Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/631

EMPIRE.] PERSIA 603 h oari in 42 and 54 A.TX, but in 59 the Ilyrcaiiian ambassadors were able to return home from a port on the Persian Gulf without touching Parthian soil (Tac., Ann., xiv. 25). This implies that all the upper satrapies had been lost to the empire. The Hyrcanians were still independent c. 155 during the reign of Antoninus Pius (Victor, Epit., 15, 4). In 72 they held the whole southern coast of the Cas- j:i om plan, and for a time at least bordered on a Parthian kingdom which n tt had succeeded that of the Scythians in Sacastane at a date subse- ruJ qucnt to that of Isidore of C harax (1 n. c. ). The names of seven kings of this dynasty, beginning apparently with an Arsaces Dicreus, are known from coins. The most powerful of these was the Gon- dophares under whom, according to the legendary Ada Thomas, 1 the apostle Thomas came to India in 29 A.D. ; he reigned over a great territory, which in large part had formerly belonged to Par- thia, his coins being found mainly in Herat, Sistan, and Kandahar, but also in Begram and sometimes in the Punjab ; an inscription at Takht-i-Bahi, north-east of Peshawar, makes his twenty-sixth year the hundredth of an era which is probably that of the intro duction of Buddhism in the C abul valley. 2 The dynasty of Gon- dophares, however, was but loosely constituted : we often find two kings at one time ; and the Pcriplus (70 A.D. ), which tells ns of the possession of old Indo-Scythia by these Parthians, says that one king was constantly displacing another, a sure symptom of a mori bund condition. One of the last kings, Sanabares, reigned a little after 78 A.D. (Sallet, op. cit., p. 158). The author of the Periplus had also heard of the independent and very warlike nation of the Bactrians, i.e. , the Tochari, whose greatest conquests fall at this time. Kieu-tsieu-khio, the founder of their power, died, according to Chinese accounts, at the age of eighty, and was succeeded by his son Yeii-kao-chin, who conquered the Indus lands. The Tochari were then more powerful than ever, and ruled as far as Shao-ki or Oude. The coins, on the other hand, lead us to distinguish between Kozola - Kadaphes, the immediate successor of Kozulo - Kadphizu (who borrows the latter s name and titles, and whose copper money found at Manikyala in the Punjab may be dated by its offering a close imitation of the head of Augustus on denarii struck between 4 B.C. and 2 A.D. ), and the real conqueror of India, Ooemo-Kad phises (Ar. Hima Kapii^o), who reigned from about the middle of the 1st century A.D. , and whose might is proved by his striking gold, which no one had clone since Eucratides. His coins, frequent in Kabulistan and the Punjab, have been found as far as Benares. This evidence is reconciled with the Chinese account by an Indian notice in Kern, VarAha-Mihira, p. 39, which shows that the con quests of the Tochari were for a time interrupted. It speaks of a robber aka king who was very powerful (i.e., Yen-kao-chin, or Kozola -Kadaphes), after whom there were five native kings. Of these the first four reigned but a few years, while the fifth, who is unnamed, had a reign of twenty years over a happy land, after which the C^akas began their depredations again. The unnamed king may be identified with a king wearing earrings, and therefore Indian, whose coins, found by sackfuls in Begram, and occasionally in the Punjab, Malwa, and even farther east, mark him as a neighbour and probably contemporary of Gondophares ; they bear no name, but only the title "king of kings" and "great saviour. 13 The recommencement of the Caka conquest will thus begin with Ooemo-Kadphises, who was the immediate predecessor of Kanerki or Kanishka, the founder of the Tumshka dynasty, whose accession in 79 A.D. is the epoch of the Caka era (Oldenberg, Z.f. Num., viii. 290 sq. ), and marks the consolidation of affairs in the East. Volagases I. died soon after the Alan wars, leaving a just reputation by his friendly relations to his brothers a thing so long unknown his patient steadfastness in foreign war and home troubles, and his foundation of a testine new capital. Perhaps also he has the merit of collecting iorder?. f rom fragments or oral tradition all that remained of the Avesta.^ From June 78 we find two kings coining and reigning together, Volagases II. and Pacorus II., probably brothers. From 79 there is a long break in the coins of the former, and Artabanus IV. takes his place with a coin struck in July 81. This Artabanus appears as the pro tector of a certain Terentius Maximus, who pretended to be Nero 5 ; he threatened to restore him and displace Titus by force, and, though the pretender was at length given up, the farce, which was kept up till 88, might have ended 1 See N. Rhein. Mus., xix. 161 sq. 2 This was 500 years after Buddha (Z. f. K. d. Morgenl, iii. 129), which would give the date 57 A.D. 3 This is perhaps the king qui regnavll sine nomine of Suetonius, De Regibus (Auson., Ep., 19). 4 Dinkart, in Hang, Pahl.-Paz. Gloss., p. 144, calls the king who did this only Valkosh (i.e., Volkash), descendant of Ashkan. 5 Zonaras, xi. 18; Orac. Sib., iv. 124, 137. in earnest but for the disorders of the times, indicated by 75-115 A.D. a break in the Parthian coinage between 84 and 93, in which latter year Pacorus appears as sole king. 6 At this time the political horizon of Parthia was very wide, and its intercourse with the farthest East was livelier than at any other date. In 90 the Yue-chi had come to war with the governor of Chinese Tartary and been reduced to vassalship ; in 94 a Chinese expedition slew their king, and, advancing to the " North Sea " (Lake Aral), subdued fifty kingdoms. 7 The Tochari, one sees, like the Greeks before them, had neglected the lands north of the Hindu-Kush in their designs on India ; even of Ooemo-Kadphises no coins are found north of that range. In 97 Chinese envoys directed to Rome actually reached the Mediterranean, but were dissuaded from going farther by Parthian accounts of the terrors of the sea voyage, and in 101 Muon-kiu, king of the An-si (Parthians), sent lions and gazelles of the kind called "fu-pa" (/3or(3aX.os) to the emperor of China. Muon-kiu reigned in Ho -to, i.e., Carta or Zadracarta in Hyrcania ; he was therefore a king of the Hyrcanians, who also held the old Parthian lands east of the Caspian Gate, and may be identical with a king, rival to Pacorus, who struck copper coins in 107 and 108, if the latter is not identical with the later monarch Osroes. But anyhow the representative of the Parthian power in the west was still Pacorus II., who in 110 s sold the crown of Edessa to Abgar VII. bar Izat, and died soon after, making way for his brother Osroes, who coins in the same year, but had to reckon with two rivals, viz., Volagases II. (who reappears after an interval of thirty-three years), from 112 onwards, and Meherdates (Mithradates) VI. The latter was a brother of Osroes, and so probably was the former. None of the three was strong enough to conquer the others, and continual war went on between them till Osroes was foolish enough to provoke Roman intervention by taking Armenia from Exedares, son of Pacorus, to whose appointment Rome had not objected, and transferring it to another son of Pacorus called Parthamasiris. Trajan, who had quite thrown over Trajan s the principle of the Julii and Flavii, that the Danube and con - the Euphrates were the boundaries of the empire, and was (lues s- fully embarked on the old Chauvinist traditions of the republic, would not let such an occasion slip ; and, refus ing an answer to an embassy that met him at Athens, he entered Armenia and took Arsamosata 9 without battle, after receiving the homage of western Armenia (114). Parthamasiris submitted himself to the emperor, but Trajan declared that Armenia must be a Roman province, appointed an escort to see the Parthian over the border, and when he resisted and tried to escape ordered his execution, a brutal act, meant to inspire terror and show that the Arsacids should no longer be treated with on equal terms. Armenia and the neighbouring kings to the north having given in their submission, Trajan marched back by Edessa, receiving the homage of Abgar. The campaign of 115 was in Mesopotamia, and the burden of it fell on Mebar- sapes of Adiabene and his ally Mannus of Singara. At 6 There is a naive personal character about all the feelings of the Arsacids towards the Csesars. Artabanus III. orders deep mourning for Germanicus, and sends Tiberius an insulting letter, advising him to escape the hate of his subjects by suicide. Volagases I. urges the senate to honour the memory of Nero. In the support given to the pseudo- Nero legitimist sympathies with the Julii may have combined with the wish to pay back in their own coin the Romans who had so often backed Parthian pretendants. 7 Hist. Gen. de la Chine, iii. 393 sq. 8 The third year of Abgar VII. was the fifteenth of Trajan (Cureton, Anc. Si/r. Doc., p. 41) ; this involves a correction of +23 years applied to all Dionysius of Telmahar s dates for the later kings of Edessa, as well as a blank of nineteen years before Abgar VII. u Read ^X/" J Aptra/Mffdruv in Dio, Ixviii. 19. Samosata was a Roman town, and if they had lost it first this would have been mentioned.