The lost language of the Arsacid Empire still echoes in modern Armenian vocabulary

Countries & Cities · Published 15 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Parthian was the official language of the Arsacid Empire, yet it vanished as a spoken tongue centuries ago. Today, it survives through ancient pottery shards, royal inscriptions, and a surprising amount of loanwords embedded deep within the Armenian language, offering a rare window into a lost Iranian civilization.

The Parthian language, also known as Arsacid Pahlavi, served as the administrative and state language of the Arsacid Parthian Empire from 248 BC to 224 AD. As a Northwestern Iranian language, it belonged to the broader Indo-European family, distinct from the Southwestern Middle Persian. Its reach extended across the Arsacid dynasties of Armenia, Iberia, and Caucasian Albania, leaving a lasting mark on the region's linguistic landscape.

The language is primarily known through a diverse corpus of evidence. Archaeologists have recovered thousands of ostraca—inscribed pottery fragments—at sites like Nisa in Turkmenistan, which date back to the first century BC. Other vital attestations include royal inscriptions on coins, the bilingual text at Seleucia on the Tigris (150–151 AD), and documents from Dura-Europos. Later Manichaean texts, composed after the fall of Parthian power, are particularly valuable for reconstruction because they lack the complex ideograms found in earlier Pahlavi script.

The Pahlavi writing system used for Parthian was derived from Imperial Aramaic. It featured a unique quirk: writers used Aramaic words as logograms, meaning they wrote in Aramaic but read the text in Parthian. This system contrasts with the later, ideogram-free Manichaean manuscripts. Beyond its own records, Parthian significantly influenced Armenian, contributing a vast array of administrative, religious, and everyday vocabulary. While Parthian and Middle Persian shared similarities, they remained distinct, with clear differences in morphology, phonology, and lexicon, such as the Parthian word for 'land' (zamīg) versus the Persian (zamīn).

Today, the legacy of Parthian persists in the phonological developments of contemporary Northwestern Iranian languages like Zaza and Semnani. Scholars continue to study these connections, though the field remains an area of active research. By analyzing these linguistic fossils, historians can reconstruct the cultural and political influence of an empire that once dominated the crossroads of the ancient world.

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