History

The Parthians were a nomadic Iranian people from the region of Parthia (modern northeastern Iran and southern Turkmenistan) who exploited the collapse of the Seleucid Empire to establish their own dynasty around 247 BC under Arsaces I. Within a century they had seized Media, Mesopotamia, and Persia, creating an empire that rivalled Rome.

Old Nisa served as the dynasty’s original sacred centre — not a civilian city, but a heavily fortified ceremonial complex containing the royal treasury, dynastic shrines, and possibly the tombs of the earliest Arsacid kings. Its probable name, Mithridatkert, honours Mithridates I (r. 171–138 BC), who transformed the Parthian state from a regional power into an empire stretching from the Euphrates to Bactria.

The Parthians practised a remarkable cultural synthesis: their court art was Hellenistic in style (the rhytons are proof), their administration used Aramaic script inherited from the Achaemenid Persians, their religion blended Zoroastrian and local Iranian traditions, and their political organisation drew on both Iranian tribal traditions and Greek city-state models. Old Nisa is a physical record of this hybrid civilisation.

Soviet archaeologists began systematic excavations of Old Nisa in the 1940s, continuing through the 1980s. After Turkmenistan’s independence in 1991, work continued intermittently. The extraordinary finds from the site — rhytons, sculptures, ostraca — are now held primarily in the National Museum of Turkmenistan in Ashgabat and in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.