Elymais

Elam, one more time

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

Elymais is the Greek form of Elam, and the name is three thousand years older than the kingdom that carried it here.

Elam was one of the oldest states in the world: Susa on the plain and Anshan in the highlands, writing in its own language in its own script, contemporary with Sumer and Akkad and periodically at war with both, and finally destroyed by Ashurbanipal in the 640s BC in a campaign the Assyrian reliefs record with unusual relish.

Elam did not have one ending. It had several, separated by centuries, and each time the name came back on a different state: the Elam of Awan and Shimashki and the sukkalmah, which brought down the Third Dynasty of Ur in 2004; the Middle Elamite kingdom that sacked Babylon in 1158 and carried Hammurabi's stele home to Susa; the Neo-Elamite kingdom Ashurbanipal destroyed.

What follows here is the last of them, and it is five hundred years after Ashurbanipal. The Achaemenids wintered at Susa, and then came Alexander and the Seleucids, and then, around 147 BC, as the Seleucid empire was losing Iran to the Parthians, a man called Kamnaskires took the royal title in the highland country above the Susiana plain and the name Elam was a kingdom again.

National Museum of Iran, Tehran · Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · Carole Raddato · CC BY-SA 2.0

The kingdom lasted three hundred and seventy years, most of it as somebody's client, and produced no narrative whatever. There is no Elymaean history and no chronicle. What there is, is coins, some rock reliefs on outcrops in the Zagros, scattered notices in Greek and Latin writers, and a reputation for being worth robbing.

Worth robbing

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

The sanctuaries of Elymais were famous in antiquity for one reason: they had been accumulating dedications for a very long time, in country that had been a religious centre since the Bronze Age, and nobody had emptied them.

Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · AMIR 121 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Antiochus III — the greatest of the Seleucids, the man who recovered the east in a seven-year progress and was then broken by Rome at Magnesia — needed money for the indemnity Rome had imposed. In 187 BC he attempted to plunder a temple of Bel in Elymais and was killed there, with his escort, by the local population. A king who had marched to the Hindu Kush and back died robbing a shrine in the Zagros because he could not pay a Roman fine.

Antiochus IV did the same thing twenty-three years later with the same result at one remove. Polybius and the books of Maccabees have him attempting a temple in Elymais, being driven off by the inhabitants, and dying shortly afterwards at Gabae in 164 — and the Jewish tradition, which had every reason to want his death explained, connected the two directly. This is the king who had banned Jewish practice in Judaea and provoked the Maccabean revolt, and the same fiscal desperation is visible at both ends of his empire: a treasury short of money looking for religious wealth to take.

Then in 139 BC Mithridates I of Parthia took Elymais and plundered the sanctuaries himself. He was not driven off. It is the hinge of the kingdom's history and it did two things: it made Elymais a Parthian vassal for the remaining three and a half centuries of its life, and it removed the thing that had made it worth attacking.

It is worth being clear about what those treasuries were, because it is easy to mistake them for wealth. A kingdom lives on income — on what the land yields each year, or what passes through and can be taxed. Elymais lived on the irrigated Susiana plain like everybody else in the region. The temple hoards were not income at all. They were a stock, accumulated over centuries by people giving things away, sitting in a building, producing nothing.

Musée du Louvre, Paris · Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · ALFGRN · CC BY-SA 2.0

In fiscal terms a stock like that is not an asset. It is a reason for other people to come.

Coins and rock faces

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996)

A good deal of the ancient world is known principally from its coinage — Greco-Bactria, the Indo-Greek kingdoms, Persis, Characene. Elymais is the thinnest case of the kind.

The Elymaean series runs from Kamnaskires' tetradrachms, which are competent Hellenistic work with Greek legends, through three centuries of progressive change: the portraits become frontal and schematic, the Greek legends decay into unreadable marks and are eventually replaced by Aramaic, and an anchor appears as a persistent symbol. The dynastic reconstruction from that is loose enough that no greatest king can be named and no last king either.

Private collection · Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

The other evidence is on rock. At Tang-e Sarvak, on outcrops in a valley in Khuzistan, there are reliefs of kings — an investiture scene, a reclining banqueter, a horseman, figures in Parthian dress with Aramaic inscriptions beside them. There are Parthian-period sanctuaries at Masjid-i Solaiman and Bard-e Neshandeh with terraces and column bases. It is enough to establish that there were kings who wanted to be shown as kings, and not enough to say much more.

Tang-e Sarvak, Khuzestan Province, Iran · Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · Photograph: Davidplan66 · CC BY-SA 4.0

So: nobody knows how Elymais raised an army, or how it collected what it collected, or how one king followed another, or how large it was, or how many people lived in it. The only datable event in three hundred and seventy years is somebody else arriving.

That is not a puzzle and it is not a controversy. It is the ordinary condition of a small kingdom that lasted a long time and wrote nothing down. Most of the past is in this state, and the reason it does not look that way is that the places which wrote about themselves are the places anybody has heard of.

Elymais is known because it minted money, and because two Seleucid kings died trying to take its temple treasure. In the ancient world that counts as being well documented.

The set completed

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

Ardashir took Elymais around 224, on his way to everything else: Fars first, then Kerman, then Elymais and the Gulf coast, then Ctesiphon and the empire. Khuzistan became a Sasanian province and one of the most valuable.

Musée du Louvre, Paris · Azodi, Ancient Persia: From 550 BC to 650 AD (1996) · Unknown artist · Public domain

It is worth pausing on the six kingdoms that went the same way, because between them they are the whole structure of the Parthian empire, and each is the same object seen once more. Persis, Elymais, Characene, Adiabene, Media Atropatene, Armenia. A hereditary local dynasty. Its own silver, with Greek legends that gradually stop being Greek. Between one and five centuries of somebody's vassalage. No surviving narrative of its own. And an ending in the 220s at the hands of the sub-king from Fars who took the lot.

They are identical in structure and they fall on a very long spectrum of consequence.

Armenia became a kingdom that outlived every empire around it and is still there. Persis produced the dynasty that ended the whole arrangement and ruled Iran for four centuries. Atropatene gave its name to a country. Adiabene's royal house became Jewish, and its capital became the senior bishopric of a church that reached China. Characene was where the ships unloaded.

And Elymais had temples somebody robbed.

That range is the reason for looking at all six rather than the two famous ones. An empire held together by magnates is only legible if you can see the magnates, and five of these six would not appear in a narrative history of Iran at all — not because they did not matter but because nobody in them wrote a book.

What the province became

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 had no history worth the name. The country it sat in had rather a lot of one, and almost all of it happened after 224.

A Roman emperor's weir

In 260 the emperor Valerian was captured by Shapur I, and the Persian historians say that during his seven years as a prisoner he was set to build a dam.

The Great Weir stands below Tustar — Shushtar, on the river the Arabs called the Dujayl and Persians the Karun — and the Arabic writers counted it one of the wonders of the world. It is close to a mile across. The bed of the river west of the town was paved; the weir held the water high enough that part of the flow could be diverted above the town into an artificial channel running east, which irrigated the country it crossed and rejoined the river many miles downstream. Muqaddasi says a bridge of boats ran across the top of it carrying the high road west into Iraq.

The remains are still there.

Shushtar, Khuzestan Province, Iran · Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905) · Photograph: Morteza Hashemi · CC BY-SA 4.0

The hospital

Eight leagues north-west of Shushtar are the ruins the map now calls Shahabad, and they are Gundeshapur — Junday Sabur — which was the Sasanian capital of Khuzistan.

It is remembered for its medical school, and the shape of what happened to that school is the useful part. The physician associated with it in the Arabic tradition is Bukhtishu, a Christian, whose sons and grandsons after him were personal physicians to Abbasid caliphs from al-Mansur to Harun al-Rashid — a Christian medical dynasty from a Sasanian provincial capital, running the health of the Islamic empire for four generations.

The town itself did poorly. It exported sugar to Khurasan and beyond, and it made embroideries, and it grew rice; but by the tenth century Muqaddasi already describes Gundeshapur as falling into ruin from Kurdish raiding. Ya'qub ibn Layth the Saffarid made it his capital and died there in 878, and his tomb was shown in the town. Mustawfi in the fourteenth century still calls it populous and famous for its sugar cane. Today it is an almost uninhabited ruin.

Daniel in the riverbed

And then there is Susa, which by then was called Sus: a populous medieval town in a district full of cities, growing sugar cane and oranges, famous for raw silk, with a fortress and a congregational mosque built on round columns.

The tomb of the prophet Daniel was there. Tradition held that the grave had been made in the bed of the Karkhah river running past the town, with a fine mosque on the near bank marking the spot; Mustawfi, later, describes the tomb as standing on dry ground west of the city, and adds that in Daniel's honour nobody would touch a fish in that river.

The point of listing all this

Elymais held that country for three hundred and seventy years and left a coin series, some rock reliefs, and two dead Seleucid kings.

The four centuries after it produced a dam built by a captured Roman emperor, a medical school that supplied Baghdad with its doctors, a sugar industry exporting east, and a river whose fish were protected because a Hebrew prophet was supposed to be buried under it.

A polity is not the same thing as a place, and the place is usually the more interesting of the two.