Media Atropatene

The satrap who did not hand it over

formationDrafted from Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996)

Atropates was the Achaemenid satrap of Media. He commanded the Median contingent against Alexander at Gaugamela, and afterwards did what a good many Persian governors did: he submitted, and was confirmed in his own province.

When Alexander died in 323 the settlement at Babylon divided the satrapies among the officers, and Media was split. The southern part went to a Macedonian. The northern part — Media Minor, the mountain country from the Araxes down to the Zagros — stayed with Atropates, and he never handed it over.

His descendants ruled it for five hundred and fifty years.

Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · Interfase · CC BY-SA 4.0

That is a rarer thing than it sounds. Dynasties all over Iran would spend the next thousand years claiming descent from the Achaemenids — the Parthians did, the Sasanians did, the Shirvanshahs claimed the Sasanians, and each of those is an assertion of connection to something that had ended. Atropates' house was not claiming succession from the Achaemenid empire. It was a piece of the administration of that empire which had simply never been handed over, running the same mountains under the same family while the claimants argued.

The kingdom was a client of whoever was strongest — Seleucid, then Parthian, with periods of effective independence and one Roman alliance — and the strategy is the one every durable mountain principality has used: submit early, pay, hold country that is expensive to take, and outlast the people who take it. Atropatene did it for longer than almost anyone.

The fire of the warriors

peakDrafted from Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996)

Zoroastrianism recognised three great fires, each associated with an estate of society and each burning at a named place: Adur Farnbag for the priests, in Fars; Adur Burzen-Mihr for the farmers, in Parthia; and Adur Gushnasp for the warriors and the kings, in Atropatene.

The site is Takht-e Soleyman — Solomon's throne — a volcanic crater in the mountains of what is now Iranian Azerbaijan, with a deep lake of mineral water in the middle of it that never freezes and never empties. The fire temple stood beside the lake, inside a walled oval, and the Sasanian kings of kings made a pilgrimage to it after their coronation. The tradition is that they walked the last stage on foot.

West Azerbaijan Province, Iran · Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · Photograph: Babak Golparian · CC BY-SA 4.0

That is the largest thing in this small kingdom, and it is worth noticing what it does to the record's shape. Atropatene is politically marginal for five centuries — a client kingdom appearing in other people's narratives when somebody invades it — and it held the royal fire of the Iranian world for the whole of that period and afterwards, through the Sasanian empire, until a Byzantine army sacked the sanctuary in 624 in retaliation for the Persian capture of Jerusalem.

Note what kind of importance that is. Atropatene sent nothing out. It did not propagate Zoroastrianism, did not found a school, did not conquer a neighbour for the faith. It held a place, and the place was where other men's kingship was made legitimate. A king of kings ruling from Ctesiphon, five hundred miles away, had to come to this crater in the mountains and walk up to the fire in order to be a king of kings properly.

That is the kingdom's largest export and it never left the country. The other one is a word.

The invasion that ended the Roman project

contractionDrafted from Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996)

In 36 BC Mark Antony invaded Iran with something like a hundred thousand men, the largest force Rome ever sent east. The objective was to avenge Carrhae, where a Roman army and its commander had been destroyed seventeen years before; avenging it had become a standing political obligation at Rome, and it would eventually produce four invasions and no change in the frontier.

He came through Armenia into Atropatene and made a decision that cost him the campaign: he left his siege train behind with a small guard in order to move fast on the capital. A Parthian and Atropatenian force destroyed it. Without siege engines he could not take a walled city, and he sat outside Phraaspa into the autumn achieving nothing.

The retreat through the mountains in early winter is described by Plutarch and is one of the set pieces of Roman military disaster writing: continuous harassment, hunger, dysentery from bad water, and something between a fifth and a third of the army lost. Antony got out. He did not come back.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

Two things follow, and the second is why a small kingdom has a turning point for it.

Rome did not attempt the conquest of Iran again from the west for a hundred and fifty years, until Trajan, who took Ctesiphon, declared a province, found revolts everywhere and abandoned the whole thing inside two years. The Euphrates frontier that Carrhae had drawn was confirmed by Antony's failure and held, in one form or another, for six centuries.

And Atropatene, having helped defeat the invasion, promptly quarrelled with Parthia over the spoils and allied with Antony instead — which is the whole strategy of a small kingdom between large ones, executed within a year of the event, and is why the dynasty was still there two hundred and fifty years later.

O, the Ten Thousand

contractionDrafted from Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859)

The retreat from Phraata is the part of Antony's Median campaign that everyone who writes about it reaches for, and Plutarch earned that by noticing what happened to individual men rather than to the army.

What they were eating

The baggage animals were dead or carrying the wounded, so almost everything had been left behind. Plutarch gives the prices: an Attic quart of wheat sold for fifty drachmas, and barley loaves went for their weight in silver.

So they ate roots and vegetables, and the familiar ones ran out, and they began trying whatever they could find.

One of the plants they found was fatal, and Plutarch describes what it did before it killed:

He that had eaten of it remembered nothing in the world, and employed himself only in moving great stones from one place to another, which he did with as much earnestness and industry as if it had been a business of the greatest consequence.

Through the whole camp, he says, there was nothing to be seen but men grubbing at stones and carrying them from place to place. Then they threw up bile and died. The one antidote was wine, and the wine had run out.

An army in retreat, under daily attack, with its surviving strength spent watching its comrades solemnly rearrange rocks until they died of it.

What Antony said

Plutarch reports that as the men died and the Parthians kept up the pursuit, Antony was heard to exclaim, several times over: O, the Ten Thousand!

He meant Xenophon's Greeks, who had marched out of a deeper Asia against a stronger enemy and got home. It is a general comparing himself unfavourably with a four-hundred-year-old book in front of his own staff, and it is the most revealing thing he says in the whole campaign — he is not thinking about how to save the army, he is thinking about how this will read.

Bibliotheca Alexandrina · Plutarch, Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1859) · Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

What Atropatene got out of it

The kingdom itself barely appears in the Roman account, which is characteristic of how it survives in the record at all.

Without the engines described above, there was no way into the city, and a mountain kingdom had beaten the largest army Rome ever sent east by killing its wagons.

And then Atropatene did the other thing it was good at. Its king quarrelled with the Parthians over the division of the spoil, and went over to Antony — and later to Rome — as an ally. The state's method was never mass or wealth. It was position: high, defensible, between two empires that both needed it and neither could easily hold, and willing to change sides when the price was right.

Rome sent four invasions east in this period and moved the frontier not at all. This was the one that came closest, and it failed in a valley in Media because a baggage train was left insufficiently guarded.

Atropatene, Adurbadagan, Azerbaijan

endDrafted from Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996)

Ardashir took the kingdom around 226, two years after taking the Parthian empire it had been a client of, and Atropatene became a Sasanian province governed by an appointed marzban. The fire stayed where it was and the new kings of kings came to it exactly as the old ones had.

Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · Numisbids · Public domain

That is a five-hundred-and-fifty-year span ending in a paragraph, and the proportion is honest. Nobody in the kingdom wrote its history; nobody outside it was interested except when passing through with an army. There is no name for its greatest king, no account of how it raised troops, no rule for how a throne passed from one man to the next. What survives instead of a narrative is a name.

Atropatene is Greek for the land of Atropates. In Middle Persian it becomes Adurbadagan — which the Sasanians also glossed as the land of the fire, since adur is fire and the great sanctuary was there, and the two etymologies have been braided together ever since. In Arabic it is Adharbayjan. In modern Persian and Turkish, Azerbaijan.

The name has been in continuous use for twenty-three centuries. It is on the map now, attached to a country of ten million people and to a province of Iran with more people than that.

Set that beside what the kingdom did not do. It founded no religion and exported none. It conquered nothing. It produced no literature anyone kept, no script, no law, and no claimant to anybody else's throne. By every ordinary measure of consequence it is a small mountain client that spent five and a half centuries agreeing to terms.

And it holds the fire that crowned the kings of Iran, and it gave two countries their name.

Those are not consolation prizes for a polity that failed at something else. They are what this particular kind of durability produces. A state that survives by never being worth conquering accumulates nothing that can be counted and outlasts everything that can. Atropates declined to hand over a province in 323 BC, and the label he left on it has proved harder to remove than every empire that has since governed it.

Solomon's throne

afterlifeDrafted from Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905)

The kingdom ended in 226 and the fire did not.

Adur Gushnasp burned on beside its lake for another four centuries under the Sasanians, and the obligation attached to it hardened into law. Ibn Khurdadbih, writing in Arabic in the ninth century, records the rule as the Persians had kept it: each Chosroes, immediately after his accession to the crown, was bound to come here as a pilgrim, walking on foot the whole way from Ctesiphon, with a halt at Shahrazur at the half-way stage. Persian tradition is more modest and has the king walking only the last stage; the Arabic geographers have him walking the lot. Either way the point of the ritual is the same, and so is the direction of travel — the king of kings came to the fire.

The Arabs called the place Shiz. The Persians, Yaqut says, called it Jis or Gazn, of which Shiz was the Arabic corruption.

A prospector's report, AD 943

The best description of it was written by a man who had gone there for the wrong reason.

Ibn Muhalhal visited in 331 of the Hijra — 943 — looking for gold mines said to exist in the mountains around it, and wrote up what he saw. The town walls enclosed a lake about a third of an acre across which was unfathomable, and whose level never changed although seven streams flowed continuously out of it; the water of those streams, he reports, turned objects left in them to stone.

And the fire temple was still working. The sacred fire kept there, he says, was the one from which fire was taken to all the other temples throughout Persia, and for seven hundred years it had never been allowed to go out.

That claim needs holding at arm's length. A Byzantine army sacked this sanctuary in 624, and a fire that is extinguished can be rekindled but the seven hundred years cannot then be counted through the gap. What Ibn Muhalhal is reporting is what the custodians told a visitor in the tenth century, three hundred years into Islamic rule: that this fire was the source of all the others, and that it had never gone out. It is the same claim the kingdom had been living beside since before Christ, still being made, to an Arab looking for gold.

The name goes, the buildings stay

After that it drifts.

Mustawfi, writing in the fourteenth century, gives Shiz as the chief town of its district and says the Mongols called it Saturik. He describes a great palace there, which report said had been built by King Kay-Khusraw — a hero of Persian legend, not a Sasanian — with the bottomless pool in its courtyard, which kept its level however much ran out of it and did not overflow when the outflow was dammed. He adds that Abaqa Khan the Mongol had built himself a palace on the spot, because the pasture in the neighbourhood was excellent.

Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905) · David Jackson · CC BY 2.5

So: a crater where kings of Iran walked up to be crowned, converted into a summer residence for a grandson of Genghis Khan on the grounds that the grazing was good.

The last stage is the name. Nobody now called it the fire of the warriors, and nobody remembered whose palace the ruins had been, so they were assigned to the one builder that unexplained ancient stonework was always assigned to in this part of the world. They are called Takht-i-Sulayman — Solomon's Throne — and that is still their name.

Two things outlasted the kingdom of Atropates, and both of them lost their attribution on the way. A region kept his name and forgot he existed. A sanctuary kept its lake and its walls and was given to Solomon.