Who Were the Parthians?

The Parthians were the Iranian-speaking people who founded the second great Persian empire, the Arsacid dynasty that ruled the Near East from c. 247 BCE to 224 CE — almost five centuries, the longest run of any Iranian imperial house. They are remembered today chiefly for the Battle of Carrhae and the famous Parthian shot, but the Parthian achievement went well beyond the military. The Parthian state was a major civilisational force in its own right, and the Sasanian Empire that succeeded it inherited much of its administrative, religious, and artistic tradition.

A note on naming, because the question is harder than it looks. “Parthian” is the English form of the Greek Parthaios, which is in turn a transliteration of the Old Persian Parthava, the name of an Achaemenid satrapy in the northeast of the Iranian plateau. The dynasty that founded the empire in the third century BCE, however, was not originally the people of Parthava but a different group, the Parni, who came from the steppes east of the Caspian. The Parni invaded or migrated into the older Parthian territory, absorbed the local population, and took the name. From the outside, the two became one. To most ancient and modern readers, “Parthian” means the imperial house and its subjects, regardless of the original ethnic distinction. Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis’s edited volume The Parthian Empire and its Successors (2012) is the most useful recent collection on these questions.

The original Parthians

The original Parthians — the Parthava of the Behistun inscription (c. 520 BCE, DB §20) — lived in the region the Greeks called Parthyene, south-east of the Caspian Sea. They spoke a northwestern Iranian language that would become Middle Parthian, the language of the Arsacid chancery and the great noble families. They were a settled agricultural people who lived in fortified towns and villages and practised a mixed economy of agriculture, animal husbandry, and trade. The Achaemenid satrapy of Parthia was a small and quiet province of the empire, mentioned in the Behistun inscription as one of the rebellious provinces that Darius defeated in his accession-year campaign.

The Parni, and the founding of the empire

The Parni were a different people, originally pastoralists of the steppe east of the Caspian, in the region the classical sources call Tapuria. They were a nomadic or semi-nomadic Iranian-speaking people, related to the Dahae, the Sacae, and the other steppe peoples of Central Asia. The Parni had been clients of the Seleucid crown for some time, and they were in a position to take advantage of the chronic disorder of the Seleucid empire in the third century. Around 247 BCE — the date is conventional, and the convention may be a later Arsacid construction — a chieftain named Arsaces led the Parni into the older Parthian territory, defeated the local Seleucid satrap (the satrap Andragoras had himself struck coins in the name of independence shortly before), and established a new state. The new state took the name “Parthian” from the people it had absorbed, and the dynasty Arsaces founded — the Arsacids — would rule the Iranian plateau, with interruptions, for almost five centuries.

The dynasty’s later claim of Achaemenid descent, asserted in Armenian and Sasanian sources and adopted by Firdowsi in the Shahnameh, is probably a legitimation strategy rather than a memory. I am not aware of any external evidence for the claim that predates the second century BCE, and the conflation of the Parni with the older Parthians makes a clean genealogy impossible.

The empire they built

The Parthian state that the Arsacids built was, at its height in the first century BCE, the dominant power of the Near East. It stretched from the Euphrates to the Pamirs, from the Caspian to the Persian Gulf. The state was a federation of kingdoms, ruled by a king of kings (the shahanshah) with the help of a council of great noble families — the Suren, the Karen, the Aspahapet, the Ispahbudhan, and others. The great families held the military commands of the empire and could depose and replace kings at will. Parvaneh Pourshariati’s Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire (2008) argues, in my view persuasively, that this noble-led, federative structure was the dominant feature of late Arsacid politics and persisted into the Sasanian period.

The Parthian state was the chief rival of Rome for control of the eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, and the two empires fought an intermittent series of wars for nearly three centuries. The famous engagement was Carrhae in 53 BCE; the famous settlement was the Treaty of Rhandeia in 63 CE; the famous annexation was Trajan’s brief conquest of Mesopotamia in 114–117 CE; the famous last war was Septimius Severus’ campaign of 194–202 CE. The Parthian state survived them all. What it could not survive was the Sasanian revolution of 224 CE, in which Ardashir I overthrew the last Arsacid king of kings and replaced the dynasty with a more centralised and militarily aggressive state.

Culture and religion

The Parthian culture was a synthesis of Greek, Mesopotamian, and Iranian elements. In the western provinces, Greek remained a language of administration and high culture, and the cities of Mesopotamia preserved their Greek-style institutions. The Parthian court was bilingual: the kings used Greek for their official inscriptions and seals, while the nobility and the Zoroastrian priesthood used Middle Persian and Parthian. The Parthian coinage, particularly the silver drachms of Mithridates I and his successors, is the most abundant single category of source for the dynasty.

The Parthian state was officially Zoroastrian, but it was notable for its religious tolerance. The Jewish communities of Mesopotamia, which had been continuously present in the Babylonian diaspora from the Neo-Babylonian period, flourished under Parthian rule. Christian communities also began to take root in Mesopotamia in the first and second centuries CE, and the Parthian period saw the establishment of the Church of the East. The Sasanian religious system, which was the most fully developed form of pre-Islamic Iranian religion, was based in part on Parthian precedents.

The legacy

The Parthian legacy is substantial. Politically, the Parthian state preserved the Iranian imperial idea for nearly five centuries, and the Sasanian revolution of 224 CE was, in part, a Parthian restoration. Culturally, the Parthian period saw the emergence of a distinctive Iranian Hellenistic art style, of which the best surviving examples are the painted plaster walls of Old Nisa and the bronze rhytons from the same site (now in the Turkmenistan national museum and the British Museum). Linguistically, the Parthian period saw the emergence of Middle Persian and Middle Parthian as literary languages and the development of the Pahlavi script. Militarily, the Parthian doctrine of horse archery and cataphracts was a military system of the first importance in the ancient world and would be imitated for centuries.

The Parthian period is often overshadowed in popular memory by the glories of the Achaemenids and the Sasanians, but it was, in fact, the longest of the three classical Persian empires, and the period in which many of the institutions of pre-Islamic Iran were consolidated. To call the Parthians “the second great Persian empire” is, in literal terms, an understatement. They were the longest Persian empire of all.