Parthian Culture and Arts

From 247 BCE to 224 CE, the Arsacid dynasty ruled lands that stretched from northeastern Iran and Central Asia to Mesopotamia. The Arsacid empire included royal centers, local kingdoms, cities and religious communities, each with its own patrons and audiences. Greek, Iranian and older Near Eastern forms met in images and buildings, while Parthian, Greek and Aramaic served different written settings. Artistic forms could travel across political borders even as rulers used them to express particular authority.

On this page4 sections

Royal images and local patrons

Royal coins carried portraits and titles into towns and markets far from the king’s court. Portraits paired royal headwear and a diadem, a headband of kingship, with titles such as “King of Kings.” The Greek legend often named the dynasty as Arsaces rather than identifying the individual ruler, so the coin connected its image with a continuing royal house.

At Old Nisa, near modern Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, carved ivory rhyta were found in the Square House, a royal ceremonial complex. A rhyton was a vessel used to pour or serve liquid. Its friezes depict Greek gods, sacrifice and Dionysian scenes, while some carved creatures draw on Greek or Achaemenid imagery. The vessels were suited to banquets and libations, ritual offerings of liquid. Their Greek subjects formed part of a wider Central Asian court culture and suit a royal ceremonial setting.

Hatra, in northern Iraq, shows how images also served local rulers and worshippers. Its dynasts ruled a small kingdom subordinate to the Parthian King of Kings, and the city’s temples received statues of gods and members of the ruling family. Many figures face directly forward, a pose called frontality. Their still poses, symmetrical dress and detailed long coats and trousers made the figures legible to worshippers approaching a shrine. Short inscriptions on statues and altars named dedicators, rulers or deities, joining individual gifts to the public life of a sanctuary.

Buildings for ceremony and reception

Builders selected forms and materials for the work a building had to do. At Old Nisa, a raised ceremonial center was enclosed by mud-brick walls. In the Square House, rooms surrounded a courtyard; wooden columns supported the roofs of the long rooms and benches lined their walls. The Square Hall stood on a platform made by filling earlier structures. In a later phase, builders replaced its four central supports with broad, four-lobed piers of fired brick, changing how the roof’s weight reached the ground.

Further west, houses at Seleucia-on-Tigris adopted the earthen walls, timber roofs, stone masonry and plaster found in varied combinations across the region. In the late first century CE, some reception rooms shifted from a roof carried by columns to a brick barrel vault, a continuous arched ceiling shaped like a half-cylinder. A related form called an iwan is a vaulted hall open at one end toward a courtyard. Its height and long axis made an imposing reception room without changing the basic plan greatly. At Hatra, the Great Temple and its large open-fronted hall formed a monumental setting for worship. Across these regions, local communities adapted broadly shared forms to their own building needs.

Languages and written records

The empire’s several written traditions served royal administration, civic life and private agreements. Parthian was an Iranian language written in a script descended from Imperial Aramaic. Greek remained prominent on royal coins and appears in some legal deeds; Aramaic continued in Mesopotamian communities. The language spoken and the script used on a document were separate choices. Parthian texts could also use conventional Aramaic word-signs that scribes read as Iranian words.

Old Nisa’s storehouses preserve a practical example. Scribes wrote brief entries on ostraca, broken pottery pieces reused as writing surfaces. Most Nisa ostraca label large wine jars, identifying contents and other accounting details; lists and apprentice exercises also survive. These notes linked stored goods with the people responsible for receiving them. The Avroman parchments include two Greek vineyard deeds and a third deed assumed to be in an early form of Parthian; they recorded transfers of productive property and named witnesses. Writing connected everyday transactions to officials, legal obligations and royal storehouses.

Music, performance and remembered stories

A banquet account offers a named example of court entertainment in 53 BCE. Plutarch, a Greek biographer writing in the early second century CE, describes celebrations after the marriage alliance between the Parthian king Orodes II and the Armenian king Artavasdes, whose sister married Orodes’ son Pacorus. During a banquet, the Greek tragic actor Jason of Tralles sang a passage from Euripides’ play The Bacchae. When news arrived that the Roman commander Crassus had been killed, a messenger brought his head into the hall. Jason adapted the scene he was performing, and Parthian courtier Pomaxathres claimed the victory. The performance joined Greek drama to a current political triumph before the assembled rulers and guests.

A different performance tradition is associated with the Parthian word gōsān, meaning poet-musician or minstrel. A surviving Parthian passage from the fourth or fifth century CE describes a gōsān praising kings and heroes of the past. The role could include sung praise, heroic narratives and laments, drawing on a memorized repertoire that a performer adapted for listeners and patrons. The Middle Persian epic Ayādgār ī Zarērān, or “Memorial of Zarēr,” gives a vivid example of heroic grief: after finding his father dead, the young Bastwar sings a lament. Later works preserve these older materials through new audiences and forms. The eleventh-century romance Vis o Rāmin, for example, uses the word gōsān and is understood to draw on a Parthian oral story transmitted through a written Middle Persian version. The word and stories also survived in later Iranian and Armenian contexts.

These varied settings are explored further in Performance, where court entertainment and the later transmission of oral stories can be followed in detail.