50-448: The Pāratarājas ( Brahmi : [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] [REDACTED] Pāratarāja , Kharosthi : 𐨤𐨪𐨟𐨪𐨗 Pa-ra-ta-ra-ja , Parataraja , "Kings of Pārata ") or Pāradarājas was a dynasty of Parthian kings in the territory of modern-day Baluchistan province of Pakistan from circa 125 CE to circa 300 CE. It appears to have been a tribal polity of Western Iranian heritage. Sometime between
100-444: A Persian subject, and it may be that the young Herodotus heard local eyewitness accounts of events within the empire and of Persian preparations for the invasion of Greece , including the movements of the local fleet under the command of Artemisia I of Caria . Inscriptions recently discovered at Halicarnassus indicate that Artemesia's grandson Lygdamis negotiated with a local assembly to settle disputes over seized property, which
150-473: A boy living on the island of Samos, to which he had fled with his family from the oppressions of Lygdamis, tyrant of Halicarnassus and grandson of Artemisia. Panyassis , the epic poet related to Herodotus, is reported to have taken part in a failed uprising. The Suda also states that Herodotus later returned home to lead the revolt that eventually overthrew the tyrant. Due to recent discoveries of inscriptions at Halicarnassus dated to about Herodotus's time, it
200-477: A bust adorning a curved hem on the coin obverse can be correlated to the contemporaneous Kanishka II . A rough lineage of Paratarajas rulers can be reconstructed from numismatic evidence as follows: [REDACTED] Yolamirasa Bagarevaputrasa Pāratarājasa The frequent referencing of Mithra , a Zoroastrian deity, in the names of the rulers lends credence to the origins of the Paratarajas lying in
250-533: A date of c. 125 CE using circumstantial evidence: The disintegration of Paratarajas can be predicted with more confidence. Two overstrikes by Datayola— the last extant Parataraja ruler—on coins of the Kushano-Sasanian ruler Hormizd I provide a terminus post quem of c. 275 CE Accepting this schema allots about 15 years per ruler, which fits with the norms for ancient dynasties; additionally, Koziya can be assigned to about c. 230, whose incorporation of
300-664: A historical topic more in keeping with the Greek world-view: focused on the context of the polis or city-state. The interplay of civilizations was more relevant to Greeks living in Anatolia, such as Herodotus himself, for whom life within a foreign civilization was a recent memory. Before the Persian crisis, history had been represented among the Greeks only by local or family traditions. The "Wars of Liberation" had given to Herodotus
350-404: A literary critic of Augustan Rome , listed seven predecessors of Herodotus, describing their works as simple unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends, sometimes melodramatic and naïve, often charming – all traits that can be found in the work of Herodotus himself. Modern historians regard the chronology as uncertain, but according to
400-451: A marked contrast in the legend and the long gap from Datayola, the common use of the swastika as the central motif on the reverse and a similarity in metrological standards led Tandon to hypothesize Vijayapotasya might have been either a Parataraja or a ruler from a successor dynasty that exercised nominal independence despite the strong presence of Sassanians in the region. Brahmi script Too Many Requests If you report this error to
450-588: A new city. The Paikuli inscription , which was erected by Narseh (r. 293-302) after his victory over Bahram III , notes an anonymous "Pāradānshah" (King of Pardan) to have been among his many congratulators. Shapur I's inscription at the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht in Naqsh-i-Rustam , which is dated to 262, had "P'rtu"/"Pardan" as one of the many provinces of the Sasanian Empire : And I [Shapur I] possess
500-613: A siege was mounted but eventually their ruler offered submission and was rewarded with governorship of other provinces. Isidore of Charax (fl. 0 C.E - ?) noted Paraitakene was the geographical area beyond Sakastene . The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea (1st century CE) describes the territory of the Parsidai beyond the Ommanitic region on the coast of Balochistan. The contemporaneous text Natural History by Pliny records
550-696: A version of the Histories written by "Herodotus of Thurium", and some passages in the Histories have been interpreted as proof that he wrote about Magna Graecia from personal experience there (IV, 15,99; VI, 127). According to Ptolemaeus Chennus , a late source summarized in the Library of Photius , Plesirrhous the Thessalian, the hymnographer, was the eromenos of Herodotus and his heir. This account has also led some historians to assume Herodotus died childless. Intimate knowledge of some events in
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#1732772101423600-572: A wellspring of additional information. Herodotus was criticized in ancient times for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment. He retorted that he reported what he could see and was told. A sizable portion of the Histories has since been confirmed by modern historians and archaeologists . Modern scholars generally turn to Herodotus's own writing for reliable information about his life, supplemented with ancient yet much later sources, such as
650-520: A young Thucydides happened to be in the assembly with his father, and burst into tears during the recital. Herodotus observed prophetically to the boy's father: "Your son's soul yearns for knowledge." Eventually, Thucydides and Herodotus became close enough for both to be interred in Thucydides's tomb in Athens. Such at least was the opinion of Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides . According to
700-640: Is consistent with a tyrant under pressure. His name is not mentioned later in the tribute list of the Athenian Delian League , indicating that there might well have been a successful uprising against him some time before 454 BC. Herodotus wrote his Histories in the Ionian dialect , in spite of being born in a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda , Herodotus learned the Ionian dialect as
750-491: Is generally assumed that he died not long afterwards, possibly before his sixtieth year. Herodotus would have made his researches known to the larger world through oral recitations to a public crowd. John Marincola writes in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the Histories that there are certain identifiable pieces in the early books of Herodotus's work which could be labeled as "performance pieces". These portions of
800-809: Is now known that the Ionic dialect was used in Halicarnassus in some official documents, so there is no need to assume (like the Suda ) that he must have learned the dialect elsewhere. The Suda is the only source placing Herodotus as the heroic liberator of his birthplace, casting doubt upon the veracity of that romantic account. As Herodotus himself reveals, Halicarnassus, though a Dorian city, had ended its close relations with its Dorian neighbours after an unseemly quarrel (I, 144), and it had helped pioneer Greek trade with Egypt (II, 178). It was, therefore, an outward-looking, international-minded port within
850-609: Is on account of the many strange stories and the folk-tales he reported that his critics have branded him "The Father of Lies". Even his own contemporaries found reason to scoff at his achievement. In fact, one modern scholar has wondered whether Herodotus left his home in Greek Anatolia , migrating westwards to Athens and beyond, because his own countrymen had ridiculed his work, a circumstance possibly hinted at in an epitaph said to have been dedicated to Herodotus at one of his three supposed resting places, Thuria : Herodotus
900-535: The Alcmaeonids , a clan whose history is featured frequently in his writing. According to Plutarch , Herodotus was granted a financial reward by the Athenian assembly in recognition of his work. Plutarch, using Diyllus as a source, says this was 10 talents . In 443 BC or shortly afterwards, he migrated to Thurii , in modern Calabria , as part of an Athenian-sponsored colony . Aristotle refers to
950-569: The Byzantine Suda , an 11th-century encyclopedia which possibly took its information from traditional accounts. Still, the challenge is great: The data are so few – they rest upon such late and slight authority; they are so improbable or so contradictory, that to compile them into a biography is like building a house of cards, which the first breath of criticism will blow to the ground. Still, certain points may be approximately fixed ... Herodotus was, according to his own statement, at
1000-491: The Euphrates to Babylon . For some reason, possibly associated with local politics, he subsequently found himself unpopular in Halicarnassus, and sometime around 447 BC, migrated to Periclean Athens – a city whose people and democratic institutions he openly admired (V, 78). Athens was also the place where he came to know the local topography (VI, 137; VIII, 52–55), as well as leading citizens such as
1050-663: The Greek city of Halicarnassus , part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum , Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria , Italy. He wrote the Histories , a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars , and was the first writer to apply a scientific method to historical events. He has been described as " The Father of History ", a title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero , and
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#17327721014231100-772: The Peloponnesian War on the abduction of some prostitutes – a mocking reference to Herodotus, who reported the Persians' account of their wars with Greece , beginning with the rapes of the mythical heroines Io , Europa , Medea , and Helen . Similarly, the Athenian historian Thucydides dismissed Herodotus as a story-teller. Thucydides, who had been trained in rhetoric , became the model for subsequent prose-writers as an author who seeks to appear firmly in control of his material, whereas with his frequent digressions Herodotus appeared to minimize (or possibly disguise) his authorial control. Moreover, Thucydides developed
1150-513: The Persian Empire , and the historian's family could well have had contacts in other countries under Persian rule, facilitating his travels and his researches. Herodotus's eyewitness accounts indicate that he traveled in Egypt in association with Athenians, probably sometime after 454 BC or possibly earlier, after an Athenian fleet had assisted the uprising against Persian rule in 460–454 BC. He probably traveled to Tyre next and then down
1200-581: The Suda , he was buried in Macedonian Pella and in the agora in Thurii. Herodotus announced the purpose and scope of his work at the beginning of his Histories: Here are presented the results of the inquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among
1250-401: The " Father of Lies " by others. The Histories primarily cover the lives of prominent kings and famous battles such as Marathon , Thermopylae , Artemisium , Salamis , Plataea , and Mycale . His work deviates from the main topics to provide a cultural, ethnographical , geographical, and historiographical background that forms an essential part of the narrative and provides readers with
1300-444: The "King of Paratas". The die engraver often left the legend incomplete if he ran out of room, a quirk that is peculiar to the Paratarajas. Four contemporaneous inscriptions refer to the polity — two of them are edicts by Sasanian Emperors that cursorily refer to the Paratarajas, one is a collection of potsherds that record Yola Mira's patronage of Buddhist monks, and the other is a stone inscription recording Datayola's commissioning of
1350-402: The 7th and 4th centuries BCE, they started their gradual eastward migration from what is now northern Iraq or Iran, and by the 1st century CE, they had reached modern-day Baluchistan. The ancient history of Balochistan , western Pakistan, is scarcely documented. The Paratarajas polity is known through coinage, which has been primarily found in and around Loralai . E. J. Rapson first studied
1400-600: The Far West. The Paratarajas were Zoroastrian by faith but they likely patronized Buddhism as well. Tandon said the Paratarajas may have been Parthian vassals who declared independence, leveraging the weakening of imperial authority and a burgeoning trade with the Roman Empire . The only significant information about their rule is that they flourished as an intermediary state between three major powers—the Kushanas to
1450-489: The Paraetaceni to be between Aria and Parthia . Ptolemy notes Paradene was a toponym for an interior region of Gedrosia . Extant literature portrays the Paratarajas as a migrant tribal polity that had originated in the territory of modern-day north-western Iran or further east, and migrated over centuries to the eastern fringes of Parthian territory. There, it may have reached its peak as an independent polity. Neither
1500-525: The Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.151 via cp1112 cp1112, Varnish XID 922618040 Upstream caches: cp1112 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 05:35:01 GMT Herodotus Herodotus ( Ancient Greek : Ἡρόδοτος , romanized : Hēródotos ; c. 484 – c. 425 BC) was a Greek historian and geographer from
1550-407: The ancient account, these predecessors included Dionysius of Miletus , Charon of Lampsacus, Hellanicus of Lesbos , Xanthus of Lydia and, the best attested of them all, Hecataeus of Miletus . Of these, only fragments of Hecataeus's works survived, and the authenticity of these is debatable, but they provide a glimpse into the kind of tradition within which Herodotus wrote his own Histories . It
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1600-591: The audience. It was conventional in Herodotus's day for authors to "publish" their works by reciting them at popular festivals. According to Lucian , Herodotus took his finished work straight from Anatolia to the Olympic Games and read the entire Histories to the assembled spectators in one sitting, receiving rapturous applause at the end of it. According to a very different account by an ancient grammarian, Herodotus refused to begin reading his work at
1650-458: The beginning of his work, a native of Halicarnassus in Anatolia , and it is generally accepted that he was born there around 485 BC. The Suda says his family was influential, that he was the son of Lyxes and Dryo and the brother of Theodorus, and that he was also related to Panyassis – an epic poet of the time. Halicarnassus was then within the Persian Empire , making Herodotus
1700-483: The case of Bactria , and because the region was not claimed as a Sassanian territory in future inscriptions like Kartir's, at Naqsh-e Rajab . Coins carrying an inscription of " śrī rājño sāhi vijayapotasya" ("Of the noble Lord, King Vijayapota") on the reverse have been found around Loralai; based on the presence of a crescent at the brow of the obverse bust, a terminus post quem of c. 400 corresponding to Sassanian shahanshah Yazdegerd I can be assigned. Despite
1750-536: The coinage in 1905; it was subjected to a comprehensive evaluation by B. N. Mukherjee in 1972; these studies have been since superseded by analyses by Pankaj Tandon and Harry Falk . Coinage was issued in five denominations: didrachms, drachms, hemidrachms, quarter drachms, and obols; all rulers did not issue every denomination. The first six rulers minted stable denominations in silver that were devalued and then replaced by billon than copper. Tandon notes multiple similarities with Indo-Parthian coinage, especially in
1800-432: The extant inscriptions nor the coinage map the extents of the Paratarajas to any geographic precision. Nonetheless, most scholars have placed the polity in western Balochistan, west of Turan and east of Siestan, largely catering to individual biases. Tandon challenges this "implicit consensus" and hypothesizes Shapur I's inscription to have listed regions in a geographical order from west to east — thus, Pardan falls between
1850-439: The festival of Olympia until some clouds offered him a bit of shade – by which time the assembly had dispersed. (Hence the proverbial expression "Herodotus and his shade" to describe someone who misses an opportunity through delay.) Herodotus's recitation at Olympia was a favourite theme among ancient writers, and there is another interesting variation on the story to be found in the Suda : that of Photius and Tzetzes , in which
1900-422: The first genuinely historical inspiration felt by a Greek. These wars showed him that there was a corporate life, higher than that of the city, of which the story might be told; and they offered to him as a subject the drama of the collision between East and West. With him, the spirit of history was born into Greece; and his work, called after the nine Muses, was indeed the first utterance of Clio . Though Herodotus
1950-505: The first years of the Peloponnesian War (VI, 91; VII, 133, 233; IX, 73) suggests that he returned to Athens, in which case it is possible that he died there during an outbreak of the plague. It is also possible he died in Macedonia instead, after obtaining the patronage of the court there; or else he died back in Thurii. There is nothing in the Histories that can be dated to later than 430 BC with any certainty, and it
2000-537: The inexact provinces Makran and Hind. Deriving support from the abundant finds of Parataraja coins and potsherds in Loralai, he proposes the Paratarajas to have ruled the district and its surrounds, probably extending in the west to modern-day Quetta (or Kandahar) and in the north-east to modern-day Zhob . There exists no conclusive evidence to date the establishment of Paratarajas in Balochistan. Tandon proposed
2050-399: The lands: Fars Persis, Pahlav [Parthia] ... and all of Abarshahr [all the upper (eastern, Parthian) provinces], Kerman, Sakastan, Turgistan, Makuran, Pardan Paradene, Hind [Sind] and Kushanshahr all the way to Pashkibur [Peshawar?] and to the borders of Kashgaria, Sogdia and Chach [Tashkent] and of that sea-coast Mazonshahr [Oman]. In 1926 and 1927, Aurel Stein commanded an excavation at
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2100-424: The matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks. His record of the achievements of others was an achievement in itself, though the extent of it has been debated. Herodotus's place in history and his significance may be understood according to the traditions within which he worked. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. Dionysius of Halicarnassus ,
2150-542: The metrological standards and shape, and the coinage of the Western Satraps , especially in materials. The coins exhibit a bust on the obverse and a swastika —either right-facing or left-facing—on the reverse, circumscribed by a Prakrit legend in Brahmi script (usually silver coins) or Kharoshthi script (usually copper coins). This legend carried the name of the issuer followed by patronymic, and identification as
2200-730: The north, the Western Satraps to the east, and the Sassanids to the west—for about two centuries. Their fall can be correlated to the well-corroborated decline in Indo-Roman trade volume beginning in the mid-3rd century and then, Shapur II's devastating Eastern Campaign . Tandon rejects the idea that they were conquered by the Sasanians as early as 262—as attested in Shapur I's inscription—because Parata coins continued to be abundant without exhibiting any abrupt Sassanian influence as in
2250-472: The order of the four quarters, in the acceptance of the Sarvastivadin teachers. And from this right donation may there be in future a share for [his] mother and father, in future a share for all beings and long life for the master of the law. Yola Mira, a king whose existence was unknown at the time of the excavation, has since been determined form coin finds to be the earliest Parataraja king. For long,
2300-769: The potsherds remained the only non-numismatic evidence for any of the Parataraja rulers. A stone-slab inscription found in ??, inscribed in both Brahmi and Kharosthi, commemorates the establishment of an eponymous city by Datayola in the sixteenth year of his reign. A right-facing Swastika is engraved on the inscription. No mention of the dynasty is found in extant literature; however, classical literature in Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit make mention of tribal polities named "Parētakēnoí" (Πᾰρητᾰκηνοί), "Pareitakai/Pareitacae" (Παρειτάκαις), "Parsidai" (Παρ?óδòν > Παρσιδὦν (?)), "Paraetaceni", "Paradene" (Παραδηνή) and "Parada". Tandon accepts Mukherjee's theory all of these names refer to
2350-468: The research seem independent and "almost detachable", so that they might have been set aside by the author for the purposes of an oral performance. The intellectual matrix of the 5th century, Marincola suggests, comprised many oral performances in which philosophers would dramatically recite such detachable pieces of their work. The idea was to criticize previous arguments on a topic and emphatically and enthusiastically insert their own in order to win over
2400-597: The ruins of a Buddhist site at Tor Dherai in Loralai and discovered potsherds carrying Prakrit inscriptions in Brahmi and Kharosthi scripts. Sten Konow , publishing the report about three years later, failed to understand the Brahmi legends but interpreted the Kharosthi legend as: Of the Shahi Yola Mira, the master [owner] of the vihara, this water hall [is] the religious gift, in his own Yola-Mira-shahi-Vihara, to
2450-624: The same entity, who gave rise to the dynasty; he cites Datayola's coin-inscriptions in support. Around 440 BCE, Herodotus described of the Parētakēnoí as one of the Median tribes that were collectively ruled by Deiokes . Arrian records Alexander to have encountered the Pareitakai in Sogdian province — in his account, that parallels those by Quintus Curtius Rufus , Strabo , and Plutarch ,
2500-474: The son of Sphynx lies; in Ionic history without peer; a Dorian born, who fled from slander's brand and made in Thuria his new native land. Yet it was in Athens where his most formidable contemporary critics could be found. In 425 BC, which is about the time that Herodotus is thought by many scholars to have died, the Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes created The Acharnians , in which he blames
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