The empire of Achaemenid Persia was inherited by its Greek conquerors, who settled and founded new cities eastwards to the Indus. The eastern satrapies of Persia are now known as Greco-India.
Because this culture seems to me important, yet largely ignored in the history of Antiquity, I will be exploring in the following weeks what we can learn of its foundation and development. This, therefore, is by way of a general introduction.
Traces of intense cultural activity once marked the routes that centuries ago joined east and west, north and south across Afghanistan. Ruins of ancient cities, such as Kapisa, in the heart of Afghanistan, and Aï Khanoum and Yemshi on the northern Afghan plains told a story of complex exchanges with other lands.
At Aï Khanoum, archeologists discovered an orientalized Greek city; at Kapisa they unearthed a treasure trove of Indian ivories, Chinese lacquers and Roman art, and at Yemshi they found motives reflecting the disparate artistic styles of India, Greece, Iran, China and the nomads of Central Asia.
The legacy of Alexander the Great
The Achaemenid Persians were the first to include Afghanistan in their empire in the 6th century BC, but a few coins found at the foot of Tepe Maranjan in the centre of Kabul were the only surviving evidence of their presence. These have now been stolen.
Alexander the Great, having crushed Achaemenid power, was the next to invade Afghanistan in 328 BC. A Macedonian who became steeped in Greek culture after his conquest of Greece, and then an oriental monarch captivated by the idealism of the East, Alexander was himself the embodiment of cultural intermingling.
Unable to quite conquer Central Asia, because of fierce resistance, Alexander colonized it. He founded several new cities there and his men intermarried, introducing Hellenism but at the same time becoming thoroughly Asianized and integrated into the local population. This cross-fertilization of cultures resulted in a multinational kingdom that bridged the disparate cultures of India, Iran, Greece and China. It’s name was Bactria and one of its cities was at Aï Khanoum, at the confluence of the Kokcha and Amu Darya (ancient Oxus) rivers in northern Afghanistan.
Aï Khanoum was the easternmost Greek city ever discovered in Asia, and before their work there was interrupted by the Soviet invasion in 1979, French archeologists uncovered a triangular metropolis with sides 1.6 km long. Inside it were many typical Greek monuments, including a gymnasium, a 6,000-seat theatre, a stadium, public baths and temples. Its Hellenistic architecture incorporated the three classical styles: Ionic, Doric and Corinthian. Some of its shrines, however, were more Persian than Greek.
– Culture: A historical junction, UNESCO
You may have noticed how my earlier posts have Alexander the Great as a focus, as we explore the little archaeology that is certain for him. Tradition, in the form of records from later centuries – that is, not contemporary to his life – are largely unsupported by the archaeology and I suggest that this is because Alexander became a venerated ‘divine man’ and the basis for mythology, rather than history. We will therefore examine the archaeology of the founding of Greco-India and see what, if any, archaeology exists there for Alexander and his conquering army.
Wine-drinking and music (Detail from Chakhil-i-Ghoundi stupa, Hadda, 1st-2nd century CE).
Tradition also holds that before, during and after the Macedonian conquest, this same eastern region was a kingdom known as Gandhara.
Pakistan is the land which attracted Alexander the great from Macedonia in 326 B.C., with whom the influence of Greek culture came to this part of the world. During the 2nd century B.C., it was here that Buddhism was adopted as the state religion which flourished and prevailed here for over 1000 years, starting from 2nd century B.C., until 10th century A.D. During this time Taxila, Swat and Charsaddah (old Pushkalavati) became three important centres for culture, trade and learning. Hundreds of monasteries and stupas were built together with Greek and Kushan towns such as Sirkap and Sirsukh both in Taxila. It was from these centres that a unique art of sculpture originated which is known as Gandhara Art all over the world.
– Gandhara Civilization, Governnment of Pakistan
We will try to see how Buddhism developed within Greco-India and impacted upon the wider world of Classical Antiquity in and around the Mediterranean. Is Buddha a historical character and if so, can we identify him from among the known figures of history? Did the development of Buddha in human form derive in any way from the image of Alexander?
The peoples of Greco-India were not isolated. As well as contact with the subcontinent of India, their Chinese and Himalayan neighbours, there were (and are) long-established trade routes by land (known now as the Silk Road) and sea (the incense, spice and gem trade). As importantly, Persia after Alexander and for some centuries thereafter, was dominated by the Hellenistic society of the Seleucids, with their great empire.
This empire connected Greco-India with Judea, Arabia and Egypt, as well as Greece and Rome, ruling from 312 – 63 BCE. This brings us to the age of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony (83 – 30 BCE) and Cleopatra VII (69 – 30 BCE). We will see how Greco-India relates to the economics, politics, culture and faiths of Rome.
We will travel along the trade routes between East and West, visiting the Buddhist monasteries used as trading posts, see how early synagogues are related to trade and how the archaeology of good governance evolves through mythology into the faiths that are mainstream today.
The history starts most probably with the successor generals of Alexander and in the West, we will have a tight focus on the western terminus for Eastern trade goods – Alexandria – home to Jew and Greek communities, the Royal Library and the Alexandrian school.
Suggested reading:
The Caves at Aurangabad: Buddhist Art in Transformation by Pia Brancaccio
This is a study that focuses on the art and architecture of a group of Buddhist rock-cut monuments excavated on the western edge of the Deccan Plateau in India. It analyses the various cultural, historical and religious phenomena that shaped the caves at Aurangabad through the first seven centuries of the Common Era and it comments on the Buddhist tradition of the western Deccan as a whole. The result is a comprehensive work that does not address exclusively iconography and chronology, but looks beyond Aurangabad to the larger artistic and religious traditions of the Indian Subcontinent.
Dionysus and drama in the Buddhist art of Gandhara, by Pia Brancaccioa1 and Xinru Liu
This essay examines the relationships existing between Dionysian traditions of wine drinking and drama that reached the easternmost part of the Hellenistic world, and the Buddhist culture and art that flourished in Gandhara (Eastern Afghanistan and Northern Pakistan) under the Kushan kings between the first and third centuries CE. By piecing together archaeological, artistic and literary evidence, it appears that along with viniculture and viticulture, Dionysian rituals, Greek theatre and vernacular drama also became rooted in these eastern lands. Continuous interactions with the Graeco-Roman world strengthened these important cultural elements. At the beginning of the Common Era Dionysian traditions and drama came to be employed by the Buddhists of Gandhara to propagate their own ideas. The creation of a body of artworks representing the life of the Buddha in narrative form along with the literary work of Ashvaghosha, may be an expression of the same dramatic format that developed locally along with a strong Dionysian ritual presence.
Gandharan Buddhism: Archaeology, Art, Texts, Pia Brancaccio and Kurt Behrendt, editors
Related posts:
- Cleopatra’s legacy: the Sacred Lotus of India
- Greco-Indian contact with Rome
- An army of divine men and the secret army of Mithras
- The language of Buddhist archaeology
- Helios and Selene in Alexandria on the Oxus
- Dynastic power in the Greco-Roman world
- Archaeology of good governance
- The Zen of Buddhist archaeology: earliest texts
- Archaeology and identity of the first Buddhists
- Mani and Authorship of the Canonical Gospels
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