Religion and Culture in Parthian Iran

Religion in Parthian Iran (c. 247 BCE–224 CE) was Zoroastrian at its core but open and varied: the Arsacid kings honoured Ahura Mazda, Mithra and Anahita, kept sacred fires and included magi in their councils, while ruling over Greek, Babylonian, Jewish and early Christian communities. Their courts also fostered a lively oral culture of minstrels, the gosans, whose songs carried stories later written down as Vis and Ramin and parts of the Shahnameh.

Zoroastrian kings without a state church

The Parthian kings left no religious inscriptions like those of Darius the Great, and their coins mostly show the dynasty’s founder, Arsaces, seated with a bow. Historians therefore piece together their religion from names, calendars, temple sites and later traditions. Together these point clearly to Zoroastrianism, the religion described on the page Zoroaster and the Avesta.

The clearest evidence is the calendar. Thousands of ostraca from Nisa, the early Parthian capital, use the Zoroastrian month names, such as Frawardin and Mihr, which are still the names of months in the Iranian calendar today. Personal names point the same way. Mithridates, the name of several kings, means “given by Mithra”; many officials at Nisa bore names built on Mithra, Arta (truth) or Mazda.

Unlike the later Sasanians, the Parthians did not create a centralised church with a hierarchy of priests and a single written canon. Practices varied from region to region, and local cults flourished. This looser arrangement is one reason later Zoroastrian priests, writing under the Sasanians, presented the Parthian age as a time when the faith had declined. Modern historians treat that claim with caution, because it served Sasanian propaganda.

Sacred fires and temples

The geographer Isidore of Charax, who described the road across the Parthian empire around the start of the Common Era, mentions an ever-burning fire at Asaak, the town where the first Arsaces was proclaimed king. He also mentions temples of the goddess Anahita, whom the Greeks identified with Artemis, at Ecbatana and at Kangavar. Of the three great sacred fires of later Zoroastrian tradition, one, Adur Burzen-Mihr, was in Khorasan, the old Parthian homeland, and was closely linked to it.

In Sistan, the hill of Kuh-e Khwaja rising from Lake Hamun holds a large complex of palace and temple buildings with a fire sanctuary and wall paintings. Archaeologists disagree on whether its main phases are Parthian or Sasanian, but it is the best-known religious site of eastern Iran from this period.

Magi, Tiridates and the Avesta

Magi, the Zoroastrian priests, had a place at court. Strabo says one of the two royal councils was made up of “wise men and magi”. When Tiridates, brother of Vologases I, travelled to Rome in 66 CE to be crowned king of Armenia, Pliny the Elder calls him a magus and says he refused to travel by sea so as not to pollute the water, in keeping with Zoroastrian purity rules. The story is told on the page Vologases I and the War over Armenia.

A Zoroastrian text of the 9th century, the Denkard, says that a king named Valakhsh (Vologases) ordered the surviving parts of the Avesta, written and oral, to be gathered together. Many scholars identify him with Vologases I, though the passage is late and its details cannot be checked. The written Avesta that survives was fixed later, under the Sasanians; see Zoroastrianism under the Sasanians.

Mithra and the Roman mystery cult

Mithra, the god of contracts, oaths and light, was especially popular among the Parthians and their neighbours. In the Roman empire a mystery religion of Mithras spread among soldiers and officials from the late 1st century CE. The Romans believed it came from Persia, and its temples show Mithras in Persian dress. Most modern scholars see Roman Mithraism as a new cult created within the Roman world that borrowed an Iranian god’s name and image, not a direct import of Parthian religion, though they still debate how much Iranian belief came with it.

Many faiths under Arsacid rule

The Parthian empire was home to many religions besides Zoroastrianism. In Seleucia and other Greek cities, the old Greek cults continued, and some kings styled themselves Philhellene, “friend of the Greeks”, on their coins. In Babylon, temple scholars kept writing astronomical texts in cuneiform until the 1st century CE, the last known uses of the world’s oldest script.

A large Jewish community lived in Babylonia, and in the 1st century CE the royal family of Adiabene, a Parthian vassal kingdom around Arbela, converted to Judaism; Josephus tells the story of Queen Helena and her son Izates. Christianity reached Mesopotamia in the 1st or 2nd century. In 216 CE, in the last years of Parthian rule, the prophet Mani was born near Ctesiphon, and his followers later wrote many hymns in the Parthian language.

Gosans: the minstrels of Parthia

Much of Parthian culture was oral. In a famous article of 1957, the scholar Mary Boyce showed that the Parthian word gosan meant a poet-musician who sang at court and in noble houses, performing heroic tales, love stories, satire and laments to the accompaniment of a stringed instrument. Gosans appear in Manichaean texts, in the Armenian historian Movses Khorenatsi, and in the Persian romance Vis and Ramin.

Vis and Ramin, written in Persian by Fakhr al-Din Gorgani in the 11th century, is set among Parthian kings and nobles of Media and Khorasan. Gorgani says he based it on an older version in Pahlavi. Most scholars accept that the story goes back to the Parthian period. Two short works that survive in Middle Persian, the debate poem The Assyrian Tree and the epic Memorial of Zarer, are also thought to come from Parthian originals. Through such poets, Parthian heroes and noble families passed into the Shahnameh; see The Great Houses of Parthia and the site’s introduction to the Shahnameh.

Greek theatre at a Parthian court

The Arsacid elite were comfortable in Greek culture too. Plutarch tells how, after the battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE, the head of Crassus was brought to the courts of the Parthian king Orodes II and the king of Armenia while they were watching a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae, and an actor used the head as a prop. The story may be embroidered, but it shows that Greek drama was known and performed. The court spoke Parthian, the empire’s records were kept in Parthian written in an Aramaic-derived script, and Greek remained the language of coins and of many cities. The language itself is the subject of The Parthian Language and Its Records.