12.B Economic Dynamics in the Arsakid Empire

This brief consideration of the economic processes in the Arsakid Empire picks up where the previous chapter on hypotheses concerning processes and patterns in the Hellenistic world ends. It considers the Arsakid Empire, looking at both the core territory stretching across Mesopotamia and Iran, and the halo of polities that has increasingly come to be understood as the “Parthian Commonwealth,” including both smaller and larger vassal kingdoms along the flanks of the Arsakid heartland.1 A synthetic elucidation of the dynamic processes by which the Arsakid Empire came to incorporate these diverse local spaces on an economic level – or how the local spaces reacted to the new forms of Arsakid control – lies out of reach of current scholarship. The available documentary, archaeological, and historical evidence is pointillistic and often internally inconsistent, problems that were discussed at more length in other chapters here as well as in our previous volume.2 The attempt in what follows is rather to consider how the general framework laid out by von Reden with respect to the Hellenistic world can be applied in the context of the Arsakid Empire, looking for moments of continuity, rupture, or gradual divergence. A fundamental question here is whether and in what ways the economy of the Arsakid Empire came to function as an “overarching fiscal-military” regime of the type described by von Reden for the Hellenistic world.3 The explicit comparison of the Hellenistic and Arsakid Empires is not intended to suggest that the Arsakid world should be understood fundamentally, or even primarily, as a product of the Hellenistic world. However much the rise of the Arsakid dynasty in the third century  was predicated on preconditions in the Hellenistic Near East, and however much once-Seleukid territory the Arsakids came to control over the course of second and first centuries , the logic of their empire developed atop a wide range of cultural substrata – drawing most obviously on pre-Seleukid Achaemenid models of the Iranian Plateau (which were also a part of the Hellenistic legacy), but also on patterns among the Parni, from whom the dynasty emerged.4 At the