Rome and the East
used, as it had been under the Achaemenids and the Seleucids. Akkadian sur-
vived in Babylonia at least until towards the end of the first century..,
and Greek cities, deriving from early Hellenistic colonisation, like Seleu-
cia on the Tigris and Seleucia on the Eulaeus—the ancient Persian city of
Susa in Elymais (Elam)—flourished in the Parthian Empire. There was also
the (now) famous small Hellenistic settlement of Dura-Europos on the Eu-
phrates, which was excavated, if not exactly by, at any rate under the di-
rection of, Franz Cumont and Mikhail Rostovtzeff in the s and s.
Thus, the Parthian Empire was a multi-cultural, or multi-ethnic, world in
which the culture least visible to us was that of the Parthians themselves. Al-
though the original documentation surviving from the region in this period
is scanty, a significant amount of what there is was written in Greek. In other
words, the Parthian Empire was, in one respect, just another late Hellenistic
kingdom.
Take, for instance, the two long Greek parchments of the first century..
(– and –.., respectively), whose origin E. H. Minns, when pub-
lishing them in , describes in terms which now seem striking: ‘‘Avroman
is a town in Persian Kurdistan lying close to the Turkish Frontier.’’^41 In fact,
the place of origin lies in the foothills of the Zagros, north-north-east of
Baghdad, in present-day Iraq. The dating of the earlier of the two parch-
ments perfectly reflects the character both of the Parthian kings as late Hel-
lenistic monarchs and also the power relations of the time: ‘‘In the reign of
the King of Kings, Arsaces, benefactor, just, manifest, philhellene, and of
the Queens, Siace his compaternal sister and wife and Aryazate surnamed
Automa, daughter of the great King Tigranes (of Armenia) and his wife...’’
Next, one might cite the inscription of.. containing a letter in Greek
from the Parthian king, Artabanus III, addressed to the city of Susa on the
Eulaeus;^42 or, perhaps more indicative, a series of nine business and legal
documents written in Greek on parchment, found in Dura-Europos and
dating from the last eighty years of Parthian rule, before the Roman advance
of the s.^43 Although Dura-Europos was a Greek settlement, this evidence
. E. H. Minns, ‘‘Parchments of the Parthian Period from Avroman in Kurdistan,’’Journ.
Hell. Stud. (): . It seems extraordinary that these two extensive Greek documents,
along with one in Parthian, now in the British Museum, have never been re-studied in
detail since.
. C. B. Welles,Royal Correspondence in the Hellenistic Period(), no. .
. H. M. Cotton, W. E. H. Cockle, and F. G. B. Millar, ‘‘The Papyrology of the Roman
Near East: A Survey,’’Journ. Rom. Stud. (): , nos. and to . See also F. Mil-
lar, ‘‘Dura-Europos under Parthian Rule,’’ in J. Wiesehöfer, ed.,Das Partherreich und seine
Zeugnisse(Historia-Einzelschrift , ), – ( chapter in the present volume).