Quite interesting thread ….
"For a long time, I've been interested in the history of ancient Iran. And one part of this history that has interested me specially is the demise of the Arsacid dynasty as rulers of Iran and their replacement with the Persian Sasanians. So, I've decided to write a series of posts dealing with this subject. I have a penchant for writing long walls of text, so I apologize in advance if I cause any fellow forumites any undue annoyance.
The posts will be divided in three major series. First, a block of posts dealing with the political, demographic, geographical, cultural and economic realities of ancient Iran. Then, a second part dealing with the events that led to the fall of the Arsacids and the rise of the Sasanians. And finally, a third part dealing with the reigns of Ardašir I and his son Šābuhr I.
As anybody minimally acquainted with Roman history should know, the only polity that the Romans of the Principate deigned themselves to consider even remotely comparable to their own res publica was the Regnum Parthorum, the Iranian empire ruled by the Arsacid dinasty and centered in the Iranian plateau. Before I go into further discussion, I should make clear that scholars don't know much about that empire which rivaled Rome and that lasted for five centuries in the Iranian plateau. The Arsacid dinasty was created by an adventurer called Aršak (Arsaces in Greek and Latin), that according to the writings of the Greek and Latin chroniclers Arrian, Justin and Strabo (with some differences in details) had fled from the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom and sought refuge among the Parni tribe, a part of the Dahae tribal confederation that dwelled in the ancient land of Khwarazm, now in western Turkestan. Aršak eventually managed to convince some of the Parni tribesmen to accept him as a leader and invaded the Seleucid satrapy of Parthiene, then governed by a satrap called Andragoras (who despite his Greek name seems to have been an Iranian) and who for the last ten years had been independent from Seleucid rule following the successful secession of the satrapy of Bactriana under the Greek satrap Diodotus, who'd proclaimed himself king. Aršak managed to conquer Parthiene and kill Andragoras, after which he also proclaimed himself king, thus he gave his name to a dinasty and his people became known to Greeks and Romans as "Parthians" due to their first conquest in the Iranian plateau. The Parni were also an Iranian people, but they seem to have quickly lost their own Iranian language (a member of the eastern Iranian language family, close to Scythian) and adopted as their own the language of Parthiene (Parthava in Achaemenid Old Persian, Parthia in Latin), which was the Parthian language (Pahlav in Parthian), a northwestern Iranian language close to Median and Azeri…."
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