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6 results

  • 10 - Darius I to Alexander, and Seleucid to Parthian Rule

  • Stephanie Dalley, University of Oxford
  • Book:
    The City of Babylon
    Published online:
    23 June 2021
    Print publication:
    08 July 2021, pp 275-307

  • Summary

    Darius I overcame rebellions and seized the throne of Babylon, but cuneiform scholarship continued and developed; religious practices did not change, nor did the great buildings on the citadel. The zodiac scheme came into use. The Achaemenid king took Babylonian royal titles and promoted the worship of Marduk for local purposes. Xerxes broke the continuity. Following an uprising, a purge led to the ending of many archives. The province of Babylon was divided in two. Subsequent Achaemenid kings continued to treat Babylon with reverence. Alexander the Great defeated Darius III, entered Babylon, retained the Persian satrap, and moved treasure from Susa and Ecbatana to Babylon. He was recognized as a god. Lack of sons at his premature death precipitated a civil war from which Alexander’s commander Seleucus emerged to take the throne jointly with his son Antiochus. The derelict ziggurat was demolished, but temples and rituals, chronicles and astronomical diaries, continued as before. Aramaic was widely used, and fewer texts were inscribed in cuneiform. Interest in the fall of Assyria and of the Babylonian empire is apparent in Greek literature. Famous scholars include Berossus and named astronomers. Parthians invaded and eventually ended the dynasty.

  • Bahl Šahastan in the land of the K‘ušans: Medieval Armenian memories of Balkh as an Arsacid capital

  • Alison Vacca
  • Journal:
    Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 84 / Issue 1 / February 2021
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 March 2021, pp. 19-45
    Print publication:
    February 2021

  • This paper explores the medieval Armenian understanding of the city of Balkh as a capital of the Arsacid Empire. Medieval Armenian sources employ four strategies of remembrance: scriptural geography, genealogy, folk etymology, and origin stories. These strategies invest the city of Balkh as the source of power of both Armenian royalty and nobility, through their connections to the Great Arsacids. There are two main themes in the descriptions of Balkh. First, the Arsacids of Balkh consistently decimated Sasanian armies in ways that the Armenian Arsacids could not emulate. Second, Balkh emerges as a refuge for (usually Parthian) rebels against the Chinese and Persian Empires. This paper explores the significance of Balkh as a site of memory by placing Armenian constructions of the Great Arsacid past (with some potential echoes of Great Kushan and Kushano-Sasanian history) into dialogue with the history of the city as it appears in Arabic.

Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia
  • Miniaturization and Cultural Hybridity
  • Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper
  • Published online:
    19 December 2019
    Print publication:
    12 March 2020
  • In this volume, Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper investigates the impact of Greek art on the miniature figure sculptures produced in Babylonia after the conquests of Alexander the Great. Figurines in Hellenistic Babylonia were used as agents of social change, by visually expressing and negotiating cultural differences. The scaled-down quality of figurines encouraged both visual and tactile engagement, enabling them to effectively work as non-threatening instruments of cultural blending. Reconstructing the embodied experience of miniaturization in detailed case studies, Langin-Hooper illuminates the dynamic process of combining Greek and Babylonian sculpture forms, social customs, and viewing habits into new, hybrid works of art. Her innovative focus on figurines as instruments of both personal encounter and global cultural shifts has important implications for the study of tiny objects in art history, anthropology, classics, and other disciplines.

  • The Gawri Wall: a possible Partho-Sasanian structure in the western foothills of the Zagros Mountains

  • Sajjad Alibaigi
  • Journal:
    Antiquity / Volume 93 / Issue 370 / August 2019
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 August 2019, e22
    Print publication:
    August 2019
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  • Survey at Sar Pol-e Zahab has revealed a hitherto unknown long wall in western Iran. Possibly dating to the Partho-Sasanian period, the wall extends more than 100km along the modern border of Iraq and Iran.

  • Footnotes on a Parthian sound change1

  • Agnes Korn
  • Journal:
    Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 76 / Issue 1 / February 2013
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    12 March 2013, pp. 99-110
    Print publication:
    February 2013

  • The treatment of Proto-Iranian *θw (PIE *t) is one of the isoglosses distinguishing Middle Persian from Parthian and thus important for Western Iranian dialectology. The re-discussion of the Parthian development of this consonant cluster by Nicholas Sims-Williams presents a welcome opportunity for some notes on the matter. I will argue that there is some additional evidence in favour of his suggestion that the Parthian result is not -f- as previously assumed, but a consonant cluster. I will also suggest a modification of the steps that the development takes. The Middle Persian development of *θw as well as some related issues of historical phonology and Pth. orthography and Western Ir. are likewise discussed.

  • 4 - THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF IRAN UNDER THE SASANIANS

  • from PART 1 - POLITICAL HISTORY
  • Edited by E. Yarshater
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Iran
    Published online:
    28 March 2008
    Print publication:
    14 April 1983, pp 116-180

  • Summary

    The rise of the Sasanian dynasty can be understood as the successful struggle of a minor ruler of Persis not only against his Parthian overlord, but also against a multitude of neighbouring rulers. The main adversary of the Persians was the Roman empire, and the ambitions of the first Sasanian ruler were soon countered by Rome. It was during the reign of Yazdgard that the Christians of the Sasanian empire held a council in the city of Seleucia in the year 410. Shortly after Bahrāam accession in 421 the persecution of Christians in the Sasanian empire was resumed, probably at the instigation of Zoroastrian priests. The Sasanians inherited from the Parthians a legacy of over two centuries of conflict with the western power. With a Sasanian belief in the destiny of Iran to rule over the territories once held by the Achaemenians, it was inevitable that wars between the two great powers would continue.