The Dr. N. Debevoise work, 1938, addresses the Parthians' political history out of necessity, because a part of its political history is supported by innumerous sources. The lack of information on the people of Parthia in these innumerable sources is so bad that N. Debevoise unequivocally states an absolute lack of knowledge on the language of Parthians. Their economy, their cultural traditions are known only in a most schematic format. Once a century, a monograph like this Dr. N. Debevoise work gets updated, accounting for numerous articles on particular aspects in the interim period. Until that happened, the N. Debevoise 1938 monograph remains a main and dependable source on the Parthians. Due to the origin of the sources, in the political events, the Parthians serve as purely accidental background, the main content and actors are the Roman and Seleucid empires. It is a monotonous litany of ancient greed and ambitions, 90% of it is minutiae that may infuse a feeling of the times, while leaving a reader with few kernels of knowledge about the Parthians. Abridging the Romans and Seleucids down to size would shrink the history book covering 471 years of Parthian period (247 BC – 224 AD) to about 20 pages. These pages would barely touch on the major events that shaped Eurasia and Middle East during Parthian time, the events that took place in the immense nomadic world stretching from Dardanelles to Yellow Sea, where Parthia was a southwestern peninsula. A trigger for these events was a palace coup in China that replaced the 1400-year reign of Zhou Scythians with the reign of Han Chinese. There is a direct parallel between the fall of the Zhou Scythians and the fall of the Parthians. Both ruling elites had to accommodate to the people under their rule, adapt their culture, traditions, and language, they lost the vigor and military capacity of the nomadic base that brought them to the top, and were ready to succumb to the local ambitions raised on the largely nomadic mindset. In the case of the Zhou, in 1400 years both the ruling elite and their parent tribes merged with the local populations, and were more Chinese than Türkic (cf. today's Uigurs in China and Uigurs in Central Asia, who also diverged 1400 years, or 58 generations ago). In the case of Parni-Parthians, the core of the tribes probably carried their culture and language intact through the 18 generations of the Parthian dominance, and had all chances to sustain them for another millennium. As a dynastic tribe, of all Türkic nomadic tribes in Parthia, Parni had best chances to survive all nature and man-made cataclysms.

In 2008, the Dr. N. Debevoise book was published in Russia in Russian translation, with extensive bibliographic appendix, updated with ​​the works of the Russian and world scientists covering history, culture, and socio-economic structure of Parthia and its neighbors, accounting for the period from the publication of the N. Debevoise book to the recent time (1938-2008). The work of just listing 10,500 bibliographical references is indeed monumental, But since the angle of the compendium is about the same as of the N. Debevoise book, the large questions unanswered in the N. Debevoise book remain unanswered. For access to the PDF file, see the Russian version of this page.

Before the term Scythians became a household name in the Western world, the continuum of the nomadic tribes in the Eurasia was known under numerous tribal names, with few of these names of generic nature, Guzes standing for tribes, and Juns standing for kins, in the west and in the east respectively. Thus, we learn that Parthians were Guzes: “Additional omen tablets from Uruk, dated February 7, 213 B.C., make more certain the identification of the Parthians with that ancient enemy from the northeast, the Guti (Thureau-Dangin, Tablettes d'Uruk, No. 3 rev., lines 28 and 43).” [Debevoise Neilson, A political history of Parthia, p. 14] The Guti were really ancient, in the Assyrian tablets they figure from 2300 BC, by the Parthian time they were entrenched Middle Easterners for more than 2 millennia. From the genetic tracing we can conclude that they, like the other nomadic Middle Easterners Kumans, Lulu, Quti, Turuks, and Subars, were fractions of the N. Pontic Kurgan nomads who crossed the Caucasus starting in 6000 - 5500 ybp, or 4000-3500 BC. Before getting on record  in the Assyrian tablets, at least some of the Guties lived in the Middle East for nearly 2 millennia. According to the Assyrian records, nomadic animal herders occupied a prominent place in the life of the Middle East, they figure in the royal correspondence of the Middle Eastern rulers with their Almighty. Between the lake Urmia and Aral Sea lies a nice path along the Uzboi channel of the Amudarya, and the Aral Sea area before depopulation at 2000 BC must also have been a pasturing range of the Guti tribes, accessible from the northern and southern ends of the Caspian Sea. According to archeological research, before depopulation of 2000 BC, the Aral river valleys were populated by Uralic-type hunter-gatherers engaged in fishing. Re-population of the area came from the Eastern and Western Kurgan Timber-Gravers. With the revival of the Uzboi channel at 1000 BC, the “Western Kurgan Timber-Gravers” had likely included both the Pontic and Middle Eastern nomads, the two prongs of the N. Pontic Kurgan origin.

At about 500 BC we learn of the Middle Asia nomadic tribes under the names of Massagets-Masguts, Dahae-Tochars, and generic Ircanian-Yiyrk nomads, Yiyrk meaning nomad in Türkic. After a blurred picture of the Assyrian tablets, from Herodotus we receive a much crisper picture. Meanwhile, the exotic technological marker of unique cast bronze axes with unique method of joint with the handle, identified with the Middle Eastern nomadic Guties and with the Altai area Seima-Turbino metallurgical province (1800–1500 BC), are found in the far-away China associated with the nomadic Juns and Zhou. Whether these nomads in China were splinters of the Guties from the Middle East we do not know yet, and probably it is not only irrelevant, but also imprecise question, since the same pleiad of nomadic metallurgists could join any other nomadic confederation that ended up ruling local farming communities, be it the China or the Middle East. What is manifesting is that the archeological terminology switches from the Herodotus-time name Scythians to the modern terminology of the name Türkic people. In-between, the term of the day for the horse nomadic tribes after 200 BC and before 550s AD was Huns, identified as Scythic people by the contemporaries and modern archeologists.

From Herodotus, we learn the scenery two centuries before the rise of the Parthians. Parthians are a southwestern branch called Parni of the nomadic Dahae-Tochars-Yuezhi, who are an eastern branch of Massagets-Masguts, the leaders of the nomadic confederation. Massagets-Masguts is a Scythian confederation, or Saka in Persian. Sometime before 250 BC Parni moved southward into the Persian province of Parthava. The consonance of the terms Parni, Persia, Fars, Partukka, Partakka, Parthava, and Parthia allows to suspect that they all ascend to Parni, since in naming localities the tribal names have precedence; in that case Parthava was an ancestral land of Parni that became an Ahaemenid province of the same name. The see-saw movement of nomadic tribes is an ordinary event, escaping danger or hardship and then returning, thus the move from Amudarya (Oxus) back to Parthava follows a common pattern; the Assyrian records of shortly before 673 BC already called Partukka and Partakka the future Parthava; the Ahaemenid Parthava included Hyrcania. The Parthian period lasted 247 BC – 224 AD, Parthians took hold in the milieu of the Ptolemy-Seleucid struggle. Soon after initial consolidation of the Parthian power, started a major re-alignment of the nomadic forces. At the turn of the 200 BC, the Saka Scythians (later Indo-Scythians) moved toward Parthian territories, and Tochars (As-Tochars, with Subaroi-Savirs) migrated to Bactria at 140s BC. The hassle of adjusting to the new realities constituted a primary task for the Parthians, whereas their western neighbors were of a secondary concern, more salient because of their prominence in the available sources. The eastern interplay constantly dings in the background of the western events, allowing to perceive the love-and-hate relations in the east. Another movement of the nomadic Masguts and the Hunnic Kayis to the Southeast Caucasus, dated by the turn of the 100 BC to 150 AD, added to the motley picture. Instead of being the only nomadic master heading nomadic confederation and ruling diverse assembly of sedentary peoples, Parthia became surrounded by less-brotherly nomadic neighbors in the north and the east, and faced an aggressive Roman neighbor in the west. Unfortunately, this apparently main theme of the Parthian history remains in a deep shadow. We do not even know the disposition of the Parthian tribes after their loss of political superiority.

For the Parthian native language, “Language provides no clue to the origin of the Parthians, for their speech as we know it was adopted after they entered the Iranian plateau.” [Debevoise Neilson, A political history of Parthia, p. 1]. Tentatively, and apparently without any evidence, the language of official communication of the Parthian government is ascribed to two milestones, the late version of the Old Persian, the official language of the Achaemenids (ca 600 to 300 BC), termed with confusing “pre-Middle Persian” and "post-Old Persian”, and the Middle Persian, also known as Pahlavi or Pehlevi written in Aramaic characters, of the Sassanid times (224–654 AD). Under that scenario, the Parthian period is a literary blank, it makes Parthian rulers to communicate with their Parthian deputies in a foreign Persian language, and leaves the communication language of the Parthian tribes completely ignored. That is especially strange since the the syllabic Old Persian cuneiform script consisted of 36 phonetic characters and 8 logograms, quite readable in the alphabetical script  adaptable to different languages. A less radical scenario allows Parthian rulers to communicate with their Greek subjects in Greek, with Mesopotamian subjects in Assyrian, with Elamite-Dravidian subjects in Dravidian, with Persian subjects in their version of Persian-Parsi, and their kindred subjects in their kindred Parthian. The Parthian native language would be usable to communicate with the Azeri Scythians, Kayi Huns, Masguts-Massagets-Alans, Gilans, Yiyrks, Ases-Yuezhi, Tochars-Yuezhi, Savirs, and Indo-Scythian Saka tribes. The writing on the early coins of Persis dated roughly about 250-150 BC is suspected to be in Aramaic script, introduction of Aramaic script may coincide with Parthian expansion over Iranian Plateau and the conquest of Mesopotamia. It is somewhat puzzling how the scripts of inscriptions may not be self-evident, to allow suspicions and speculations.