Medieval Baghdad was home to academies for the study of talmudic tradition called yeshivot/metivata. This fact is relevant because the historiography that has dominated modern scholarship on the subject originated in Baghdad in the ninth through the eleventh centuries. That historiography asserted that the yeshivot of Sasanian Babylonia were similar to the talmudic academies of Islamic Iraq. The only contemporary evidence available on Jewish education in Sasanian Babylonia appears in talmudic literature. Two medieval documents contain information on the history of the Babylonian academies in Sasanian times. One is Seder Tannaim VeAmoraim. The other work is an account of the yeshivot of Baghdad by Nathan son of Isaac the Babylonian. The attempt to base the history of the academies on contemporary evidence and thereby to minimize the possibility of anachronism has resulted in an account quite different from the one presented in traditional historiography.

For the traditional outlook of ancient Eastern Iran, the birthplace of Iranian culture, which must be guided by such realia as may be extracted from the religious texts which comprise the Avesta, supplemented, by Pahlavi citations from lost Avestan texts. The "Avesta people", like the Indo-Europeans who settled northwestern India and founded the Vedic culture, called themselves Arya. While our Avestan texts were composed at a period in which settled agricultural life had long before become widespread, the basis of social structuring it attests, which survived at least theoretically through Sasanian times, took shape during the earlier period of nomadism, and nomadic life has continued, of course, to exist side-by-side with agriculturism down to the present day in Iran. In the early stages of Indo-European thought, human fertility was connected with the concept of moisture and fluidity, and this association continued in the ancient Iranian outlook. The cattle-raising was a central part of the most ancient economy of Eastern Iran.