It appears that Dura Europos was occupied by the Parthians towards the end of the second century BC, but it is difficult to be more precise than this despite the tendency in many publications to suggest a date of 113 BC.37 The date of 113bc for the Parthian occupation of Dura Europos was first suggested by Bellinger on numismatic grounds and has been largely accepted ever since. This date was, by Bellinger’s own admission, a very tenuous one and a review of the method by which he arrived at it demonstrates the problematic nature of his conclusion. The date relied on the identification of countermarks on coins from the mint at Antioch from the first reign of Antiochus VIII (120-113bc).38 The countermarks were
Figure 4.6 View of the Euphrates at Dura Europos with tower 5 in foreground.
Identified by Bellinger as Parthian, although he admitted that the nature of the countermarks was not certain. The countermarks were limited to a total of six coins out of 90 found from the first reign of Antiochus VIII, which ended in 113 BC. The catalogue dates these coins no more specifically than to the years of the first reign of Antiochus VIII (120-113 Bc), and the assumption that the six countermarked coins in question date to the last year of his first reign is no more than guesswork. Potentially problematic also to Bellinger’s conclusion is the presence of the same marking on one earlier coin from the joint reign of Antiochus VIII and Cleopatra (125-120 bc).39 Bellinger’s argument was ultimately circular, as he claimed ‘[b]ut if we abandon 113 there is no other date for which we can find numismatic support’.40
The beginning of Parthian control of Dura Europos can only be a matter for speculation in the context of wider historical events in Mesopotamia and Syria as the site itself provides no convincing evidence for the beginning of Parthian occupation. There is a general dearth of datable evidence from Dura Europos from the late second century BC until the beginning of a major building phase in the second half of the first century BC.41 The Parthians were not clearly in control of Mesopotamia until the early years of the first century BC, and the frontier between Rome and Parthia seems to have been fluid for much of the first century BC.42 After the Parthians captured Seleucia on the Tigris in the late 140sBC, the Seleucid Empire steadily lost territory to the Parthians. At the time Sulla met with a representative of Mithridates I of Parthia in 92bc it seems that Rome’s influence was felt on the upper Euphrates and everything below it was under some form of Parthian influence.43
The disintegration of the Seleucid Empire gathered pace during the prolonged civil war of Antiochus VIII and Antiochus IX (120-96bc) with many of the coastal cities of Seleucid Syria obtaining formal recognition of their freedom between 111 bc and 81 bc.44 After Pompey’s establishment of the province of Syria c. 65 BC, the upper Euphrates and a section of the middle Euphrates was conceived as a boundary between Roman and Parthian interests, though we saw in Chapter 1 that no Roman fortifications appeared on the river for another 130 years. By the end of the first century BC the Khabur may have acted as a type of boundary, but we know nothing of its extent and nature.45 Dura Europos came under Parthian control at some stage in the process of the Seleucid disintegration of the late second/early first century BC, and it was well within the territory considered to have been under Parthian suzerainty during the first century BC. We know little of the nature of Parthian control at the city until the late first century AD, but it is clear that the city enjoyed prosperity during the Parthian period. Much of this was due to the city’s links with the world of the Roman Near East rather than with the Parthians.
World History
