This research project focuses on Iranian elites during the Hellenistic period. It aims to reassess the place of Iranians within the fabric of Macedonian imperial hegemony, from the rise of Argead Macedon in the 4th century to the collapse of the Seleukid Empire as a military superpower after 150 BCE.

The basic idea is this: after Alexander the Great defeated the Achaemenids in 330, Iran and the Near East were ruled by Macedonian emperors for almost two centuries. But in the later Hellenistic period, local Iranian dynasties reestablished themselves. These dynasties however—the Arsakids of Parthia, Frataraka of Parsa (Persis), Mithradatids of Pontos, Orontids of Kommagene, and others—used an idiom of monarchical representation that was profoundly different from that used previously by the Persian Achaemenids. So what happened during the period in between? This question follows from the reconsideration, in this researcher’s earlier work, of the Seleukid Empire as a negotiated enterprise and a dynamic network of personal relations converging at the (mobile) imperial court. By moving away from the conventional conceptualization of the empire as a bounded, territorial state, a more dynamic model is feasible to explain cultural change in the Hellenistic World—a model in which imperial-local interactions are neither top-down nor bottom-up, but entangled.

Working from this new perspective on empire as a web of relations, which is part of a broader ‘Imperial Turn’ in the study of world history, the research considers the place of Iranians within the Macedonian empires of the Argeads and the Seleukids. Alexander the Great famously co-opted Persian nobles and initiated a policy of intermarriage between the Macedonian nobility and leading Iranian families. Alexander’s ‘Iranian policy’ is considered a failure in conventional scholarship. But the Seleukids successfully continued this policy. It is now becoming more accepted that Iranians were pivotal to Macedonian rule and military power in the East, while new studies on the Hellenistic ‘East’ have shown that Iran and Central Asia were much longer and more effectively integrated into the Seleukid fabric of empire than previously thought. Like Alexander, the Seleukids too used huge numbers of Iranian cavalry for their campaigns. The military significance of Iranian troops, as well as ongoing intermarriage with Iranian dynasties, suggest a strong presence of Iranian nobles at the Seleukid court. The growing importance of Iranians in the Seleukid Empire eventually led to what may be termed ‘the Persianization of Hellenistic Iran’, that is: the emergence of Iranicate royal idiom among local rulers in the context of the gradual ‘vassalization’ of the Seleukid Empire.

In studying the evolution of Middle Iranian dynastic identities, special attention will be given to the imperial court: the mobile contact zone where local elites met and interacted. That the Seleukid court had such agency is evident from the ‘globalized’ nature of the Iranian ‘revival’, and the local dynasties’ preference for monarchical idiom derived from the fourth-century Aegean kings and satraps, viz., the cultural context in which ‘Hellenistic’ kingship originally developed. A more difficult question, yet to be addressed in both Hellenistic and Iranian scholarship, is how the imperial dynasty itself was affected by intermarriage with Iranians and generations-long dealings with Iranian troops in their armies. Did the Seleukids eventually become ‘Iranian’ or did they choose to remain ‘Greek’, an if so, why? And can it be really assumed that the imagery used in Seleukid monarchical representation was also thought of by contemporaries as ‘Greek’, and foreign, as we are now wont to do? Or have modern categories of national identity been projected retrospectively on past visual styles? 

This research is part of a bigger project entitled ‘Iranians in the Hellenistic world’. It aims to investigate the impact of western Achaemenid elites upon the development of Hellenistic imperial culture and royal style. Specifically it endeavors to place the rise of Argead Macedon in the context of the late Achaemenid Aegean.

The entangled world of satraps and local rulers in fourth-century Asia Minor, with its many cross-cultural interactions, has been rightly described as a West Achaemenid koine. As a former Achaemenid satellite state, the Argead dynasty too participated in this world of interconnected elites and courts even after its breakaway from direct Achaemenid control. It has often been noted that the closest model for early Hellenistic kingship, apart from Macedonian customs and traditions, was the world of the western satrap-kings, in particular the rulers of the Hekatomnid dynasty, and among them most of all the ‘philhellene’ empire-builder Mausollos. But this has never been the subject of a focused historical study.

The research project will now examine these dynastic entanglements (1) by charting the networks connecting the Argead court with the households of the other Aegean dynasties on the basis of narrative sources, and (2) by studying the development of royal and religious iconography on the coinage, material culture and inscriptions of the Aegean kings and satraps from a comparative perspective. With the aid of globalization theory, and working from the Imperial Turn in current historical studies, the research moves beyond the traditional understanding of the Achaemenid Empire as a bounded, centralized nation state avant la lettre and instead considers the empire as a dynamic, ever-shifting network of interactions between various individuals and interest groups.

The final aim is not simply to write a history of cultural developments as such, let alone to describe the so-called ‘influence’ of one ‘culture’ upon the other. Abandoning modern ideas about ‘East’ and ‘West’ and the concomitant conceptualization of ‘Greece’ and the ‘Near East’ as distinct cultural zones (as in the ever-popular notions of a ‘Near Eastern influence on Classical Greece’ or the ‘Hellenization of the Near East’), the aim is to learn how cultural exchanges worked in the Achaemenid Aegean and why they took place, without the restrictions imposed by preconceived cultural and national categories.