The author begins with a statement of the colossal influence that came from the territory of Persia and covered both the nearest and more distant cultures of Europe: Roman, Germanic, Scandinavian, and Slavic. The center of that cultural impact was Sassanian Iran, and the bulk of finds, by which we can judge the high level of Iranian art and craft of that time, did not come from Iran itself, but from the vast territory of Eastern Europe, extending north to Perm and Vyatka where art products came as a result of trade in exchange for furs. That is why the Hermitage (St. Petersburg, Russia) possesses the best collection of Sassanian toreutics. The author traces the history of the flourishing of this art from the epoch of the Achaemenids, examines the external influences, both Western and, to a greater extent, Eastern, which it experienced. The article provides an overview of all types of art, from monumental ones (architecture, reliefs, sculpture) to decorative and applied art, represented mainly by work on metal and intaglio. O. examines the main pictorial motives and observes some traces of the everyday culture of that time (ceremonial, first of all) in the form of ethnographic remnants, for example, in contemporary Kurdistan.