John Stathatos: Arkiotis

ARKIOTIS

Tarn's scathing comment on the lost Kingdom of Ormuz and its predecessor state is familiar: “of all the Seleucid satrapies, Carmania is the least known; it seems to have no history”. Like most bon mots, this one needs to be taken cum grano salis. There is, at least, no quarrel over the satrapy's general geographical location: west of Gedrosia, along the coast south of the Persian Desert, dominating the Straights of Ormuz along their northern shore. Alexander the Great's admiral, Nearchos, mentions it in passing in his memoirs, while Onesicritus writes of mines, the gold-bearing river Amanis, and of the head-hunters infesting the hinterland. The exact boundaries are in some doubt, for Strabo's conflation of earlier sources gives the distance from Cape Jask to Macae (Ras Mussendam) in Arabia as “one day's voyage” - unlikely even under the most auspicious of circumstances.
     The invaluable Pliny adds to the scant information, noting the presence in the country of the Harmozaei of “Portus Macedonum et arae Alexandri in promunturio” (VI, 110) - in other words, of a Graeco-Macedonian town on the Gulf of Ormuz and of altars on Cape Jask attributed to (or dedicated to?) Alexander. Ptolemy (VI, 18) mentions three Carmanian cities: the inevitable Alexandria; Carmania Metropolis (probably modern Kerman); and Harmozia or Ormozia, doubtless Pliny's Portus Macedonum, from which hand-sewn native coracles operated a regular ferry service to Arabia. Megasthenes adds a fourth place name, that of Arkiotis, placing it somewhere in the upper Jiruft basin.
     By the death of Antiochus IV in 163, the Seleucids had lost most of their Persian satrapies, including Persis and Seistan; on the other hand, Carmania did not at that time, or for the next two centuries, form part of the Bactrian or Parthian realms. The inevitable assumption must be that Carmania, or Ormuz as it was increasingly known, became an independent kingdom, an assumption supported by numismatic evidence of an otherwise unaccounted-for dynasty including kings Bellaios, Tigraios and Goaisos (see Alotte de la Fuye, 1934, and J.M. Unvala, 1935). According to an inscription on the reverse of a silver coin found in Susa, the capital of the Kingdom of Ormuz was Arkiotis, a city briefly but wonderfully enriched thanks to its key position in the southern trade route from India to Persepolis. This route, according to Tarn, was “perhaps” the one taken by the Hyrcanian envoys to Nero in AD 59; clearly identified in the Peutinger Table as a half-way house between Seistan and Ormuz, there may be reason to associate Arkiotis with Marco Polo's Camadi.
     Other than a handful of uncertain place-names, little survives of the lost kingdom of Ormuz and its capital: a few porphyry seals, coins whose obverse bears a riotous confusion of symbols (the Ptolemaic eagle, a burning palm, a boar's head, a winged thunderbolt), an incomplete set of ivory spice weights, the strangely shaped and balanced Ormuzian stabbing sword described by Macrobius, an unusually obscene epigram by Martial beginning “Aspicis ingenium Arkiotæ...”, a now illegible text inscribed on a vast limestone slab dredged up from the Red Sea in 1873, and, above all, the celebrated bronze statue of Arkiote Tyche, or Fortune of the City, which was excavated in 1977 by the Imperial Iranian Department of Archaeology, only to be melted down three years later by order of Ayatollah Khorasani.~