title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: As a pro-European party, the Liberal Democrats tended to fare badly at European Parliament elections. In the 2004 local elections their share of the vote was 29% (placing them second, ahead of Labour) and 14.9% in the simultaneous European Parliament elections (putting them in fourth place behind the UK Independence Party). The results of the 2009 European elections were similar with the party achieving a vote of 28% in the county council elections yet achieving only 13.7% in the Europeans despite the elections taking place on the same day. The 2009 elections did however see the party gain one seat from UKIP in the East Midlands region taking the number of representatives in the parliament up to 11. In 2014 the party lost ten seats, leaving them with one MEP. Campaigning on a pro-Remain platform with the slogan "Bollocks to Brexit", the party achieved their best ever results in the 2019 election, taking 19.6% of the vote and winning 16 seats.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: In the European Parliament from 2004 to 2019, the party sat with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) political group, which favoured further strengthening European integration. The group's leader for seven and a half years was the South West England MEP Graham Watson, who was also the first Liberal Democrat to be elected to the European Parliament when he won the old Somerset and North Devon constituency in 1994. The group's current leader is the former Prime Minister of Belgium Guy Verhofstadt. Following the 2019 European elections, the Liberal Democrats joined Renew Europe, the successor group to the ALDE group.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: The inaugural Scottish Parliament election was held in 1999 and resulted in the Scottish Liberal Democrats winning a total of 17 seats. The Scottish Liberal Democrats subsequently formed a coalition government with Scottish Labour. Scottish Liberal Democrat leader Jim Wallace became deputy first minister of the new Scottish Executive, a position he held until his resignation as party leader in 2005. Wallace served briefly as acting first minister following the death in office of Donald Dewar in 2000 and the resignation of Henry McLeish in 2001.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: The Scottish Liberal Democrats again won 17 seats in the 2003 Scottish Parliament election and again formed a coalition government with Scottish Labour. Nicol Stephen was elected party leader in 2005. Stephen served as deputy first minister for two years. The Scottish Liberal Democrats exited government in 2007 despite losing only one seat in the 2007 Scottish Parliament election. The Scottish National Party emerged from the election as the largest party and formed a minority administration. Nicol Stephen resigned as party leader the following year.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: Tavish Scott was elected party leader in 2008. Scott resigned following what he described as "disastrous" results in the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, in which the Scottish Liberal Democrats were reduced to five seats. Scott claimed that the party had been "damaged" in Scotland by its decision to form a coalition government with the Conservative Party in 2010. He further blamed the coalition government's austerity programme. Willie Rennie, who became party leader in 2011, also blamed the unpopularity of the Conservative–Liberal Democrat coalition.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: The Scottish Liberal Democrats contested two Scottish Parliament elections under the leadership of Willie Rennie. The party again returned a total of five seats in the 2016 Scottish Parliament election. The Scottish Liberal Democrats recorded its worst ever result in a Scottish Parliament election by returning its lowest ever tally of four seats and achieving its lowest ever share of the vote in the 2021 Scottish Parliament election. Willie Rennie resigned as leader and was succeeded by Alex Cole-Hamilton in 2021.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: The first elections to the newly created National Assembly for Wales (now Senedd) were in 1999; the Liberal Democrats took six seats in the inaugural Assembly; Welsh Labour won a plurality of seats, but without an overall majority. In October 2000, following a series of close votes, the parties formed a coalition, with the Liberal Democrat leader in the assembly, Michael German, becoming the Deputy First Minister. The deal lasted until the 2003 election, when Labour won enough seats to be able to govern outright.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: The party had polled consistently in the first four elections to the National Assembly, returning six representatives in the first three elections and five in the 2011 election, thereby establishing itself as the fourth party in Wales behind Labour, the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru, but fell to just one seat in 2016. Between 2008 and 2016, the leader of the Welsh Liberal Democrats was Kirsty Williams, the Assembly Member (now Member of the Senedd (MS)) for Brecon and Radnorshire, the Assembly's first female party leader.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: Presidents chair the Federal Board. They are elected for a two-year term, starting on 1 January and ending on 31 December. They may serve a maximum of two terms.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: Eleven Liberal Democrat Members of Parliament (MPs) were elected to the House of Commons at the 2019 general election. Since then, Sarah Green was elected at the 2021 Chesham and Amersham by-election, Helen Morgan was elected at the 2021 North Shropshire by-election, and Richard Foord was elected at the 2022 Tiverton and Honiton by-election, bringing the current total to 14.


title: Liberal Democrats (UK)

text: In 2006, Whiteley et al. noted that the Liberal Democrats were "a major force in contemporary British politics". Although throughout its history, the party had been relegated to third party status, they argued that it had the capability of breaking through to become one of the country's main two parties if proportional representation (or something like it) was introduced, or if either the Conservatives or Labour were severely weakened by splitting in two.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Brian Manion Dennehy (; July 9, 1938 – April 15, 2020) was an American actor of stage, television, and film. He won two Tony Awards, an Olivier Award, and a Golden Globe, and received six Primetime Emmy Award nominations. Dennehy had roles in over 180 films and in many television and stage productions. His film roles included "First Blood" (1982), "Gorky Park" (1983), "Silverado" (1985), "Cocoon" (1985), "F/X" (1986), "Presumed Innocent" (1990), "Romeo + Juliet" (1996), "Ratatouille" (2007), and "Knight of Cups" (2015). Dennehy won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Miniseries or Television Film for his role as Willy Loman in the television film "Death of a Salesman" (2000).


title: Brian Dennehy

text: According to "Variety", Dennehy was "perhaps the foremost living interpreter" of playwright Eugene O'Neill's works on stage and screen. He had a decades long relationship with Chicago's Goodman Theatre where much of his O'Neill work originated. He also regularly played Canada's Stratford Festival, especially in works by William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett. He once gave credit for his award-winning performances to the play's authors: "When you walk with giants, you learn how to take bigger steps." Dennehy was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2010.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Brian Manion Dennehy was born on July 9, 1938, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Hannah (Manion), a nurse, and Edward Dennehy, a wire service editor for the Associated Press. He had two brothers, Michael and Edward. He was of Irish ancestry and was raised Catholic. The family relocated to Long Island, New York, where Dennehy attended Chaminade High School in the village of Mineola.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: He entered Columbia University in New York City on a football scholarship in the fall of 1956. He interrupted his college education to spend five years in the U.S. Marines. He was stationed in the U.S., Japan, and Korea. He returned to Columbia in 1960 and graduated in 1965 with a B.A. in history. While acting in regional theater he supported his family by working blue-collar jobs including driving a taxi and bartending. He hated his brief stint as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch in their Manhattan office in the mid-1970s. He later described how working odd hours allowed him to attend matinee theater performances that provided his acting education: "I never went to acting school—I was a truck driver and I used to go see everything I could see—Wednesday afternoons". In the 1970s, stage performances in New York led to television and film work.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy was primarily known as a dramatic actor. His breakthrough role was as the overzealous sheriff Will Teasle in "First Blood" (1982) opposite Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: His earlier films included several comedies, like "Semi-Tough" with Burt Reynolds (in which he portrayed a pro football player), "Foul Play" with Chevy Chase, and "10" with Dudley Moore (as a Manzanillo bartender). He later portrayed a corrupt sheriff in the western "Silverado" and an alien in "Cocoon", both released in 1985.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy had memorable supporting parts in such films as "Split Image" (1982), "Legal Eagles" (1986), "Cocoon: The Return (1988)", F/X: Murder By Illusion" (1986), "Presumed Innocent" (1990), "F/X2: The Deadly Art of Illusion" (1991) and "Prophet of Evil" (1993).


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy gradually became a valuable character actor but also achieved leading-man status in the thriller "Best Seller" (1987) co-starring James Woods. He also starred in the Peter Greenaway film "The Belly of an Architect", for which he won the Best Actor Award at the 1987 Chicago International Film Festival. Commenting upon this unusual venture, Dennehy said, "I've been in a lot of movies but this is the first film I've made."


title: Brian Dennehy

text: One of his most well-known roles came in the 1995 Chris Farley-David Spade comedy "Tommy Boy" as Big Tom Callahan. He also was reunited with his "10" co-star Bo Derek in "Tommy Boy", in which she played his wife.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy had a voice role in the animated movie "Ratatouille" as Django, father of the rat chef Remy. He appeared as the superior officer of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in the 2008 cop drama "Righteous Kill" and as the father of Russell Crowe in the 2010 suspense film "The Next Three Days".


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy starred as Clarence Darrow in "Alleged", a film based on the Scopes Monkey Trial, the famous court battle over the teaching of evolution in American public schools.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy's early professional acting career included small guest roles in such 1970s and 1980s series as "Kojak", "Lou Grant", "Dallas", "Dynasty", and "Hunter". He also appeared in an episode of "Miami Vice" during the 1987–88 season.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy portrayed Sergeant Ned T. "Frozen Chosen" Coleman in the television movie "A Rumor of War" (1980) opposite Brad Davis. He continued to appear in such high-profile television films as "Skokie" (1981), "Split Image" (1982), "Day One" (1989), and "A Killing in a Small Town" (1990) opposite Barbara Hershey. He also played the title role in HBO's "".


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy had a lead role as fire chief/celebrity dad Leslie "Buddy" Krebs in the short-lived 1982 series "Star of the Family". Despite his star power, that show was cancelled after a half-season. He starred in the crime drama "Jack Reed" TV movies.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy was nominated for Emmy Awards six times for his television movies. In 1992, he was nominated for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie for his performance as John Wayne Gacy in "To Catch a Killer", and he was nominated that same year in a different category, Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie, for "The Burden of Proof". Dennehy's other Emmy nominations were for his work in "A Killing in a Small Town", "Murder in the Heartland" (1993) and his work in the Showtime cable TV movie "Our Fathers" (2005), which was about the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal. In 2000, Dennehy was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Miniseries or TV Movie for a television presentation for his performance as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" which he had performed on Broadway. While not gaining the actor an Emmy win, the performance did, however, win him a Golden Globe Award. He also appeared as a recurring character in the NBC sitcom "Just Shoot Me!".


title: Brian Dennehy

text: A cartoon version of Dennehy appeared in the 1999 film "" as well as in an episode of "The Simpsons".


title: Brian Dennehy

text: In January 2007, he starred in the episode "" of "" as a retired criminal who wants to reconnect with his daughter and admit his crimes before dying of a terminal disease thus eventually clearing a wrongfully imprisoned inmate. In April 2008, Dennehy guest-starred as a Teamster boss in "Sandwich Day", an episode of the TV series "30 Rock". He guest-starred in a 2009 episode of "Rules of Engagement" as the father of the main character, Jeff.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy starred as Elizabeth Keen's grandfather on the NBC series "The Blacklist" since the third season until his death from sepsis. He is replaced by actor Ron Raines during the show's eighth season.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: In 2015 Dennehy co-starred in the Amazon Studios pilot "Cocked" with Jason Lee, Dreama Walker, Diora Baird, and Sam Trammell.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy also narrated many television programs including the Canadian-Irish docudrama "Death or Canada".


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy won two Tony Awards, both times for Best Lead Actor in a Play. His first win was for "Death of a Salesman" (for which he also won a Laurence Olivier Award for the production's London run), in 1999, and the second was for Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day's Journey into Night" in 2003. Both productions were directed by Robert Falls and were originally produced at the Goodman Theatre company in Chicago, Illinois. His acting in the "Salesman" was called "the performance of Dennehy's career".


title: Brian Dennehy

text: On stage, Dennehy frequently performed in the Chicago theater world, and made his Broadway debut in 1995 in Brian Friel's "Translations". In 1999, he was the first male performer to be voted the Sarah Siddons Award for his work in Chicago theater. He made a return to Broadway in 2007 as Matthew Harrison Brady in "Inherit the Wind" opposite Christopher Plummer, then returned again opposite Carla Gugino in a 2009 revival of Eugene O'Neill's "Desire Under the Elms".


title: Brian Dennehy

text: In fall 1992, he played the lead role of Hickey in Robert Falls's production of Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh" at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: In 2008, Dennehy appeared at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, in Stratford, Ontario, Canada, appearing in "All's Well That Ends Well" as the King of France, and a double bill of plays, Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" and Eugene O'Neill's "Hughie", where Dennehy reprised the role of Erie Smith. In 2010, he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame. In December 2010, he returned to Ireland to play Bull McCabe in the Olympia Theatre of Dublin's stage version of John B. Keane's "The Field".


title: Brian Dennehy

text: In 2011, Dennehy returned to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in the role of Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night". He also played Max in Harold Pinter's "The Homecoming", the first Pinter work to be produced there.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: In April through June 2012, he played the role of Larry Slade in the Eugene O'Neill play "The Iceman Cometh" at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, which he reprised in 2015 when the production, with most of the Goodman Theater production cast, was revived at the BAM Harvey Theater in Brooklyn, New York, New York.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy enlisted in the United States Marine Corps serving from 1958 to 1963, including playing football on Okinawa. In several interviews, he described being wounded in combat and repeatedly claimed to have served in Vietnam.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: In 1999, he apologized for misrepresenting his military record, stating: "I lied about serving in Vietnam, and I'm sorry. I did not mean to take away from the actions and the sacrifices of the ones who did really serve there ... I did steal valor. That was very wrong of me. There is no real excuse for that."


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy married for the first time while in the Marines in the early 1960s. Before he finished college he and his first wife had three daughters. Two of them became actresses, including Elizabeth Dennehy. After his first marriage ended in divorce in 1987, he married Jennifer Arnott, an Australian, in 1988, they had two children, a boy and a girl.


title: Brian Dennehy

text: Dennehy died on April 15, 2020, of cardiac arrest due to sepsis. in New Haven, Connecticut. He was survived by his wife and his five children.


title: Gaslit (TV series)

text: Gaslit is an American political thriller television limited series based on the first season of the podcast "Slow Burn" by Leon Neyfakh. It stars Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, Dan Stevens, Betty Gilpin, Shea Whigham, and Darby Camp. It premiered on Starz on April 24, 2022.


title: Gaslit (TV series)

text: The series is about the Watergate scandal and focuses on several untold stories, including Richard Nixon's subordinates, deranged zealots, and the whistleblowers who would eventually bring the whole enterprise crashing down. The story centers on Martha Mitchell, a celebrity Arkansan socialite and wife to Nixon’s loyal Attorney General, John N. Mitchell. Despite her party affiliation, she is the first person to publicly sound the alarm on Nixon's involvement in Watergate, causing both the presidency and her personal life to unravel. As attorney general, Mitchell is forced to choose between Martha and the president.


title: Gaslit (TV series)

text: "Gaslit" is a political thriller based on the first season of the "Slate" podcast "Slow Burn". The series from Universal Content Productions was announced in February 2020, with Sam Esmail attached to executive produce and Julia Roberts, Sean Penn, Armie Hammer and Joel Edgerton joining the cast. Edgerton was also set to direct the series along with his brother Nash Edgerton. Hammer would exit the series due to scheduling conflicts in January 2021. In February, the series was picked up by Starz, while both Edgerton brothers also exited the series. Matt Ross joined as the new director. Dan Stevens would be cast to replace Hammer in April, with Betty Gilpin, Darby Camp and Shea Whigham joining in May and Whigham replacing Edgerton.


title: Gaslit (TV series)

text: Filming began that same month in Los Angeles, California. In July 2021, Allison Tolman, J.C. Mackenzie, Chris Bauer, Chris Messina and Hamish Linklater joined the cast in recurring roles. Penn had refused to return to the series until all cast and crew on the production had the COVID-19 vaccine. In September, the studio and Penn reached a compromise where Penn would film his scenes in two weeks with a vaccinated production crew. Fourteen cast members were confirmed for recurring roles in October. On February 2, 2022, the series was given an April 24, 2022 premiere date. In an interview, Pickering said the series was not a "girlboss overcorrect of history" or a "Wikipedia run down" but that their goal was to accurately depict the historical events. "Anyone can go and read a book about this or the Wikipedia entry," Stevens said, "but there are human stories that illustrate the depth."


title: Gaslit (TV series)

text: Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 71 out of 100 based on 28 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Scots language

text: Scots (endonym: "Scots"; , ) is an Anglic language variety in the West Germanic language family, spoken in Scotland and parts of Ulster in the north of Ireland (where the local dialect is known as Ulster Scots). Most commonly spoken in the Scottish Lowlands, Northern Isles and northern Ulster, it is sometimes called Lowland Scots or Broad Scots to distinguish it from Scottish Gaelic, the Goidelic Celtic language that was historically restricted to most of the Scottish Highlands, the Hebrides and Galloway after the 16th century. Modern Scots is a sister language of Modern English, as the two diverged independently from the same source: Early Middle English (1150–1300).


title: Scots language

text: Scots is recognised as an indigenous language of Scotland, a regional or minority language of Europe, as well as a vulnerable language by UNESCO. In the 2011 Scottish Census, over 1.5 million people in Scotland reported being able to speak Scots.


title: Scots language

text: As there are no universally accepted criteria for distinguishing a language from a dialect, scholars and other interested parties often disagree about the linguistic, historical and social status of Scots, particularly its relationship to English. Although a number of paradigms for distinguishing between languages and dialects exist, they often render contradictory results. Broad Scots is at one end of a bipolar linguistic continuum, with Scottish Standard English at the other. Scots is sometimes regarded as a variety of English, though it has its own distinct dialects; other scholars treat Scots as a distinct Germanic language, in the way that Norwegian is closely linked to but distinct from Danish.


title: Scots language

text: Native speakers sometimes refer to their vernacular as (or "broad Scots" in English) or use a dialect name such as the "Doric" or the "". The old-fashioned "Scotch", an English loan, occurs occasionally, especially in Ulster. The term , a variant of the Modern Scots word , is also used, though this is more often taken to mean the Lallans literary form. Scots in Ireland is known in official circles as Ulster-Scots ( in revivalist Ulster-Scots) or "Ullans", a recent neologism merging Ulster and Lallans.


title: Scots language

text: "Scots" is a contraction of , the Older Scots and northern version of late (modern English "Scottish"), which replaced the earlier i-mutated version . Before the end of the fifteenth century, English speech in Scotland was known as "English" (written or at the time), whereas "Scottish" () referred to Gaelic. By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the English language used in Scotland had arguably become a distinct language, albeit one lacking a name which clearly distinguished it from all the other English variants and dialects spoken in Britain. From 1495, the term was increasingly used to refer to the Lowland vernacular and , meaning "Irish", was used as a name for Gaelic. For example, towards the end of the fifteenth century, William Dunbar was using to refer to Gaelic and, in the early sixteenth century, Gavin Douglas was using as a name for the Lowland vernacular. The Gaelic of Scotland is now usually called Scottish Gaelic.


title: Scots language

text: Northumbrian Old English had been established in what is now southeastern Scotland as far as the River Forth by the seventh century, as the region was part of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Northumbria. Middle Irish was the language of the Scottish court, and the common use of Old English remained largely confined to this area until the thirteenth century. The succeeding variety of early northern Middle English spoken in southeastern Scotland is also known as Early Scots. It began to further diverge from the Middle English of Northumbria due to twelfth and thirteenth-century immigration of Scandinavian-influenced Middle English-speakers from the North and Midlands of England. Later influences on the development of Scots came from the Romance languages via ecclesiastical and legal Latin, Norman French, and later Parisian French, due to the Auld Alliance. Additionally, there were Dutch and Middle Low German influences due to trade with and immigration from the Low Countries. Scots also includes loan words in the legal and administrative fields resulting from contact with Middle Irish, and reflected in early medieval legal documents. Contemporary Scottish Gaelic loans are mainly for geographical and cultural features, such as "cèilidh", "loch", "whisky", "glen" and "clan". Cumbric and Pictish, the medieval Brittonic languages of Northern England and Scotland, are the suspected source of a small number of Scots words, such as "lum" (derived from Cumbric) meaning "chimney". From the thirteenth century, the Early Scots language spread further into Scotland via the burghs, which were proto-urban institutions first established by King David I. In fourteenth century Scotland, the growth in prestige of Early Scots and the complementary decline of French made Scots the prestige dialect of most of eastern Scotland. By the sixteenth century, Middle Scots had established orthographic and literary norms largely independent of those developing in England.


title: Scots language

text: From 1610 to the 1690s during the Plantation of Ulster, some 200,000 Scots-speaking Lowlanders settled as colonists in Ulster in Ireland. In the core areas of Scots settlement, Scots outnumbered English settlers by five or six to one.


title: Scots language

text: Scots was studied alongside English and Scots Gaelic in the "Linguistic Survey of Scotland" at the University of Edinburgh, which began in 1949 and began to publish results in the 1970s. Also beginning in the 1970s, the "Atlas Linguarum Europae" studied the Scots language used at 15 sites in Scotland, each with its own dialect.


title: Scots language

text: From the mid-sixteenth century, written Scots was increasingly influenced by the developing Standard English of Southern England due to developments in royal and political interactions with England. When William Flower, an English herald, spoke to Mary of Guise and her councillors in 1560, they first used the . When he was , they switched into her native French. King James VI, who in 1603 became James I of England, observed in his work "Some Reulis and Cautelis to Be Observit and Eschewit in Scottis Poesie" that ("For though several have written of "(the subject)" in English, which is the language most similar to ours..."). However, with the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England, most writing in Scotland came to be done in the English fashion. In his first speech to the English Parliament in March 1603, King James VI and I declared, . Following James VI's move to London, the Protestant Church of Scotland adopted the 1611 Authorized King James Version of the Bible; subsequently, the Acts of Union 1707 led to Scotland joining England to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, having a single Parliament of Great Britain based in London. After the Union and the shift of political power to England, the use of Scots was discouraged by many in authority and education, as was the notion of "Scottishness" itself. Many leading Scots of the period, such as David Hume, defined themselves as Northern British rather than Scottish. They attempted to rid themselves of their Scots in a bid to establish standard English as the official language of the newly formed union. Nevertheless, Scots was still spoken across a wide range of domains until the end of the eighteenth century. Frederick Pottle, the twentieth-century biographer of James Boswell (1740–1795), described James's view of the use of Scots by his father Alexander Boswell (1706–1782) in the eighteenth century while serving as a judge of the Supreme Courts of Scotland:


title: Scots language

text: However, others did scorn Scots, such as Scottish Enlightenment intellectuals David Hume and Adam Smith, who went to great lengths to get rid of every Scotticism from their writings. Following such examples, many well-off Scots took to learning English through the activities of those such as Thomas Sheridan, who in 1761 gave a series of lectures on English elocution. Charging a guinea at a time (about £ in today's money), they were attended by over 300 men, and he was made a freeman of the City of Edinburgh. Following this, some of the city's intellectuals formed the Select Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland. These eighteenth-century activities would lead to the creation of Scottish Standard English. Scots remained the vernacular of many rural communities and the growing number of urban working-class Scots.


title: Scots language

text: In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the use of Scots as a literary language was revived by several prominent Scotsmen such as Robert Burns. Such writers established a new cross-dialect literary norm.


title: Scots language

text: Scots terms were included in the English Dialect Dictionary, edited by Joseph Wright. Wright had great difficulty in recruiting volunteers from Scotland, as many refused to cooperate with a venture that regarded Scots as a dialect of English, and he obtained enough help only through the assistance from a Professor Shearer in Scotland. Wright himself rejected the argument that Scots was a separate language, saying that this was a "quite modern mistake".


title: Scots language

text: During the first half of the twentieth century, knowledge of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary norms waned, and , there is no institutionalised standard literary form. By the 1940s, the Scottish Education Department's language policy was that Scots had no value: "it is not the language of 'educated' people anywhere, and could not be described as a suitable medium of education or culture". Students reverted to Scots outside the classroom, but the reversion was not complete. What occurred, and has been occurring ever since, is a process of language attrition, whereby successive generations have adopted more and more features from Standard English. This process has accelerated rapidly since widespread access to mass media in English and increased population mobility became available after the Second World War. It has recently taken on the nature of wholesale language shift, sometimes also termed language change, convergence or merger. By the end of the twentieth century, Scots was at an advanced stage of language death over much of Lowland Scotland. Residual features of Scots are often regarded as slang. A 2010 Scottish Government study of "public attitudes towards the Scots language" found that 64% of respondents (around 1,000 individuals in a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) "don't really think of Scots as a language", also finding "the most frequent speakers are least likely to agree that it is not a language (58%) and those never speaking Scots most likely to do so (72%)".


title: Scots language

text: Before the Treaty of Union 1707, when Scotland and England joined to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, there is ample evidence that Scots was widely held to be an independent sister language forming a pluricentric diasystem with English.


title: Scots language

text: German linguist considered Modern Scots a ('half language') in terms of an and languages framework, although today in Scotland most people's speech is somewhere on a continuum ranging from traditional broad Scots to Scottish Standard English. Many speakers are diglossic and may be able to code-switch along the continuum depending on the situation. Where on this continuum English-influenced Scots becomes Scots-influenced English is difficult to determine. Because standard English now generally has the role of a ('roofing language'), disputes often arise as to whether the varieties of Scots are dialects of Scottish English or constitute a separate language in their own right.


title: Scots language

text: The UK government now accepts Scots as a regional language and has recognised it as such under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages.


title: Scots language

text: Evidence for its existence as a separate language lies in the extensive body of Scots literature, its independent – if somewhat fluid – orthographic conventions, and in its former use as the language of the original Parliament of Scotland. Because Scotland retained distinct political, legal, and religious systems after the Union, many Scots terms passed into Scottish English.


title: Scots language

text: The status of the language was raised in Scottish schools, with Scots being included in the new national school curriculum. Previously in Scotland's schools there had been little education taking place through the medium of Scots, although it may have been covered superficially in English lessons, which could entail reading some Scots literature and observing the local dialect. Much of the material used was often Standard English disguised as Scots, which caused upset among proponents of Standard English and proponents of Scots alike. One example of the educational establishment's approach to Scots is, "Write a poem in Scots. (It is important not to be worried about spelling in this – write as you hear the sounds in your head.)", whereas guidelines for English require teaching pupils to be "writing fluently and legibly with accurate spelling and punctuation".


title: Scots language

text: A course in Scots language and culture delivered through the medium of Standard English and produced by the Open University (OU) in Scotland, the Open University's School of Languages and Applied Linguistics as well as Education Scotland became available online for the first time in December 2019.


title: Scots language

text: In the 2011 Scottish census, a question on Scots language ability was featured and is planned to be included again in the 2022 census.


title: Scots language

text: The Scottish government set its first Scots Language Policy in 2015, in which it pledged to support its preservation and encourage respect, recognition and use of Scots. The Scottish Parliament website also offers some information on the language in Scots.


title: Scots language

text: Serious use of the language for news, encyclopaedias, documentaries, etc., remains rare and usually reserved for niches where it is deemed acceptable, e.g. comedy, Burns Night, or representations of traditions and times gone by. However, since 2016 The National newspaper has regularly published some news articles in the language. The 2010s also saw an increasing number of English books translated in Scots and becoming widely available, particularly those in popular children's fiction series such as "The Gruffalo", "Harry Potter" and several by Roald Dahl and David Walliams. In 2021, the music streaming service Spotify created a Scots language listing.


title: Scots language

text: In Scotland, Scots is spoken in the Scottish Lowlands, the Northern Isles, Caithness, Arran and Campbeltown. In Ulster, the northern province in Ireland, its area is usually defined through the works of Robert John Gregg to include the counties of Down, Antrim, Londonderry and Donegal (especially in East Donegal and Inishowen). More recently, the Fintona-born linguist Warren Maguire has argued that some of the criteria that Gregg used as distinctive of Ulster-Scots are common in south-west Tyrone and were found in other sites across Northern Ireland investigated by the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. Dialects of Scots include Insular Scots, Northern Scots, Central Scots, Southern Scots and Ulster Scots.


title: Scots language

text: It has been difficult to determine the number of speakers of Scots via census, because many respondents might interpret the question "Do you speak Scots?" in different ways. Campaigners for Scots pressed for this question to be included in the 2001 UK National Census. The results from a 1996 trial before the Census, by the General Register Office for Scotland (GRO), suggested that there were around 1.5 million speakers of Scots, with 30% of Scots responding "Yes" to the question "Can you speak the Scots language?", but only 17% responding "Aye" to the question "Can you speak Scots?". It was also found that older, working-class people were more likely to answer in the affirmative. The University of Aberdeen Scots Leid Quorum performed its own research in 1995, cautiously suggesting that there were 2.7 million speakers, though with clarification as to why these figures required context.


title: Scots language

text: The GRO questions, as freely acknowledged by those who set them, were not as detailed and systematic as the University of Aberdeen ones, and only included reared speakers (people raised speaking Scots), not those who had learned the language. Part of the difference resulted from the central question posed by surveys: "Do you speak Scots?". In the Aberdeen University study, the question was augmented with the further clause "... or a dialect of Scots such as Border etc.", which resulted in greater recognition from respondents. The GRO concluded that there simply was not enough linguistic self-awareness amongst the Scottish populace, with people still thinking of themselves as speaking badly pronounced, grammatically inferior English rather than Scots, for an accurate census to be taken. The GRO research concluded that "[a] more precise estimate of genuine Scots language ability would require a more in-depth interview survey and may involve asking various questions about the language used in different situations. Such an approach would be inappropriate for a Census." Thus, although it was acknowledged that the "inclusion of such a Census question would undoubtedly raise the profile of Scots", no question about Scots was, in the end, included in the 2001 Census. The Scottish Government's "Pupils in Scotland Census 2008" found that 306 pupils spoke Scots as their main home language. A Scottish Government study in 2010 found that 85% of around 1000 respondents (being a representative sample of Scotland's adult population) claim to speak Scots to varying degrees.


title: Scots language

text: The 2011 UK census was the first to ask residents of Scotland about Scots. A campaign called "Aye Can" was set up to help individuals answer the question. The specific wording used was "Which of these can you do? Tick all that apply" with options for "Understand", "Speak", "Read" and "Write" in three columns: English, Scottish Gaelic and Scots. Of approximately 5.1 million respondents, about 1.2 million (24%) could speak, read and write Scots, 3.2 million (62%) had no skills in Scots and the remainder had some degree of skill, such as understanding Scots (0.27 million, 5.2%) or being able to speak it but not read or write it (0.18 million, 3.5%). There were also small numbers of Scots speakers recorded in England and Wales on the 2011 Census, with the largest numbers being either in bordering areas (e.g. Carlisle) or in areas that had recruited large numbers of Scottish workers in the past (e.g. Corby or the former mining areas of Kent).


title: Scots language

text: Among the earliest Scots literature is John Barbour's "Brus" (fourteenth century), Wyntoun's "Cronykil" and Blind Harry's "The Wallace" (fifteenth century). From the fifteenth century, much literature based on the Royal Court in Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews was produced by writers such as Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas and David Lyndsay. "The Complaynt of Scotland" was an early printed work in Scots. The "Eneados" is a Middle Scots translation of Virgil's "Aeneid", completed by Gavin Douglas in 1513.


title: Scots language

text: After the seventeenth century, anglicisation increased. At the time, many of the oral ballads from the borders and the North East were written down. Writers of the period were Robert Sempill, Robert Sempill the younger, Francis Sempill, Lady Wardlaw and Lady Grizel Baillie.


title: Scots language

text: In the eighteenth century, writers such as Allan Ramsay, Robert Burns, James Orr, Robert Fergusson and Walter Scott continued to use Scots – Burns's "Auld Lang Syne" is in Scots, for example. Scott introduced vernacular dialogue to his novels. Other well-known authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, William Alexander, George MacDonald, J. M. Barrie and other members of the Kailyard school like Ian Maclaren also wrote in Scots or used it in dialogue.


title: Scots language

text: In the Victorian era popular Scottish newspapers regularly included articles and commentary in the vernacular, often of unprecedented proportions.


title: Scots language

text: In the early twentieth century, a renaissance in the use of Scots occurred, its most vocal figure being Hugh MacDiarmid whose benchmark poem "A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" (1926) did much to demonstrate the power of Scots as a modern idiom. Other contemporaries were Douglas Young, John Buchan, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch, Edith Anne Robertson and Robert McLellan. The revival extended to verse and other literature.


title: Scots language

text: In 1955, three Ayrshire men – Sandy MacMillan, an English teacher at Ayr Academy; Thomas Limond, noted town chamberlain of Ayr; and A. L. "Ross" Taylor, rector of Cumnock Academy – collaborated to write ("Child Songs"), a collection of children's nursery rhymes and poems in Scots. The book contains a five-page glossary of contemporary Scots words and their pronunciations.


title: Scots language

text: Alexander Gray's translations into Scots constitute the greater part of his work, and are the main basis for his reputation.


title: Scots language

text: In 1983, William Laughton Lorimer's translation of the New Testament from the original Greek was published.


title: Scots language

text: Scots is sometimes used in contemporary fiction, such as the Edinburgh dialect of Scots in "Trainspotting" by Irvine Welsh (later made into a motion picture of the same name).


title: Scots language

text: "But'n'Ben A-Go-Go" by Matthew Fitt is a cyberpunk novel written entirely in what ("Our Own Language") calls "General Scots". Like all cyberpunk work, it contains imaginative neologisms.


title: Scots language

text: The "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" has been translated into Scots by Rab Wilson (published in 2004). Alexander Hutchison has translated the poetry of Catullus into Scots, and in the 1980s, Liz Lochhead produced a Scots translation of "Tartuffe" by Molière. J. K. Annand translated poetry and fiction from German and Medieval Latin into Scots.


title: Scots language

text: The strip cartoons "Oor Wullie" and "The Broons" in the "Sunday Post" use some Scots. In 2018, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stane", a Scots translation of the first Harry Potter book, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", was published by Matthew Fitt.


title: Scots language

text: In 2020, the Scots Wikipedia received attention after a Reddit post criticised it for containing a large number of articles written in very low-quality Scots by a single prolific contributor who was not a native speaker of Scots.


title: Scots language

text: The orthography of Early Scots had become more or less standardised by the middle to late sixteenth century. After the Union of the Crowns in 1603, the Standard English of England came to have an increasing influence on the spelling of Scots through the increasing influence and availability of books printed in England. After the Acts of Union in 1707 the emerging Scottish form of Standard English replaced Scots for most formal writing in Scotland.


title: Scots language

text: The eighteenth-century Scots revival saw the introduction of a new literary language descended from the old court Scots, but with an orthography that had abandoned some of the more distinctive old Scots spellings and adopted many standard English spellings. Despite the updated spelling, however, the rhymes make it clear that a Scots pronunciation was intended. These writings also introduced what came to be known as the apologetic apostrophe, generally occurring where a consonant exists in the Standard English cognate. This Written Scots drew not only on the vernacular, but also on the King James Bible, and was heavily influenced by the norms and conventions of Augustan English poetry. Consequently, this written Scots looked very similar to contemporary Standard English, suggesting a somewhat modified version of that, rather than a distinct speech form with a phonological system which had been developing independently for many centuries. This modern literary dialect, "Scots of the book" or Standard Scots, once again gave Scots an orthography of its own, lacking neither "authority nor author". This literary language used throughout Lowland Scotland and Ulster, embodied by writers such as Allan Ramsay, Robert Fergusson, Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Murray, David Herbison, James Orr, James Hogg and William Laidlaw among others, is well described in the 1921 "Manual of Modern Scots".


title: Scots language

text: Other authors developed dialect writing, preferring to represent their own speech in a more phonological manner rather than following the pan-dialect conventions of modern literary Scots, especially for the northern and insular dialects of Scots.


title: Scots language

text: During the twentieth century, a number of proposals for spelling reform were presented. Commenting on this, John Corbett (2003: 260) writes that "devising a normative orthography for Scots has been one of the greatest linguistic hobbies of the past century". Most proposals entailed regularising the use of established eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conventions, in particular, the avoidance of the apologetic apostrophe, which represented letters that were perceived to be missing when compared to the corresponding English cognates but were never actually present in the Scots word. For example, in the fourteenth century, Barbour spelt the Scots cognate of "taken" as . It is argued that, because there has been no "k" in the word for over 700 years, representing its omission with an apostrophe is of little value. The current spelling is usually .


title: Scots language

text: Through the twentieth century, with the decline of spoken Scots and knowledge of the literary tradition, phonetic (often humorous) representations became more common.


title: Scots language

text: Modern Scots follows the subject–verb–object sentence structure like Standard English. However, the word order ("Give us it") vs. "Give it to me" may be preferred.


title: Scots language

text: The indefinite article "a" may be used before both consonants and vowels. The definite article "the" is used before the names of seasons, days of the week, many nouns, diseases, trades and occupations, sciences and academic subjects. It is also often used in place of the indefinite article and instead of a possessive pronoun.


title: Scots language

text: Scots includes some strong plurals such as ("eye/eyes"), ("calf/calves"), ("horse/horses"), ("cow/cows") and ("shoe/shoes") that survived from Old English into Modern Scots, but have become weak plurals in Standard Modern English – "ox"/"oxen" and "child"/"children" being exceptions. Nouns of measure and quantity remain unchanged in the plural.


title: Scots language

text: The relative pronoun is "that" for all persons and numbers, but may be elided. Modern Scots also has a third adjective/adverb "this"-"that"-"yon"/"yonder" () indicating something at some distance. and are the plurals of "this" and "that" respectively.


title: Scots language

text: The present tense of verbs adheres to the Northern subject rule whereby verbs end in -"s" in all persons and numbers except when a single personal pronoun is next to the verb. Certain verbs are often used progressively and verbs of motion may be dropped before an adverb or adverbial phrase of motion.


title: Scots language

text: The regular past form of the weak or regular verbs is "-it", "-t" or "-ed", according to the preceding consonant or vowel.


title: Scots language

text: The present participle and gerund "in" are now usually but may still be differentiated and in Southern Scots, and and in Northern Scots.


title: Scots language

text: Adverbs usually take the same form as the verb root or adjective, especially after verbs. Examples include ("Having a really good day") and ("She's awfully tired").


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are two-letter country codes defined in ISO 3166-1, part of the ISO 3166 standard published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), to represent countries, dependent territories, and special areas of geographical interest. They are the most widely used of the country codes published by ISO (the others being alpha-3 and numeric), and are used most prominently for the Internet's country code top-level domains (with a few exceptions). They are also used as country identifiers extending the postal code when appropriate within the international postal system for paper mail, and have replaced the previous one consisting one-letter codes. They were first included as part of the ISO 3166 standard in its first edition in 1974.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: The ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes are used in different environments and are also part of other standards. In some cases they are not perfectly implemented.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: Starting in 1985, ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes have been used in the Domain Name System as country code top-level domains (ccTLDs). The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority currently assigns the ccTLDs mostly following the alpha-2 codes, but with a few exceptions. For example, the United Kingdom, whose alpha-2 code is , uses .uk instead of .gb as its ccTLD, as is currently exceptionally reserved in ISO 3166-1 on the request of the United Kingdom.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: The WIPO coding standard ST.3 is based on ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, but includes a number of additional codes for international intellectual property organizations, which are currently reserved and not used at the present stage in ISO 3166-1.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: The European Commission generally uses ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes with two exceptions: (not ) is used to represent Greece, and (not ) is used to represent the United Kingdom. This notwithstanding, the "Official Journal of the European Communities" specified that and be used to represent Greece and United Kingdom respectively. For VAT administration purposes, the European Commission uses and for Greece and the United Kingdom respectively.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: The United Nations uses a combination of ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and alpha-3 codes, along with codes that pre-date the creation of ISO 3166, for international vehicle registration codes, which are codes used to identify the issuing country of a vehicle registration plate; some of these codes are currently indeterminately reserved in ISO 3166-1.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: IETF language tags (conforming to the BCP 47 standard track and maintained in an IANA registry) are also partially derived from ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes (for the region subtags). The full list of ISO 3166-1 codes assigned to countries and territories are usable as region subtags. Also, the "exceptionally reserved" alpha-2 codes defined in ISO 3166-1 (with the exception of ) are also usable as region subtags for language tags. However, newer stability policies (agreed with ISO) have been implemented to avoid deleting subtags that have been withdrawn in ISO 3166-1; instead they are kept and aliased to the new preferred subtags, or kept as subtags grouping several countries. Some other region grouping subtags are derived from other standards. Under the newer stability policies, old assigned codes that have been withdrawn from ISO 3166-1 should no longer be reassigned to another country or territory (as has occurred in the past for "CS").


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: The following is a complete list of the 249 current officially assigned ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 codes, with the following columns:


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: User-assigned code elements are codes at the disposal of users who need to add further names of countries, territories, or other geographical entities to their in-house application of ISO 3166-1, and the ISO 3166/MA will never use these codes in the updating process of the standard. The following alpha-2 codes can be user-assigned: , to , to , and . For example:


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: Furthermore, the code element is designated as an escape code if the number of regular user-assigned code elements is not sufficient.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: Reserved code elements are codes which have become obsolete, or are required in order to enable a particular user application of the standard but do not qualify for inclusion in ISO 3166-1. To avoid transitional application problems and to aid users who require specific additional code elements for the functioning of their coding systems, the ISO 3166/MA, when justified, reserves these codes which it undertakes not to use for other than specified purposes during a limited or indeterminate period of time. The reserved alpha-2 codes can be divided into the following four categories: exceptional reservations, transitional reservations, indeterminate reservations, and codes currently agreed not to use.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: Exceptionally reserved code elements are codes reserved at the request of national ISO member bodies, governments and international organizations, which are required in order to support a particular application, as specified by the requesting body and limited to such use; any further use of such code elements is subject to approval by the ISO 3166/MA. The following alpha-2 codes are currently exceptionally reserved:


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: Transitional reserved code elements are codes reserved after their deletion from ISO 3166-1. These codes may be used only during a transitional period of at least five years while new code elements that may have replaced them are taken into use. These codes may be reassigned by the ISO 3166/MA after the expiration of the transitional period. The following alpha-2 codes are currently transitionally reserved:


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: The following alpha-2 code was previously transitionally reserved, but was later reassigned to another country as its official code:


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: For each deleted alpha-2 code, an entry for the corresponding former country name is included in ISO 3166-3. Each entry is assigned a four-letter alphabetic code, where the first two letters are the deleted alpha-2 code.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: Indeterminately reserved code elements are codes used to designate road vehicles under the 1949 and 1968 United Nations Conventions on Road Traffic but differing from those contained in ISO 3166-1. These code elements are expected eventually to be either eliminated or replaced by code elements within ISO 3166-1. In the meantime, the ISO 3166/MA has reserved such code elements for an indeterminate period. Any use beyond the application of the two Conventions is discouraged and will not be approved by the ISO 3166/MA. Moreover, these codes may be reassigned by the ISO 3166/MA at any time. The following alpha-2 codes are currently indeterminately reserved:


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: The following alpha-2 codes were previously indeterminately reserved, but have been reassigned to another country as its official code:


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: In addition, the ISO 3166/MA will not use the following alpha-2 codes at the present stage, as they are used for international intellectual property organizations in WIPO Standard ST.3:


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: WIPO Standard ST.3 actually uses , instead of , to represent the Eurasian Patent Organization. However, was already exceptionally reserved by the ISO 3166/MA to represent Ceuta and Melilla for customs purposes. The ISO 3166/MA proposed in 1995 that be used by WIPO to represent the Eurasian Patent Organization; however, this request was not honoured by WIPO.


title: ISO 3166-1 alpha-2

text: Besides the codes currently transitionally reserved and two other codes currently exceptionally reserved ( for France, Metropolitan and for USSR), the following alpha-2 codes have also been deleted from ISO 3166-1:


title: Parthian Empire

text: The Parthian Empire (), also known as the Arsacid Empire (), was a major Iranian political and cultural power in ancient Iran from 247 BC to 224 AD. Its latter name comes from its founder, Arsaces I, who led the Parni tribe in conquering the region of Parthia in Iran's northeast, then a satrapy (province) under Andragoras, who was rebelling against the Seleucid Empire. Mithridates I (r. c. 171–132 BC) greatly expanded the empire by seizing Media and Mesopotamia from the Seleucids. At its height, the Parthian Empire stretched from the northern reaches of the Euphrates, in what is now central-eastern Turkey, to present-day Afghanistan and western Pakistan. The empire, located on the Silk Road trade route between the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean Basin and the Han dynasty of China, became a center of trade and commerce.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The Parthians largely adopted the art, architecture, religious beliefs, and royal insignia of their culturally heterogeneous empire, which encompassed Persian, Hellenistic, and regional cultures. For about the first half of its existence, the Arsacid court adopted elements of Greek culture, though it eventually saw a gradual revival of Iranian traditions. The Arsacid rulers were titled the "King of Kings", as a claim to be the heirs to the Achaemenid Empire; indeed, they accepted many local kings as vassals where the Achaemenids would have had centrally appointed, albeit largely autonomous, satraps. The court did appoint a small number of satraps, largely outside Iran, but these satrapies were smaller and less powerful than the Achaemenid potentates. With the expansion of Arsacid power, the seat of central government shifted from Nisa to Ctesiphon along the Tigris (south of modern Baghdad, Iraq), although several other sites also served as capitals.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The earliest enemies of the Parthians were the Seleucids in the west and the Scythians in the north. However, as Parthia expanded westward, they came into conflict with the Kingdom of Armenia, and eventually the late Roman Republic. Rome and Parthia competed with each other to establish the kings of Armenia as their subordinate clients. The Parthians destroyed the army of Marcus Licinius Crassus at the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BC, and in 40–39 BC, Parthian forces captured the whole of the Levant except Tyre from the Romans; Mark Antony led a Roman counterattack. Several Roman emperors invaded Mesopotamia in the Roman–Parthian Wars of the next few centuries, capturing the cities of Seleucia and Ctesiphon on multiple occasions but never being able to hold on to them. Frequent civil wars between Parthian contenders to the throne proved more dangerous to the Empire's stability than foreign invasion, and Parthian power evaporated when Ardashir I, ruler of Istakhr in Persis, revolted against the Arsacids and killed their last ruler, Artabanus IV, in 224 AD. Ardashir established the Sasanian Empire, which ruled Iran and much of the Near East until the Muslim conquests of the 7th century AD, although the Arsacid dynasty lived on through branches of the family that ruled Armenia, Iberia, and Albania in the Caucasus.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Native Parthian sources, written in Parthian, Greek and other languages, are scarce when compared to Sasanian and even earlier Achaemenid sources. Aside from scattered cuneiform tablets, fragmentary ostraca, rock inscriptions, drachma coins, and the chance survival of some parchment documents, much of Parthian history is only known through external sources. These include mainly Greek and Roman histories, but also Chinese histories, prompted by the Han Chinese desire to form alliances against the Xiongnu. Parthian artwork is viewed by historians as a valid source for understanding aspects of society and culture that are otherwise absent in textual sources.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Before Arsaces I founded the Arsacid Dynasty, he was chieftain of the Parni, an ancient Central Asian tribe of Iranian peoples and one of several nomadic tribes within the confederation of the Dahae. The Parni most likely spoke an eastern Iranian language, in contrast to the northwestern Iranian language spoken at the time in Parthia. The latter was a northeastern province, first under the Achaemenid Empire, and then the Seleucid Empire. After conquering the region, the Parni adopted Parthian as the official court language, speaking it alongside Middle Persian, Aramaic, Greek, Babylonian, Sogdian and other languages in the multilingual territories they would conquer.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Why the Arsacid court retroactively chose 247 BC as the first year of the Arsacid era is uncertain. A.D.H. Bivar concludes that this was the year the Seleucids lost control of Parthia to Andragoras, the appointed satrap who rebelled against them. Hence, Arsaces I "backdated his regnal years" to the moment when Seleucid control over Parthia ceased. However, Vesta Sarkhosh Curtis asserts that this was simply the year Arsaces was made chief of the Parni tribe. Homa Katouzian and Gene Ralph Garthwaite claim it was the year Arsaces conquered Parthia and expelled the Seleucid authorities, yet Curtis and Maria Brosius state that Andragoras was not overthrown by the Arsacids until 238 BC.


title: Parthian Empire

text: It is unclear who immediately succeeded Arsaces I. Bivar and Katouzian affirm that it was his brother Tiridates I of Parthia, who in turn was succeeded by his son Arsaces II of Parthia in 211 BC. Yet Curtis and Brosius state that Arsaces II was the immediate successor of Arsaces I, with Curtis claiming the succession took place in 211 BC, and Brosius in 217 BC. Bivar insists that 138 BC, the last regnal year of Mithridates I, is "the first precisely established regnal date of Parthian history." Due to these and other discrepancies, Bivar outlines two distinct royal chronologies accepted by historians. A fictitious claim was later made from the 2nd-century BC onwards by the Parthians, which represented them as descendants of the Achaemenid king of kings, Artaxerxes II of Persia ().


title: Parthian Empire

text: For a time, Arsaces consolidated his position in Parthia and Hyrcania by taking advantage of the invasion of Seleucid territory in the west by Ptolemy III Euergetes ("r". 246–222 BC) of Egypt. This conflict with Ptolemy, the Third Syrian War (246–241 BC), also allowed Diodotus I to rebel and form the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom in Central Asia. The latter's successor, Diodotus II, formed an alliance with Arsaces against the Seleucids, but Arsaces was temporarily driven from Parthia by the forces of Seleucus II Callinicus ("r". 246–225 BC). After spending some time in exile among the nomadic Apasiacae tribe, Arsaces led a counterattack and recaptured Parthia. Seleucus II's successor, Antiochus III the Great ("r". 222–187 BC), was unable to immediately retaliate because his troops were engaged in putting down the rebellion of Molon in Media.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Antiochus III launched a massive campaign to retake Parthia and Bactria in 210 or 209 BC. Despite some victories he was unsuccessful, but did negotiate a peace settlement with Arsaces II. The latter was granted the title of king (Greek: "basileus") in return for his submission to Antiochus III as his superior. The Seleucids were unable to further intervene in Parthian affairs following increasing encroachment by the Roman Republic and the Seleucid defeat at Magnesia in 190 BC. Priapatius ("r". c. 191–176 BC) succeeded Arsaces II, and Phraates I ("r". c. 176–171 BC) eventually ascended the Parthian throne. Phraates I ruled Parthia without further Seleucid interference.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Phraates I is recorded as expanding Parthia's control past the Gates of Alexander and occupied Apamea Ragiana. The locations of these are unknown. Yet the greatest expansion of Parthian power and territory took place during the reign of his brother and successor Mithridates I (r. c. 171–132 BC), whom Katouzian compares to Cyrus the Great (d. 530 BC), founder of the Achaemenid Empire.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Relations between Parthia and Greco-Bactria deteriorated after the death of Diodotus II, when Mithridates' forces captured two eparchies of the latter kingdom, then under Eucratides I ("r". c. 170–145 BC). Turning his sights on the Seleucid realm, Mithridates invaded Media and occupied Ecbatana in 148 or 147 BC; the region had been destabilized by a recent Seleucid suppression of a rebellion there led by Timarchus. This victory was followed by the Parthian conquest of Babylonia in Mesopotamia, where Mithridates had coins minted at Seleucia in 141 BC and held an official investiture ceremony. While Mithridates retired to Hyrcania, his forces subdued the kingdoms of Elymais and Characene and occupied Susa. By this time, Parthian authority extended as far east as the Indus River.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Whereas Hecatompylos had served as the first Parthian capital, Mithridates established royal residences at Seleucia, Ecbatana, Ctesiphon and his newly founded city, Mithradatkert (Nisa), where the tombs of the Arsacid kings were built and maintained. Ecbatana became the main summertime residence for the Arsacid royalty. Ctesiphon may not have become the official capital until the reign of Gotarzes I ("r". c. 90–80 BC). It became the site of the royal coronation ceremony and the representational city of the Arsacids, according to Brosius.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The Seleucids were unable to retaliate immediately as general Diodotus Tryphon led a rebellion at the capital Antioch in 142 BC. However, by 140 BC Demetrius II Nicator was able to launch a counter-invasion against the Parthians in Mesopotamia. Despite early successes, the Seleucids were defeated and Demetrius himself was captured by Parthian forces and taken to Hyrcania. There Mithridates treated his captive with great hospitality; he even married his daughter Rhodogune of Parthia to Demetrius.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Antiochus VII Sidetes ("r". 138–129 BC), a brother of Demetrius, assumed the Seleucid throne and married the latter's wife Cleopatra Thea. After defeating Diodotus Tryphon, Antiochus initiated a campaign in 130 BC to retake Mesopotamia, now under the rule of Phraates II ("r". c. 132–127 BC). The Parthian general Indates was defeated along the Great Zab, followed by a local uprising where the Parthian governor of Babylonia was killed. Antiochus conquered Babylonia and occupied Susa, where he minted coins. After advancing his army into Media, the Parthians pushed for peace, which Antiochus refused to accept unless the Arsacids relinquished all lands to him except Parthia proper, paid heavy tribute, and released Demetrius from captivity. Arsaces released Demetrius and sent him to Syria, but refused the other demands. By spring 129 BC, the Medes were in open revolt against Antiochus, whose army had exhausted the resources of the countryside during winter. While attempting to put down the revolts, the main Parthian force swept into the region and killed Antiochus at the Battle of Ecbatana in 129 BC. His body was sent back to Syria in a silver coffin; his son Seleucus was made a Parthian hostage and a daughter joined Phraates' harem.


title: Parthian Empire

text: While the Parthians regained the territories lost in the west, another threat arose in the east. In 177–176 BC the nomadic confederation of the Xiongnu dislodged the nomadic Yuezhi from their homelands in what is now Gansu province in Northwest China; the Yuezhi then migrated west into Bactria and displaced the Saka (Scythian) tribes. The Saka were forced to move further west, where they invaded the Parthian Empire's northeastern borders. Mithridates was thus forced to retire to Hyrcania after his conquest of Mesopotamia.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Some of the Saka were enlisted in Phraates' forces against Antiochus. However, they arrived too late to engage in the conflict. When Phraates refused to pay their wages, the Saka revolted, which he tried to put down with the aid of former Seleucid soldiers, yet they too abandoned Phraates and joined sides with the Saka. Phraates II marched against this combined force, but he was killed in battle. The Roman historian Justin reports that his successor Artabanus I ("r". c. 128–124 BC) shared a similar fate fighting nomads in the east. He claims Artabanus was killed by the Tokhari (identified as the Yuezhi), although Bivar believes Justin conflated them with the Saka. Mithridates II (r. c. 124–91 BC) later recovered the lands lost to the Saka in Sakastan.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Following the Seleucid withdrawal from Mesopotamia, the Parthian governor of Babylonia, Himerus, was ordered by the Arsacid court to conquer Characene, then ruled by Hyspaosines from Charax Spasinu. When this failed, Hyspaosines invaded Babylonia in 127 BC and occupied Seleucia. Yet by 122 BC, Mithridates II forced Hyspaosines out of Babylonia and made the kings of Characene vassals under Parthian suzerainty. After Mithridates extended Parthian control further west, occupying Dura-Europos in 113 BC, he became embroiled in a conflict with the Kingdom of Armenia. His forces defeated and deposed Artavasdes I of Armenia in 97 BC, taking his son Tigranes hostage, who would later become Tigranes II "the Great" of Armenia ("r". c. 95–55 BC).


title: Parthian Empire

text: The Indo-Parthian Kingdom, located in modern-day Afghanistan and Pakistan made an alliance with the Parthian Empire in the 1st century BC. Bivar claims that these two states considered each other political equals. After the Greek philosopher Apollonius of Tyana visited the court of Vardanes I ("r". c. 40–47 AD) in 42 AD, Vardanes provided him with the protection of a caravan as he traveled to Indo-Parthia. When Apollonius reached Indo-Parthia's capital Taxila, his caravan leader read Vardanes' official letter, perhaps written in Parthian, to an Indian official who treated Apollonius with great hospitality.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Following the diplomatic venture of Zhang Qian into Central Asia during the reign of Emperor Wu of Han ("r". 141–87 BC), the Han Empire of China sent a delegation to Mithridates II's court in 121 BC. The Han embassy opened official trade relations with Parthia via the Silk Road yet did not achieve a desired military alliance against the confederation of the Xiongnu. The Parthian Empire was enriched by taxing the Eurasian caravan trade in silk, the most highly priced luxury good imported by the Romans. Pearls were also a highly valued import from China, while the Chinese purchased Parthian spices, perfumes, and fruits. Exotic animals were also given as gifts from the Arsacid to Han courts; in 87 AD Pacorus II of Parthia sent lions and Persian gazelles to Emperor Zhang of Han ("r". 75–88 AD). Besides silk, Parthian goods purchased by Roman merchants included iron from India, spices, and fine leather. Caravans traveling through the Parthian Empire brought West Asian and sometimes Roman luxury glasswares to China. The merchants of Sogdia, speaking an Eastern Iranian language, served as the primary middlemen of this vital silk trade between Parthia and Han China.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The Yuezhi Kushan Empire in northern India largely guaranteed the security of Parthia's eastern border. Thus, from the mid-1st century BC onwards, the Arsacid court focused on securing the western border, primarily against Rome. A year following Mithridates II's subjugation of Armenia, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the Roman proconsul of Cilicia, convened with the Parthian diplomat Orobazus at the Euphrates river. The two agreed that the river would serve as the border between Parthia and Rome, although several historians have argued that Sulla only had authority to communicate these terms back to Rome.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Despite this agreement, in 93 or 92 BC Parthia fought a war in Syria against the tribal leader Laodice and her Seleucid ally Antiochus X Eusebes ("r". 95–92? BC), killing the latter. When one of the last Seleucid monarchs, Demetrius III Eucaerus, attempted to besiege Beroea (modern Aleppo), Parthia sent military aid to the inhabitants and Demetrius was defeated.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Following the rule of Mithridates II, his son Gotarzes I succeeded him. He reigned during a period coined in scholarship as the "Parthian Dark Age," due to the lack of clear information on the events of this period in the empire, except a series of, apparently overlapping, reigns. It is only with the beginning of the reign of Orodes II in , that the line of Parthian rulers can again be reliably traced. This system of split monarchy weakened Parthia, allowing Tigranes II of Armenia to annex Parthian territory in western Mesopotamia. This land would not be restored to Parthia until the reign of Sinatruces ("r". c. 78–69 BC).


title: Parthian Empire

text: Following the outbreak of the Third Mithridatic War, Mithridates VI of Pontus ("r". 119–63 BC), an ally of Tigranes II of Armenia, requested aid from Parthia against Rome, but Sinatruces refused help. When the Roman commander Lucullus marched against the Armenian capital Tigranocerta in 69 BC, Mithridates VI and Tigranes II requested the aid of Phraates III ("r". c. 71–58). Phraates did not send aid to either, and after the fall of Tigranocerta he reaffirmed with Lucullus the Euphrates as the boundary between Parthia and Rome.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Tigranes the Younger, son of Tigranes II of Armenia, failed to usurp the Armenian throne from his father. He fled to Phraates III and convinced him to march against Armenia's new capital at Artaxarta. When this siege failed, Tigranes the Younger once again fled, this time to the Roman commander Pompey. He promised Pompey that he would act as a guide through Armenia, but, when Tigranes II submitted to Rome as a client king, Tigranes the Younger was brought to Rome as a hostage. Phraates demanded Pompey return Tigranes the Younger to him, but Pompey refused. In retaliation, Phraates launched an invasion into Corduene (southeastern Turkey) where, according to two conflicting Roman accounts, the Roman consul Lucius Afranius forced the Parthians out by either military or diplomatic means.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Phraates III was assassinated by his sons Orodes II of Parthia and Mithridates IV of Parthia, after which Orodes turned on Mithridates, forcing him to flee from Media to Roman Syria. Aulus Gabinius, the Roman proconsul of Syria, marched in support of Mithridates to the Euphrates, but had to turn back to aid Ptolemy XII Auletes ("r". 80–58; 55–51 BC) against a rebellion in Egypt. Despite losing his Roman support, Mithridates managed to conquer Babylonia, and minted coins at Seleucia until 54 BC. In that year, Orodes' general, known only as Surena after his noble family's clan name, recaptured Seleucia, and Mithridates was executed.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Marcus Licinius Crassus, one of the triumvirs, who was now proconsul of Syria, invaded Parthia in 53 BC in belated support of Mithridates. As his army marched to Carrhae (modern Harran, southeastern Turkey), Orodes II invaded Armenia, cutting off support from Rome's ally Artavasdes II of Armenia ("r". 53–34 BC). Orodes persuaded Artavasdes to a marriage alliance between the crown prince Pacorus I of Parthia (d. 38 BC) and Artavasdes' sister.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Surena, with an army entirely on horseback, rode to meet Crassus. Surena's 1,000 cataphracts (armed with lances) and 9,000 horse archers were outnumbered roughly four to one by Crassus' army, comprising seven Roman legions and auxiliaries including mounted Gauls and light infantry. Using a baggage train of about 1,000 camels, the Parthian army provided the horse archers with a constant supply of arrows. The horse archers employed the "Parthian shot" tactic: feigning retreat to draw enemy out, then turning and shooting at them when exposed. This tactic, executed with heavy composite bows on the flat plain, devastated Crassus' infantry.


title: Parthian Empire

text: With some 20,000 Romans dead, approximately 10,000 captured, and roughly another 10,000 escaping west, Crassus fled into the Armenian countryside. At the head of his army, Surena approached Crassus, offering a parley, which Crassus accepted. However, he was killed when one of his junior officers, suspecting a trap, attempted to stop him from riding into Surena's camp. Crassus' defeat at Carrhae was one of the worst military defeats of Roman history. Parthia's victory cemented its reputation as a formidable if not equal power with Rome. With his camp followers, war captives, and precious Roman booty, Surena traveled some 700 km (430 mi) back to Seleucia where his victory was celebrated. However, fearing his ambitions even for the Arsacid throne, Orodes had Surena executed shortly thereafter.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Emboldened by the victory over Crassus, the Parthians attempted to capture Roman-held territories in Western Asia. Crown prince Pacorus I and his commander Osaces raided Syria as far as Antioch in 51 BC, but were repulsed by Gaius Cassius Longinus, who ambushed and killed Osaces. The Arsacids sided with Pompey in the civil war against Julius Caesar and even sent troops to support the anti-Caesarian forces at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Quintus Labienus, a general loyal to Cassius and Brutus, sided with Parthia against the Second Triumvirate in 40 BC; the following year he invaded Syria alongside Pacorus I. The triumvir Mark Antony was unable to lead the Roman defense against Parthia due to his departure to Italy, where he amassed his forces to confront his rival Octavian and eventually conducted negotiations with him at Brundisium.


title: Parthian Empire

text: After Syria was occupied by Pacorus' army, Labienus split from the main Parthian force to invade Anatolia while Pacorus and his commander Barzapharnes invaded the Roman Levant. They subdued all settlements along the Mediterranean coast as far south as Ptolemais (modern Acre, Israel), with the lone exception of Tyre. In Judea, the pro-Roman Jewish forces of high priest Hyrcanus II, Phasael, and Herod were defeated by the Parthians and their Jewish ally Antigonus II Mattathias (r. 40–37 BC); the latter was made king of Judea while Herod fled to his fort at Masada.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Despite these successes, the Parthians were soon driven out of the Levant by a Roman counteroffensive. Publius Ventidius Bassus, an officer under Mark Antony, defeated and then executed Labienus at the Battle of the Cilician Gates (in modern Mersin Province, Turkey) in 39 BC. Shortly afterward, a Parthian force in Syria led by general Pharnapates was defeated by Ventidius at the Battle of Amanus Pass.


title: Parthian Empire

text: As a result, Pacorus I temporarily withdrew from Syria. When he returned in the spring of 38 BC, he faced Ventidius at the Battle of Mount Gindarus, northeast of Antioch. Pacorus was killed during the battle, and his forces retreated across the Euphrates. His death spurred a succession crisis in which Orodes II chose Phraates IV ("r". c. 38–2 BC) as his new heir.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Upon assuming the throne, Phraates IV eliminated rival claimants by killing and exiling his own brothers. One of them, Monaeses, fled to Antony and persuaded him to invade Parthia. Antony defeated Parthia's Judaean ally Antigonus in 37 BC, installing Herod as a client king in his place.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The following year, when Antony marched to Theodosiopolis, Artavasdes II of Armenia once again switched alliances by sending Antony additional troops. Antony invaded Media Atropatene (modern Iranian Azerbaijan), then ruled by Parthia's ally Artavasdes I of Media Atropatene, with the intention of seizing the capital Praaspa, the location of which is now unknown. However, Phraates IV ambushed Antony's rear detachment, destroying a giant battering ram meant for the siege of Praaspa; after this, Artavasdes II abandoned Antony's forces.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The Parthians pursued and harassed Antony's army as it fled to Armenia. Eventually, the greatly weakened force reached Syria. Antony lured Artavasdes II into a trap with the promise of a marriage alliance. He was taken captive in 34 BC, paraded in Antony's mock Roman triumph in Alexandria, Egypt, and eventually executed by Cleopatra VII of the Ptolemaic Kingdom.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Antony attempted to strike an alliance with Artavasdes I of Media Atropatene, whose relations with Phraates IV had recently soured. This was abandoned when Antony and his forces withdrew from Armenia in 33 BC; they escaped a Parthian invasion while Antony's rival Octavian attacked his forces to the west. After the defeat and suicides of Antony and Cleopatra in 30 BC, Parthian ally Artaxias II reassumed the throne of Armenia.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Following the defeat and deaths of Antony and Cleopatra of Ptolemaic Egypt after the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, Octavian consolidated his political power and in 27 BC was named Augustus by the Roman Senate, becoming the first Roman emperor. Around this time, Tiridates II of Parthia briefly overthrew Phraates IV, who was able to quickly reestablish his rule with the aid of Scythian nomads. Tiridates fled to the Romans, taking one of Phraates' sons with him. In negotiations conducted in 20 BC, Phraates arranged for the release of his kidnapped son. In return, the Romans received the lost legionary standards taken at Carrhae in 53 BC, as well as any surviving prisoners of war. The Parthians viewed this exchange as a small price to pay to regain the prince. Augustus hailed the return of the standards as a political victory over Parthia; this propaganda was celebrated in the minting of new coins, the building of a new temple to house the standards, and even in fine art such as the breastplate scene on his statue Augustus of Prima Porta.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Along with the prince, Augustus also gave Phraates IV an Italian slave-girl, who later became Queen Musa of Parthia. To ensure that her child Phraataces would inherit the throne without incident, Musa convinced Phraates IV to give his other sons to Augustus as hostages. Again, Augustus used this as propaganda depicting the submission of Parthia to Rome, listing it as a great accomplishment in his "Res Gestae Divi Augusti". When Phraataces took the throne as Phraates V ("r". c. 2 BC – 4 AD), Musa ruled alongside him, and according to Josephus, married him. The Parthian nobility, disapproving of the notion of a king with non-Arsacid blood, forced the pair into exile in Roman territory. Phraates' successor Orodes III of Parthia lasted just two years on the throne, and was followed by Vonones I, who had adopted many Roman mannerisms during time in Rome. The Parthian nobility, angered by Vonones' sympathies for the Romans, backed a rival claimant, Artabanus II of Parthia ("r". c. 10–38 AD), who eventually defeated Vonones and drove him into exile in Roman Syria.


title: Parthian Empire

text: During the reign of Artabanus II, two Jewish commoners and brothers, Anilai and Asinai from Nehardea (near modern Fallujah, Iraq), led a revolt against the Parthian governor of Babylonia. After defeating the latter, the two were granted the right to govern the region by Artabanus II, who feared further rebellion elsewhere. Anilai's Parthian wife poisoned Asinai out of fear he would attack Anilai over his marriage to a gentile. Following this, Anilai became embroiled in an armed conflict with a son-in-law of Artabanus, who eventually defeated him. With the Jewish regime removed, the native Babylonians began to harass the local Jewish community, forcing them to emigrate to Seleucia. When that city rebelled against Parthian rule in 35–36 AD, the Jews were expelled again, this time by the local Greeks and Aramaeans. The exiled Jews fled to Ctesiphon, Nehardea, and Nisibis.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Although at peace with Parthia, Rome still interfered in its affairs. The Roman emperor Tiberius (r. 14–37 AD) became involved in a plot by Pharasmanes I of Iberia to place his brother Mithridates on the throne of Armenia by assassinating the Parthian ally King Arsaces of Armenia. Artabanus II tried and failed to restore Parthian control of Armenia, prompting an aristocratic revolt that forced him to flee to Scythia. The Romans released a hostage prince, Tiridates III of Parthia, to rule the region as an ally of Rome. Shortly before his death, Artabanus managed to force Tiridates from the throne using troops from Hyrcania. After Artabanus' death in 38 AD, a long civil war ensued between the rightful successor Vardanes I and his brother Gotarzes II. After Vardanes was assassinated during a hunting expedition, the Parthian nobility appealed to Roman emperor Claudius ("r". 41–54 AD) in 49 AD to release the hostage prince Meherdates to challenge Gotarzes. This backfired when Meherdates was betrayed by the governor of Edessa and Izates bar Monobaz of Adiabene; he was captured and sent to Gotarzes, where he was allowed to live after having his ears mutilated, an act that disqualified him from inheriting the throne.


title: Parthian Empire

text: In 97 AD, the Chinese general Ban Chao, the Protector-General of the Western Regions, sent his emissary Gan Ying on a diplomatic mission to reach the Roman Empire. Gan visited the court of Pacorus II at Hecatompylos before departing towards Rome. He traveled as far west as the Persian Gulf, where Parthian authorities convinced him that an arduous sea voyage around the Arabian Peninsula was the only means to reach Rome. Discouraged by this, Gan Ying returned to the Han court and provided Emperor He of Han ("r". 88–105 AD) with a detailed report on the Roman Empire based on oral accounts of his Parthian hosts. William Watson speculates that the Parthians would have been relieved at the failed efforts by the Han Empire to open diplomatic relations with Rome, especially after Ban Chao's military victories against the Xiongnu in eastern Central Asia. However, Chinese records maintain that a Roman embassy, perhaps only a group of Roman merchants, arrived at the Han capital Luoyang by way of Jiaozhi (northern Vietnam) in 166 AD, during the reigns of Marcus Aurelius ("r". 161–180 AD) and Emperor Huan of Han ("r". 146–168 AD). Although it could be coincidental, Antonine Roman golden medallions dated to the reigns of Marcus Aurelius and his predecessor Antoninus Pius have been discovered at Oc Eo, Vietnam (among other Roman artefacts in the Mekong Delta), a site that is one of the suggested locations for the port city of "Cattigara" along the "Magnus Sinus" (i.e. Gulf of Thailand and South China Sea) in Ptolemy's "Geography".


title: Parthian Empire

text: After the Iberian king Pharasmanes I had his son Rhadamistus ("r". 51–55 AD) invade Armenia to depose the Roman client king Mithridates, Vologases I of Parthia ("r". c. 51–77 AD) planned to invade and place his brother, the later Tiridates I of Armenia, on the throne. Rhadamistus was eventually driven from power, and, beginning with the reign of Tiridates, Parthia would retain firm control over Armenia—with brief interruptions—through the Arsacid Dynasty of Armenia. Even after the fall of the Parthian Empire, the Arsacid line lived on through the Armenian kings. However, not only did the Arsacid line continue through the Armenians, it as well continued through the Georgian kings with the Arsacid dynasty of Iberia, and for many centuries afterwards in Caucasian Albania through the Arsacid Dynasty of Caucasian Albania.


title: Parthian Empire

text: When Vardanes II of Parthia rebelled against his father Vologases I in 55 AD, Vologases withdrew his forces from Armenia. Rome quickly attempted to fill the political vacuum left behind. In the Roman–Parthian War of 58–63 AD, the commander Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo achieved some military successes against the Parthians while installing Tigranes VI of Armenia as a Roman client. However, Corbulo's successor Lucius Caesennius Paetus was soundly defeated by Parthian forces and fled Armenia. Following a peace treaty, Tiridates I traveled to Naples and Rome in 63 AD. At both sites the Roman emperor Nero ("r". 54–68 AD) ceremoniously crowned him king of Armenia by placing the royal diadem on his head.


title: Parthian Empire

text: A long period of peace between Parthia and Rome ensued, with only the invasion of Alans into Parthia's eastern territories around 72 AD mentioned by Roman historians. Whereas Augustus and Nero had chosen a cautious military policy when confronting Parthia, later Roman emperors invaded and attempted to conquer the eastern Fertile Crescent, the heart of the Parthian Empire along the Tigris and Euphrates. The heightened aggression can be explained in part by Rome's military reforms. To match Parthia's strength in missile troops and mounted warriors, the Romans at first used foreign allies (especially Nabataeans), but later established a permanent "auxilia" force to complement their heavy legionary infantry. The Romans eventually maintained regiments of horse archers ("sagittarii") and even mail-armored cataphracts in their eastern provinces. Yet the Romans had no discernible grand strategy in dealing with Parthia and gained very little territory from these invasions. The primary motivations for war were the advancement of the personal glory and political position of the emperor, as well as defending Roman honor against perceived slights such as Parthian interference in the affairs of Rome's client states.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Hostilities between Rome and Parthia were renewed when Osroes I of Parthia ("r". c. 109–128 AD) deposed the Armenian king Sanatruk and replaced him with Axidares, son of Pacorus II, without consulting Rome. The Roman emperor Trajan ("r". 98–117 AD) had the next Parthian nominee for the throne, Parthamasiris, killed in 114 AD, instead making Armenia a Roman province. His forces, led by Lusius Quietus, also captured Nisibis; its occupation was essential to securing all the major routes across the northern Mesopotamian plain. The following year, Trajan invaded Mesopotamia and met little resistance from only Meharaspes of Adiabene, since Osroes was engaged in a civil war to the east with Vologases III of Parthia. Trajan spent the winter of 115–116 at Antioch, but resumed his campaign in the spring. Marching down the Euphrates, he captured Dura-Europos, the capital Ctesiphon and Seleucia, and even subjugated Characene, where he watched ships depart to India from the Persian Gulf.


title: Parthian Empire

text: In the last months of 116 AD, Trajan captured the Persian city of Susa. When Sanatruces II of Parthia gathered forces in eastern Parthia to challenge the Romans, his cousin Parthamaspates of Parthia betrayed and killed him: Trajan crowned him the new king of Parthia. Never again would the Roman Empire advance so far to the east. On Trajan's return north, the Babylonian settlements revolted against the Roman garrisons. Trajan was forced to retreat from Mesopotamia in 117 AD, overseeing a failed siege of Hatra during his withdrawal. His retreat was—in his intentions—temporary, because he wanted to renew the attack on Parthia in 118 AD and "make the subjection of the Parthians a reality," but Trajan died suddenly in August 117 AD. During his campaign, Trajan was granted the title "Parthicus" by the Senate and coins were minted proclaiming the conquest of Parthia. However, only the 4th-century AD historians Eutropius and Festus allege that he attempted to establish a Roman province in lower Mesopotamia.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Trajan's successor Hadrian ("r". 117–138 AD) reaffirmed the Roman-Parthian border at the Euphrates, choosing not to invade Mesopotamia due to Rome's now limited military resources. Parthamaspates fled after the Parthians revolted against him, yet the Romans made him king of Osroene. Osroes I died during his conflict with Vologases III, the latter succeeded by Vologases IV of Parthia ("r". c. 147–191 AD) who ushered in a period of peace and stability. However, the Roman–Parthian War of 161–166 AD began when Vologases invaded Armenia and Syria, retaking Edessa. Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius ("r". 161–180 AD) had co-ruler Lucius Verus ("r". 161–169 AD) guard Syria while Marcus Statius Priscus invaded Armenia in 163 AD, followed by the invasion of Mesopotamia by Avidius Cassius in 164 AD. The Romans captured and burnt Seleucia and Ctesiphon to the ground, yet they were forced to retreat once the Roman soldiers contracted a deadly disease (possibly smallpox) that soon ravaged the Roman world. Although they withdrew, from this point forward the city of Dura-Europos remained in Roman hands. When Roman emperor Septimius Severus ("r". 193–211 AD) invaded Mesopotamia in 197 AD during the reign of Vologases V of Parthia ("r". c. 191–208 AD), the Romans once again marched down the Euphrates and captured Seleucia and Ctesiphon. After assuming the title "Parthicus Maximus", he retreated in late 198 AD, failing as Trajan once did to capture Hatra during a siege.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Around 212 AD, soon after Vologases VI of Parthia ("r". c. 208–222 AD) took the throne, his brother Artabanus IV of Parthia (d. 224 AD) rebelled against him and gained control over a greater part of the empire. Meanwhile, the Roman emperor Caracalla ("r". 211–217 AD) deposed the kings of Osroene and Armenia to make them Roman provinces once more. He marched into Mesopotamia under the pretext of marrying one of Artabanus' daughters, but—because the marriage was not allowed—made war on Parthia and conquered Arbil east of the Tigris river. Caracalla was assassinated the next year on the road to Carrhae by his soldiers. After this debacle, the Parthians made a settlement with Macrinus ("r". 217–218) where the Romans paid Parthia over two-hundred million "denarii" with additional gifts.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The Parthian Empire, weakened by internal strife and wars with Rome, was soon to be followed by the Sasanian Empire. Indeed, shortly afterward, Ardashir I, the local Iranian ruler of Persis (modern Fars Province, Iran) from Istakhr began subjugating the surrounding territories in defiance of Arsacid rule. He confronted Artabanus IV at the Battle of Hormozdgān on 28 April 224 AD, perhaps at a site near Isfahan, defeating him and establishing the Sasanian Empire. There is evidence, however, that suggests Vologases VI continued to mint coins at Seleucia as late as 228 AD.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The Sassanians would not only assume Parthia's legacy as Rome's Persian nemesis, but they would also attempt to restore the boundaries of the Achaemenid Empire by briefly conquering the Levant, Anatolia, and Egypt from the Eastern Roman Empire during the reign of Khosrau II ("r". 590–628 AD). However, they would lose these territories to Heraclius—the last Roman emperor before the Arab conquests. Nevertheless, for a period of more than 400 years, they succeeded the Parthian realm as Rome's principal rival.


title: Parthian Empire

text: Local and foreign written accounts, as well as non-textual artifacts, have been used to reconstruct Parthian history. Although the Parthian court maintained records, the Parthians had no formal study of history; the earliest universal history of Iran, the "Khwaday-Namag", was not compiled until the reign of the last Sasanian ruler Yazdegerd III (r. 632–651 AD). Indigenous sources on Parthian history remain scarce, with fewer of them available than for any other period of Iranian history. Most contemporary written records on Parthia contain Greek as well as Parthian and Aramaic inscriptions. The Parthian language was written in a distinct script derived from the Imperial Aramaic chancellery script of the Achaemenids, and later developed into the Pahlavi writing system.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The most valuable indigenous sources for reconstructing an accurate chronology of Arsacid rulers are the metal drachma coins issued by each ruler. These represent a "transition from non-textual to textual remains," according to historian Geo Widengren. Other Parthian sources used for reconstructing chronology include cuneiform astronomical tablets and colophons discovered in Babylonia. Indigenous textual sources also include stone inscriptions, parchment and papyri documents, and pottery ostraca. For example, at the early Parthian capital of Mithradatkert/Nisa in Turkmenistan, large caches of pottery ostraca have been found yielding information on the sale and storage of items like wine. Along with parchment documents found at sites like Dura-Europos, these also provide valuable information on Parthian governmental administration, covering issues such as taxation, military titles, and provincial organization.


title: Parthian Empire

text: The Greek and Latin histories, which represent the majority of materials covering Parthian history, are not considered entirely reliable since they were written from the perspective of rivals and wartime enemies. These external sources generally concern major military and political events, and often ignore social and cultural aspects of Parthian history. The Romans usually depicted the Parthians as fierce warriors but also as a culturally refined people; recipes for Parthian dishes in the cookbook "Apicius" exemplifies their admiration for Parthian cuisine. Apollodorus of Artemita and Arrian wrote histories focusing on Parthia, which are now lost and survive only as quoted extracts in other histories. Isidore of Charax, who lived during the reign of Augustus, provides an account of Parthian territories, perhaps from a Parthian government survey. To a lesser extent, people and events of Parthian history were also included in the histories of Justin, Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Cassius Dio, Appian, Josephus, Pliny the Elder, and Herodian.