The Parthian-era city

Under Arsacid 'Parthian' rule, Europos remained formally a Greek, or rather Macedonian city-state, its elite of colonial descent permanently dominating the Aramaic-speaking bulk of the urban and rural population. However, outward appearances masked a more complex reality.

The Parthian empire was ruled by a King of Kings drawn from the Arsacid royal house. It was a multi-cultural empire, in which Macedonians, Greeks and Greek culture remained prestigious. The subject states comprising the empire generally governed themselves, subject to light royal supervision.

Under Arsacid dominion, Europos grew to be a modest but fairly prosperous city-state. Its early explorer Rostovtzeff saw it as a ‘caravan city’, prospering on the trade in spices and silks from the Far East to the Mediterranean world which, by the last century BC, was entirely controlled by Rome. However, we now know most of this caravan traffic went by other routes. Rather the city became a centre of manufacture, trade and administration for this fertile and populous stretch of the Middle Euphrates valley--which still also served as a corridor between Greek- and then Roman-ruled Syria, and Parthian-ruled Babylonia. Europos also developed close economic, social and probably political relations with the real caravan city of Palmyra (or Tadmor, another city with alternative names) at an oasis to the west. Via the Euphrates and Palmyra, increasingly the Arsacid-ruled city was economically networked into the Roman world.

As part of the Arsacid empire, Europos always remained formally a Greek-style city-state. Nonetheless most of its population, and much of its culture, clearly derived from the Syro-Mesopotamian societies of the local region. While Greek was the language of governance, on the streets most people spoke Aramaic and related Semitic dialects--and called their town Dura.

Europos was no democracy. The mass of Aramaic-speaking Durenes were subordinate to the aristocracy of privileged full citizens: the Greek-speaking Europaioi. During the second century AD, a boule (city council) was drawn from these men, but executive power in Arsacid times lay in the hands of hereditary dynasts ruling at the pleasure of the King of Kings. One of the families of Europaioi provided successive strategoi ('magistrates'), usually also entrusted with the nominally separate role of royal overseer, so bearing the double title of strategos kai epistates. These rulers were drawn from the House of Lysias, a 'house' in both the dynastic and architectural senses. Their mansion, conveniently close to the main administrative building (strategeion), expanded to fill an entire city block.

The division looks stark between the Greek-speaking colonial elite of Macedonian descent and the mass of subordinated Aramaic-speaking Durenes. However, the reality was more subtle. From Alexander's time onwards, the ruling Macedonians and Greeks in Asia took local wives; their descendants were of mixed heritage. At Dura, Macedonian ancestry and Greek education became exclusive marks of local status rather than ethnic distinction. Surviving texts show that, like the city itself, later generations of full-citizen Europaioi would often have both Macdedonian or Greek and Aramaic names, used in different contexts. The material remains of the Arsacid-era city tell a similar story. Europaioi generally wore local or 'Parthian' clothing rather than Mediterranean dress, while their houses also look Mesopotamian in pattern, except sometimes for details like a little Greek-style plaster decoration.