IRANIAN SOCIETY AND LAW

A. Perikhanian

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521246934.002

18 - IRANIAN SOCIETY AND LAW

from PART 5 - INSTITUTIONS

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

A. Perikhanian

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E. Yarshater

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A. Perikhanian: Affiliation:
Institute of Oriental Studies, Academy of Sciences, Leningrad

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For the questions dealt with in this chapter the available sources are markedly uneven in quality: evidence for the Parthian period is extremely meagre and fragmentary when compared with the information provided by the written sources of the Sasanian period.

Historical records in the Iranian language for the Parthian period, if such ever existed, have not survived. Some information, very scanty and inadequate, can be gathered from the works of Greek and Roman writers who lived in that period, and also from later Syriac and especially Armenian texts which sometimes refer back to events of the Parthian period and preserve a number of social and legal terms. Of incomparably greater value is the Parthian epigraphic evidence, the three private-law documents of the 1st century b.c. and the 1st century a.d. from Avroman (the earlier two are in Greek, the third in Middle Iranian), and some parchments from Dura-Europos which belong to the period of Parthian rule. During excavations of the Parthian fortress Mihrdātkart (at Nisā in modern Turkmenistān) Soviet archaeologists found about 3,000 potsherds inscribed in Parthian. The inscriptions cover the period from the end of the 2nd century b.c. to the middle of the 1st century a.d. They are mostly accounts, and the majority of them were found in the wine-storehouse where contributions in kind from neighbouring vineyards were assembled. Many of these documents have been published, but full publication is still in the preparatory stage.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge History of Iran
Seleucid Parthian
, pp. 625 - 680

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521246934.002 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 1983

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18 - IRANIAN SOCIETY AND LAW

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