In art, the Sasanians gave as good as they got, generating widespread and long-lasting influences of their own.
But a new study offers a clue to how an experience early in childhood may exert such a powerful and long-lasting influence.
In Essinger's accessible biography, Annabella emerges as a controlling, highly intellectual mother with long-lasting influence over her more imaginative and emotional daughter.
The findings, commissioned by the Sutton Trust, reveal the powerful and long-lasting influence of background in shaping educational outcomes and suggest that income is only partly responsible for the variations in levels of education by different groups.
I owned records by a few bands that sounded like Beefheart's — XTC and the Gang of Four spring to mind — but these turned out later to be more evidence of Beefheart's wide and long-lasting influence.
It was his mastery of drama and his use of critically timed deviations in pitch ("note bending") that had the greatest long-lasting influence, because they were absorbed by his disciple Johnny Hodges, Duke Ellington's principal soloist from 1928 to 1970.
"I'm over here, mate," Xabi Alonso calls, poking his head out from behind the wall of an access point, the use of the word "mate" a reminder that five years living on Merseyside can have a long-lasting influence on a foreign player's vocabulary.
Of special and long-lasting influence in the history of the interpretation of myth was Euhemerism (named after Euhemerus, a Greek writer who flourished about 300 bce), according to which certain gods were originally great people venerated because of their benefactions to mankind.
The contribution made by historical-philological semantics to the study of lexical phenomena had a long-lasting influence.
And his re-invention of school league tables - away from the unyielding reliance on five good GCSEs - could be an unexpected and long-lasting influence.
