Parthia

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Parthia sits in the northeastern corner of what is now Iran, a strip of land pressed between the Kopet Dag mountains to the north and the Dasht-e Kavir desert to the south. For more than a thousand years, every great empire that rose in the ancient world either absorbed Parthia, tried to hold it, or lost it. The Medes took it in the 7th century BC. The Achaemenids folded it in under Cyrus the Great in the 6th century BC. Alexander the Great swept through in the 4th century BC. And yet each time the region passed from one master to another, it retained a distinctive identity rooted in the land, the people, and a tradition of oral poetry so durable that a single word from it, the Parthian term for minstrel, gosan, survives to this day in both Iranian languages and in Armenian. How did a peripheral northeastern province become the political heartland of an empire that stretched across most of Greater Iran? And how did its ruling families continue to shape the world long after the empire itself fell? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Achaemenid Province

  ›

  Cyrus the Great defeated the Median king Astyages, and within a year Parthia became one of the first provinces to accept Cyrus as its ruler. That early allegiance carried strategic weight: it secured Cyrus's eastern flanks and made possible his first imperial campaign, the march against Sardis. The inscription that recorded Parthia for the first time in an Iranian source was carved at Behistun by Darius I, dating to around 520 BC. It lists Parthia among the governorates near Drangiana, in the typical Iranian clockwise order. The center of administration may have been at the site later known as Hecatompylus. Herodotus, writing of the same period, grouped the Parthians with the Chorasmians, Sogdians, and Areioi as peoples of a single satrapy, the 16th, whose annual tribute to the king was 300 talents of silver. That modest figure has, as scholars have noted, rightly caused disquiet. The province was not merely compliant; it could also resist. When Darius I seized the Achaemenid throne, the Parthians joined the Median king Phraortes in revolt. Hystaspes, the governor of the province and said to be the father of Darius I himself, suppressed that revolt around 522-521 BC. By the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BC, the Parthian contingent in Darius III's army was commanded by Phrataphernes, then serving as Achaemenid governor. After Alexander defeated Darius III, Phrataphernes surrendered Parthia to the Macedonian in the summer of 330 BC. Alexander reappointed him governor.

• 3. The Parni Takeover

  ›

  In 247 BC, the death of Antiochus II opened a crack in Seleucid authority. Ptolemy III moved against the Seleucid capital at Antioch, and the dynasty's future was briefly in question. Andragoras, the Seleucid governor of Parthia, seized that moment to proclaim independence and began minting his own coins. His freedom did not last. A man named Arsaces, described as being of Scythian or Bactrian origin, had been elected leader of the Parni, an eastern-Iranian people from the Tajen River valley southeast of the Caspian Sea. The Parni watched as Andragoras, now cut off from Seleucid military backing, struggled to hold his borders. Around 238 BC, under the joint command of Arsaces and his brother Tiridates, the Parni invaded and seized Astabene, the northern region of Parthia, whose administrative capital was Kabuchan. They then pushed further and took the rest of the province, killing Andragoras in the process. A punitive expedition by Seleucus II failed to dislodge them. Antiochus III did recapture Arsacid-controlled territory in 209 BC, forcing Arsaces II to sue for peace and accept vassal status. It was not until Arsaces II's grandson, or grand-nephew, Phraates I, that the Arsacid line began asserting independence a second time. That patient, grinding persistence would eventually produce the Parthian Empire, which endured from 247 BC to 224 AD.

• 4. Noble Power and Imperial Fracture

  ›

  From their base in Parthia, the Arsacid rulers extended control across most of Greater Iran and placed eponymous branches of the dynasty on the thrones of Armenia, Iberia, and Caucasian Albania. Their power depended on the great feudal families of Parthia, who supplied military forces and financial backing. In return, those families received large tracts of land in the earliest conquered territories adjacent to Parthia. The largest of the resulting city-states were Kuchan, Semnan, Gorgan, Merv, Zabol, and Yazd. From around 105 BC onward, this small cluster of noble families grew influential enough to oppose the monarch directly. From about 130 BC, nomadic incursions by the Sakas, the Yuezhi, and the Massagetae pressed the empire's frontiers. Defending against those raids cost two kings their lives: Phraates II and Artabanus I. Around 32 BC, a civil war broke out when Tiridates rebelled against Phraates IV, probably with support from the nobility Phraates had previously persecuted. The revolt succeeded at first but failed by 25 BC. In 9/8 AD, the nobility placed their preferred candidate on the throne, only to find that Vonones kept too tight a budgetary control. He was usurped in favor of Artabanus II, apparently a non-Arsacid Parthian nobleman. By the 2nd century AD, wars with Rome, nomadic pressure, and noble infighting had weakened the Arsacids past recovery. In April 224, the Persian Sassanids, formerly a minor vassal from southwestern Iran, finally defeated and ended the dynasty.

• 5. The Minstrel Tradition

  ›

  No Parthian literature survives from before the Sasanian period in its original form, and the Parthians seem to have written very little down. What they had instead was a rich oral minstrel-poet culture. Their word for such performers, gosan, survives to this day in multiple Iranian languages and, in the form gusan, in Armenian, where its influence on vocabulary was especially heavy. These performers moved through every layer of Parthian daily life, from birth to death, entertaining kings and ordinary people alike. Their method was to praise patrons by linking them to mythical heroes and rulers of legend. The heroic poems that circulated in this tradition survived mainly in Persian retellings, including through the lost Middle Persian Xwaday-namag, and most accessibly through Firdausi's Shahnameh. The evidence suggests those poems were not wholly lost in the Khurasan of Firdausi's own day. The later poetic tradition known as fahlaviyat, poems associated with the areas considered Parthian in the Islamic period, carry the characteristics of oral literature and may represent a continuation of the Parthian minstrel tradition itself. Written Parthian, by contrast, is attested mainly through nearly three thousand ostraca found at Nisa in present-day Turkmenistan, apparently in what had been a wine storage facility. A handful of additional written traces survive: part of a land-sale document at Avroman in the Kermanshah province of Iran, more ostraca and graffiti at Dura-Europos in present-day Syria.

• 6. Language on Coins and Stone

  ›

  The Parthian Arsacids were slow to use their own language in official settings. Parthian first appears on Arsacid coinage only during the reign of Vologases I, who ruled from 51 to 58 AD. For most of the empire's history, Greek had served as the administrative language. Yet the wider use of Parthian had been real all along: when the early Sasanian kings issued their royal declarations, they inscribed them not only in their native Middle Persian but also in Parthian, treating it as a language that would be understood across the former empire. The name of the region itself traveled through several linguistic layers. The Old Persian Parthava was the Parthian language's own self-designation, meaning simply "of the Parthians." In Hellenistic contexts it became Parthyaea. The Middle Persian sources of the Sasanian period knew the region as Pahlaw. Later Islamic writers called it Pahla or Fahla, though by then those terms referred more broadly to the Parthian-settled areas in western Iran. The scholar Ibn al-Muqaffa defined Parthia as covering Isfahan, Ray, Hamadan, Mah-i Nihawand, and Azerbaijan. The scholars al-Khawazmi and Hamza al-Isfahani agreed. Al-Dinawari, avoiding the word Parthia entirely, identified Jibal as the realm of Artabanus IV, the last Parthian king.

• 7. Sasanian Inheritance

  ›

  Ardashir I, the founder of the Sasanian dynasty, apparently made Parthia the first region he conquered after defeating Artabanus IV, a choice that signals how much strategic and symbolic weight the province still carried. Some Parthian nobles resisted Sasanian rule for a time, but most switched allegiance early. Several families claiming descent from the old Parthian nobility became enshrined as a Sasanian institution called the "Seven houses." Scholars note that five of those seven claimed genealogies are probably not genuinely Parthian, but fabricated to stress the antiquity of those families. Parthia retained formal prestige throughout the 3rd century. In his Ka'be-ye Zardusht inscription, Shapur I placed Parthia second in his list of provinces, directly after Pars. The Abnun inscription, describing the Roman invasion of 243/44, refers to an attack on "Pars and Parthia" as a combined target. Scholars have observed that since Roman forces never advanced beyond Mesopotamia, the phrase "Pars and Parthia" may have functioned as shorthand for the Sasanian Empire itself. After the Battle of Edessa in 260, Parthia was the second province chosen for settlement by Roman prisoners of war, a sign that the region remained valuable and populated enough to absorb a significant influx of new inhabitants.