Under the reign of the Sasanians, the Middle Persian term huniyāgar was used to refer to a minstrel. ĭancers and musical instrument players depicted on a Sasanian silver bowl from the 5th-7th century AD. It is also mentioned in Plutarch's Life of Crassus (23.7) that the Parthians used drums to prepare for battle. Šāhnāme itself was based on Xwadāynāmag, an earlier Middle Persian work, which was an important part of Persian folklore and that is now lost. Parthian songs were later absorbed into the Iranian national epic of Šāhnāme, composed by 10th-century Persian poet Ferdowsi. Likewise, Strabo's Geographica reports that the Parthian youth were taught songs about "the deeds both of the gods and of the noblest men". According to Plutarch's Life of Crassus (32.3), they praised their national heroes and ridiculed their Roman rivals. They performed for their audiences at royal courts and in public theaters. Under the Parthian Empire, the gōsān ( Parthian for "minstrel") had a prominent role in the society. Xenophon's Cyropaedia also mentions a great number of singing women at the court of the Achaemenid Empire. Athenaeus also points out to the capture of singing girls at the court of the last Achaemenid king Darius III (336–330 BC) by Macedonian general Parmenion. Athenaeus of Naucratis, in his Deipnosophistae, mentions a court singer who had sung a warning to the king of the Median Empire of the plans of Cyrus the Great, who would later establish the Achaemenid dynasty on the throne. According to Herodotus, the magi, who were a priestly caste in ancient Iran, accompanied their sacrifice rituals with singing. Not much is known on the music scene of the classical Iranian empires of the Medes, the Achaemenids, and the Parthians, other than a few archaeological remains and some notations from the writings of Greek historians. Lute player statue from the time of the Parthian Empire, kept at the Netherlands's Rijksmuseum van Oudheden.
Multiple depictions of horizontal harps were also sculpted in Assyrian palaces, dating back between 865 and 650 BC.
The use of both vertical and horizontal angular harps have been documented at the archaeological sites of Madaktu (650 BC) and Kul-e Fara (900–600 BC), with the largest collection of Elamite instruments documented at Kul-e Fara. A number of trumpets made of silver, gold, and copper were found in eastern Iran that are attributed to the Oxus civilization and date back between 22 BC. Iran is the birthplace of the earliest complex instruments, which date back to the third millennium BC. Music in Iran, as evidenced by the "pre-Iranian" archaeological records of Elam, the oldest civilization in southwestern Iran, dates back thousands of years.
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