Arsaces I
Arsaces I was the chief of the Parni, a nomad people of the steppe east of the Caspian, who led them into the Seleucid province of Parthia in 247 BC while the Seleucids were fighting Egypt and each other, killed its rebel satrap, and held what he had taken against the counter-attack; every one of the thirty or so kings who followed him for four and a half centuries took his name as a title, so that the Romans called them all Arsaces and the sources cannot always tell them apart. What is known is thin. The Parni were one of the Dahae confederacy of Iranian-speaking horsemen, and Arsaces, whom the later kings' legend made a descendant of the Achaemenids and the Greek historians made a bandit, seems to have been elected their leader and to have crossed into the settled land of Parthia, the region around Nisa and the modern Turkmen border, when its Seleucid satrap Andragoras declared himself independent. Andragoras was killed, the Parni took the province, and the Arsacid era that the Parthians counted from was fixed at 247. Seleucus II came east about 230 to recover it, and the tradition has Arsaces retreat into the steppe, come back when the Seleucid was called home by a war in Syria, and hold a memorial for the victory. He built or fortified Dara in the hills and was buried at Nisa, where the royal tombs and the ivory drinking-horns were found in the 1940s. His brother Tiridates, whom some ancient writers name as the real founder and modern ones mostly do not, and his son Arsaces II followed him. Antiochus III forced the son to acknowledge Seleucid overlordship about 209. It was a great-nephew, Mithridates I, who a generation later made the kingdom the Parthian empire that stood against Rome for three centuries. The Parthians' own name for their state was the kingdom of the Arsacids, and the Armenian branch of the family reigned until 428, the longest dynasty of the ancient Near East.
- Lived: 280 BCE – 217 BCE
- Nationality: Parthian
- Roles: king, monarch, founder
