PARTHIA: RELIGION, LITERATURE, ART

III

THE SARMATAE AND PARTHIANS

VI.

The official religion of the Parthian royal house was Mazdaism, at least since the reign of Vologases I, who made a new edition of the Avesta and had it provided with a running commentary in Pahlavi. Herein he was true to the great Iranian traditions of Atropatene, the home of his dynasty, and his brother Tiridates made clear his adhesion to Mazdaean tenets. In the Iranian Epos both Vologases (Vistaspa) and Tiridates (Spaniyad) appear as champions of the new religion against paganism. In all this we may perhaps detect a deliberate reaction against the syncretistic and Hellenistic tendencies of their predecessors, especially Phraates IV and Phraataces and the pretenders supported by Rome. On Parthian coins the titles Theopater and Theos disappear, while that of Epiphanes, which does not make so explicit a claim to divinity, persists. Indeed the title Theos, first used by Phraates III, was revived but once in this period and that for Musa, the mother of Phraataces. The Greek poems found at Susa go farther in stressing the divine nature of Phraates IV than would have been acceptable to a good Zoroastrian even from his Greek subjects. The Parthian kings, it is true, never abandoned such elements of the official worship of the king as they inherited from the Achaemenids, but it appears not improbable that the last Arsacids of the old line had pressed this tendency too far, and that the dynasty from Atropatene marks a reaction to the older tradition. At the same time, the kings and probably the Magi, of whose organization in this period hardly anything is known, did not fail in reverence to their ancestral gods, whom they may have regarded as emanations of the great Ahura-Mazda. Chief among these was the Sun and Moon, and it is to be noted that coins of Persis, where the kings were notably orthodox Mazdaeans, show the symbol of the crescent moon on the royal tiara, as did the coins of the Sacastene kings and their successors the Kushans.

The religious beliefs of the masses of the people throughout the Parthian Empire are quite another matter. But evidence is lacking to decide how large a part of the Iranian population were Mazdaeans or what kind of Mazdaism, if any, was offered to them by the numerous and powerful Magi, the clergy of the Empire. Nor is it easy to tell how far Mazdaean and Iranian religion in general influenced the cults and faith of the non-Iranian subjects of Parthia. But one thing is certain, the Arsacids were no fanatics and did not seek to impose their own religion on their subjects. In Assyria, for instance, local cults persisted, and new temples were built to the ancient gods. The same is true of Doura, where even the Seleucid dynastic cults continued under Parthian rule, and of Susa. What we find in these Greek cities is not the introduction of Iranian cults and the building of fire-temples, but the supplementing of Greek cults by Semitic even among the inhabitants who still spoke Greek and had Greek names.

How far Iranian doctrine and practice affected the various semitic religions is also a question. At Doura, for instance, where all the temples found are dedicated to gods with Semitic names, it is probable that a slight Iranian influence was perceptible, which through a kind of syncretism made it possible for Iranians to take part in the worship of Semitic gods. The Babylonian Bel and his acolytes, the gods of the Sun and the Moon, may well have been in one way or another identified with Ahura-Mazda and the corresponding Iranian gods of the pre-Zoroastrian Pantheon, one of whom was Mithra. The tolerance of the Parthian kings extended beyond the ancient worships of the Empire to proselytizing foreign religions, especially Judaism and Christianity. In Adiabene, if we may trust the Jewish tradition, they did not demur when the ruling dynasty embraced Judaism, and any persecution of the Christians in the same vassal-state was the work of the local Magi and not of the central government or its representatives.

Little is known of the intellectual life of the Parthian Empire. The citizens of the Greek cities kept intact their native language and probably gave to their children a Greek education or at least an education in Greek. Many citizens of Seleucia on the Eulaeus (Susa) must have been fond of Greek poetry, to judge from the four poems that have been discovered there, and no doubt they studied the classical poets of Greece in order to be able themselves to compose. The excellent style of King Artabanus' letter to the magistrates of that city shows that the Greek secretaries of the Parthian kings, who were probably of Mesopotamian origin, were well trained in schools which kept alive the Seleucid traditions of Greek rhetoric. A like familiarity with the Greek language and the same degree of education are shown by the much more modest scribes of Doura, who are found writing a correct Greek style as late as the second century AD. The same is true for Media Atropatene. Literary and stylistic interests seem to have been keener in Babylonia than in upper Mesopotamia. No metrical inscriptions in Greek comparable to those of Susa have been found at Doura, and most of the non-official inscriptions show that the population at large—in this unlike the professional scribes—spoke a highly debased and semitized form of Greek.

The Greeks of the Parthian Empire did not lose their interest in learning. Apollodorus of Artemita, the late Hellenistic historian of Parthia, had successors of his own type, men who were born in Parthia but wrote for the educated people of the Graeco-Roman world. Such was Dionysius of Charax, the geographer, author of a description of the world, who wrote for Augustus a monograph on Parthia and Arabia. Such was another writer used by the elder Pliny, Isidore of Charax, whose date and identity are uncertain. We still possess his Parthian Stations, in which he describes the great military and caravan route down the Euphrates and across Parthia to India. It is a work doubtless based on Parthian official itineraries, and we have quotations from his other writings in Pliny, Athenaeus and the author of the Macrobioi. The last quotation shows that he gave lists of kings of Parthia, Persis, Elymais, Spasinu Charax and the Yemen. The list of kings of Charax which goes down to a time which coincides with the gap in our numismatic evidence between AD 71/2 and 100/1 may be taken as evidence that Isidore was a contemporary of Pliny and not to be identified with Dionysius of Charax. Finally a similar work may have been used by Josephus, perhaps a Parthica written by a hellenized Jew of Mesopotamia in which special attention was paid to the destinies of the Jews and of the kings of Adiabene who were converts to Judaism. To the same class of Mesopotamian educated Greeks belonged Maes Titianus and his agents.

Greek education and Greek learning certainly affected some of the natives, both Iranians and non-Iranians. The most splendid example is the great teacher Mani, who certainly had a good Greek philosophical training. But we are not entitled to ascribe exclusively to Greek influence the literary activity of those subjects of the Parthian kings who never received a Greek education. Thus it is improbable that the acquaintance with Parthian history of Abel the Teacher, the source of Mesiha-zekha, who wrote about AD 550 a local ecclesiastical chronicle of Arbela, was derived from Greek works. It probably goes back to a Parthian chronicle or annals which embodied the official tradition of Parthian history. It may be assumed that similar chronicles existed in most of the vassal-kingdoms and formed with the Parthian annals the historical substructure of such works as the life of Addai, the apostle of Adiabene and Osrhoene, and the lists of Arsacid kings which are found in Dionysius of Tellmahre for Osrhoene and in Mar Abas and Moses of Choarene for Armenia, as well as those cited in the Macrobioi. It was probably not Greeks who kept the itineraries of the Parthian kingdom which were used by Isidore and the agents of Maes Titianus. All these semi-official, semi-literary records perished when the Sassanians replaced the Arsacids, and yet their memory survived—for the West in the works of Western historians, for the East in the epic poetry, whose most glorious heroes are reflections of the Arsacids and of their vassals.

More or less the same conditions prevailed with Parthian art. As in the field of religion we must clearly distinguish between the imperial art of the court and the Iranian art of the Arsacid period in general on the one hand and the art of the various non-Iranian kingdoms and satrapies of Parthia on the other. Both the Iranian, and what may be called the provincial, art of the Parthian Empire are very little known and studied, but an analysis of the extant monuments shows that the common view of Parthian art as a degeneration of Greek art is mistaken. A peculiar and original Iranian art, which included a flourishing imperial art, did exist and shows but very few Greek elements. This Iranian art exercised a strong influence both on the art of the non-Iranian parts of the empire and on that of its eastern neighbors, especially China. What we know of the provincial art of Parthia and its Iranian features is derived from the many objects found in North India and in Mesopotamia, especially in Babylonia, at Susa, at Hatra, at Assur and at Doura.

The greatest contribution that the Parthian Empire made to art was in the field of architecture. The excavations of the Parthian city of Assur and the study of the Parthian monuments there and at Hatra prove that the so-called liwan-palace with its peculiar plan and stucco decoration which is so typical for the Sassanian period is of Parthian origin. All the essential parts of the palace and all the peculiar features of its decoration are brilliantly exemplified in both cities, and they certainly had a deep influence on Mesopotamian architecture of the same period as we find it in Babylon and at Doura. How far back we can trace the development of the liwan-palace in the pre-Parthian period it is difficult to say. The same is true of another peculiar form of Iranian architecture—the fire-temple. It is certain that the Sassanian fire-temples repeat the plan and the system of decoration of earlier temples of the same type.

It is beyond doubt that both sculpture and painting flourished in Iranian lands in the Parthian period. Very few monuments are extant, but they suffice to show that both religious and secular sculpture and painting were cultivated in the Parthian Empire by Iranian artists. In the field of religious art may be adduced the religious paintings and sculptures of Doura and the religious sculptures of Palmyra, especially the recently discovered painted bas-reliefs of the temple of Bel. They cannot be derived from either Greek or Assyrian art alone. Indeed, their style and composition show striking resemblances with those of scattered religious sculptures of the Parthian period in Iranian lands and of the impressive religious sculptures of Nimrud Dagh of half-Iranian Commagene in the first century BC, both of which show many purely Achaemenid features. It may, therefore, be suggested that the religious paintings and sculptures of Doura and Palmyra are to be regarded as products of late Iranian art which flourished in both Iranian and Syro-Anatolian regions in Hellenistic times and was ultimately a direct continuation of the late Graeco-Persian art of the fifth, fourth and third centuries BC.

The same is true of secular art. The portraits of the kings on the Parthian coins have always been regarded as products of genuine Greek art. Yet the style of these portraits is Graeco-Iranian rather than Greek, as is proved by a comparison with products of Graeco-Iranian toreutics in South Russia and with the Graeco-Iranian sculptures of Nimrud Dagh. A glance at the contemporary coins of the Hellenistic kings will suffice to show how deep is the difference between them and the coins of the Parthian dynasty. Far more Iranian are secular sculptures and paintings, most of which illustrate episodes in the heroic epos of Iran. The bas-relief of Bihistun which represents the duel between Gotarzes and Meherdates was certainly not the first of its kind and shows no connection with Greek art. The same type of composition is found in South Russia in graves of the early Roman period in painting and in many graffiti and dipinti on the walls of temples and private houses in Doura. The same is true of another favorite motive of epic art in general—the hunting-scene—which recurs in this Iranian treatment at Doura, on bas-reliefs of the Iranian border lands and in South Russia. They must derive, like the compositions of religious art, from late Achaemenid art, for the same types of composition and the same style are found on the Graeco-Persian gems. Finally a third favorite motif of epic art—the banquet scene—is often found on monuments of the Parthian period, in the bone-carvings of Olbia, the silver cups of Sacastene, the paintings and sculptures of Palmyra, Babylonia and Doura. This, too, goes back to the art of the Achaemenid period.

It is not the composition only that is characteristic for the Iranian art of the Parthian period. The monuments mentioned above show stylistic peculiarities which set them in a class apart. Some of these are typical of Oriental art in general; others, however, are peculiar to the Parthian period. One of these last is the flying gallop, another the strict frontality of the human figures, next come the elongated proportions of the bodies, a peculiar schematic treatment of the folds of their dress, a far-reaching neglect of the study of the human body and a growing linearity in its representation. Some minor peculiarities like special treatment of eyes, hair, beards and moustaches are equally typical of Parthian art. But its most striking peculiarity is the way in which intense spiritual rather than intellectual life is reflected especially in the eyes. Of this the figures of the priests of the well-known Conon fresco at Doura give a fine example, but the same trait is found in almost all the religious sculptures and paintings and in the portraits of this period both in the Iranian and the non-Iranian parts of the Parthian Empire.

The silver plate of this period presents new and peculiar features both in style and composition. A new type of plant-ornament takes hold of it, and figure compositions which show at the beginning strong Greek influences become gradually more and more iranized and use all the motives of the great secular art of Parthia: battles and hunting-scenes and banquets. A set of Sacian silver cups is especially rich and typical in its development. The same is true of the jewels of the Parthian period, especially of those of heavy silver inset with colored stones which characterize both Palmyrene and Gandhara sculpture (both men and women are represented wearing them) and of which two sets were found in Doura and some examples at Taxila. They all go back to Greek originals but show a development and tendencies of their own which lead gradually to the creation of new types, such as large and massive round and trapezoidal fibulae, characteristic chains with medallions, amulets and the like. One of the most striking features of this jewelry is its fondness for polychromy, which seems to be an ancient peculiarity of Iranian jewelry and may have been borrowed from Iran by Syria, where it flourished in the late Hellenistic and the Roman period. Finally, the Mesopotamian countries use a special type of glazed pottery different both from the contemporary Egyptian and Hellenistic glazed pottery and from the similar ware of China. Both the forms and ornaments of the pots and the type of the glaze show that Mesopotamian pottery forms a class in itself which attained such a rich development later in the Sassanian and Arab periods. It is worthy of note that glaze was used in the Parthian times not only for vases but also for various types of coffins. In conclusion it may be said that most of the types of composition and, in great measure, the style of Parthian art were inherited and developed by the artists of the Sassanian period. Sassanian art thus appears, not as a sudden renascence of what was Achaemenid, but as a natural continuation of the Iranian art of the Parthian period.


	HISTORY OF ROME-THE IMPERIAL PEACE III THE SARMATAE AND PARTHIANS VI. PARTHIA: RELIGION, LITERATURE, ART The official religion of the Parthian royal house was Mazdaism, at least since the reign of Vologases I, who made a new edition of the Avesta and had it provided with a running commentary in Pahlavi. Herein he was true to the great Iranian traditions of Atropatene, the home of his dynasty, and his brother Tiridates made clear his adhesion to Mazdaean tenets. In the Iranian Epos both Vologases (Vistaspa) and Tiridates (Spaniyad) appear as champions of the new religion against paganism. In all this we may perhaps detect a deliberate reaction against the syncretistic and Hellenistic tendencies of their predecessors, especially Phraates IV and Phraataces and the pretenders supported by Rome. On Parthian coins the titles Theopater and Theos disappear, while that of Epiphanes, which does not make so explicit a claim to divinity, persists. Indeed the title Theos, first used by Phraates III, was revived but once in this period and that for Musa, the mother of Phraataces. The Greek poems found at Susa go farther in stressing the divine nature of Phraates IV than would have been acceptable to a good Zoroastrian even from his Greek subjects. The Parthian kings, it is true, never abandoned such elements of the official worship of the king as they inherited from the Achaemenids, but it appears not improbable that the last Arsacids of the old line had pressed this tendency too far, and that the dynasty from Atropatene marks a reaction to the older tradition. At the same time, the kings and probably the Magi, of whose organization in this period hardly anything is known, did not fail in reverence to their ancestral gods, whom they may have regarded as emanations of the great Ahura-Mazda. Chief among these was the Sun and Moon, and it is to be noted that coins of Persis, where the kings were notably orthodox Mazdaeans, show the symbol of the crescent moon on the royal tiara, as did the coins of the Sacastene kings and their successors the Kushans. The religious beliefs of the masses of the people throughout the Parthian Empire are quite another matter. But evidence is lacking to decide how large a part of the Iranian population were Mazdaeans or what kind of Mazdaism, if any, was offered to them by the numerous and powerful Magi, the clergy of the Empire. Nor is it easy to tell how far Mazdaean and Iranian religion in general influenced the cults and faith of the non-Iranian subjects of Parthia. But one thing is certain, the Arsacids were no fanatics and did not seek to impose their own religion on their subjects. In Assyria, for instance, local cults persisted, and new temples were built to the ancient gods. The same is true of Doura, where even the Seleucid dynastic cults continued under Parthian rule, and of Susa. What we find in these Greek cities is not the introduction of Iranian cults and the building of fire-temples, but the supplementing of Greek cults by Semitic even among the inhabitants who still spoke Greek and had Greek names. How far Iranian doctrine and practice affected the various semitic religions is also a question. At Doura, for instance, where all the temples found are dedicated to gods with Semitic names, it is probable that a slight Iranian influence was perceptible, which through a kind of syncretism made it possible for Iranians to take part in the worship of Semitic gods. The Babylonian Bel and his acolytes, the gods of the Sun and the Moon, may well have been in one way or another identified with Ahura-Mazda and the corresponding Iranian gods of the pre-Zoroastrian Pantheon, one of whom was Mithra. The tolerance of the Parthian kings extended beyond the ancient worships of the Empire to proselytizing foreign religions, especially Judaism and Christianity. In Adiabene, if we may trust the Jewish tradition, they did not demur when the ruling dynasty embraced Judaism, and any persecution of the Christians in the same vassal-state was the work of the local Magi and not of the central government or its representatives. Little is known of the intellectual life of the Parthian Empire. The citizens of the Greek cities kept intact their native language and probably gave to their children a Greek education or at least an education in Greek. Many citizens of Seleucia on the Eulaeus (Susa) must have been fond of Greek poetry, to judge from the four poems that have been discovered there, and no doubt they studied the classical poets of Greece in order to be able themselves to compose. The excellent style of King Artabanus' letter to the magistrates of that city shows that the Greek secretaries of the Parthian kings, who were probably of Mesopotamian origin, were well trained in schools which kept alive the Seleucid traditions of Greek rhetoric. A like familiarity with the Greek language and the same degree of education are shown by the much more modest scribes of Doura, who are found writing a correct Greek style as late as the second century AD. The same is true for Media Atropatene. Literary and stylistic interests seem to have been keener in Babylonia than in upper Mesopotamia. No metrical inscriptions in Greek comparable to those of Susa have been found at Doura, and most of the non-official inscriptions show that the population at large—in this unlike the professional scribes—spoke a highly debased and semitized form of Greek. The Greeks of the Parthian Empire did not lose their interest in learning. Apollodorus of Artemita, the late Hellenistic historian of Parthia, had successors of his own type, men who were born in Parthia but wrote for the educated people of the Graeco-Roman world. Such was Dionysius of Charax, the geographer, author of a description of the world, who wrote for Augustus a monograph on Parthia and Arabia. Such was another writer used by the elder Pliny, Isidore of Charax, whose date and identity are uncertain. We still possess his Parthian Stations, in which he describes the great military and caravan route down the Euphrates and across Parthia to India. It is a work doubtless based on Parthian official itineraries, and we have quotations from his other writings in Pliny, Athenaeus and the author of the Macrobioi. The last quotation shows that he gave lists of kings of Parthia, Persis, Elymais, Spasinu Charax and the Yemen. The list of kings of Charax which goes down to a time which coincides with the gap in our numismatic evidence between AD 71/2 and 100/1 may be taken as evidence that Isidore was a contemporary of Pliny and not to be identified with Dionysius of Charax. Finally a similar work may have been used by Josephus, perhaps a Parthica written by a hellenized Jew of Mesopotamia in which special attention was paid to the destinies of the Jews and of the kings of Adiabene who were converts to Judaism. To the same class of Mesopotamian educated Greeks belonged Maes Titianus and his agents. Greek education and Greek learning certainly affected some of the natives, both Iranians and non-Iranians. The most splendid example is the great teacher Mani, who certainly had a good Greek philosophical training. But we are not entitled to ascribe exclusively to Greek influence the literary activity of those subjects of the Parthian kings who never received a Greek education. Thus it is improbable that the acquaintance with Parthian history of Abel the Teacher, the source of Mesiha-zekha, who wrote about AD 550 a local ecclesiastical chronicle of Arbela, was derived from Greek works. It probably goes back to a Parthian chronicle or annals which embodied the official tradition of Parthian history. It may be assumed that similar chronicles existed in most of the vassal-kingdoms and formed with the Parthian annals the historical substructure of such works as the life of Addai, the apostle of Adiabene and Osrhoene, and the lists of Arsacid kings which are found in Dionysius of Tellmahre for Osrhoene and in Mar Abas and Moses of Choarene for Armenia, as well as those cited in the Macrobioi. It was probably not Greeks who kept the itineraries of the Parthian kingdom which were used by Isidore and the agents of Maes Titianus. All these semi-official, semi-literary records perished when the Sassanians replaced the Arsacids, and yet their memory survived—for the West in the works of Western historians, for the East in the epic poetry, whose most glorious heroes are reflections of the Arsacids and of their vassals. More or less the same conditions prevailed with Parthian art. As in the field of religion we must clearly distinguish between the imperial art of the court and the Iranian art of the Arsacid period in general on the one hand and the art of the various non-Iranian kingdoms and satrapies of Parthia on the other. Both the Iranian, and what may be called the provincial, art of the Parthian Empire are very little known and studied, but an analysis of the extant monuments shows that the common view of Parthian art as a degeneration of Greek art is mistaken. A peculiar and original Iranian art, which included a flourishing imperial art, did exist and shows but very few Greek elements. This Iranian art exercised a strong influence both on the art of the non-Iranian parts of the empire and on that of its eastern neighbors, especially China. What we know of the provincial art of Parthia and its Iranian features is derived from the many objects found in North India and in Mesopotamia, especially in Babylonia, at Susa, at Hatra, at Assur and at Doura. The greatest contribution that the Parthian Empire made to art was in the field of architecture. The excavations of the Parthian city of Assur and the study of the Parthian monuments there and at Hatra prove that the so-called liwan-palace with its peculiar plan and stucco decoration which is so typical for the Sassanian period is of Parthian origin. All the essential parts of the palace and all the peculiar features of its decoration are brilliantly exemplified in both cities, and they certainly had a deep influence on Mesopotamian architecture of the same period as we find it in Babylon and at Doura. How far back we can trace the development of the liwan-palace in the pre-Parthian period it is difficult to say. The same is true of another peculiar form of Iranian architecture—the fire-temple. It is certain that the Sassanian fire-temples repeat the plan and the system of decoration of earlier temples of the same type. It is beyond doubt that both sculpture and painting flourished in Iranian lands in the Parthian period. Very few monuments are extant, but they suffice to show that both religious and secular sculpture and painting were cultivated in the Parthian Empire by Iranian artists. In the field of religious art may be adduced the religious paintings and sculptures of Doura and the religious sculptures of Palmyra, especially the recently discovered painted bas-reliefs of the temple of Bel. They cannot be derived from either Greek or Assyrian art alone. Indeed, their style and composition show striking resemblances with those of scattered religious sculptures of the Parthian period in Iranian lands and of the impressive religious sculptures of Nimrud Dagh of half-Iranian Commagene in the first century BC, both of which show many purely Achaemenid features. It may, therefore, be suggested that the religious paintings and sculptures of Doura and Palmyra are to be regarded as products of late Iranian art which flourished in both Iranian and Syro-Anatolian regions in Hellenistic times and was ultimately a direct continuation of the late Graeco-Persian art of the fifth, fourth and third centuries BC. The same is true of secular art. The portraits of the kings on the Parthian coins have always been regarded as products of genuine Greek art. Yet the style of these portraits is Graeco-Iranian rather than Greek, as is proved by a comparison with products of Graeco-Iranian toreutics in South Russia and with the Graeco-Iranian sculptures of Nimrud Dagh. A glance at the contemporary coins of the Hellenistic kings will suffice to show how deep is the difference between them and the coins of the Parthian dynasty. Far more Iranian are secular sculptures and paintings, most of which illustrate episodes in the heroic epos of Iran. The bas-relief of Bihistun which represents the duel between Gotarzes and Meherdates was certainly not the first of its kind and shows no connection with Greek art. The same type of composition is found in South Russia in graves of the early Roman period in painting and in many graffiti and dipinti on the walls of temples and private houses in Doura. The same is true of another favorite motive of epic art in general—the hunting-scene—which recurs in this Iranian treatment at Doura, on bas-reliefs of the Iranian border lands and in South Russia. They must derive, like the compositions of religious art, from late Achaemenid art, for the same types of composition and the same style are found on the Graeco-Persian gems. Finally a third favorite motif of epic art—the banquet scene—is often found on monuments of the Parthian period, in the bone-carvings of Olbia, the silver cups of Sacastene, the paintings and sculptures of Palmyra, Babylonia and Doura. This, too, goes back to the art of the Achaemenid period. It is not the composition only that is characteristic for the Iranian art of the Parthian period. The monuments mentioned above show stylistic peculiarities which set them in a class apart. Some of these are typical of Oriental art in general; others, however, are peculiar to the Parthian period. One of these last is the flying gallop, another the strict frontality of the human figures, next come the elongated proportions of the bodies, a peculiar schematic treatment of the folds of their dress, a far-reaching neglect of the study of the human body and a growing linearity in its representation. Some minor peculiarities like special treatment of eyes, hair, beards and moustaches are equally typical of Parthian art. But its most striking peculiarity is the way in which intense spiritual rather than intellectual life is reflected especially in the eyes. Of this the figures of the priests of the well-known Conon fresco at Doura give a fine example, but the same trait is found in almost all the religious sculptures and paintings and in the portraits of this period both in the Iranian and the non-Iranian parts of the Parthian Empire. The silver plate of this period presents new and peculiar features both in style and composition. A new type of plant-ornament takes hold of it, and figure compositions which show at the beginning strong Greek influences become gradually more and more iranized and use all the motives of the great secular art of Parthia: battles and hunting-scenes and banquets. A set of Sacian silver cups is especially rich and typical in its development. The same is true of the jewels of the Parthian period, especially of those of heavy silver inset with colored stones which characterize both Palmyrene and Gandhara sculpture (both men and women are represented wearing them) and of which two sets were found in Doura and some examples at Taxila. They all go back to Greek originals but show a development and tendencies of their own which lead gradually to the creation of new types, such as large and massive round and trapezoidal fibulae, characteristic chains with medallions, amulets and the like. One of the most striking features of this jewelry is its fondness for polychromy, which seems to be an ancient peculiarity of Iranian jewelry and may have been borrowed from Iran by Syria, where it flourished in the late Hellenistic and the Roman period. Finally, the Mesopotamian countries use a special type of glazed pottery different both from the contemporary Egyptian and Hellenistic glazed pottery and from the similar ware of China. Both the forms and ornaments of the pots and the type of the glaze show that Mesopotamian pottery forms a class in itself which attained such a rich development later in the Sassanian and Arab periods. It is worthy of note that glaze was used in the Parthian times not only for vases but also for various types of coffins. In conclusion it may be said that most of the types of composition and, in great measure, the style of Parthian art were inherited and developed by the artists of the Sassanian period. Sassanian art thus appears, not as a sudden renascence of what was Achaemenid, but as a natural continuation of the Iranian art of the Parthian period.