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Die Parther: Die vergessene Großmacht
Das Partherreich bestand fast 500 Jahre und erstreckte sich zu Zeiten seiner größten Ausdehnung vom heutigen Syrien bis nach Indien und vom Kaspischen Meer bis zum Golf von Persien. Uwe Ellerbrock und Sylvia Winkelmann vermitteln in dieser einzigen Darstellung des Partherreiches einen umfassenden Überblick über seine geschichtliche und kulturelle Entwicklung. Dabei dienen parthische Münzen, die die Herrschaftslinie lückenlos wiedergeben, als Leitgattung einer bislang wenig beachteten antiken Großmacht des iranischen Hochlandes zwischen Zweistromland und Hindukusch.Jetzt in komplett bearbeiteter Neuausgabe!
- GenresHistoryNonfiction
356 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 31, 2012
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 27, 2020
Ein unglaublich interessantes Thema, stellenweise fand ich das Buch aber schlecht geschrieben und trotz 2. Auflage eklatant fehlerhaft. Als ausgesprochen störend empfand ich aber das extrem glatte und hochglänzende Papier, ich war ständig nur damit beschäftigt, den Buch-Halte-Winkel zu ändern, um den Lichtspiegelungen zu trotzen.
November 2, 2022
This book, published in 2021 by Routledge, is written in English. The given ratings only refer to the earlier books that were written in German (The first book was published in 2012. The second book, newly edited and revised, was published in 2015 (Zabern Verlag, Germany).
Based on the German edition from 2015, the present English book was completely revised and re- edited. More than 90 new photos have been added the new English edition.
Based on the German edition from 2015, the present English book was completely revised and re- edited. More than 90 new photos have been added the new English edition.
November 14, 2025
The Parthians, the Forgotten Empire by Uwe Ellerbrock is, I believe, a revised version of a more technical study first published by the author, a reputed historian and expert in the field, in German. In it we get something that has been sorely lacking: a detailed historical account of the ancient and powerful empire of the Parthians. They are indeed one of antiquity’s great blind spots: an Iranian dynasty of nomadic origin who seized control of the eastern remnants of Alexander’s empire in the mid-3rd century BC and ruled a vast, loose federation stretching from Mesopotamia to Central Asia, which lasted for five hundred years (247 BCE to 224 CE). They were the only major Near Eastern power to check Roman expansion for centuries, and yet they left almost no written history of their own. What survives -Greek and Roman accounts, scattered inscriptions, a few ostraca, and coins- is enough to show that they had a remarkably stable and powerful polity, and one capable enough to put the Romans to shame (witness the battle of Carrhae and a few other failed Latin expeditions into the east), but reconstructing any other information about them turns out to be a painful labor of collecting and patching together scarce, fragile and indirect traces.
This is no small feat, and it is the mission Uwe Ellerbrock has assigned for himself in this book. With hardly any surviving Parthian texts and scant archeological remains that can be closely tied to this period, the author is forced to wrestle with paper-thin sources; in fact, most of the textual evidence is squeezed out of coins (portraits, mint marks, symbols, writing, iconography, the tiniest scraps of legend) and numismatics ends up becoming the cornerstone of everything. It’s astonishing how much water he manages to coax out of such a barren rock.
Archaeology helps, but only up to a point. None of the grand cities at the heart of the empire like Ctesiphon, Ecbatana or Susa have been found or properly excavated, and some lie under modern cities, so the real substance has to come from marginal sites like Hatra, Dura-Europos, and Nisa. Ellerbrock does a good job turning these into case studies: Nisa’s ostraca and wine-production remains, Hatra’s monumental iwans and syncretic pantheon, and the hybrid art of Dura-Europos all become windows into the Parthian world.
What did I learn that felt genuinely new? A few things.
First, just how decentralized the Parthian state really was. Ellerbrock almost hesitates to call it an “empire,” preferring something closer to a “Parthian commonwealth1”: a constellation of vassal kings, noble houses, local dynasts, and semi-autonomous regions that acknowledged Parthian authority while preserving their internal structures. It sounds chaotic, especially with kings being assassinated at a rate that would make the Julio-Claudians blush, but the system endured, as we have said, for roughly five centuries. Whatever else one says about it, it worked.
Second, their military excellence. The Parthians, originally a small Indo-Iranian group of nomads that landed on a peripheral part of the Seleucid Empire and ended conquering the lot, inherited from the steppes a style of heavy, highly mobile cavalry warfare -cataphracts- that the Romans repeatedly underestimated until disasters like Carrhae forced them to rethink their entire military doctrine. Eventually Rome adopted similar troops of its own, the clibanarii, “walking ovens” as they were jokingly nicknamed by the plebs and a label that speaks for itself in the Near Eastern sun.
Third, the cultural arc is more complex than the neat Achaemenid → Parthian → Sasanian continuum that Greek, Roman, and modern Iranian narratives often imply (and which are the main and very biased sources we have for the Parthians). The early Parthian state was almost aggressively Hellenistic in a bid by its Iranian overlords to gather the support of their Hellenized subjects, but over time they drifted toward what we now think of as Persian culture, linguistically, religiously, and artistically. Parthia was multilingual and multicultural: Greek remained in official inscriptions well into the first century, Aramaic was the administrative lingua franca, Parthian gradually emerged as a standardized bureaucratic language with a remarkably consistent scribal style across enormous distances. Ethnically speaking, you had Greeks, Persians, Indo-Iranians, Old Babylonians and Elamites still writing in cuneiform - you name it.
Religion gets a substantial treatment too. The Parthians almost certainly retained a Zoroastrian framework, though the evidence is scant: fire temples, dated ostraca, and coin iconography. Ellerbrock’s discussion of the “Parthian Tyche”, a Hellenistic goddess transformed through Iranian reinterpretation, is one of the more intriguing parts of the book. We also get a very brief view of other religions in the empire, like Manichaeism, whose founder was himself a Parthian noble, making that religion one of the few global traditions with genuinely Parthian roots.
In short, this is a book written against the grain of its evidence. Ellerbrock builds a careful, honest reconstruction out of whatever scraps exist, and ends up with something sturdier than you would expect, but still much less than you would wish. Probably that is the biggest limitation of the book, but one can’t blame it on the author. To the degree that he has partially lifted the veil that covered the Parthians, and to the degree that you may be interested in semi-forgotten civilizations, it is well worth the read.
This is no small feat, and it is the mission Uwe Ellerbrock has assigned for himself in this book. With hardly any surviving Parthian texts and scant archeological remains that can be closely tied to this period, the author is forced to wrestle with paper-thin sources; in fact, most of the textual evidence is squeezed out of coins (portraits, mint marks, symbols, writing, iconography, the tiniest scraps of legend) and numismatics ends up becoming the cornerstone of everything. It’s astonishing how much water he manages to coax out of such a barren rock.
Archaeology helps, but only up to a point. None of the grand cities at the heart of the empire like Ctesiphon, Ecbatana or Susa have been found or properly excavated, and some lie under modern cities, so the real substance has to come from marginal sites like Hatra, Dura-Europos, and Nisa. Ellerbrock does a good job turning these into case studies: Nisa’s ostraca and wine-production remains, Hatra’s monumental iwans and syncretic pantheon, and the hybrid art of Dura-Europos all become windows into the Parthian world.
What did I learn that felt genuinely new? A few things.
First, just how decentralized the Parthian state really was. Ellerbrock almost hesitates to call it an “empire,” preferring something closer to a “Parthian commonwealth1”: a constellation of vassal kings, noble houses, local dynasts, and semi-autonomous regions that acknowledged Parthian authority while preserving their internal structures. It sounds chaotic, especially with kings being assassinated at a rate that would make the Julio-Claudians blush, but the system endured, as we have said, for roughly five centuries. Whatever else one says about it, it worked.
Second, their military excellence. The Parthians, originally a small Indo-Iranian group of nomads that landed on a peripheral part of the Seleucid Empire and ended conquering the lot, inherited from the steppes a style of heavy, highly mobile cavalry warfare -cataphracts- that the Romans repeatedly underestimated until disasters like Carrhae forced them to rethink their entire military doctrine. Eventually Rome adopted similar troops of its own, the clibanarii, “walking ovens” as they were jokingly nicknamed by the plebs and a label that speaks for itself in the Near Eastern sun.
Third, the cultural arc is more complex than the neat Achaemenid → Parthian → Sasanian continuum that Greek, Roman, and modern Iranian narratives often imply (and which are the main and very biased sources we have for the Parthians). The early Parthian state was almost aggressively Hellenistic in a bid by its Iranian overlords to gather the support of their Hellenized subjects, but over time they drifted toward what we now think of as Persian culture, linguistically, religiously, and artistically. Parthia was multilingual and multicultural: Greek remained in official inscriptions well into the first century, Aramaic was the administrative lingua franca, Parthian gradually emerged as a standardized bureaucratic language with a remarkably consistent scribal style across enormous distances. Ethnically speaking, you had Greeks, Persians, Indo-Iranians, Old Babylonians and Elamites still writing in cuneiform - you name it.
Religion gets a substantial treatment too. The Parthians almost certainly retained a Zoroastrian framework, though the evidence is scant: fire temples, dated ostraca, and coin iconography. Ellerbrock’s discussion of the “Parthian Tyche”, a Hellenistic goddess transformed through Iranian reinterpretation, is one of the more intriguing parts of the book. We also get a very brief view of other religions in the empire, like Manichaeism, whose founder was himself a Parthian noble, making that religion one of the few global traditions with genuinely Parthian roots.
In short, this is a book written against the grain of its evidence. Ellerbrock builds a careful, honest reconstruction out of whatever scraps exist, and ends up with something sturdier than you would expect, but still much less than you would wish. Probably that is the biggest limitation of the book, but one can’t blame it on the author. To the degree that he has partially lifted the veil that covered the Parthians, and to the degree that you may be interested in semi-forgotten civilizations, it is well worth the read.
May 2, 2023
This was my first book in the Parthian Empire reading series. It is a good resource which has all the information regarding the Parthians including their lifestyle, clothing, Parthian art, the Parthian kings etc. and more. All the information is chronologically given here and is a good read for anyone who wants to improve their knowledge regarding the Parthian people.
August 30, 2019
Etwas trocken zu lesen und in manchen Belangen historisch unkorrekt ( was ich als Laie selber nicht beurteilen kann- dazu gibt es Fachrezensionen von Historikern im Internet) habe ich doch den Eindruck, dass der Schatten, der über diesen ominösen Gegnern der Römer liegt , an vielen Ecken und Enden gelüftet worden ist, die Tür zu einem sehr großen Saal ist geöffnet. Die drei Sterne -Bewertung kommt nur aus dem mühsamen Sprachstil.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews