Scene from “Apotheosis” of the Parthian frieze of Ephesos, on marble, c. AD 166, 186 × 163 cm, Vienna, Ephesos Museum.
“But news from the east…shall alarm him, and he shall go out with great fury to destroy and devote many to destruction.”
- Daniel 11:44
Antiochus IV Epiphanes was humiliated and enraged. As ruler of the Greek Seleucid empire based in modern Turkey, Antiochus had set out with his army in 167 BC on a campaign against his Egyptian rival, but was turned back by the intervention of a Roman emissary. Erroneous reports had spread to the Promised Land regarding the Greek king’s alleged assassination, and Jewish factions opposed to Greek influence quickly occupied Jerusalem, forcing the high priest (appointed by Antiochus) to flee. Nicknamed “the Mad,” Antiochus arrived in the Holy City in a state of bloodlust. He quickly restored his man to the high priesthood and ordered his troops on a murderous rampage throughout Jerusalem and its environs, killing 40,000 men, women, and children in just 3 days. An idol of the Greek god Zeus was erected in the holy temple, and all Jews were forbidden to show outward obedience to God’s commands in the Torah.
The bloodshed and forced apostacy was too much for the priestly Hasmonean family, known as the Maccabees. Their leader, Judas Maccabeus, began a successful insurgency against the Greek oppressors, thwarting each successive commander that Antiochus sent to quell the rebellion. But the Maccabees of Judea weren’t Antiochus’ only headache. “News from the east” came to the Greek king while he was in Judea that Mithridates I the Great, King of Parthia in modern-day Iran, was taking advantage of Antiochus’ preoccupation by seizing key trade cities, cutting off the Seleucids from their easternmost provinces. Antiochus left his top general in charge of the Judean campaign to march east with his army. After some initial success against his eastern rival, the Mad King mysteriously died of disease in 164 BC. The Seleucid army withdrew from the east, and the Greek occupation surrendered and withdrew from Jerusalem the same year. The Jewish people would rule an independent Jerusalem for the first time since the Babylonian conquest more than 300 years earlier, and an ongoing rivalry between the kings of modern Turkey and Iran was fated to continue.
SELEUCIDS AND PARTHIANS
The historic rivalry between the kings of modern Turkey and Iran traces back to the conquest of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC. The young Greek king was a master tactician, managing to conquer most of the known world by the age of 32. He toppled the once-mighty Persian Empire in modern Iran and moved into South Asia before eventually turning back, dying suddenly of disease in Babylon. Alexander’s empire was split between his top generals, with the region of Babylon going to Seleucus I in 323 BC. From there, the Greek general-turned-king conquered most of the Middle East, with his empire eventually stretching east across modern Iran and Afghanistan to Pakistan, and north across modern Syria and Turkey. The Seleucid emperors would rule from the Greek city of Antioch in modern Turkey, while the descendants of Ptolemy, another leading general in Alexander’s empire, ruled from Alexandria, Egypt. The governors of the old Persian homeland remained as vassals to the Seleucids for a time, but the seeds of a geographical rivalry had been planted, and it would not be long before they grew to bear fruit.
In 246 BC, Seleucus II came to the throne founded by his grandfather. The Greek governors of Parthia and Bactria, located in modern-day Iran and Afghanistan, took advantage of the transition in power and declared independence from the Seleucid Empire. Before the armies of the young emperor could march east, Parthia was suddenly conquered in 238 BC by an ethnic Iranian tribe who had swept into the province from the northern steppes of Central Asia. Taking the name of their new homeland, the Parthians made an alliance with the Greek governor in Afghanistan, thereby severing the eastern third of the Seleucid Empire from its ruler in Antioch. Seleucus was preoccupied with other campaigns in Egypt and Asia Minor (Western Turkey), allowing the Parthians to expand further in the third century, before the Seleucid king died in 225 BC. The eastern provinces would remain in Parthian hands for almost 40 years.
After the death of Seleucus II and a brief reign by an older son, his younger son Antiochus III was crowned emperor of a disintegrating Seleucid empire. The Greek provinces of Media and Persis, also located in modern Iran, rebelled under the new emperor in 222 BC. Antiochus marched east with a massive expeditionary force, swiftly recapturing both territories before returning west to subdue the Ptolemies of Egypt. Then in 209, Antiochus returned east to Parthia, forcing the Iranian king to surrender, before pushing east to reclaim Bactria (Afghanistan) and continuing back towards India. For his success in recapturing most of his great-grandfather’s original domain in the East, the Seleucid king earned the honorific title that his Greek predecessor bore a century before, becoming Antiochus "the Great.” But his later campaigns in the West to retake Greece from the Romans were ill-advised, and the great king died in battle in 187 BC. The eastern provinces began to once again reclaim their independence, and the Parthian kingdom began its ascendency.
After Antiochus IV Epiphanes died in 164 BC and his eastern campaign was aborted, the Parthians gradually began subduing the surrounding Seleucid lands. Mithridates I, the same Parthian king who had sent the Mad King “news from the east,” took Media after his rival’s death, followed by the city of Seleucia, the eastern capital of the empire. The Seleucid kings attempted two major campaigns to retake their eastern provinces, but both failed, and the new Parthian Empire began to push out, reaching west past the Euphrates River and east to the Indus River Valley by the turn of the first century BC. The Seleucid Empire was reduced to a rump state surrounding Antioch in modern Turkey, and would soon be annexed by the heir of the Greeks in the West, the Roman Republic.
ROMANS AND SASSANIDS
After taking the old Seleucid territories of Asia Minor (Turkey) and Syria, Roman general Pompey the Great went on to annex the divided Hasmonean state of Judea in 63 BC. However, unlike their Greek predecessors, the Roman legions would never take root east of the Euphrates River. At the Battle of Carrhae in modern Armenia, the Parthians dealt Rome a major defeat in 53 BC. The Roman Republic (soon succeeded by the Roman Empire) wouldn’t attempt another campaign against Parthia for almost 170 years.
After taking the imperial throne in Rome, Trajan annexed Arabia and prioritized the conquest of Parthian lands further east. The emperor managed to cross the Euphrates River and take the Parthian capital of Ctesiphon in AD 113, appointing a vassal king to rule there. However, Trajan died only 4 years later, and his successor, Hadrian, considered his Parthian holdings too far-flung and costly to administer. Roman forces withdraw across the Euphrates shortly afterward. The legions would cross the Euphrates in campaigns against the Armenians and Parthians twice more in AD 165 and 195, but after sacking Ctesiphon in both instances, the Romans did not remain as an occupying force. Once again, the ancient kings of modern Iran would not be overthrown by Greco-Roman armies from the west, but by a local competitor.
By the beginning of the third century AD, the Sassanid kingdom was expanding quickly from what is today southern Iran. Taking advantage of a divided Parthian kingdom, Sassanid king Ardashir I took the Parthian capital in AD 224, receiving the ancient Persian imperial title of “King of Kings,” and consolidating Sassanid control over Parthian lands. At the same time, the the Roman Empire was fragmenting, split at the end of the third century between East and West before being reunited again by the first Holy Roman Emperor, Constantine I. The young emperor moved the capital of his empire in AD 324 from Rome to the city of Byzantium along the Bosporus Strait in modern Turkey, at the gateway between Europe and Asia. Renaming the city “New Rome,” it was eventually named Constantinople in his honor. Even after “Old Rome” fell to the barbarians in the fifth century, the Eastern Roman Empire (or Byzantine Empire) would endure for almost another 1,000 years, and Constantinople would remain the richest and most populous city in Europe for most of that time.
After co-opting the Parthian Empire, the Sassanids almost immediately began challenging the Romans on the western side of the Euphrates, beginning a rivalry that would stretch over four centuries. Western Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) would change hands several times between the third and seventh centuries. The modern territories of Syria, Iraq and Armenia once again became the battlegrounds of the ancient kings of Iran and Turkey, until a new power exploded from the deserts of Arabia, changing the face of the Middle East forever.
