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Parthian Silk Road Treasury/ Justin's History


Onasander

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Their armour, and that of their horses, is formed of plates, lapping over one another like the feathers of a bird, and covers both man and horse entirely.[5] Of gold and silver, except for adorning their arms, they make no use.

 

http://www.shsu.edu/~his_ncp/Parthian.html

 

The Romans knew as little about Istakhr as the Greeks had known about Persepolis—and this despite the fact that for four hundred years the Sassanians maintained relations, friendly or hostile, with the empire.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis

Estakhr first appears in history as an Achaemenid city in present-day Fârs Province, Iran. It gained its importance not only from its close association with Persepolis: it also commanded the western end of an ancient caravan-route that ran from the Indus Valley via Kandahar and Sistan to Persia.[1]

 

The city temporarily became the capital of Sassanian Persia during the reign of Ardashir I (224-242) before the capital moved to Ctesiphon. During the Sasanid period (224-651) the royal treasury of the empire, known as ganj ī šāhīgān, is said[by whom?] to have been in Estakhr. In 915-916, Masʿūdī himself saw in a house at Estakhr owned by a Persian noble, "the large and very fine manuscript" of a work copied in 731 from original documents in the royal treasury.[2]

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istakhr

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So.... how exactly did they operate economically?

 

It seems obvious if Persian and Parthian treasuries pop up in such close proximity to one another, along the silk road, they used it as a obvious central hub along that highway to centralize wealth, as well as to milk the traders going through.

 

Just what do you do with a treasury if your army is a slave army, and your nobility is levied to provide Calvary proportional to wealth?

 

Gold and Silver seems rather nuisanced, beyond buying food, or buying off people/cities.

 

Yet.... they had a treasury, undoubtedly filled with said gold and silver.

 

I'm clearly missing something here. Anyone knows?

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