Arsacid Asia: Sovereignty, Subjection, and the Making of the Silk Roads

Abstract

This is a dissertation in six chapters arguing that the Arsacid dynasty imposed coercive ideologies and institutions upon the political communities of Asia, and so generated the conditions which catalysed the emergence of diplomatic and commercial networks across Eurasia, traditionally called the “Silk Roads”. Chapter 1 establishes a new periodization of Arsacid imperialism, describing the major shifts in Arsacid sovereign and spatial ideologies from around 247 BCE to 225 CE. Chapter 2 argues that the Arsacids used ceremonial architecture to aid the creation of a continuous dynastic identity and to coerce the courtly elite into dependent status. Chapter 3 establishes the administrative hierarchies of each rural agricultural region, the settlement and road networks of these regions, and the Arsacids' means of revenue collection. Chapter 4 exposes Arsacid military violence towards the cities of Mesopotamia, shows their establishment of imperial officials and institutions within cities, and suggests that the Arsacids, in choosing to govern through Greek civic elites, caused the demise of millennia old Sumero-Akkadian elite culture. Chapter 5 describes which indigenous kingdoms were subjected by the Arsacids and then demonstrates that the Arsacids staged repeated conquests of indigenous kingdoms as well as interfered with indigenous dynastic succession. Chapter 6 suggests that the Arsacids’ coercive imperial ideologies and institutions, which enabled the formation of the “Silk Roads”, were refused by the peoples of the southern central Asian steppe, the Jewish communities of Babylonia, and the peoples of the Syrian-Mesopotamian steppe.