Parthia

The Akkadian name of the province, Partu, the form Parthia takes in the Babylonian version of the Behistun inscription, written as pa-ar-tu-ú in classical Mesopotamian cuneiform. The Babylonian scribes rendered Old Persian Parθava by dropping its final syllable and the interdental, giving the short Akkadian Partu.

Partu is the third chancellery face of the name, completing the Behistun trilingual beside Old Persian Parθava and Elamite Partumaip. The three are parallel official renderings of one satrapy name, each in its own script, the same imperial usage that names Bactria thrice over on the very same rock. Where the Persian form carries the interdental that would later soften to the -hl- of Pahlaw, the Akkadian keeps only the bare Partu, the name reduced to what Babylonian cuneiform most easily held.

The Elamite name of the province, Partumaip, the form Parthia takes in the Elamite version of the Behistun inscription, where it appears with the Elamite plural ending as “the Parthians,” the people of the land. Elamite rendered Old Persian Parθava as par-tu-ma, replacing the Persian interdental with a plain t that its own script could write.

Partumaip is the Elamite member of the Achaemenid trilingual, standing beside Old Persian Parθava and Babylonian Partu in Darius’s roll of subject lands. As with Bactria on the same monument, the three forms are parallel chancellery renderings of one name rather than borrowings, the satrapy set down in the empire’s three scripts at once; the Elamite version, written by scribes of the old Susa bureaucracy, names not the land but its people, the Partumaip, as Elamite administrative usage preferred.

The Old Persian name of the region, Parθava, the form Darius cut into the rock at Behistun in his roll of the lands that obeyed him. It names the satrapy of Parthia, on the northeastern edge of the Iranian plateau, and it is one of the oldest written forms of the name. Philologically it is a dialectal variant of the very stem that gives Pārsa, Persia: the same Iranian root, in a northeastern rather than a southwestern shape.

Parθava is the headwater of this page and the source of its first surprise, that Parthia and Persia are, at bottom, the same name. The southwestern dialect made the stem Pārsa and gave the world “Persia”; the northeastern made it Parθava and gave the world “Parthia.” Two peoples, two empires, and two of the great names of ancient Iran, separated less by their root than by the dialect that pronounced it. Everything else on this page descends from this Old Persian form, save the Chinese, which took a different name entirely.

The Greek name of the land, Parthía (also Parthuaía), and of its people, the Párthoi, taken from the Iranian Parθava. The Greeks knew Parthia first as a Seleucid province and then, with growing respect and alarm, as the empire that wrested the East from them and faced Rome across the Euphrates; the Párthoi and their feigned-retreat archery gave English the “Parthian shot.”

Parthía is the form through which the West received the name, the ancestor of the Latin Parthia and the English Parthia. It keeps the rth of the older Iranian pronunciation, frozen at the moment the Greeks borrowed it, so that the Western name preserves an earlier stage of the word than the Iranian languages themselves do: while Iran moved on from Parθava to Pahlaw, Greek and Latin held the name still, and “Parthia” is, in effect, the Iranian name as it sounded before the rθ softened to hl.

The Parthians’ own name for themselves and their land, Parθaw, in the Parthian language of the Arsacid empire, written in the Inscriptional Parthian script. It continues the Old Persian Parθava directly, the northeastern Iranian form as spoken by the people it named, the Parni and the Arsacid house that ruled from the Parthian homeland for nearly five centuries.

Parθaw is the endonym proper, the form on the lips of the Parthians at the height of their power, when their cavalry held the Roman legions on the Euphrates. It is also the pivot of the page’s central transmission: it is from this Parθaw, not from the Old Persian, that the Middle Persian Pahlaw develops by the regular Iranian softening of rθ to hl, and so the Parthians’ name for themselves becomes, a few centuries on, the word Pahlavi.

The Sanskrit name for the Parthians, Pahlava, used in the epics, the law-books, and the inscriptions for the Iranian people who, with the Śakas (Scythians) and Yavanas (Greeks), pressed into northwestern India in the centuries around the turn of the era. The form clearly reflects the hl of the Iranian Pahlaw rather than the rθ of the older Parθava, marking it as a borrowing of the later, softened pronunciation.

Pahlava is the eastern, Indian witness to the name, and a useful dating clue in itself: because it carries the hl and not the rθ, it shows that the Iranian sound change had already happened by the time India learned the name. In the Sanskrit sources the Pahlavas keep the company they kept in life, listed among the Śakas and Yavanas as one of the foreign warrior-peoples on India’s northwestern marches, the Parthians seen from the far side of the Iranian world.

The Classical Chinese name for the Parthian empire, Ānxī, recorded in the Shiji after the Han envoy Zhang Qian’s reports from the west around 130 BCE and standard in the Chinese histories thereafter. It does not render the land-name Parθava at all, but the name of the ruling house: Ānxī is a transcription of Aršak (Arsaces), the founder of the Arsacid dynasty, whose name every Parthian king took as a title.

Ānxī is the page’s outlier, the one name not drawn from Parθava. Where every other people named the country, China named the dynasty, calling the whole empire after the house of Arsaces because that was how the Parthians, on their coins and through their envoys, presented themselves to the east. It is the same move the Greeks made when they turned Nineveh into “King Ninos”: an empire met from a great distance and remembered under the name of a ruler rather than a land. To the Han historians, Parthia was simply Ānxī, the realm of Arsaces.

The Latin name of the land, Parthia, taken from the Greek, with the people the Parthī. For Rome, Parthia was the great rival of the East, the power that destroyed Crassus and his legions at Carrhae and that no Roman emperor ever fully subdued; the Parthī fill Latin history and poetry as the archetypal eastern enemy, masters of the bow and the feigned retreat. The form passed unchanged into English.

Parthia is the western terminus of the name and the form the modern world keeps. Through it, the older Iranian pronunciation, the rth of Parθava and Parθaw, survives in English long after Iran itself had moved on to Pahlaw and Pahlavi. So the same empire is known by two faces of one name: in the West as Parthia, freezing the ancient sound, and in the Iranian and Indian East as Pahlaw and Pahlava, carrying the later one. Only China, naming the empire for its dynasty, stood outside the whole family.

The Middle Persian form of the name, Pahlaw, the Parthian Parθaw carried into the Sasanian period by the regular Iranian sound change that turned rθ into hl. To the Sasanians, Pahlaw meant the old Parthian territory and the noble houses of Parthian descent, and the later Islamic geographers knew the region as Pahla or Fahla.

Pahlaw is the form with the longest shadow. From it comes the word Pahlavi, the name given to the Middle Persian language and its script, to the heroic “Pahlavi” epic tradition that fed the Shāhnāmeh, and, in the twentieth century, to the dynasty of the last shahs of Iran, who took Pahlavi as their name to claim that ancient Iranian inheritance. The chain is quiet but unbroken: to be Pahlavi is, at the end of a long sound change, to be Parthian, and a northeastern Iranian people gave its name to the whole later idea of an Iranian classical past.