TEHRAN -- A new study of Parthian and Sasanian numismatics reveals how Persian kings borrowed, adapted and transformed divine imagery to legitimize their rule — and how visual traditions can outlive the dynasties that created them.
For centuries, the coins of ancient Iran carried a quiet but potent message: a king receiving a sacred symbol — a ring, a diadem, a palm branch — from the hand of a god. It was a scene of divine endorsement, minted into metal and circulated among merchants, soldiers and subjects. But who really controlled the image?
Neda Akhavan Aghdam, an associate professor at the Research Institute of Art at the Iranian Academy of Arts, presented a comparative study this week on exactly that question. 
Her subject: the visual evolution of the “investiture scene” on Parthian and Sasanian coins. Her method: interpictoriality, a framework that treats images not as static artifacts but as living references that shift across social, political and religious contexts.
The findings challenge some comfortable assumptions. The Sasanians, who came to power in the third century C.E., cultivated an official discourse of direct continuity with the Achaemenids, often downplaying the intervening Parthian era. 
But the coins tell a different story. Akhavan Aghdam says the visual language of kingship — the very composition of the investiture scene — reveals a clear line of continuity between Parthian and Sasanian traditions.
“The Sasanians, while redefining the ideology of legitimacy and divine glory (farrah), nevertheless adopted established visual structures that had taken shape in the Parthian period,” she said at the fifth promotional chair session held at the Research Institute of Art in Tehran. “They adapted them to the intellectual and religious framework of their own era.”
In other words: new ideology, old picture.
The Parthians, for their part, had borrowed heavily from Hellenistic visual traditions, particularly the Seleucid habit of showing a ruler receiving power from a Greek deity. But they Iranianized it. By the time the Sasanians took over, the image had been reworked again, this time within a Zoroastrian cosmology.
What makes the study unusual is its deliberate avoidance of textual sources. Akhavan Aghdam focused almost entirely on the images themselves, arguing that written records — inscriptions, the Avesta, Pahlavi texts — can unconsciously steer interpretation toward predetermined conclusions. The visual evidence, she suggests, deserves to speak on its own terms.
Azadeh Heydarpour, an associate professor at the Research Institute for Cultural Heritage and Tourism, praised the methodological innovation but noted that the concept of divine legitimacy has much deeper roots — visible already in Achaemenid inscriptions praising Ahura Mazda. The investiture scene, she suggested, was not a beginning but a reinterpretation of a far older Iranian political idea.
Still, Akhavan Aghdam’s central insight stands. Ancient Iranian art, she says, evolved not through sudden ruptures but through gradual processes of transmission, adaptation and reinterpretation. The kings changed. The gods changed. But the scene — a king, a god, a sacred ring — endured.