Jean Foy-Vaillant’s Arsacidarum Imperium and Achaemenidarum Imperium

The ISAW Library is often pleasantly surprised by titles that have come to us through large collection donations. We recently added a particularly impressive title from the collection of Nina Garsoían to the library: Jean Foy-Vaillant’s Arsacidarum Imperium and Achaemenidarum Imperium, a major work in the history of Parthian and Persian numismatics. The ISAW Library is particularly excited to have added these volumes to our collection because it relates directly to the research of one of our doctoral candidates, Alireza Khounani, who is planning to include material on Vaillant’s contributions to the economic history of ancient West Asia in his dissertation.

Jean Foy-Vaillant (born May 24, 1632 in Beauvais) first became interested in numismatics when a farmer brought him ancient coins that he had found in the area of Beauvais.[1] He studied these coins meticulously and deciphered their inscriptions. This ignited a passion in the young Vaillant, who soon traveled to Paris to meet with the renowned numismatist Peter Seguin. Before long, First Minister of State Jean-Baptist Colbert sent Foy-Vaillant on a mission to Italy and Greece to collect coins for the collection of the Royal Museum. His contribution doubled the size of the collection, for which he prepared a catalogue in two volumes, Numismata Imperatorum Romanorum Praestantiora a Julio Caesare ad Postumum et Tyrannos [The Rarer Coins of the Roman Emperors from Julius Caesar to Postumus and the Tyrants].

Vaillant’s second voyage, ordered by Colbert in 1674, nearly ended in disaster. En route from Marseille to Rome, Vaillant’s ship was captured by an Algerian vessel, and the crew taken to Algiers. In a letter to the King Louis XIV of France, the Dey of Algeria promised to release them on the condition that the French king liberated eight Algerians who, the Dey claimed, were being held as galley slaves. After four and half months of captivity, Vaillant and his companions were released and the Dey returned the 200 silver and 21 gold ancient coins that he had collected. (The capture of Vaillant’s vessel was part of a pattern of conflict that would soon explode into the French-Algerian war of 1681-1688). On the return voyage, Vaillant’s ship encountered a pirate vessel originating from the Moroccan city of Salé, and the numismatist swallowed the 21 gold coins he had collected. However, the wind pushed the would-be assailants away and Vaillant passed the 5-6 ounces of gold coins within a few days of his return to France. According to Robert Morris, one of Vaillant’s friends purchased one of these coins (an aureus of the Roman emperor Otho) while it was still inside the numismatist’s digestive tract. 

In 1679 and 1685 respectively, Vaillant was sent to Iran and Egypt where he found the “most precious metals, and the rarest,” which he took to the Royal Museum. After his return, he published Seleucidarum Imperium, sive Historia Regum Syriae. Ad fidem Numismaium accommodata [The Empire of the Seleucids, or the History of the Kings of Syria arranged according to the testimony of coins]. In his future publications, he adopted the methodology he had formulated in this book, using numismatic evidence to fill in gaps in extant literary and historical sources.

Following his travels in Iran, Vaillant left an unpublished account of his travel which describes the geography of the country and his observations of its culture. He began work on a two-volume work on the coins he collected there, giving a lecture on the subject at the Académie d’inscriptions et Belles Lettres on Nov. 14. 1704.[2] His two-volume book on the subject was not quite finished at the time of his death on October 23, 1706. The work was completed by Charles de Valois de la Mare (1671-1747) and published in 1725 by Charles Moett in two volumes. Volume 1 is Arsacidarum Imperium, sive, Regum Parthorum historia. Ad fidem Numismatum accommodata [The Empire of the Arsacids, or the History of the Kings of Parthia. Arranged according to the testimony of coins], and volume 2 is Achaemenidarum Imperium, sive Regum Ponti, Bosphori, et Bithyniae Historia. Ad fidem Numismatum accommodata [The Empire of the Achaemenids, or the History of the Kings of Pontus, Bosphorus, and Bithynia. Arranged according to the testimony of the coins].

The second volume, Achaemenidarum Imperium, offers a comprehensive study of three kingdoms, Pontus, Bosphorus, and Bithynia. The most detailed study is on the Bosphoran rulers, which totals 107 pages with 18 engraved illustrations of coins. Its main error is miscalculation of the beginning of the Bosphoran era by misreading a gold stater of Pharnaces II. (Writing in 1744, Félix Cary suggested that this and other errors in the volumes would have been avoided if it had been completed by the author himself rather than Valois, judging by Vaillant’s earlier, more meticulous publications)[3]. 

Arsacidarum Imperium was the first complete and systematic catalog of Arsacid coins organized on a historical basis. There was no truly systematic study of these coins until nearly 250 years later, with the 1971 publication of David Sellwood’s 1971 An introduction to the coinage of Parthia. The book begins with a chronology of important events associated with Arsacid kings based on Greco-Roman sources, including the rise of Arsaces in Parthia, struggles with the Seleucids until the Arsacid conquest of Mesopotamia, encounters with the Romans especially the disagreements over Armenia beginning with Phraates III and Pompey the Great, and finally the overthrow of the Arsacids by the hands of, then local kings of Pars, Ardashir and his son Shapur. The chronology is followed by a genealogy of Arsacid kings, and an index of the kings’ titles according to their coins. The author then offers a synthesis of the Arsacid history based on written sources, entitled Annales Arsacidarum, before examining each king based on numismatic evidence.

Vaillant’s text on the Arsacid period includes some errors and misattributions, but by and large it demonstrates impressive skill in stylistic analysis, which informed a broadly sound order of the coins based on the chronology of Arsacid kings mentioned in Greek and Roman texts. Still today, identifying Arsacid coinage is considered one of the most difficult tasks for numismatists. Most coins only contain the title “Arsaces,” not the personal names of the rulers, making the assignment of a coin to a particular ruler problematic. The immense contribution of Vaillant in the early 18th century was to recognize, for the first time, the importance and uniqueness of Arsacid history and numismatics, which established a strong methodological foundation for numerous studies of the following centuries that complemented his admirable effort in introducing one of the most enigmatic and long-lasting empires of the ancient world.

Notes

[1] The biographical material in this in the following paragraph is based chiefly on Morris, R. (1877). Jean Foy Vaillant. American Journal of Numismatics. Vol. 12 (2), 38-45. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43583957 ^

[2] Bayle, P. (1706). Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, June 1705, 606-612. https://books.google.fr/books?id=y4Y3AAAAMAAJ&hl=fr&pg=PA606#v=onepage&f=false

[3] Cary, F. (1744). Dissertations sur la Fondation de la Ville de Marseille; sur l’histoire des rois du Bosphore Cimmerien et sure Lesbonax, philosophe de Mytilene, 121. https://books.google.com/books?id=ohshCx72RqEC&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&pg=PA121#v=onepage&f=false