Hyrcania

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Hyrcania ( Greek Ὑρκανία Hyrkania , Old Persian ????? Varkâna , Middle Persian ?????? Gurgān , Akkadian Urqananu ) is an ancient landscape on the southern Caspian Sea in what is now Iran and Turkmenistan . The area in Iran roughly comprised the provinces of Gilan , Māzandarān and Golestan .

Location of Hyrkania

history

Under Darius III. was Phrataphernes ( Greek Φραταφέρνης ) satrap of Parthia and Hyrcania. After the death of Darius, he was subjugated by Alexander the Great and confirmed as a satrap. Even after Alexander's death in 323 BC He remained a satrap.

Wildlife

In ancient times, Hyrcania was famous for its tigers , but they have been extinct since around 1970. This is how the princess Dido of ancient mythology accuses the hero Aeneas , who left her:

“Not from Dardanos ' tribe;
thou art created by the rock staring at the Caucasus . You were nourished by the milk of Hyrcanic tigers. "

- Virgil , Aeneid 4, 365

Christoph Martin Wieland took up this metaphor when he reproached the scholar Graeter in a letter in 1797 : If he believed the accusations against him, then he had “no Christian blood drop in his body, then some Caucasian rock gave birth to you and suckled a Hyrkanian tiger - in short, you must be a second Robespierre ”.

In Georg Friedrich Handel's aria by Ruggiero Sta nell'Ircana pietrosa tana it says (in the third act of the opera Alcina ): “The wild tigress hides in her rock hole in Hyrcania”.

See also

literature

  • Udo Hartmann : Hyrcania in Parthian times: a regnum without a king? In: Binder, Carsten / Börm, Henning / Luther, Andreas (eds.): Diwan. Studies in the History and Culture of the Ancient Near East and the Eastern Mediterranean - Studies on the history and culture of the Middle East and the Eastern Mediterranean in antiquity. Festschrift for Josef Wiesehöfer on his 65th birthday. Wellem, Duisburg, 2016, pp. 391–431.
  • Mohammed Yusuf Kiani: Parthian Sites in Hyrcania (The Gurgan Plain). (Archaeological messages from Iran, supplementary volume, 9) Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1982
  • Martin Schottky: On the history of Media Atropatene and Hyrkanien in Parthian times . In: Josef Wiesehöfer (ed.): The Parthian Empire and its testimonies. (Historia-Einzelschriften 122) Steiner, Stuttgart, 1998, pp. 435–472.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Woodhouse (1910), p. 1013
  2. a b Lendering (1996)
  3. Christoph Martin Wieland: Selected letters to various friends, written in the years 1851 to 1810 and arranged according to the chronological order. Zurich 1815, p. 155 ( on Google Books )