Thinking About Parthia in the Teaching of Ancient History

This presentation will focus on an in-class source analysis lesson, comparing coinage and written records from antiquity. It comes from a teaching module on ancient Parthia that I am developing for the History for the 21st Century project to provide instructors and students access to studying the Parthians within the wider interconnected cultural and geopolitical landscape of Afro-Eurasia. It helps orient students to think about the scope of the ancient world and the Parthians’ place within it. Students consider the historical developments of the Mediterranean and West Asia, focusing on the origin of the Parthians as a migrant warband from Central Asia, the establishment of their kingdom in the northern Iranian plateau, and the creation of their empire across West Asia through conquest.

Regrettably, no account of the Parthians’ history survives from their perspective. What we have is a broad and incomplete collection of observations on them from their Greek and Roman neighbors. These foreign sources have distortions, biases, and stereotypes that make the reconstruction of Parthian history challenging but not impossible. Internal sources, like cuneiform records and coinage, are fundamentally important to balancing the perspectives of Greco-Roman writers. This balancing act is exactly what this lesson accomplishes, introducing students to the external and internal sources to try to understand the Parthians as much as possible on their own terms.

I will start by introducing three short passages on the origins of the Parthians from Greco-Roman writers, Justinus, Ammianus Marcellinus, and Strabo. Then, with those in attendance, we will consider three coins that expand and balance the Greco-Roman interpretation of the origins of the Parthians within West Asia. The audience will explore how the history and identity of the Parthians both were forged by the Greeks and Romans from a distance and from the Parthians themselves.