The Parthian Empire

The history of the Parthian Empire traditionally begins in 247 bce, when the founder of the Arsacid dynasty, Arsaces I, seized control of the Seleucid satrapy of Parthia (Parthyaia and Parthyene in Greek and Parθava in Old Persian) and ends with the defeat of Ardavan (or Artabanus) IV by the rebellious Sasanid Persian king Ardashir in 224 ce. The ruling dynasty of the state was the Arsacids, named for their founder Arsaces, thus leading to the alternate name of the state as the Arsacid Empire. “Arsacid” (or “Arsakid”) is increasingly used by specialists to refer to the period and state structure, but the geographic and ethnic term “Parthian” is still commonly used to refer to all aspects of this empire. The all-inclusive “Parthian” with its ethnic connotations can lead to conceptual confusion, particularly in the attribution of cultural products to the groups that produced them. The most important difficulty in studying the Parthians is the nature of our sources. The Parthians did not leave an extensive literature of their own; most of our written sources are Greek and Roman authors writing within the political and ideological structures of rival empires: external at best and hostile at worst. In particular, the tendency for Roman authors to minimize Parthian power compared to their own has cast a long shadow. Similarly, their successors, the Sasanid Persians, saw them as interlopers between their own empire and the earlier Achaemenids, referring to them as “petty kings.” These source biases influence the treatment of the Parthians in modern scholarship, with strands of Orientalism and Eurocentrism persisting even in recent works. Material culture is essential for understanding the Parthian Empire, especially numismatic evidence. The chronology of Arsacid kings relies in large part on the work of numismatists, in part owing to the ambiguity of royal names in our external written sources. The result is that the dates and even existence of some kings remain unsettled. In the absence of internal written evidence, much of our knowledge of Parthian culture must also derive from material culture. This is complicated by local diversity across the empire and by debates over the degree to which various aspects of Parthian culture should be attributed to Hellenizing influences from the Seleucids, the nomadic origins of Arsaces and the Parni in Central Asia, or local Iranian customs.