The Probable (It Seems to Me) Origin of the Parthian Seated Archer

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 pic, with the throne legs in the leftmost image of the lower pic, which is the very first coin issued by the Parthians. Pics below courtesy of CNG and Parthia.com.

Reverses of coins of Datames:


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:


*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.

 

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Fantastic article. Thanks for sharing that with us.

Here you can see the process of degeneration of the Archer's reverse and Parthian coinage design quite clear.

 

Fascinating.

 

Nice, thank you for the write up... great explanation of the archer. I always wondered of the significance.

 

Very interesting analysis!!!

 

Great article. Thanks Bob.