Of the art of the earliest civilisations on the Iranian plateau no tangible trace has remained. The Persian Empire of the Achaemenian (550 A 331 B.C.), with all its glory, has left us little to reveal the nature of its musical culture. Herodotus mentions the religious rituals of Zoroasterians, which involved chanting of sacred hymns. Xenophon, in its Cyropedia, speaks about the martial and ceremonial musics of the Empire.

The first documents of any extend on Persian music come to us from Sassanian period (A.D. 226-652). At the Sassanian court musicians had an exalted status. Emperor Khosro Parviz [xosro parviz] who ruled from A.D. 590 A 628 was patron to numerous musicians. Ramtin [rAmtyn], Bamshad [bAmSAd], Nakisa [nakysA], Azad [AzAd], Sarkash [sarkaS] and Barbod [bArbod] were among the musicians of this period whose names have survived.

Barbad was most illustrious musician of the court of Khosro Parviz. He is credited with the organization of a musical system containing seven modal structures, known as royal modes (Khosrovani [xosravAni]), thirty derivative modes (Lahn [lahn]) and three hundred and sixty melodies (Dastan [dastAn]) which apparently correspond with the number of days in the week, month and year of the Sassanian calendar.

We do not know what these modes and melodies were, but a number of their names have been related by the writers of the Islamic era. In general, the musical documents from the ensuing periods abound in references to the music of the Sassanian age. An investigation of these works brings the quasi-certainty that the music of Sassanian period had been the germination seed from which Islamic music grew.

The Arab conquest of the Persian Empire was about the middle of the 7th century. And, here, the conqueror discovered a culture considerably in advance of his own. With the ascendency of the Abbasid dynasty (A.D. 750-1258), the seat of the Caliphate was moved from Damascus to Baghdad, within former Persian territory. From this time on, Persian musicians and scholars in all fields became the dominant figures in the formation and development of Islamic culture in the East.

We should point out here that it has been customary to recognize Persian scholars of the Abbasid period as Arabs. This error, which has been subbornly perpetuated by the best of the Western scholars, is primarily due to two reasons: 1) the Persians at that time, usually, wrote in Arabic, as that was lingua franca of the Emire, and was the language of the patron princes, 2) the Persians also had Arabic names, although they frequently sustained surnames which identified their place of birth (for example, Aboltara Estahani [aboltArA esfehAni], Satiaddin Armavi [satiadin armavi], Abu Nasr Farabi [abu nasr fArAbi]). Even such identifications have gone unnoticed by the Westerne writer.

Musical scholars and theoreticians whose valuable works on music have survived, from the beginning of the Abbasid period to the end 15th century, are numerous. The most important of them were: Abu Nasr Farabi (872-950), Abu AIi Ebne Sina [abu ali ebne sinA] (980-1307), Satiaddin Armavi (died 1257) and Abdalghader Maraghi [abdolqader marAqi] (died 1434). All of them have wretten expensively on the theory, the physics and aesthetics of music. Thanks to their writings we are able to have a reasonably concise idea as to the structure of Persian musical intervals and modes and we can draw certain conclusions concerning both the relationship of the music of the Islamic period with the Sassanian age, like on its development until our days.

From the sixteenth century to the beginnings of the twentieth century, musical scholarship seems to have suffered in Persia. In these four centuries no work of any consequence was written on music, however as an art of performance, music continued to flourish.