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Bahl Šahastan in the land of the K‘ušans: Medieval Armenian memories of Balkh as an Arsacid capital

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2021

Alison Vacca Open the ORCID record for Alison Vacca [Opens in a new window]
Alison Vacca*
Affiliation:
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper explores the medieval Armenian understanding of the city of Balkh as a capital of the Arsacid Empire. Medieval Armenian sources employ four strategies of remembrance: scriptural geography, genealogy, folk etymology, and origin stories. These strategies invest the city of Balkh as the source of power of both Armenian royalty and nobility, through their connections to the Great Arsacids. There are two main themes in the descriptions of Balkh. First, the Arsacids of Balkh consistently decimated Sasanian armies in ways that the Armenian Arsacids could not emulate. Second, Balkh emerges as a refuge for (usually Parthian) rebels against the Chinese and Persian Empires. This paper explores the significance of Balkh as a site of memory by placing Armenian constructions of the Great Arsacid past (with some potential echoes of Great Kushan and Kushano-Sasanian history) into dialogue with the history of the city as it appears in Arabic.

Keywords

BalkhArmeniaArsacidMemorySasanianParthianPahlav
Type
Article
Information
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 84 , Issue 1 , February 2021 , pp. 19 - 45
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of SOAS University of London

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Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Sergio La Porta for reading through drafts of this article and offering very productive suggestions to improve. I would also like to thank Khodadad Rezakhani, whose questions about Arsacid territory in my book kick-started this project. I presented on my first inkling of the importance of Balkh at the “Armeno-Iranica” conference at UCLA, organized by Touraj Daryaee, Houri Berberian, and Sebouh Aslanian; I presented the final version of this article at “Re-presented pasts” at the University of Leiden, organized by Peter Webb. I would like to thank the organizers and participants (particularly Sarah Savant and Antoine Borrut) for their thoughts and encouragement. Both Gohar Grigoryan and Alexander Akopyan were kind enough to send me scans of relevant sources that were otherwise unavailable during the 2020 pandemic: such friendly overtures are not only incredibly helpful, but also uplifting in difficult times. Finally, I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. All mistakes remain entirely my own.

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