Parthian

Parthian is the Northwest Iranian language of the Arsacid empire, which ruled the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia from the third century BCE to the early third century CE. It is a close sister of Middle Persian, the two diverging as the western and eastern members of the Middle Iranian group, and the political succession of the Sasanians to the Arsacids left the two languages in contact long enough that Parthian forms are embedded in early Middle Persian usage. Parthian is attested in the ostraca of the Arsacid treasury at Nisa, on coinage, in the early Sasanian royal inscriptions where it appears beside Middle Persian and Greek, and in the substantial Manichaean literature recovered from Turfan, which carried the language on as a confessional medium for centuries after Arsacid rule had ended.

The language was written in two main scripts, both descended from Aramaic. The Inscriptional Parthian script, a monumental chancellery hand retaining Aramaic heterograms, served the coins, ostraca, and the Parthian text of the great Sasanian trilinguals such as the inscription of Šāpur I at the Kaʿba-ye Zardošt. The Manichaean community later wrote Parthian in the clearer Manichaean alphabet, which marks vowels and abandons the heterographic spellings, and it is largely through the Manichaean corpus that the language’s phonology is securely known.

@misc{onomastikon-parthian,
  author = {Rajagopal, Shriram},
  title = {Parthian},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://onomastikon.org/languages/parthian}},
  note = {Onomastikon: A Digital Atlas of Ancient Names}
}