Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/620

 592 PERSIA [PARTHIAN 133-128. that of Athena, and that of Artemis or Nausea in Azara yielded him a booty of 10,000 talents (2,258,000), and the great town of Seleucia on the Hedyphon was taken l (Strabo, xvi. p. 744). The country was brought under Parthia, but continued to have its own kings. The coins make it likely that Mithradates simply set up a new dynasty, a branch of his own house. 2 Mithradates died in a good old age in 138, or a little later. 3 His memory was reverenced almost equally with that of the founder of his house, but his real glory was much greater, for it was he who made Parthia a great power. He is praised as a just and humane ruler, who, having become lord of all the lands from the Indian Caucasus to the Euphrates, intro duced among the Parthians the best institutions of each country, and so became the legislator of his nation. Parthian The divisions of the empire which lie founded can be sketched &quot; kin::- by the aid of an excerpt from the itinerary of Isidore of Charax domsT&quot; (at the beginning of the Christian era) and of Pliny (X. //., vi. 44, 112). The empire was divided into the upper and lower kingdoms, separated by the Caspian Gates. The lower kingdoms were seven (1) Mesopotamia and Babylonia, (2) Apolloniatis, (3) Chalonitis, 4 (4) Carina, 5 (5) Cambadene, (6) Upper Media, (7) Lower or Rhagian Media. 6 The upper kingdoms were eleven (8) Choarene, (9) Comisene, 7 (10) Hyrcania, (11) Astauenc, (12) Parthyene, (13) Apauarcticene, 8 (14) Margiana, a part of Bactria, (15) Aria,_ (16) the country of the Anauans (a division of Aria), (17) Zarangiana, 9 (18) Arachosia, now called &quot; White India.&quot; The eighteen Parthian kingdoms thus correspond to six old satrapies ; the new divisions were probably derived from the provinces of Seleucus Nicator (see especially Posidonius in Strabo, xvi. p. 749). But upper and lower provinces have changed their meaning ; apart from Arachosia, the upper provinces are the old conquests of the Parthians before they occupied Media and became lords of Iran, and the lower all the liter conquests in the west. The Parthians, we see, gave much less attention to the west than did their predecessors, and they still left Mesopotamia as the only great satrapy, and perhaps first added Babylonia to it when Ctesiphon became the residence of the Arsacids. We note also that they cared little for reaching the sea, which they can have touched only for a little way at the mouth of the Euphrates ; and even here they allowed the petty Characene quite to outstrip them in competing for the great sea-trade. As compared with the older Macedonian empire, the Parthian realm lacked the east Iranian satrapies, Bactria with Sogdiana, and the Paropanisadse, andalso the three Indian one.s, which, with Parretacene, or, as it was afterwards called, Sacastane, remained under the Bactrian Greeks and their successors. In the north they lacked Lesser Media, which had long been an independent state, and in the south they lacked Susiana, which now belonged to Elymais, and the satrapies of Persis and Carmauia, which the Persians held along with the 1 In giving this order of events it is assumed that the capture of Demetrius, omitted in Justin s epitome of Trogus, xli. C, comes after 7, not, as has been assumed since Vaillant, after 8. When Trogus mentions such unimportant events as the nomination of Bacasis to Media and the visit of Mithradates to Hyrcania, we must suppose that these facts bore on others of more note, that Bacasis was the captor of Demetrius, and that the royal court was in Hyrcania when the captive was brought before the Parthian king. 2 Coins of the venerable Camnascires, whom Pseudo-Lucian Macrobii calls a Parthian, but separated from the great kings by Armenia and Characene, have been brought from Baghdad and Shuster, and can hardly have been struck elsewhere than in Elyrnais. He was preceded by an Ar.^aces, not one of the main Parthian line. See Sallet, in Z. f. Num., viii. 207 sq. 3 Demetrius had married Rhodogune when Antiochus VII. married his deserted wife Cleopatra in 138, and there were children by the marriage, though not earlier than the time of Demetrius s second attempt to escape ; hence both attempts must have been after the deatli of Mithradates. 4 These three make up the old satrapies of Mesopotamia (with Arbelitis) and Babylonia. The whole land between the Euphrates and the Tigris was now put together, and the countries to the east of the Tigris detached, Apolloniatis being taken fiom Babylonia, and Chalouitis from Arbelitis. 5 In Isid., 4 (Geog. Min., i. 250), read EvrfuOtv Mijota Kal x&amp;lt;l&amp;gt;pa K.dpii&amp;gt;a, TJTLS Kar^x fi ffxolvovt Kff, i) apx^i O.VTUJV. 6 Nos. 4 to 7 are all parts of the old satrapy of Media. 7 The two most eastern parts of Media fliat were the first Parthian conquests. 8 Nos. 10 to 13 form the old satrapy of Parthia and Hyrcania. 9 Nos. 15 to 17 belong to the old satrapy of Aria with Draugiana. Sacastane, another part of this satrapy, was not Parthian, but, as Isidore remarks, belonged to the Sacse. western part of Gedrosia (Per. Mar. Er., 37). In the extreme west they lacked Arbelitis proper, which formed a small kingdom under the name of Adiabene, first mentioned in 69 B.C. (Pint, Lucullus, 27). The kingdom of Mannus of Orrha (Mdycou &quot;Oppaj, so ruad) in north Mesopotamia, which accc riling to Isidore ( 1) reached a good way south of Edessa, seems also to have been independ ent, and, like Adiabene, probably existed before the Parthian time. From these small kingdoms the Parthians asked only an acknowledg ment of vassalship. When Parthia was vigorous the vassalship was real, but when Parthia was torn by factions it became a mere name (Stralio, xvi. p. 732). The relation was always loose, and the political power of Parthia was therefore never comparable to the later power of the Sasauians. Arsaces Tiridates and his successors called them selves &quot;great king. &quot; Mithradates, as overlord of the minor kingships, first bore the title &quot;great king of kings.&quot; The title seems to have been conferred, not assumed in mere boastfulness ; for (apart from a single usurper in times of disorder who calls himself king of kings&quot;) none of his successors bears it until Phraates III., seventy years later, a fact clear from the coins, but hitherto unnoticed. The nobility had great influence in all things, and especially in the nomination of the king, who, however, was always an Arsacid. Next to the king stood the senate of probuli, 10 from whom all generals and lieutenant-governors were chosen. They were called the king s kin, and were no doubt the old Parniaii martial nobility. A second senate was composed of the Magians and wise men, and by these two senates the king was nominated (Posidonius, ap. Strabo, xi. p. 515). The Parthians were, in fact, very pious, conscientious in observing even the most troublesome precepts of Zoroastrianism as to the dis posal of dead bodies, which were exposed to birds of prey and dogs, the bare bones alone being buried (Justin, xli. 3, 5, 6). When the Parthian prince Tiridates visited Nero he journeyed overland that he might not be forced to defile the sea when he spat, :ind his spiritual advisers the Magians travelled with him (Plin., xxx. 17). The Magians were not, indeed, so all-powerful as under the Sasanians, but it is quite a mistake to think that the Parthians were but lukewarm Zoroastrians. The complete annihilation of the Macedonian empire in Fall &amp;lt; Iran was closely followed by the destruction of Creek in- Creel dependence in eastern Iran, north of the Paropanisus. The r last mention of independent Bactria is in 140 ; no king of Bactria and Sogdiana is known from coins after the parri cide Heliocles. Classical writers give only two laconic accounts of the catastrophe. Strabo says that &quot; the no madic peoples of the Asii, Pasiani, Tochari, and Sacaraucu) (so read for 2aKa/3auAoi K-CU in xi. p. oil), dwellers in the land of the Sacse, beyond the Jaxartes [in its middle course], opposite to the Sacao and Sogdians, came and took Bactria from the Greeks.&quot; Trogus (Pro!., xli.) names the Scythian peoples Saraucoa and Asiani. 11 Fortunately the lively interest taken by the Chinese in the movements of the nomads of Central Asia enables us to fill up this meagre notice from the report of the Chinese agent in Bactria in 128, as recorded a little later by the oldest Chinese historian, and from other notices collected by the Chinese after the opening of the regular caravan route with the west, about 115, and embodied in their second oldest history. 12 According to these sources the Yue-chi, a nomad Chin people akin to the Tibetans, lived aforetime between !lcc l Tun-hoang (i.e., Sha-cheu) and the Kilien-shan moun tains, and about 177 were subjugated, like all their neigh bours, by the Turkish Hiung-nu. Between 167 and 161 they renewed the struggle without success; Lao-shang, the great khan of the Hiung-nu, slew their king Chang- 10 For popular um (Just., xli. 2, 2) a synonym of senatas (xlii. 4, 1) is wanted ; write, therefore, probulorum. 11 Modern writers since Bayer make the Greek kingdom in Bactria fall before the Parthians, appealing to Just., xli. 6, 3. But the epi tome here contradicts its source, and confounds the fall of the king dom with the earlier loss of two satrapies to the Parthians under Euera- tides. The right account is to be found elsewhere in Justin himself, ii. 1, 3; 3, 6. la Comp. the Sseki of Ssematsien (100 B.C.), tr. by Brosset, Wouv. Journ. As., ii. 418 sq., and the Annals (of the first Han] of Panku (80 A.D. ), excerpts from which are given by Hitter, Erdk., pt. vii. bk. 3, pp. 604-728; Deguignes, Hist, des Huns, 1, 2, p. Ixiv. 57., 41 sq., and &quot; Becherches sur quelques eVenements,&quot; &c., in Mem. Ac. Inscr., xxv. 17 sq. ; Abel Kc musat, on th* Fu8-kouS-ki, p. 37 sq. The account given in the text is based wholly on the two oldest sources, without reference to the newer Chinese encyclopaedias. Comp. further Richt- hofeu, China, p. 447.