However, writers of later periods have left a list of these modes and melodies. The theories these modal systems were based on are not known. These numbers are in accordance with the number of days in a week, month, and year in the Sasanian calendar. He has been credited to have organized a musical system consisting of seven "royal modes" ( xosrovāni), 30 derived modes ( navā), and 360 melodies ( dāstān). He may have invented the lute and the musical tradition that was to transform into the forms of dastgah and maqam. He was a poet-musician who performed on occasions such as state banquets and the festivals of Nowruz and Mehrgan. Among these attested names, Barbad is remembered in many documents and has been named as remarkably high skilled. The court of Khosrow II hosted a number of prominent musicians, including Azad, Bamshad, Barbad, Nagisa, Ramtin, and Sarkash. The relief depicts two boats that are shown at "two successive moments within the same panel". He is shown among his musicians on a large relief at the archaeological site of Taq-e Bostan, holding a bow and arrows himself and standing in a boat amidst a group of harpists. The reign of Sasanian ruler Khosrow II is regarded as a "golden age" for Iranian music. Sasanian musical scenes are depicted especially on silver vessels and some wall reliefs. Musical instruments were not accompanied with formal Zoroastrian worship, but they were used in the festivals. The Zoroastrian paradise itself was known as the "House of Song" ( garōdmān in Middle Persian), "where music induced perpetual joy". The recitation of the Sasanian Avestan text of Vendidād has been connected to the Oxus trumpet. The history of Sasanian music is better documented than the earlier periods, and is especially more evident in Avestan texts. 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. 3 International recognitions of Iranian music.