Ḵosrow III appears to have come to power between the rule of Queen Azarmīgduxt (r. 630) and that of Yazdegerd III (r. 632-51), supported by one of the factions in the Sasanian court and the army (Figure 1; Daryaee, pp. 48-49). It should be noted that uncertainty about the order and number of Ḵosrows is due to the period of chaos in the 630s. An Armenian source places Ḵosrow III between the rule of Queen Bōrān (r. 630-31) and Azarmīgduxt (Sebeos, I, 130; II, 89), where the confusion is due to chronology and contenders who simultaneously attempted to gain power in different parts of the empire (Sebeos II, 89). Arthur Christensen took a certain Ḵosrow, the son of a prince named Kawād from Khorasan as Ḵosrow III (Christensen, pp. 498-99), where he can be placed in 630 CE after the reign of Šahrwarāz (Wiesehöfer, p. 152). Ṭabari (I, 1065; tr. Bosworth, p. 407; Kolesnikov, Pers. tr. p. 166), took the Ḵosrow under discussion here as Ḵosrow III (which technically could be counted as Ḵosrow IV), and reported him to be the son of a Mihr-Gošnasp (Ar. Mihr Jushnas), who resided in Ahvāz in Ḵuzestān (Ṭabari, I, 1066; tr. Bosworth, p. 408). Four cities, which minted coins with year two and year three, can be attributed to this Ḵosrow III: Kerman (KL), Susa or Ērān-āsān-kerd-Kawād (AYLAN), Eṣṭaḵr/ Staxr (ST), and WYHC which has been identified variously as 1. “Visp-Śād-Khusraw” (Mochiri, 1983, pp. 221-22); 2. “Veh-az-Amid-Kavād” (Gyselen, p. 210); 3. “Weh-az-Andiok-Khusro” (Schindel, p. 499), and with skepticism for all of the above suggestions (Malek, p. 243). These mints suggest that Ḵosrow III held power in provinces of Ḵuzestan, Fārs, and Kerman, which matches the historical report of Ṭabari. The coins show him beardless as a young man.
Figure 1. Obverse and reverse of silver drachm of Ḵosrow III (mint WYHC); 34 mm, 4.11 grams. Princeton University Library, Special Collections-Numismatics Collection, Coin 11272 (accession no. 702, 2015-05021, Robert Schaaf).
Bibliography
Christensen, Arthur. L’Iran sous les Sassanides. 2. édition, Revue et augmentée. Ejnar Munksgaard, 1944.
Daryaee, Touraj. “When the End Is Near: Barbarized Armies and Barracks Kings of Late Antique Iran.” In Ancient and Middle Iranian Studies: Proceedings of the 6th European Conference of Iranian Studies, Held in Vienna, 18-22 September 2007, edited by Maria Macuch, Dieter Weber, and Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst. Iranica 19. Harrassowitz, 2010.
Gyselen, Rika. “Ateliers monétaires et cachets officiels Sasanides.” Studia Iranica 8, no. 2 (1979): 189–212.
Kolesnikov, A. I. Iran v nachale VII veka (Iran at the beginning of the 7th century), Leningrad, 1970; tr. Moḥammad Rafiq Yahyāʾi as Irān dar āstāna-ye soquṭ-e sāsāniān, Tehran, 2010.
Malek, Hodge Mehd. “A Survey of Research on Sasanian Numismatics.” The Numismatic Chronicle 153 (1993): 227–69.
Mochiri, M. I. “A Coin of Khusraw III’s Third Year.” The Numismatic Chronicle 143 (1983): 221–23.
—— . “Monnaies Dites de ‘Khusraw IV.” In Sources for the History of Sasanian and Post-Sasanian Iran, edited by Rika. Gyselen, vol. 19. Res Orientales. Groupe pour l’Étude de la Civilisation du Moyen-Orient, 2010.
Sebeos, Patmutʿiwn, tr. with notes by R. W. Thomson and historical comm. by J. Howard-Johnston and T. Greenwood, as The Armenian History Attributed to Sebeos, Translated Texts for Historians 31, Liverpool, 1999.
Schindel, Nikolaus. “Sasanian Mints – Where and Why?” In Infrastructure and Distribution in Ancient Economies, 1st ed., edited by Bernhard Woytek. Proceedings of a Conference Held at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 28-31 October 2014. Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2018.
Moḥammad b. Jarir Ṭabari, Ketāb taʾriḵ al-rosol wa’lmoluk, eds. M. J. de Goeje et al., 15 vols. in 3, Leiden, 1879-1901; part tr. C. E. Bosworth, as The History of al-Tabarī V: The Sāsānids, the Byzantines, the Lakhmids, and Yemen, Albany, NY, 1999.
Wiesehöfer, Josef. “The Late Sasanian Near East.” In The New Cambridge History of Islam: Volume 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries, edited by Chase F. Robinson, vol. 1. The New Cambridge History of Islam. Cambridge University Press, 2010.