et one of no very
special eminency. On the ethnology of the nation, and the circumstances
under which the country became an integral part of the Persian
dominions, they throw no light. We have still to seek an answer to the
questions, "Who were the Parthians?" and "How did they become Persian
subjects?"

Who were the Parthians? It is not until the Parthians have emerged
from obscurity and become a great people that ancient authors trouble
themselves with inquiries as to their ethnic character and remote
antecedents. Of the first writers who take the subject into their
consideration, some are content to say that the Parthians were a race of
Scyths, who at a remote date had separated from the rest of the nation,
and had occupied the southern portion of the Chorasmian desert, whence
they had gradually made themselves masters of the mountain region
adjoining it. Others added to this that the Scythic tribe to which they
belonged was called the Dahse; that their own proper name was Parni, or
Aparni; and that they had migrated originally from the country to the
north of the Palus Maeotis, where they had left the great mass of their
fellow tribesmen. Subsequently, in the time of the Antonines, the theory
was started that the Parthians were Scyths, whom Sesostris, on his
return from his Scythian expedition, brought into Asia and settled in
the mountain-tract lying east of the Caspian.

It can scarcely be thought that these notices have very much historical
value. Moderns are generally agreed that the Scythian conquests of
Sesostris are an invention of the Egyptian priests, which they palmed
on Herodotus and Diodorus. Could they be regarded as having really taken
place, still the march back from Scythia to Egypt round the north and
east of the Caspian Sea would be in the highest degree improbable. The
settlement of the Parthians in Parthia by the returning conqueror is, in
fact, a mere duplicate of the tale commonly told of his having settled
the Colchians in Colchis, and is equally worthless. The earlier authors,
moreover, know nothing of the story, which first appears in the second
century after our era, and as time goes on becomes more circumstantial.

Even the special connection of the Parthians with the Dahse, and their
migration from the shores of the Palus Mteotis, may be doubted. Strabo
admits it to be uncertain whether there were any Dahse at all about the
Mseotis; and, if there were, it would be open to question wheth