Parthian Empire

The empire that beat Rome repeatedly and left almost no account of itself. The Parthians were a steppe people who took Iran from the Seleucids in the third century BCE and ruled it for nearly five hundred years, longer than the Achaemenids or Sasanians. Their army was built on two things: heavily armoured cataphract cavalry and horse archers who could shoot backwards at full gallop, which gave English the Parthian shot. At Carrhae in 53 BCE they destroyed a Roman army under Crassus, killing him and taking the legionary standards, a humiliation Augustus spent decades negotiating to recover. Rome invaded Mesopotamia several times and took Ctesiphon more than once without ever holding it. The empire was decentralised almost to the point of confederation, with vassal kings and powerful noble houses, which made it resilient against invasion and fragile in succession. It sat astride the silk route and taxed the trade between Rome and Han China. Almost nothing survives in Parthian from the Parthians themselves, so the record is Roman, Greek and later Persian - and the Sasanians who overthrew them in 224 CE deliberately wrote them out. Ctesiphon on the Tigris was the winter capital and Nisa the dynastic centre. The empire lasted from about 247 BCE to 224 CE. Its coins carry Greek legends for centuries after the Seleucids left. Hatra, a fortified Parthian-era city, withstood two Roman sieges and is a World Heritage site. Roman prisoners from Carrhae were settled on the eastern frontier. Parthian shot remains an English idiom for a remark made while leaving.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history