Languages, Writing and Records in the Parthian Empire

The Arsacid dynasty ruled the Parthian Empire from 247 BCE to AD 224 across the Iranian plateau, Mesopotamia, chiefly present-day Iraq, and western Central Asia. Parthian, the state’s Iranian language, was written alongside Greek and Aramaic traditions. At Nisa, near modern Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, most surviving administrative texts are Parthian entries on broken pottery sherds, or ostraca. They show how writing connected goods arriving at a royal storehouse to names, measures and responsibilities.

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Languages and writing conventions

Parthian letters descended from Imperial Aramaic. The script and the language are different things: a text written in Aramaic-derived letters could record Parthian speech. Some Parthian texts also used Aramaic word-signs, called arameograms or heterograms. A scribe wrote a conventional Aramaic spelling but read it as the corresponding Iranian word. One documented Parthian word-sign is YRḤʾ, used for “month.”

Greek continued in documentary settings and on Arsacid coins. Under Vologases I, who ruled from AD 51 to 77, one or two Parthian letters were added to coin legends, the inscriptions on coins, that were otherwise Greek. Full Parthian coin legends appeared only later, under Mithradates IV around AD 130. At Nisa, by contrast, brief written dates, quantities and officials’ names identified particular deliveries.

How the Nisa storehouse recorded deliveries

Old Nisa was an Arsacid royal centre. In its Northern Complex, store rooms had floor openings for large ceramic jars. Archaeologists recovered more than 2,700 pottery sherds from the storage area; the published collection includes 2,758 Parthian texts, most from the first century BCE. Most sherds label jars, while others list deposits. A smaller group preserves apprentice exercises.

The labels connected stored contents with accounting details. Dated entries can name a collecting agent, give a quantity in mari, a volume unit, identify an estate or vineyard, and sometimes state the product’s quality or the payer. Wine porters gathered deliveries and brought them to the royal storehouse; ostraca often name the official under whose authority a deposit was made. A keeper could use the written label to identify the jar’s contents and compare its recorded measure with the store’s accounts.

One record dated to 72 BCE totals 6,351 mari of “old wine” for a single storehouse. The entry groups a stated quantity by product type and place of storage, showing how written records made accumulated stock countable. A practice text rehearses how to record the king’s demand for an unspecified amount of wine and the keeper who should receive it. Alireza Khounani identifies such exercises as training for royal storehouse scribes.

The sherds were probably short-lived notes in a larger process. Encyclopaedia Iranica suggests that scribes copied their contents into a running account, probably on parchment. No such Nisa ledger has survived, so the parchment record is a scholarly reconstruction of the archive’s workflow.

Contracts in Greek and Parthian

The Avroman parchments, found in a cave in western Iran, show Greek and Parthian in written property deeds. Two Greek documents dated to 88/87 and 22/21 BCE record sales of half a vineyard. A third deed is in Parthian and gives the year 300; if this is the Arsacid era, it corresponds to January or February of AD 33. David Neil MacKenzie reads it as the apparent sale of half a different vineyard, with several witnesses named.

Later Parthian texts

Some surviving Parthian texts belong to centuries after Arsacid rule. Parthian versions of royal inscriptions commissioned by early Sasanian kings date to the third century CE. Manichaean religious manuscripts from Central Asia preserve later Parthian writing in the more phonetic Manichean script, which avoided the Aramaic word-signs common in earlier Parthian texts. Nisa’s ostraca are contemporary storehouse records, while these later works served royal and religious settings. For the wider history of that continuity, see Parthian continued after the end of the Arsacid empire.

For other aspects of Parthian culture, see Parthian Culture and Arts. The coin legends are discussed in the article on royal coinage, and Travel and Routes through the Parthian Empire covers how goods moved between settlements and storehouses.