only after those Persians, not very willingly, had cast the desired horoscope, that the king and his army, in accordance with their indication, accomplished the solemn laying of the foundation-stone of the new Greek city. Thus by his side stood the priests of Ahura Mazda as counsellors, and they, not those of the Hellenic Olympus, were interrogated in public affairs, so far as these concerned divine things. As a matter of course this was all the more the case with the Arsacids. We have already observed that in the election of king, along with the council of the nobility, that of the priests took part. King Tiridates of Armenia, of the house of the Arsacids, came to Rome attended by a train of Magians, and travelled and took food according to their directions, even in company with the emperor Nero, who gladly allowed the foreign wise men to preach their doctrine and to conjure spirits for him. From this certainly it does not follow that the priestly order as such exercised an essentially determining influence on the management of the state; but the Mazda-faith was by no means re-established only by the Sassanids; on the contrary, amidst all change of dynasties, and amidst all its own development, the religion of the land of Iran remained in its outline the same.

Language.The language of the land in the Parthian empire was the native language of Iran. There is no trace pointing to any foreign language having ever been in public use under the Arsacids. On the contrary, it is the Iranian land-dialect of Babylonia and the writing peculiar to this—as both were developed before, and in, the Arsacid period under the influence of the language and writing of the Aramaean neighbours—which are covered by the appellation Pahlavi, i.e. Parthava, and thereby designated as those of the empire of the Parthians. Even Greek did not become an official language there. None of the rulers bear even as a second name a Greek one; and, had the Arsacids made this language their own, we should not have failed to find Greek inscriptions in their empire. Certainly their coins show down to the time of Claudius exclusively,11 and predominantly even later, Greek legends, as they show also no trace of the religion of the land, and in standard attach themselves to the local coinage of the Roman east provinces, while they retain the division of the year as well as the reckoning by years just as these had been regulated under the Seleucids. But this must rather be taken as meaning that the great-kings themselves did not coin at all,12 and these coins, which in fact served essentially for intercourse with the western neighbours, were struck by the Greek towns of the empire in the name of the sovereign. The designation of the king on these coins as “friend of Greeks” (φιλέλλην), which already meets us early,13 and is constant from the time of Mithradates I., i.e. from the extension of the state as far as the Tigris, has a meaning only if it is the Parthian Greek city that is speaking on these coins. It may be conjectured that a secondary position was conceded in public use to the Greek language in the Parthian empire alongside of the Persian, similar to that which it possessed in the Roman state by the side of Latin. The gradual disappearance of Hellenism under the Parthian rule may be clearly followed on these urban coins, as well in the emergence of the native language alongside and instead of the Greek, as in the debasement of language which becomes more and more prominent.14

Extent of the Parthian empire.As to extent the kingdom of the Arsacids was far inferior, not merely to the great state of the Achaemenids, but also to that of their immediate predecessors, the state of the Seleucids. Of its original territory they possessed only the larger eastern half; after the battle with the Parthians, in which king Antiochus Sidetes, a contemporary of the Gracchi, fell, the Syrian kings did not again seriously attempt to assert their rule beyond the Euphrates; but the country on this side of the Euphrates remained with the Occidentals.

Arabia.Both coasts of the Persian Gulf, even the Arabian, were in possession of the Parthians, and the navigation was thus completely in their power; the rest of the Arabian peninsula did not obey either the Parthians or the Romans ruling over Egypt.

The region of the Indus.To describe the struggle of the nations for the possession of the Indus valley, and of the regions bordering on it, to the west and east, so far as the wholly fragmentary tradition allows of a description at all, is not the task of our survey; but the main lines of this struggle, which constantly goes by the side of that waged for the Euphrates valley, may the less be omitted in this connection, as our tradition does not allow us to follow out in detail the circumstances of Iran to the east in their influence on western relations, and it hence appears necessary at least to realise for ourselves its outlines. Soon after the death of Alexander the Great, the boundary between Iran and India was drawn by the agreement of his marshal and coheir Seleucus with Chandragupta, or in Greek Sandracottos, the founder of the empire of the Indians. According to this the latter ruled not merely over the Ganges-valley in all its extent and the whole north-west of India, but in the region of the Indus, at least over a part of the upland valley of what is now Cabul, further over Arachosia or Afghanistan, presumably also over the waste and arid Gedrosia, the modern Beloochistan, as well as over the delta and mouths of the Indus; the documents hewn in stone, by which Chandragupta’s grandson, the orthodox Buddha-worshipper Asoka, inculcated the general moral law on his subjects, have been found, as in all this widely extended domain, so particularly in the region of Peshawur.15 The Hindoo Koosh, the Parapanisus of the ancients, and its continuation to the east and west, thus separated with their mighty chain—pierced only by few passes—Iran and India. But this agreement did not long subsist.

Bactro-Indian empire.In the earlier period of the Diadochi the Greek rulers of the kingdom of Bactra, which took a mighty impulse on its breaking off from the Seleucid state, crossed the frontier-mountains, brought a considerable part of the Indus valley into their power, and perhaps established themselves still farther inland in Hindostan, so that the centre of gravity of this empire was shifted from western Iran to eastern India, and Hellenism gave way to an Indian type. The kings of this empire were called Indian, and bore subsequently non-Greek names; on the coins the native Indian language and writing appear by the side, and instead, of the Greek, just as in the Partho-Persian coinage the Pahlavi comes up