Eduard Meyer

“ Kavadh, however, escaped and found refuge with the Ephthalites, whose king gave him his daughter in marriage and aided him to return to Persia. In 499 he became king again and punished his opponents. He had to pay a tribute to the Ephthalites and applied for subsidies to Rome, which had before supported the Persians. But now the emperor Anastasius refused subsidies, expecting that the two rival powers of the East would exhaust one another in war. At the same time he intervened in the affairs of the Persian part of Armenia. So Kavadh joined the Ephthalites and began war against the Romans. ”

“ He fixed the coinage and introduced the gold coinage of the Daric (which is not named after him, as the Greeks believed, but derived from a Persian word meaning “gold”; in Middle Persian it is called zarīg) . He tried to develop the commerce of the empire, and sent an expedition down the Kabul and the Indus, led by the Carian captain Scylax of Caryanda, who explored the Indian Ocean from the mouth of the Indus to Suez. He dug a canal from the Nile to Suez, and, as the fragments of a hieroglyphic inscription found there show, his ships sailed from the Nile through the Red Sea by Saba to Persia. ”

“ The defeat of the Persians at Mycale roused the Greek cities of Asia.
Of the later years of Xerxes little is known. He sent out Sataspes to attempt the circumnavigation of Africa (Herod, iv. 143) , but the victory of the Greeks threw the empire into a state of languid torpor, from which it could not rise again. The king himself became involved in intrigues of the harem (cf. Herod, ix. 108 ff.—compare the late Jewish novel of Esther, in which a remembrance of the true character of the king is retained) and was much dependent upon courtiers and eunuchs. ”

“ His great crime is the killing of the Apis, for which he is punished by madness, in which he commits many other crimes, kills his brother and his sister, and at last loses his empire and dies from a wound in the hip, at the same place where he had wounded the sacred animal. ”

“ Parthian (Pehlevi is the modern form of Parthawa) and the magnates themselves Pehlevans, i.e. “Parthians,” a term transferred by Firdousi to the heroes of the old Iranian legend. But the Arsacid kingdom never was a truly national state; with the Scythian and Parthian elements were united some elements of Greek civilization. The successors of Arsaces I. even founded some Greek towns, and when they had conquered Babylonia and Mesopotamia they all adopted the epithet “Philhellen.”
To Arsaces I. probably belong the earliest Parthian coins; the oldest simply bear the name Arsaces ”

“ The origin and early history of the Parthian kingdom, of which we possess only very scanty information, is surrounded by fabulous legends, narrated by Arrian in his Parthica (preserved in Photius, cod. 58, and Syncellus, p. 539 seq.) . Here Arsaces and his brother Tiridates are derived from the royal house of the Achaemenids, probably from Artaxerxes II.; the young Tiridates is insulted by the prefect Agathocles or Pherecles; in revenge the brothers with five companions (corresponding to the seven Persians of Darius) slay him, and Arsaces becomes king. ”

“ But we know from the prophecies of Jeremiah and Zephaniah that Syria and Palestine were really invaded by northern barbarians in 626 B.C., and it is probable that this invasion was the principal cause of the downfall of the Assyrian empire (see Media and Persia: Ancient History) . ”

“ The principal seat of the Tochari and the Kushan dynasty seems to have been Bactria; but they always maintained the eastern parts of modern Afghanistan and Baluchistan, while the western regions (Areia, i.e. Herat, Seistan and part of the Helmund valley) were conquered by the Arsacids. In the 3rd century the Kushan dynasty began to decay; about A.D. 320 the Gupta empire was founded in India. Thus the Kushanas were reduced to eastern Iran, where they had to fight against the Sassanids. In the 5th century a new people came from the east, the Ephthalites (q.v.) ”

“ So it seems that the dynasty, which more than half a century later succeeded in throwing off the Assyrian yoke and founded the Median empire, was derived from this Dāyukku, and that his name was thus introduced into the Median traditions, which contrary to history considered him as founder of the kingdom. ”

“ Nine rebel chiefs are led before him, their hands bound behind them, and a rope round their necks: the ninth is Skunka, the chief of the Scythians (Sacae) whom he defeated. Behind the king stand his bow-bearer and his lance-bearer; in the air appears the figure of the great god Ahuramazda, whose protection led him to victory. [1] The inscriptions are composed in the three languages which are written with cuneiform signs, and were used in all official inscriptions of the Achaemenian kings: the chief place is of course given to the Persian language (in four columns) ”

“ It was quite natural that, after Cyrus had conquered Asia, Cambyses should undertake the conquest of Egypt, the only remaining independent state of the Eastern world. Before he set out on his expedition he killed his brother Bardiya (Smerdis) , whom Cyrus had appointed governor of the eastern provinces. The date is given by Darius, whereas the Greek authors narrate the murder after the conquest of Egypt. ”

“ Intermingled are some stories derived from the Greek mercenaries, especially about their leader Phanes of Halicarnassus, who betrayed Egypt to the Persians. In the Persian tradition the crime of Cambyses is the murder of his brother; he is further accused of drunkenness, in which he commits many crimes, and thus accelerates his ruin. These traditions are found in different passages of Herodotus, and in a later form, but with some trustworthy detail about his household, in the fragments of Ctesias. ”

“ In 159 B.C., according to Chinese sources, they entered Sogdiana, in 139 they conquered Bactria, and during the next generation they had made an end to the Greek rule in eastern Iran. Only in India the Greek conquerors (Menander, Apollodotus) maintained themselves some time longer. But in the middle of the 1st century B.C. the whole of eastern Iran and western India belonged to the great “Indo-Scythian” empire. The ruling dynasty had the name Kushan (Kushana) , by which they are called on their coins and in the Persian sources. ”

“ By these wars the dominant position of the Greeks was undermined even more quickly than would otherwise have been the case. After Demetrius and Eucratides, the kings abandoned the Attic standard of coinage and introduced a native standard; at the same time the native language came into use by the side of the Greek. On the coins struck in India, the well-known Indian alphabet (called Brahmi by the Indians, the older form of the Devanagari) is used ”

“ Many other rebellious tribes were subjected. About 570 the dynasts of Yemen, who had been subdued by the Ethiopians of Axum, applied to Chosroes for help. He sent a fleet with a small army under Vahriz, who expelled the Ethiopians. From that time till the conquests of Mahomet, Yemen was dependent on Persia, and a Persian governor resided here. In 571 a new war with Rome broke out about Armenia, in which Chosroes conquered the fortress Dara on the Euphrates, invaded Syria and Cappadocia, and returned with large booty. ”

“ The kings generally used Greek inscriptions on their coins, but when they sided with the Parthians, as in the war of Marcus Aurelius and Verus (A.D. 161-165) , an Aramaic legend appears instead. Hellenism soon disappeared and the Arabs adopted the language and civilization of the Aramaeans. This development was hastened by the introduction of Christianity, which is said to have been brought here by the apostle Judas, the brother of James, whose tomb was shown in Edessa. In 190 and 201 we hear of Christian churches in Edessa. ”

“ Although European Greece was intimately connected with the coasts of Asia Minor, and the opposing parties in the Greek towns were continually soliciting his intervention, Darius did not meddle with their affairs. The Persian wars were begun by the Greeks themselves. ”

“ Of course the expedition undertaken on these grounds could not but prove a failure; having advanced for some weeks into the Russian steppes, Darius was forced to return. The details given by Herodotus (according to him Darius had reached the Volga!) are quite fantastical; and the account which Darius himself had given on a tablet, which was added to his great inscription in Behistun, is destroyed with the exception of a few words. (See R. W. Macan, Herodotus, vol. ii. appendix 3; G. B. Grundy, Great Persian War, pp. 48-64; J. B. Bury in Classical Review, July 1897.) ”

“ It is a mountainous country with a moderate climate. Water is abundant and the land is very fertile. Bactria was the home of one of the Iranian tribes (see Persia: Ancient History) . Modern authors have often used the name in a wider sense, as the designation of the whole eastern part of Iran. ”

“ The reverse shows the seated archer, or occasionally an elephant; the head of the king is beardless and wears a helmet and a diadem; only from the third or fourth king they begin to wear a beard after the Iranian fashion. In honour of the founder of the dynasty all his successors, when they came to the throne, adopted his name and officially (e.g. on the coins) are almost always called Arsaces, whereas the historians generally use their individual names. ”

“ He introduced a rational system of taxation, based upon a survey of landed possessions, which his father had begun, and tried in every way to increase the welfare and the revenues of his empire. In Babylonia he built or restored the canals. His army was in discipline decidedly superior to the Romans, and apparently was well paid. ”

“ Arsaces was proclaimed king at Asaak in the district of Astauene, now Kuchan in the upper Atrek (Attruck) valley (Isidor. Charac.) , and built his residence Dara on a rock in a fertile valley in Apavarktikene (Justin xli. 5; Plin. vi. 46) , now Kelat still farther eastward; the centre of his power evidently lay on the borders of eastern Khorasan and the Turanian desert. The principal institutions of the Parthian kingdom were created by him (cf. Justin xli. 2) . The Scythian nomads became the ruling race ”

“ He was attacked in 130 by Antiochus VII. Sidetes, who, however, in 129 was defeated and killed in a great battle in Media, which ended the Seleucid rule east of the Euphrates (see Seleucid Dynasty) . Meanwhile the kingdom was invaded by the Scythians (the Tochari of Bactria) , who had helped Antiochus. ”

“ The founder of the dynasty is therefore called Osroes by Procop. Bell Pers. i. 17; but Orhāi or Urhāi, son of Hewyā (i.e. “the snake”) , in the chronicle of Dionysius of Tellmahre; he is no historical personality, but the eponym of the tribe. ”

“ He narrates that, when the Medes had rebelled against the Assyrians and gained their independence about 710 B.C., according to his chronology (cf. Diodor. ii. 32) , they lived in villages without any political organization, and therefore the whole country was in a state of anarchy. Then Deioces, son of Phraortes, an illustrious man of upright character, was chosen judge in his village, and the justness of his decisions induced the inhabitants of the other villages to throng to him. ”

“ Bezold, Die (babylonischen) Achaemenideninschriften (1882) . A description of the locality, with comments on the present state of the inscriptions and doubtful passages of the Persian text, was given by Dr A. V. Williams Jackson in the Journal of the American Oriental Society, xxiv., 1903, and in his Persia, Past and Present (1906) . Dr Jackson in 1903 climbed to the ledge of the rock and was able to collate the lower part of the four large Persian columns; he thus convinced himself that Foy’s conjecture of ārštām (“righteousness”) for Rawlinson’s abištām or abaštām was correct. ”

“ After their victory over Cyaxares, the Scythians conquered and wasted the whole of western Asia, and ruled twenty-eight years, till at last they were made drunk and slain by Cyaxares at a banquet (cf. another story about Cyaxares and a Scythian host in Herod, i. 73) . As we possess scarcely any contemporary documents it is impossible to find out the real facts. ”

“ At the foot of the rock are the remainders of some other sculptures (quite destroyed) , the fragments of a Greek inscription of the Parthian prince Gotarzes (A.D. 40; text in Dittenberger, Orientis graeci inscr. selectae, no. 431) , and of an Arabic inscription. ”

“ See Cousin and Deschamps, Bulletin de corresp. hellén., xiii. (1889) , 529, and Dittenberger, Sylloge inscr. graec., 2) ; all the Greek oracles in Asia Minor and Europe therefore stood on the side of Persia in the Persian wars and admonished the Greeks to attempt no resistance.
About 512 Darius undertook a war against the Scythians. A great army crossed the Bosporus, subjugated eastern Thrace, and crossed the Danube. The purpose of this war can only have been to attack the nomadic Turanian tribes in the rear and thus to secure peace on the northern frontier of the empire. ”

“ The Chinese sources are given by Deguignes, “Recherches sur quelques événements qui concernent l’histoire des rois grecs de la Bactriane,” Mém. de l’acad. des inscriptions, xxv.; E. Specht, “Études sur l’Asie centrale d’après les historiens chinois” in Journal asiatique, 8 série, ii. ”

“ This proceeding led to two rebellions, probably in 484 and 479; in the Babylonian documents occur the names of two ephemeral kings, Shamash-irbā and Tarziya, who belong to this time. One of these rebellions was suppressed by Megabyzus, son of Zopyrus, the satrap whom the Babylonians had slain. ”

“ Of modern works on the history of the Parthians (besides the numismatic literature) the most important are: G. Rawlinson, The Sixth Oriental Monarchy (1873) , and A. von Gutschmid, Geschichte Irans und seine Nachbarländer von Alexander d. ”