Kingdom of Persis

What was left in Fars

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

Alexander burned Persepolis in 330 BC, and the empire that had been run from it was over. What happened afterwards to the province that empire had come from is a question the imperial narratives do not answer, because nothing imperial happened in it for five hundred years.

Fars — Persis to the Greeks, and the origin of the words Persia and Persian — was a Seleucid province and then a Parthian one, and throughout it was governed by local rulers of its own. The earliest of them use a title read as frataraka, which is an Achaemenid administrative word meaning something like foremost or governor, and they struck their own silver.

The coins are the whole of the early record and they are unusual in a way that has been argued about for a century. The legends are in Aramaic, not Greek — which in the third century BC, in a Seleucid province, is a deliberate choice and not an accident of literacy. The reverse shows the ruler standing before a structure usually identified as a fire temple, or before a standard, sometimes with a figure in a winged disc above. The dress is Persian.

Two readings compete. One is that the Frataraka were consciously reviving Achaemenid forms — the language of the old chancery, the imagery of the old kingship, the rejection of the Greek coinage of the conquerors — as an assertion that Fars was not a Hellenistic province but the homeland of an empire that had been interrupted. The other is more cautious: that this is local religious and administrative continuity, of the kind that persists in any province, and that the Achaemenid revival is something modern scholars have read into it.

Neither reading can be proved from the coins, which is the difficulty the third chapter is about. What is not in dispute is narrower and is strange enough on its own: two hundred kilometres from the ruins of Persepolis, in a province of somebody else's empire, local rulers spent five centuries striking silver with Persian imagery and Persian titles in an Iranian administrative language, and one of their descendants eventually founded an empire that governed Iran for four hundred years and claimed to be restoring something.

Five centuries as somebody's vassal

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

After the Frataraka the rulers of Fars call themselves mlk — king — on their coins, and they went on doing so under Parthian suzerainty for roughly three hundred and fifty years.

The Parthian empire was not a unitary state and never tried to be. It was a king of kings over great noble houses with hereditary offices and their own armed followings, and under him a ring of vassal kingdoms — Persis, Elymais, Characene, Adiabene, Media Atropatene, Armenia — each with its own dynasty and its own coinage. Persis was one of the smaller ones.

The record of those centuries is thin and almost entirely numismatic. Kings are known because coins exist; the order of them is inferred from style and overstrike; there are decades with nothing in them. No source names a greatest king of Persis, or says how it raised soldiers, or how a throne passed from one holder to the next. Five hundred years, and the evidence is a drawer of silver.

What is recorded, and matters, is the religious establishment. Fars was the Zoroastrian heartland, and Istakhr — a few kilometres from Persepolis, and built partly out of it — held a major temple of Anahita whose custodianship was a hereditary office of standing. The temple had estates, and the estates are the reason a priestly family in a small vassal kingdom had any resources at all.

That is the whole of the position at the end of the second century AD: a small hereditary kingship in an agricultural province, under a Parthian king of kings who was fighting Rome and his own nobles, next to a temple with land and a family that held it.

What a coin can and cannot show

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

A coin is a very good witness to some questions and a very bad one to others, and it is worth being precise about which is which, because for five hundred years of Persis the coins are nearly all there is.

They are excellent for sequence. In Bactria, where no text survives at all, overstrikes and hoards have yielded twenty-odd Greek kings, their order, their mints and their approximate dates — a whole dynasty reconstructed from metal. They are good for audience: the Indo-Greek kings issued bilingual pieces in Greek and Prakrit on Indian weight standards, and the choice of standard says plainly enough who was expected to spend them.

The Persis coins are being asked for something harder than either. They are being asked for an intention. The Aramaic legend instead of Greek; the fire temple instead of a Greek god; the Persian dress; the winged figure above. Every one of those is a choice, and the question is what the choice meant to the people making it — which is not a thing metal can testify to.

Wiesehöfer's discipline is to build the account from Persian material rather than from the Greek and Roman narratives, and to be careful about what the material will bear. The Achaemenid-revival reading is attractive precisely because we know what happened next: a dynasty from this province founded an empire that presented itself as a restoration. But reasoning backwards from an outcome is the oldest error in the subject. It is the same move that produced two centuries of writing about Achaemenid decline, on no better evidence than the fact that the empire eventually fell — and an empire falling is not proof that it had been failing.

The same caution applies here in reverse. A province that produced a dynasty is not thereby a province that had been waiting five hundred years to produce one. The fire on the coins is certainly a fire; the priestly office is certainly a priestly office; and whether the men who struck the silver thought of themselves as keeping an interrupted empire warm is a question they did not answer and we cannot answer for them.

A kingdom that became the centre

Drafted from Daryaee, Sasanian Persia: The Rise and Fall of an Empire (2009)end

Around 205 a man called Papak, whose family held the temple at Istakhr, deposed the sitting king of Persis and took the throne. He wrote to Artabanus IV, the Parthian king of kings, asking that his son be confirmed as his successor. Artabanus refused.

The son was Ardashir. He took Persis anyway, then the neighbouring kingdoms of Kerman and Elymais and the Gulf coast, refused tribute, and in 224 met Artabanus in battle at Hormozdgan and killed him.

Nothing arrived

It is worth being exact about what happened to the kingdom of Persis in that year, because the ordinary words all mislead.

No foreign army took it: the man who ended it had been born in it and had ruled it. It did not break into pieces. It was not usurped in 224, because the usurpation had happened twenty years earlier and by then the usurper's son was the legitimate king. It was not taken over by a rival house, because the house went on ruling, in the same province, from the same family shrine, for another four hundred years.

What happened is that the kingdom stopped being a distinct thing by becoming the middle of something much larger. Fars gave the new empire its dynasty, its name in Persian, its ancestral fire and the language its chancery ran on. A sub-kingdom of the Parthians became the core province of the Sasanian empire, and there is no moment at which anybody conquered anybody for that to happen — only a battle in which the vassal killed the overlord, after which the vassal's kingdom was not a vassal kingdom and not a kingdom either.

The five hundred years before it

That transition is famous and takes a paragraph. The interesting part is behind it.

For half a millennium a small hereditary kingship in an agricultural province had gone on striking silver in Aramaic with a fire and a Persian king on it, under Seleucid and then Parthian suzerainty, through wars it took no decisive part in, while the temple of Anahita at Istakhr accumulated land and the family that kept it accumulated standing. Nobody wrote its history. It fought no battle anyone recorded. Its kings are known because the coins exist.

And at the end of it, without ever having been a power, it produced a dynasty that governed Iran for four hundred years and told everyone it was restoring something.

A village of a hundred men

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

Istakhr did not stop when Persis stopped. It became one of the largest and most important cities of Sasanian Fars, and when the Arab armies arrived in the seventh century it was taken by capitulation rather than by storm.

Le Strange, assembling the Arabic and Persian geographers province by province, can follow it from there.

In the tenth century Ibn Hawkal describes a town about a mile across. It had been walled, and the wall, he notes, had recently been pulled down. At the city gate a fine bridge crossed the Pulvar, called the Khurasan bridge for reasons nobody records. The houses ran well out past the bridge into the country, among gardens growing rice and pomegranates. On the hills to the north-west stood three fortresses called collectively the Three Domes, and in the largest of them the Buyid ruler 'Adud al-Dawla had built roofed cisterns on twenty columns, holding enough water for a thousand men to withstand a year's siege, with a parade ground laid out on the hilltop.

That is a working provincial city with money spent on it.

What happened next was politics

Mustawfi says the ruin of Istakhr was caused by the turbulence of its own inhabitants, and the specific occasion is recorded. In the later tenth century Samsam al-Dawla, son of the man who had built the cisterns, was obliged to send an army against the town under the amir Kutlumish. It was laid in ruins.

From that point Istakhr was a village. The Fars Namah, written at the beginning of the twelfth century, puts it at perhaps a hundred men.

Five hundred years of kings striking silver, a temple of Anahita with estates, a family that took an empire out of it — and nearly nine hundred years after Ardashir left, the place he left is a hundred men in the ruins of its own walls. Le Strange notes in passing that hardly any trace of the Muslim town remains either.

The ruins next door

Two facts sit beside each other in his account and are worth putting together.

Istakhr lay a few miles up the Pulvar from the Achaemenid platform. The geographers who describe the town in careful detail — its bridge, its gardens, its rice — add nothing of interest about the palaces and rock tombs a short walk away, because they did not know what they were. The buildings were generally ascribed to Jamshid, a king out of legend, and to Solomon. The tomb of Cyrus at Pasargadae, up the same river, was called the Shrine of the Mother of King Solomon — Mashhad-i-Madar-i-Sulayman — and Le Strange, writing in 1905, gives that as its current name.

So the ruins were never lost. They were visible, visited, named and explained. What had gone was the information that they were Persian and that the people living beside them were the descendants of the men who built them.

And the last piece of it is the piece that did survive, which is the word. Pars is the province; Persis is what the Greeks made of it; Fars is what Arabic made of Pars, having no p. From that province come the name of a country and the name of its language. Nothing at Istakhr was remembered accurately, and the name of the place was carried out and put on everything.