Kamniskires and the ancient state of Elymais
In recent years, while working on the history of nomadism in Iran, I spent a great deal of time reading the works of European travellers who visited the region, from the 16th century onwards. Although looking out for descriptions of encounters with nomads, I was struck by how many times early writers referred to the Classical sources on various parts of Iran, and how well-versed they were in the region’s pre-Islamic history. I began to want to know how and when Europeans knew what they knew about ancient Iran since it seemed to me that, long before archaeological excavations were ever conducted there, an enormous amount of preparatory work on Iran’s ancient history had already been accomplished.
As I sought to understand the origins of Western curiosity about ancient Iran, I was inevitably drawn back in time. Although there are certainly relevant mediaeval works such as Marco Polo’s travelogue, copies of which began to be produced by hand in 1307, these only ever had very limited distribution, and it seemed clear that the invention of printing at Subiaco in 1464 was responsible for the real upsurge in knowledge dissemination and interest in the ancient East. Printed Latin translations of Strabo’s Geography and Herodotus’ Histories appeared in 1469 and 1474; and Quintus Curtius Rufus’ history of Alexander the Great came out in 1470 or 1471. Works like these contain copious amounts of data on ancient Persia and were staples of European education long before the Enlightenment. Travellers went to Iran equipped with these works. As Jean Chardin, who first visited Iran in 1666, wrote, ‘Nothing is easier than to recognize the situation of Persepolis in the descriptions of Arrian, Quintus Curtius and Diodorus Siculus; and it is a great pleasure to travel the country with the ancient authors in one’s hand’.
More recently, while preparing the second edition of my Archaeology of Elam (see Summer Scholarship in ISAW’s news blog for 15 July 2014), I was again reminded of just how many problems we assume were first investigated by modern scholars have a history of study stretching back hundreds of years. In the mid-2nd century BC the first kings of Elymais — the name given in Classical sources to the ancient land of Elam in southwestern Iran — bore the name Kamniskires. This name, albeit in somewhat garbled form (Mnascires), appears in Pseudo-Lucian’s Macrobii (or Longaevi), a work from the 2nd century AD which was first printed in Greek by Laurentius de Alopa in Florence in 1496. A Latin translation by the great Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus was published in Paris in 1513 or 1514. The only extant example turned up in 1933 and is today in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Ps.-Lucian’s Mnascires was identified as a ‘king of the Parthians who lived to be 96 years old’ (rex Parthiensium, sex supra nonaginta vixit annos). His position in the long sequence of Parthian kings was first suggested in 1725 by the French numismatist Jean Foy-Vaillant, but it was not until 1852 that the Russian General Ivan Aleksyeevich Bartholomaei (1813-1870) announced his discovery of a tetradrachm, allegedly from Iran, with the Greek legend ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΚΑΜΝΙΣΚΙΡΟΥ ΝΙΚΗΦΟΡΟΥ, ‘King Kamniskires Nikephorus [Bearer of Victory]’, which he felt was certainly the same individual called Mnascires by Ps-Lucian. Just four years later, in 1856, W.S.W. Vaux, President of the Numismatic Society of London (now the Royal Numismatic Society) and an Assistant Keeper at the British Museum, observed that examples of Kamniskires’ coinage had recently been found at Susa by W.K. Loftus, but it took another 20 years before numismatists categorically struck Kamniskires from the Parthian kinglist, and it wasn’t until 1888 that the great German historian Alfred von Gutschmid recognized that these coins belonged to the kingdom of Elymais, the successor state to ancient Elam. In 2004 the Iranian numismatist Farhad Assar published an important paper on the chronology of early Elymaean coinage, and in 2007 the Dutch scholar P.A. van’t Haaff brought out the first comprehensive catalogue of Elymaean coinage in over 75 years. While publications like these have brought much more clarity to our understanding of the chronology and history of the Kamniscirid dynasty, they are just the latest in a long line of inquiries stretching well back into the Renaissance.