So by this point, you are reading Gibbon because I am ignoring all his tabloid trash and only writing about new issues he raises. Last time it was another example of how early sources are unreliable, specifically Eusebius.
This time I have to arraign Gibbon's understanding of the Bible. He starts with Assyria here but, as you know, Assyria mainly shows up in the Bible late in Kings and Chronicles. Gibbon ignores everything before that. He probably is pretending that having been raised an Anglican, and having converted to Catholicism and back again, he is perfectly skeptical about everything in the Bible. He probably disagrees with Archbishop Ussher that there was a millennium and a half before Assyria conquered the northern kingdom in the Holy Land. There's a reason for this -- Ussher was archbishop in the Irish church and, like many Englishmen of his time, Gibbon was prejudiced against the Irish. It will come out again in a later chapter.
Second, Gibbon identifies the Parthians with the Syrians, but we now know that this is not the case. The Arsacid empire was founded by an elected ruler of the Parni, one of the three tribes composing the Dahae. Supposedly the Dahae killed Cyrus the Great, but this comes from Berossus the Historian and we know it might be untrue; he lived in the 200s BCE and Cyrus died in the 500s BCE. An inscription of Khshayarsha from the 400s says the Dahae lived next to the Saka. Both fought Alexander at Gaugamela. Gibbon is getting his claim from Strabo, who seems to be the last reference to the Dahae.
The Scythians or Saka had their high point in the 400s BCE but by Strabo's time lived strictly in the Crimean peninsula. They were defeated by Mithridates and disappeared from literature, except for a loss to Tiberius Plautius Silvanus Aelianus before 100 CE. They settled down, assimilated, and founded a capital called Neapolis, which the Goths destroyed in the 300s CE.
Gibbon then goes into a disquisition on the Magian and Zoroastrian religions which has to be discounted in favor of less pejorative reports by people who have actually read surviving texts like the Zend Avesta in the Avestan language. This is a case of refusing to rely on commentaries, knowing that the people who wrote them probably didn't read the primary documents. So that makes 7 pages of chapter 8 that you can ignore. If you want to know about these religions, go to some scholarly site and find the translations of the material that is available on the web.
We get a hint that Gibbon was clueless about geography when he names both the Tigris and the Euphrates as boundaries of the early Sassanian empire. These two rivers have always been more or less close together. There would thus be a narrow tract between them that stretches up to the modern Aras River in Armenia, then to the Amu Darya which rises in the Pameer Mountains at Afghanistan, and finally to the Indus in northern India. If, however, we eliminate the Tigris as a boundary, there's a solid sweep of land from the Euphrates north and east.
It is also nonsense for Gibbon to talk of a want of fresh water for agriculture with all these mighty rivers being part of the empire. The famous bread and beer culture of Mesopotamia in the 2000s BCE developed on irrigated land. You can hardly grow a population in a subsistence economy without mechanized agriculture, if you lack fresh water. But under Ardashir, canals were built that simultaneously allowed irrigation and internal transportation.
The empire accessed the Persian Gulf on the south, leading to the Gulf of Oman. It probably used the same harbors that, in the 3000s BCE, allowed traders from India to build settlements where they grew the cucumbers that they eventually brought to Mesopotamia as seed along with spices. From then on, the Akkadians had pickles to go with their beer, bread, and cheese. Gibbon didn't know about this, because none of his sources wrote about ports like Konarak or Gwadar Bay.
The archaeology of Mesopotamia really starts with Henry Layard, who proved, some 50 years after Gibbon died, that the city-state of Nineveh existed. It's another case of not blaming Gibbon for what he couldn't have known, but also recognizing that if we want the truth about Persia, we can't use Gibbon for a source because he writes out of ignorance and prejudice.
Zend-Avesta Vendidad: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.164086
Zend-Avesta part 2: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283887
Zend-Avesta Part 3: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.283888
The Bundahishn: http://www.avesta.org/mp/grb.htm
These books are also part of the Sacred Books of the East series edited by Max Muller.
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