Continuity, Transformation, and Reinvention of Iranian Kingship

When the Arsacids took control of Parthia, Macedonian charismatic kingship was the currency of power throughout the eastern Mediterranean, and Western and South Asia. From Mithradates I (171-138 bce) to Mithradates II (123-88 bce), as they expanded their ambitions, the Arsacids strategically appropriated elements of Seleucid ruler representation and ritual practice as well as Hellenistic culture, in­cluding art, architecture, and literature and court practices.

While the Arsacid kings adapted Hellenistic traditions in their royal image, they also introduced new Iranian forms. Mithradates I began calling himself basileus megalos immediately following his Median conquest, and the title basileus basileon appears about a decade after the conquest of Mesopotamia under Mithradates II.^[909] Whether these Arsacid titles, which evoke those of the Achaemenids, grew from lin­gering memories of Persian titles in the Iranian uplands, from literary conventions in Babylon, or were simply introduced in response to Mediterranean ideas of the Persians, the effect was the same: a new imperial title that stood in opposition to that of the Seleucids.

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While Seleukeia-Tigris eventually served as their royal residence city, the early Arsacids built several ritual centers, most of which clustered in their homeland of Parthia. The perpetual fire at Asaak, kept burning to commemorate the site where Arsakes was first recognized as king, was located in this region.^[911] The dynastic cult center of Parthian Nisa shows that the Arsacids skilfully commandeered aspects of Seleucid architecture, integrated Greek divine iconography into architectural ornament, and patronized sculptors trained in Greek style to create extensive clay reliefs.^[912] Paralleling this, numismatic evidence indicates that Mithradates I, his son, and his brother experimented with some of the forms of Seleucid royal cult. Mithradates I's titles on select issues include theos (“god”) and theopatros (“whose father is a god”).^[913] These new traditions appealed in different ways to the Arsacids' Greco-Macedonian and Iranian power bases, and they were widely emulated in the courts of their client kings. Inspired by the Parthian king of kings' precedent, the empire's provincial kings also cultivated such dynastic sanctuaries connected with the funerary monuments of their kings and perpetually burning regnal fires.^[914]

Once the Sasanians took power, they seized or destroyed all Arsacid sites and traditions that could be leveraged to buttress a claim to royal power.^[915] The Sasanians quickly began an intensive campaign to delegitimize the Arsacids and replace them at the center of all traditions of Iranian kingship and Iranian history.^[916] The Sasanian kings foregrounded their connections with the Achaemenid patrimony in their home province while integrating themselves into Iran's mythological his­tory and the mythical royal dynasty of the Kayanids, taking their names and titles and building sites associated with their primordial history.^[917] The Sasanians created an all-encompassing universal history, the Xwaday-namag (“The Book of Lords”), that presented the dynasty as the heritors of an Iranian tradition of kingship that stretched back to the first king and ruler of all of humanity.^[918] Simultaneously, the Sasanians blotted out the Arsacids from Iranian historiography, despite the fact that the Parthian families continued to play important roles in the empire.^[919] Several texts drawn from or reflecting the Xwaday-namag, such as the “History of Ardaxsir son of Papag,” (Kar-namag i Ardaxsir i Pabagan), Tabari, the Tansarnama, and the Sdhndma, reduce the nearly five centuries of Arsacid control largely to a period of illegitimacy and fragmentation. According to the Kar-namag, Iran was ruled by 120 tribal chiefs (kadag-xwadays) before Ardaxsir I's rise.

The Parthian and Sasanian empires leveraged art and architecture to create a tangible and powerful experience of their visions of Iranian kingship, creating rich monumental and ritual landscapes that imposed new political and symbolic topographies on their lands.^[921] They founded or embellished major fire temples across the empire and created ceremonial centers, cities and sculpted landscapes celebrating their dynasties' history.^[922] The marvels of their palaces and paradise estates were wonders to behold and, especially in the Sasanian period, their au­dience halls provided a view of unseen terrestrial and cosmological realities.^[923] Arsacid ruler representation developed into an elaborate system of regalia that was emulated not only by their client kings, but also by elites in other empires, such as in Palmyra and Bactria, and offered challenge to kings beyond their frontiers, such as the Kushans.^[924] The visual culture of Sasanian kingship similarly impacted both the Mediterranean and Central Asia with its complex religious and astral sym­bolism and simple visual repertoire for expressing divinely inspired kingship. Each Sasanian king created his own distinctive crown that differed from those of his predecessors in divine attributes and color, a practice anticipated by certain Arsacid kings' individualized iconographic motifs on the tiara.^[925]

The ancient Iranian idea of xwarrah (Av. x^varsnah, “divine royal fortune”) pro­vided a useful ideological tool that was elaborated by both the Arsacids and espe­cially the Sasanians.^[926] The Sasanians took the Avestan idea of this spiritual force empowering the rightful Iranian sovereign and elaborated it a visual marker of legitimacy held by all rightful and righteous Iranian kings since the first king of humanity.^[927] Textual sources described it as a somatic glow that shone especially from the head.