the duduk for a specific reason: the Arsacid dynasty had an Armenian branch that ruled over Armenia, and the use of the duduk here is a nod to that.
The lyrics are in the Parthian language, an Iranian language related to Persian in the same way that Russian and Polish are both members of a larger linguistic family, Slavic in the case of Russian and Polish, Iranian or Iranic in the case of Parthian and Persian. The lyrics are based on the Parthian language inscription by Shapur I, ironically a king of the dynasty who would centuries later overthrow the Arsacid dynasty--Parthian's cultural relevance was still great enough at the beginning of the Sasanian Empire that most royal inscriptions were written both in Persian and Parthian. I took the Parthian language inscription and switched out Shapur's name for Arsaces'. Note the usage of the term Erān to refer to Iran--it is a commonly held misconception, even among Iranians, that the term Persia is the historical, ancestral name of the land, and that Iran is a more recent intrusion.The opposite is true: variations of the term same term Aryana, Erān, Iran, etc, have always historically been used by Iranians to refer to their own land, and Persia is a Western exonym originating in Ancient Greece, where the name for the province of Pars was erroneously applied to the entirety of the land.
Lyrics transliterated:
Az mazdezn bag,
Arshak Shāh,
Shāhān Shāh Erān,
Ke chihr as yazdān,
Arshak Shāh,
Shāhan Shāh Eran
Translation:
I, the Mazda-worshiping,
King Arsaces,
King of Kings of Iran,
Whose race is of the gods,
King Arsaces,
King of Kings of Iran,
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