The Arsacid era began when Arsakes (Arsakes I) was elected leader of a Central Asian Dahae tribe called the Parni, and then proceeded to wrest control of the
Seleukid satrapy of
Parthia to become the first
Parthian king. He came to power around 247 BC and would rule until around 211 BC, perhaps the year of
his death. For the duration of the empire, which lasted almost 500 years, coins honored the
Parthian founder by depicting a seated archer - Arsakes - on the
reverse.
What is not so well know is that the archetype for the seated archer reverses of
Parthian coins (as well as, ultimately, the Indo-Parthian and other Eastern coins that imitated the motif) may well have been the reverses of coins from almost a century and a half before
Parthia started minting its own. Fred
Shore, in
Parthian Coins and History: Ten Dragons Against Rome, states that the
Parthian "
reverse design was derived from the
Seleukid drachms which showed
Apollo seated on the
omphalos..." For years I've taken that as gospel since, well...you know, it's from Fred
Shore.* However, I came across what I think is a more plausible theory that was put forth by
Vesta Sarkhosh
Curtis of the British Museum and Sarah
Stewart of the
London Middle East Institute at SOAS, in an article entitled
The Iranian Revival in the Parthian Period.
Curtis and
Stewart make their cursory case in just two sentences (within the context of an article more focused on its titular theme), without doing any detailed comparisons. But those two sentences, and my own poking around the Web after reading them, were enough to convince me:
Datames (sometimes referred to as Tarkumuwa) was a
satrap of
Cappadocia from 385 – 362 BC, under the Achaemenid/Persian Empire. Around 375 BC he struck silver staters at the Tarsos,
Cilicia mint that, on their reverses, depict him seated, wearing Persian dress (including the
bashlyk and baggy trousers that the
Parthians would later adopt), with empty sleeve (another motif borrowed by the
Parthians), inspecting (or offering?) an arrow, with a bow to lower right and winged solar disk to upper right. As
Curtis and
Stewart state in their article: “This could indicate that the coins of the western satraps of the
Achaemenid Empire (were) known to the early Arsacids once they took over power in
Parthia.” Datames is shown in a 3/4 view whereas the
Parthian archer is always in profile, and he (Datames) holds an arrow rather than the bow. But the similarities are clear enough. Compare, for example, the legs of the throne of Datames in the rightmost image of the top row in the pic below, with the throne legs in the leftmost image of the second row. That leftmost coin of the second row is the first issue of the
Parthians. Pics below courtesy of
CNG and
Parthia.com.
*I should add I
can accept that the transition from throne to
omphalos as the seat of
choice for the
Parthian archer in the coinage of Mithradates I (171 - 138 BC) and some rulers afterwards, may well have been inspired by the
omphalos of
Apollo in the
Seleukid issues.
Top row in the pic below shows reverses of coins of Datames; the lower row illustrates reverses of two drachms of Arsakes I from the beginning of the
Parthian Empire, and an Artabanos IV (216 - 224 AD)
reverse from the final years of the Empire, showing the degenerated image of the archer: