Eurasian Localisms: Towards a translocal approach to Hellenism and inbetweenness in central Eurasia, third to first centuries BCE 9783515133159, 3515133151

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Milinda Hoo

Eurasian Localisms Towards a translocal approach to Hellenism and inbetweenness in central Eurasia, third to first centuries BCE

ORIENS E T OCCIDENS Studien zu antiken Kulturkontakten und ihrem Nachleben | 41 Franz Steiner Verlag

Oriens et Occidens Studien zu antiken Kulturkontakten und ihrem Nachleben Herausgegeben von Josef Wiesehöfer in Zusammenarbeit mit Pierre Briant, Geoffrey Greatrex, Amélie Kuhrt und Robert Rollinger Band 41

Milinda Hoo Eurasian Localisms Towards a translocal approach to Hellenism and inbetweenness in central Eurasia, third to first centuries BCE

Franz Steiner Verlag

Umschlagabbildung: Male or female head from the Temple with Indented Niches, Ai Khanum, National Museum of Afghanistan © bpk/rmn/Thierry Ollivier, Musée Guimet Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek: Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über abrufbar. Dieses Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist unzulässig und strafbar. © Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart 2022 Layout und Herstellung durch den Verlag Satz: Fotosatz Buck, Kumhausen Druck: Beltz Grafische Betriebe, Bad Langensalza Gedruckt auf säurefreiem, alterungsbeständigem Papier. Printed in Germany. ISBN 978-3-515-13315-9 (Print) ISBN 978-3-515-13316-6 (E-Book)

because of Orientalism the Orient was not (and is not) a free subject of thought or action. (Edward Said 1978, 3)

To women in academia

Contents List of figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

11

A note on spelling and style . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

13

Part I: Contexts of Hellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

15

1 1.1 1.2 1.2.1 1.2.2 1.3

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Setting the scene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Hellenistic Central Asia: a case for inbetweenness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Geographical inbetweenness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Temporal inbetweenness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33

2 2.1 2.1.1 2.1.2 2.1.3 2.1.4 2.1.5 2.2 2.2.1 2.2.2 2.2.3 2.2.4 2.3 2.3.1 2.3.2

Hellenism’s great debates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hellenism: a history . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The birth of a concept . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hellenism, empire, and colonialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-war Hellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postcolonialism and the limits of Hellenization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postcolonialism, Orientalism, and the paradigm of continuity . . . . . . . . . . . . . New directions: hybridity and hybridization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Biological hybridity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Postcolonial hybridity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hybridity in ancient history and archaeology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hybridity and its discontents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Current trends: networks, globalization, and global perspectives . . . . . . . . . . Networks and ancient globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Global perspectives and Hellenism now . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

38 38 39 42 46 49 51 56 57 58 60 62 65 65 67

8

Contents

Part II: Cases of Hellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

71

3 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4

Ai Khanum on the Oxus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Site context and features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hellenism and Greek identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

73 73 80 100 100

4 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Takht-i Sangin and the Oxus Temple . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Site context and features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hellenism and religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

109 109 110 121 122

5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Old Nisa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Site context and features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hellenism and Philhellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

127 127 130 144 145

6 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4

Seleukeia on the Tigris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Site context and features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hellenism and hybridity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

155 155 157 167 167

7 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4

Hellenistic Babylon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Site context and features . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hellenism and localism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

176 176 181 195 196

Part III: Eurasian Localisms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 8 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6

Paradoxes of Hellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Baktria, Parthia, and Babylonia: a comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hellenism and ethnicity baggage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The question of religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The paradox of Philhellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cultural reductions in cultural hybridity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The trouble with localism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

205 205 215 218 219 222 224

Contents

9

9 9.1 9.1.1 9.1.2 9.1.3 9.1.4 9.1.5 9.1.6 9.2 9.2.1 9.2.2 9.2.3 9.2.4

Towards a translocal approach . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Globalization in theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Classics and globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Defining globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Complex connectivity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Time-space compression and deterritorialization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Glocalization and the local . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Translocalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Globalization in practice: outlook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A translocal view on Ai Khanum and Hellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A translocal view on Nisa and Hellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A translocal view on Takht-i Sangin and Hellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A translocal view on Babylon, Seleukeia, and Hellenism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

10

Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

229 229 229 231 233 234 237 240 243 244 251 257 263

Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 274 Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329

List of figures 1.1 3.1 3.2

Map of central Eurasia, third to first centuries BCE © Peter Palm Map of Ai Khanum ( J.-C. Liger and G. Lecuyot in Bernard 2012) © DAFA Plan of the northern part of the gymnasium at Ai Khanum ( J.-C. Liger in Bernard 2012) © DAFA 3.3 Plan of the palatial complex at Ai Khanum ( J.-C. Liger in Bernard 2012) © DAFA 3.4 Plan of the large house in the southern district at Ai Khanum ( J.-C. Liger in Bernard 2012) © DAFA 3.5 Plan of the temple with indented niches at Ai Khanum ( J.-C. Liger in Bernard 2012) © DAFA 4.1 Map of the Oxus Temple at Takht-i Sangin (Lindström 2016) © DAI 4.2 The Atrosokes votive altar at Takht-i Sangin (Hoo 2016) 5.1 Map of Old Nisa (Lippolis 2019) © CRAST 5.2 Plan of the Central Complex at Nisa (C. Fossati in Lippolis 2006) © CRAST 5.3 Plan of the Northern Sector at Nisa (after Koshelenko 1985) © CRAST 5.4 Plan of the South-Western Complex at Nisa (Lippolis 2019) © CRAST 6.1 Map of Seleukeia on the Tigris, showing the Italian and American excavations (Menegazzi 2014) © CRAST 6.2 Map of Seleukeia on the Tigris, showing the Archives Square in relation to Tell Umar (Menegazzi 2014) © CRAST 7.1 Map of Babylon in the Hellenistic period (Van der Spek 2009) © Mikko Kriek 9.1 Scheme of possible overlap of practitioners in converging communities of practice

Acknowledgements This book is born of my doctoral dissertation, with the large majority of research conducted and written at the international Graduate School ‘Human Development in Landscapes’ at Kiel University, Germany, from November 2014 until August 2018. After a post-doctoral rollercoaster of life changes related to a new departmental position at Freiburg University, the global coronavirus pandemic, personal loss, grief, and necessary recovery, this updated manuscript finally found its way to publication. Research is never done in isolation and mine is no exception. It is with pleasure that I express my thanks here to the people without whom this book would not have been possible. First and foremost, I thank my ‘Doktorväter’, Jozef Wiesehöfer and Miguel John Versluys, for their invaluable supervision and constructive feedback, expert guidance, and immense support and trust. Jozef Wiesehöfer continuously provided me with relevant research literature, often from his personal collection, while Miguel John rigorously mentored my journey from Master to PhD and kept me grounded, inspired, and connected with his Leiden projects. I also thank Rolf Strootman, my former teacher in Utrecht, who enthused me for Hellenistic Asia and was always open to brainstorm with me during my occasional visits to the Netherlands. My work further benefited much from conversations with and advice from amazing people I met during the journey towards the PhD. Two people stand out in this journey, who have been (and continue to be) a source of inspiration and a role model for female scholars like myself. Rachel Mairs engaged my interest in Hellenistic Central Asia, drew me in the Hellenistic Central Asia Research Network, and her theoretically informed work was particularly inspiring for the direction of my research. Gunvor Lindström invited me to join her excavation at Torbulok, Tadzhikistan – my first real encounter with Baktria – and my valuable conversations with her there led me to change the course of my dissertation and integrate the Babylonian case studies. I also warmly thank Alicia Ventresca-Miller and Bryan Miller who made the initial plunge into the complexities of globalization research easier; Jacopo Bruno, Carlo Lippolis, Viktor Pilipko, Lara Fabian, and Sitta von Reden for sharing helpful published and unpublished material; and Miguel John Versluys’ VICI group ‘Innovating Objects’ – Lennart Kruijer, Stefan Riedel, Eleni Fragaki, Suzan van de Velde, and Marike van Aerde – for reading and commenting on the first draft. I received further constructive feedback on my work during conferences and other instances from Rachel Mairs, Gun-

12

Acknowledgements

vor Lindström, Lauren Morris, Kristina Junker, Hans Beck, Rosemary Joyce, Benjamin Wright, Eelco Glas, and Anna Meens. I am deeply obliged to Jacopo Bruno for advising me on Nisa’s intricate chronology, to Vito Messina for reading and correcting my Seleukeia and Nisa chapters, and to Bror Jurna and Gustav Wollentz for proofreading the majority of the original dissertation text in 2018 – all remaining faults remain, of course, my own. Immense gratitude must go to the Graduate School ‘Human Development in Landscapes’ whose generous funding and interdisciplinary framework made it possible to make the absolute best out of my PhD. This journey would further have been impossible without the friendship of amazing people I met in Kiel – Gonzalo, Maria, Sonja, Aslı, Gustav, Eelke, André, Bráulio, Iulia, Luca, Utku, Onur, Artur, Natalia, Gianpiero, Veronika, and Jos – and the continuous support and encouragement from home in the Netherlands: my parents, Ramon and Ting-Ngan; my sister Lisanne; Marieke, Bror, Cees, Juul, and my dear friends Nikki, Lucy, Laura, Lieke, Anna, Roel, Thilini, and Coco. Last but certainly not least, I thank my partner Wei-Lin and my friends and colleagues in Freiburg for providing me with a new emotional, intellectual, and institutional home: Philip, Lars, Karin, Bastian, Emma, Mark, Özlem, and the ERC group ‘Beyond the Silk Road’: Sitta von Reden, Lara Fabian, Lauren Morris, Eli Weaverdyck, Kathrin Leese-Messing, Mamta Dwivedi, and Razieh Taasob. Finally, I thank my editor at Franz Steiner, Katharina Stüdemann, for her long-enduring patience with me. Milinda Hoo Freiburg im Breisgau 2022

A note on spelling and style This book has been written according to the standards of the Oxford spelling, as established by the Oxford English Dictionary. Similarly, abbreviations of the names and works of ancient authors follow the conventions of the Oxford Classical Dictionary (Hornblower, Spawforth, and Eidinow 2012, fourth edition); those not included in the OCD can be found in the list of abbreviations or are otherwise spelled in full. The footnotes and bibliography have been formatted in the citation style of the American Journal of Archaeology. Throughout the text, I have preferred spellings that are closer to the origins of a word. Thus, Greek names, places and terminology are rendered in their transliterated Greek forms rather than in their Latinate forms (e. g. Seleukos rather than Seleucus). However, I believe that absolute consistency is neither attainable nor desirable for the general understanding and reading flow of the text. Some words have become so ubiquitous in their Latinate spelling – including those deriving from old Persian – that I therefore chose to use them in romanized form (e. g. gymnasium rather than gymnasion; Oxus rather than Oxos; Achaemenid rather than Akhaimenid). Cyrillic names and places are transcribed to English without diacritics, according to the intuitive BGN/PCGN 1947 romanization system (updated in 2019), such as Litvinskiy for Литвинский and Tadzhikistan for Таджикистан, although an exception has been made for the increasingly common English spelling of Ай Ханум as Ai Khanum (instead of Ay Khanum or the French spelling Aï Khanoum). As for the transcription of Chinese names and places, Hanyu Pinyin is preferred over other transliteration systems such as the Wade-Giles (e. g. Yuezhi rather than Yüeh-chih). For reasons of simplicity and lucidity, diacritics of transliterations are avoided throughout.

Part I: Contexts of Hellenism

Fig. 1.1. Map of central Eurasia, third to first centuries BCE © Peter Palm

1 Introduction 1.1 Setting the scene The campaign in the northeast of Persia turned into a hard guerrilla war of almost three years. We chased Darius towards Bactria, but missed taking him by hours. He was dying when we found him. He asked for water. He drank and died. The Great King Darius had been betrayed by his own commanders. Fully honouring his corpse, Alexander hunted down these commanders into unknown lands, crossing even beyond the River Oxus into Sogdia. We fought them as far as the unknown steppes of Scythia, where only legendary heroes had once trod. The surveyors told us we were now on the borders of where Europe and Asia meet. In fact, we were totally lost. Here, Alexander founded his 10th Alexandria, and settled it with veterans, their women, and any who would dare the frontier life …1

Narrated by Anthony Hopkins in the role of an aging Ptolemy, we are visually guided to the remote lands of Central Asia in a stunning panoramic wide shot of Alexander the Great and his men on horseback riding across a mountainous steppe landscape in Oliver Stone’s 2004 epic Hollywood blockbuster Alexander. In the scene that follows, Colin Farrell as a bleached blonde Alexander with an Irish accent enters into marriage with the ‘barbarian’ face-veiled Roxane, an exotic and quiet Baktrian princess played by the Afro-Latin American actress Rosario Dawson. His grand vow breaks her silence: “through our union, Greeks and barbarians are reconciled in peace.”2 The angelic blondeness of the filmic rendering of Alexander, depicted in marked contrast with the wild ferociousness of Roxane whom he tames in their wedding night in a later scene, consciously plays into Plutarch’s influential treatise On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander 1 2

Stone 2004. Stone 2004. Roxane was the daughter of Oxyartes, a nobleman of Baktria who had served Bessos, the Persian satrap of Baktria who killed the last Achaemenid king, Darius III, and subsequently proclaimed himself King of Kings, successor to the Achaemenid empire – something Alexander could not allow. Bessos was killed by Alexander in 329 BCE. For the history of Alexander’s campaigns into Baktria, see Holt 1989. In popular culture, Alexander’s marriage to Roxane is often seen as the ultimate symbol of his desire to unite Greeks and barbarians, a noble portrayal advanced in Plutarch’s moral biography, Life of Alexander (Plut. Vit. Alex. 47.4, but cf. Plut. Mor. De Alex. fort. 388d, in which it is his marriage to Stateira (the daughter of Darius), not to Roxane, which is described as a “union of two races”, “τῶν γενῶν ἀνάμιξις”).

18

Part I: Contexts of Hellenism

in his work Moralia, written in the first century CE. In this text, the young king is portrayed as a noble philosophic conqueror driven by his ‘dream’ – to use the famous phrase by W. W. Tarn – of ‘uniting mankind in a brotherhood’ of Greeks and barbarians by bringing the gift of civilization to the savage East.3 Although Stone, consulted by the British Classicist Robin Lane Fox, received a flood of critical reviews on the historical accuracy of the movie, the Hollywood version of history vividly illustrates the typical image of Central Asia in the Western mind: a remote frontier zone ‘where Europe and Asia meet’ and a borderland region between the civilized oikoumene and the barbarian world where one could get ‘totally lost’.4 In many ways, Stone’s epic motion picture of Alexander the Great bears close relations with cultural views still pertinent in academic literature, albeit overdramatized. In the onscreen narrative, as Alexander advances eastwards from Macedon, the exoticism of the world gradually increases. Significantly, the cinematic point where West and East meet, where Europe ends and Asia begins, and where the viewer is lured into the great unknown of the East, arrives much sooner than Alexander and his men reach Central Asia. Already upon entering the lavish blue Ishtar gates at Babylon, we seem to find ourselves in the ambiguous inbetween borderland, framed by the overindulgent mise en scène of exotic animals, fire-spitting people, colourful costumes, and grand architecture overgrown with lush flora. In parallel with Alexander’s conquering pace eastwards, the fault line between Europe and Asia visually stretches along as the film narrative develops. Something similar is discernible in scholarly treatments of post-Alexandrian Asia in the Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE), a time characterized by and named after a phenomenon referred to as Hellenism or Hellenization: the spread and adoption of Greek culture in the East after Alexander the Great, resulting in eclectic amalgamations of ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cultures. As in the filmic rendition, the geographical crossroads of ‘where Europe and Asia meet’, together with its implied expectations of cultural mixture, is an imagined (common)place, a topos that scholars have differentially attributed to various parts of Asia in the Hellenistic period. The divide between the world spheres, the borderland midway East and West, is conceived to be thus abstract yet so pervasive that as an absent presence, it can be claimed to be anywhere: “there is no place on earth where East and West, cardinal directions, do not meet.”5 The ambiguity and indeterminacy of West-Eastern ‘Eur-Asian’ inbetweenness have important ramifications for historical and archaeological understandings of material and visual culture within those settings and regions that have been attributed an inbetween status. These inbetween places, as explained by cultural theorist Rob Shields, “are not necessarily on geographical peripheries but, first and foremost, they have been placed on the periphery of cultural systems of space in which places are ranked relative 3 4 5

Plut. Mor. De Alex. fort. 328c–329d, 330d; Tarn 1933; cf. Badian 1958a. Incidentally, Lane Fox negotiated a role in the movie as front man in Alexander’s cavalry. Tharoor 2015 (April 28).

1 Introduction

19

to each other. They all carry the image and stigma of their marginality which becomes indistinguishable from any basic empirical identity they might once have had.”6 Through their positional identification as marginal places, they become transgressive spaces between juxtaposed, emplaced domains, partially visible and semi-connected to both, but deprived from being (recognized as) distinct and meaningful on their own.7 As a result, material and visual culture in such inbetween locations is often etically perceived as ambiguously ‘ex-centric’, being in place and distinctly out of place at the same time.8 Theorizing cultural inbetweenness is the subject of this book, set in the wider framework of the Hellenization debate on how Hellenism in Asia in the first three centuries BCE is to be understood. Following the sociologist Bernhard Giesen, I refer to inbetweenness as “a fundamental and indissoluble given of classification and interpretation”, thus using the term as a neutral denominator for unclassifiable remainders that fall in between perceived opposites.9 Inbetweenness comes in various shapes, forms, and spaces, and can therefore be conceptualized in different ways and with different aims. Liminality, for instance, is one way to model inbetweenness; intersectionality is another.10 This study focuses on the model of Hellenism, a prominent concept often used in combination with the model of hybridity, to approach and make meaning of eclectic material culture across Asia in the Hellenistic period. The Hellenistic period and the use of the word ‘Hellenistic’ in this study, will refer to the general time frame of the first three centuries BCE, thus including Parthian domination across Asia, in order to avoid a periodization delimited by culturally biased historical events.11 Hellenistic Asia, then, 6

7 8 9 10 11

Shields 1991, 3. See also Green 2005, 1–40. NB: Shields seems to use a definition of ‘space’ according to Lefebvre (1991 [1974]) and De Certeau (1984, 117–118), in which space refers to produced or ‘practiced place’, hence his phrase of ‘cultural systems of space’. My understanding of space in relation to place, however, differs and even contrasts with this definition. Following more common usages in anthropological and archaeological literature (e. g. Ingold 1993, 155–156; Tilley 1997 [1994], 14–17; Bradley 2000), I view space as connected to the abstract and the undifferentiated (Relph 1976; Tuan 1977; 1979), although I agree with Lefebvre and De Certeau that space, too, is a construct which is often produced according to human conditions. Christopher Tilley (1997 [1994], 16) states that space “provides a situational context for places, but derives its meanings from particular places”. Place, therefore, is more connected to the distinct social construction of space, i. e. how people make space meaningful by endowing it with value, through experiences in it and aspirations of it: “place is not only a fact to be explained in the broader frame of space, but it is also a reality to be clarified and understood from the perspectives of the people who have given it meaning” (Tuan 1979, 387). Space and place are closely intertwined, as this chapter aims to set out. Boon 1999, 198–210. Hutcheon 1988, 60 defines the ex-centric as “the off-center: ineluctably identified with the center it desires but is denied.” Giesen 2017 [2012], 16. For liminality, see Van Gennep 1909; Turner 1967; 1969; for intersectionality, see Crenshaw 1989; Collins and Bilge 2016. I am aware that the word ‘Hellenistic’ in itself carries an inherent bias through its etymological anchorage in Hellas – Greece. I believe, however, that avoiding the term altogether will not only be highly impractical, but may cause undesired temporal disorientation. Therefore, from here onward, the word Hellenistic written without parentheses will be used solely for the purpose of temporal

20

Part I: Contexts of Hellenism

is here defined as the vast landmass stretching from Asia Minor to Central Asia, which is referred to in this study as (central) Eurasia, a socio-geographical portmanteau used in socio-anthropological literature to describe the perception of the region as neither European nor Asian, but both and inbetween.12 In order to better understand scholarly views on culture contact and eclectic material culture in Hellenistic Asia (culture that falls in between our etic categories of analysis), this study critically questions and deconstructs different explanations of Hellenism across Asia, to tease out problematic points of interpretation and make their positioning explicit. It will show that Hellenism, something which the literature tends to simplify as ‘Greek influence’, even if in multiple forms, is far from a universal given. Rather, it seems that it is a differential and positional scholarly construct, created by both distinct research histories as well as pretheoretical commitments through which each Hellenism in Asia lives up to particular modern expectations. While this study is relevant to Hellenistic Asia as a whole, a large part of this study is devoted to Central Asia, defined here as roughly the five former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, along with parts of north-eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.13 Central Asia is a case particularly fit for an investigation into perceptions of inbetweenness. As exemplified in Oliver Stone’s Alexander, Central Asia embodies a remote region far away from our Western frame of mind and, as such, is often reduced to specific catchphrases to make matters understandable and relatable. This is not only the case in popular culture but also in academic spheres where common descriptions of the region emphasize its inbetween status and location ‘at the crossroads of the ancient world’, ‘where East meets West’, ‘a  cultural melting pot’, or ‘a fusion of Greek and Eastern cultures’.14 Although such phrases often serve to introduce the region, this study will demonstrate that interpretations of inbetweenness not only stimulate misleading analyses of hybridity, but also

12

13 14

attribution, as neutral reference to roughly the first three centuries BCE. The phrase Hellenistic Asia thus signifies Asia in the Hellenistic period, detached from cultural, political, or ideological meanings, unless indicated otherwise. E. g. Goody 1996. For a brief overview, see Hann 2003; 2016. The term Asia as used in this book originates from ancient Greek geographers, and corresponds to the common designation in conventional histories of the Hellenistic world, e. g. Walbank 1981, 176–177, map 4. Because of its biased origin, the term is considered as an ideologically laden, Eurocentric concept (Christian 1998, 3–4; Hann 2016, 1–2). Therefore, I often use the terms Eurasia and central Eurasia instead. The term Eurasia is based on the geographical scope of the tectonic Eurasian plate which stretches from the Atlantic Sea in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east, covering the traditional continents of Europe and Asia (Cunliffe 2015, 4–8). The term central Eurasia therefore refers to the area central to this tectonic plate, i. e. from Anatolia to Central Asia (e. g. Beckwith 2009; Cunliffe 2015, 9 (map 1.3). I tend to use ‘Asia’ when discussing ancient history, while the term ‘(central) Eurasia’ will be read more often in historiographical contexts. However, these two contexts can overlap sometimes. This definition is based on a wider archaeological consensus of the region; see e. g. Grenet 2014. See e. g. Errington et al. 1992; Hiebert and Cambon 2011; Aruz and Valtz Fino 2012; Simpson 2012; Lerner 2015.

1 Introduction

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strengthen monolithic, essentialist, and ethnocentric ideas about what is (and can be) considered as ‘Western’ and what is not – and is therefore labelled as ‘Eastern’. While Central Asia takes centre stage, it will become clear that these issues of inbetweenness pertinent to the interpretive discourse about this region have significant resonance for Hellenistic Asia as a whole. Before continuing to the methodology and outline of the study, the remainder of this section further introduces and problematizes inbetweenness, considering the special case of Central Asia and its attributed position in the interstices of world-places and time-worlds. This will be used as a springboard for the wider Hellenization debate that this study engages with, set out in Chapter 2. 1.2 Hellenistic Central Asia: a case for inbetweenness 1.2.1 Geographical inbetweenness Hellenistic Central Asia occupies a privileged position when it comes to inbetweenness. To date, one of the most persistent keywords to describe this macro-region is that of a crossroads. In a 2015 current affairs article in The Diplomat, Akhilesh Pillalamarri even argued for replacing and redefining Central Asia with the term ‘Asia’s crossroads’, as this region’s history and culture were “shaped more than anything by being a nexus of overland ‘roads and routes’ between other regions”.15 Paradoxically, its prevalent status in mainstream media and academia as ‘between other regions’ marks and frames Central Asia as both central and peripheral, inside and outside distinct realms. Located in the borderlands of, and at the nexus between the ‘world’s greatest civilizations’ of ancient Persia, India, China, and the Mediterranean, Central Asia is assigned to reside amidst East and West yet to remain marginal to both – a pivotal gateway in between, but nothing distinct of its own. Throughout modern historical writings on the region’s ancient past, the perpetual peripherality of Central Asia has been sustained and endorsed by a discourse of centrality, as this section will explore. From space to place The characterization of Central Asia as a crossroads between East and West is intimately entangled with the relatively recent invention of the term Silk Roads to refer to the transcontinental network of overland and seaborne trade and exchange routes that linked the eastern and western ends of the Eurasian landmass: China and the Mediterranean.16 Before the 19th century, the defined region of Central Asia, as well 15 16

Pillalamarri 2015. These roads were not well-defined roads but “a stretch of shifting, unmarked paths across massive expanses of deserts and mountains” (Hansen 2017, 5). The name of the Silk Roads is also mislead-

22

Part I: Contexts of Hellenism

as the geographical term did not exist as perceived and depicted on Western maps, although it had been romanticized and exoticized as part of the imagined Orient.17 Scientific endeavours to put the region on the map such as the influential toponymical definitions of Central Asia by the Prussian explorers and geographers Alexander von Humboldt and Ferdinand von Richthofen in 1843 and 1877, respectively, established Central Asia as a distinct ‘place in between’.18 Drawing on earlier works of his Prussian colleagues, Von Richthofen elaborately described Central Asia as the spatial context for his founding concept of the Silk Roads – a newly invented term – through which the region decidedly entered the European mind as a commercial transit and contact zone between Han China and Roman Europe.19 His map of the Silk Roads – a visualization based on Chinese and Graeco-Roman textual sources – was essentially a map of Central Asia as he understood it; since the far ends of these routes were not situated within this defined area, the region’s position and, in effect, its distinguished significance as a ‘place in between’ could not be more clear.20 Von Richthofen’s geographical writings did not arise out of mere scholarly curiosity about the region but were part of a wider politically strategic survey of China, guided by German industrial interests in, and efforts to maintain control over China’s mineral resources.21 As an evocative spatiotemporal term, the Silk Roads became an influential referential notion to ‘emplace’ Central Asia and make geopolitical meaning of its ancient and contemporary history. Von Richthofen and Von Humboldt were neither the first nor the only ones interested to put Central Asia systematically on the map. In her monumental historiographical work L’invention de l’Asie centrale, Svetlana Gorshenina demonstrates that around the same time, Russian scholars such as the historian Nikolay Danilevskiy and the geographer Vladimir Lamanskiy were invested to describe and frame Central Asia as part of an imagined third continent between Europe and Asia: Russian Eurasia.22 While Prussian and other West-European geographers saw Central Asia as the continental outstretch of

17 18

19

20 21 22

ing: these networks facilitated much more than just trade in silk; in reality, the objects of exchange and transmission along these routes included a variety of trade goods such as paper, spices, metals, and glass, as well as ideas, artistic motifs, religions, and technologies. See instructive discussion in Rezakhani 2010. For an excellent studies on the history of the concept of (and interest in) Central Asia, see Gorshenina 2014a. Von Humboldt 1843; Von Richthofen 1877, 1–8; further discussion in Gorshenina 2014a, 301–358. Von Richthofen’s definition of Central Asia was focused on what he called ‘the core of the Asian continent’ in what we now know as Xinjiang (former Turkestan), with the surrounding areas functioning as peripheral regions within Central Asia. Von Richthofen used both the plural and singular form of the word. Although the term ‘Seidenstraße(n)’ is not widely employed in his work as much as preferred other terms, such as ‘Verkehr’, ‘Verkehrsbeziehungen’, or ‘Handelsstraßen’, the notion of the Silk Roads caught on in subsequent publications to refer to the overland trade routes across the Eurasian landmass. See Waugh 2007, 4. Von Richthofen 1877, 500, plate 8. Chin 2013, 196; Wu 2014, 343–344; 2015, 33–66, 148. Gorshenina 2014a, 377–384. Imperial Russia, at that time, already covered an immense landmass that stretched from the East-European plains across Siberia to the Pacific Ocean. On the semantic

1 Introduction

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Europe to Asia, Russian geographers considered it as the integral core of a separate and distinctly Russian continent. This conceptualization went hand in hand with Russia’s perennial expansionist drive since the 16th century and with what has become known as the Great Game in the 19th century – the Russian-British race for political ascendancy in Central Asia.23 Active in the wake of Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856) against the Ottoman Empire and their British, French, and Sardinian allies, Russian scholars were particularly concerned with restructuring a world where Russia, as opposed to Europe, was at its centre.24 According to Gorshenina, this concept of Eurasia, visualized as an organic continent, was a clear ideological tool that not only transformed and legitimized an expanding Russian world south and eastwards in terms of geopolitical territory (after all, they merely followed the natural borders of the continent), but also challenged their rivals’ Eurocentric imperial and universalistic discourses.25 While tsarist and later imperial Russia had always been considered as the eastern periphery of Europe, the thesis of a third continent covering both Europe and Asia firmly placed Russia’s anticipated Central Asian territory in the geopolitical core of the world and, as such, symbolically claimed Russian supremacy and their right to rule over the these regions. The lexical and cartographical creation of this envisioned Eurasian geography, as though a natural and logical extension of Russia, developed concurrently with its actual materialization on the geopolitical stage. In the second half of the 19th century, the Russian Empire gradually encroached on and annexed the Turkic khanates in what would become known as Russian Turkestan and later Soviet Central Asia in today’s Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tadzhikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. The struggle for empire and ‘la mission civilisatrice’ During this period, ideas about the centrality of Central Asia discursively formed and transformed the region from an empty space into a particular place, from unknown territory into ‘the heart of Asia’ – proclaimed as a vital, strategic, and therefore most desired possession. Gorshenina argued that Central Asia’s perceived condition of a terra incognita clearly referred to its being ‘undiscovered’ i. e. unpossessed by modern European colonists, emphasizing that this created an uncontested no man’s land and, essentially, an ideological charter for imperialist aspirations to lay claim on Central Asia’s

23 24 25

and ideological development of overlapping terms for Central Asia used in Russian literature, see Gorshenina 2007. The term ‘the Great Game’ was popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his 1901 novel Kim. For a contemporary history of these events, see Hopkirk 1990; Sergeev 2013. Gorshenina 2011, 99–110. Baud et al. 2003; Gorshenina 2007; 2011, 100–104. Russia always had an ambivalent relation with, and attitude to Asia, especially during the era of Russian Imperialism. See Schimmelpennick van der Oye 2010a; 2010b. For the distinction between space and place, see fn. 6 above.

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centrality between East and West.26 This was not only the case in Russian narratives that legitimized their eastwards expansion; similar ideas were present in West-European, particularly British narratives during the intensification of the Great Game around the turn of the 20th century. Threatened by the rapid spread of Russia’s successful conquests in Central Asia, suspected to head towards British territory in India, the British similarly developed a strategic vision to dominate the ‘centre of the world’ – the heart of the Eurasian continent.27 In 1904, the British geographer Halford Mackinder published his classic Heartland Theory, proclaiming Central Asia as the ‘pivot area’.28 His aim was not merely scientific, but was distinctly entangled with imperial affairs as to “make a geographical formula into which you could fit any political balance”, which explicitly served concerns about the rival mobility of Russian expansion compared to European powers that trailed behind.29 The domination over this pivotal Asian heartland would be crucial for global hegemony, a grand geopolitical objective that both the Russians and the British vigorously aspired. The reiterated importance of Central Asia in West-European and Russian narratives of world power often involved a double-faced tendency of, on the one hand, the glorification of the region as the continental centre of the world, and on the other, the marginalization and Orientalization (in the Saidian sense) of Central Asia as a weak and empty inbetween place that needed to be civilized.30 Such an Orientalist reading of Central Asia was already discernible in Western geographies such as those of Von Humboldt and Von Richthofen, for whom the middle zone embodied a culturally inhospitable region, incapable of reaching full civilization. In their view, Central Asia was not only in between East and West, but also in between the sedentary agricultural and mobile pastoralist worlds, resulting in the presence of nomads through which its society had never been able to develop into a full-grown civilization.31 Similarly, British and French narratives perceived the Central Asian heartland as a borderland torn 26 27

28 29 30 31

Gorshenina 2007, 20; Gorshenina 2011. This suspicion did not rise out of thin air. Russian expansionist monarchs had previously entertained the idea to invade India and drive out the British – particularly under Paul I, Catherine the Great’s successor, who schemed with France to march on British India in 1801, just after the failed Russian-British coalition against France in the late 1790s. This hurried and grotesque plan proved unattainable; Napoleon Bonaparte rejected the plan and the sole Cossack army subsequently sent by Paul, though devoted, experienced serious hardships already on the Kazakh steppes. The expedition was cut short midway by news of Paul’s assassination in 1801, after which his heir Alexander I ordered an immediate halt to the march. Intelligence of this plan only reached the British in Calcutta years later. See Hopkirk 1990, 26–30. Mackinder 1904, passim but esp. 434–436; 1942 [1919], 106. Mackinder considered Central Asia as central in the pivot area of ‘Euro-Asia’. See Mackinder’s distinct influence in Lattimore 1950. Mackinder 1904, 443. Gorshenina 2011, 101–102; Gorshenina and Rapin 2011, 30; Gutmeyr 2017, 83–87. E. g. Von Richthofen 1877, 43–56. This engaged with a powerful topos on the pastoral nomad; see useful discussion on this topos in ancient times in Shaw 1983; and Barfield 1993 on ethnography on nomadic pastoralists in general.

1 Introduction

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between two world halves and inhabited by savage tribes, contending that control over this intermediary zone was vital for restoring the communication between East and West and rejoining the two halves in a moral unity.32 Tales of a moral plight to save the ‘failed civilization’ of Central Asia were echoed in Russian society in the quest for imperial glory. Deeply influenced by European Romanticism, ideas of colonial superiority and the noble mission to civilize the ‘backward’ and ‘barbaric’ people of the still poorly-known region of Central Asia were taken over in Russian narratives to compete with their European rivals.33 By appropriating a colonial realm of their own, the Russian Empire posited itself as peer on the stage of world politics, claiming a share in the colonial prestige of the French and particularly the British. Indeed, in the words of David Schimmelpennick van der Oye, “Asia was one place where Russians could be the Europeans’ equals.”34 In this ideological rivalry, Russian intellectuals and officials claimed a distinct European identity, together with the European philosophy of the ‘white man’s burden’, to deepen the contrast with the ‘backward’ Central Asian lands and peoples they conquered.35 At the same time, the cultures of the Asian lands that belonged to Russia’s domain in the spatial imagination of its empire, increasingly came on display in exoticizing paintings and photography, as well as in ethnographic exhibitions in Moscow and St Petersburg. Interacting with artistic and wider cultural trends of European Romanticism, fashionable practices of collecting and showcasing exotic and antiquarian artworks and crafts from ‘Russia’s own Orient’, as well as the didactic and ideological display of the splendid ethno-cultural diversity within the Russian empire, came to serve the social prestige of Russian elites.36 That the ‘barbarization’ of Central Asia went hand in hand with its glorification – emblematic for Russia’s dualist struggle for identity – is further illustrated by the Russian adoption of the late 19th century thesis of the Aryan race, widely shared by other colonial powers too. Initially based on linguistics, this theory claimed that the forebears of the IndoEuropean race (and by extension, European civilization) had their roots in the heart of 32 33 34 35

36

Reclus 1894, esp. 485, 487. Gorshenina and Rapin 2011, 30; Gutmeyr 2017, 83–84. On ‘barbarian’ as a pejorative cultural construct, see the informative discussion in Beckwith 2009, 321–61. Their ‘European rivals’ were the Russian and British empires, which were the largest imperial powers in the world at that time. Schimmelpennick van der Oye 2010a, 4. Gorshenina 2011, 103–104; Hofmeister 2016; Gutmeyr 2017, 83. The term ‘white man’s burden’ was popularized by Rudyard Kipling in his 1899 poem with the same title, in which the American colonization of the Philippines is morally encouraged and justified. The phrase refers to the moral task of the white man to civilize non-white peoples which underpinned European imperial ideology. NB: Not all Russian intellectuals took over a European identity. At that time, Russian society was divided between two opposing intellectual movements: the Slavophiles and Westernizers. For an excellent overview, see Fabian 2018, 58–125. Gorshenina 2004; Schimmelpennick van der Oye 2010a, 60–92, Wageman and Kouteinikova 2010; Di Ruocco 2016; Gutmeyr 2017, 84–87. For Russian perceptions of the ‘East’ in relation to their conception of the Self (‘Russia’s own Orient’), see Tolz 2011. For the paradox of Russian Orientalism, see Schimmelpennick van der Oye 2010b.

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Part I: Contexts of Hellenism

Asia. The Russian appropriation of this prestigious myth of identity, which assumed Central Asia to be the cradle of the Aryans, would not only give them a lion’s share in a (proto)European identity, but also allow for an extra legitimizing factor for their colonial drive eastwards.37 In combination with the thesis of a third continent through which the Aryan cradle naturally belonged in Russian domain, a powerful internally logical discourse was constructed that justified their eastern expansion, culminating in the full annexation of Central Asia in the Russian Empire. Modern archaeology in Central Asia The Great Game and the wider perennial power play between the Russian, British, and the French over geopolitical influence in the Middle and Far East – from Persia to China – had an immense impact on archaeological, historical, artistic, and wider public interest in these regions ‘in between East and West’ amongst West-European governments, officials, journalists, travellers, and scholars in the 20th century. For Central Asia, the craze of collecting exotic artefacts from ‘the heart of Asia’ instigated a high demand for the region’s antiquities, galvanizing a frequency of treasure hunts, archaeological explorations, and often illicit amateur excavations, through which much of Central Asia’s heritage objects ended up on the local market, to be sold further to private or public collectors and museums in Russia and Europe.38 At the same time, there was a resurgence and wide circulation of evocative legends of the once blooming and rich oasis cities of Fergana, Samarkand, Bokhara, and Balkh on the fabled Silk Roads, which had been traversed by famous historical figures such as Alexander the Great, Marco Polo, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane and, as such, acquired an aura of symbolic significance in both the Russian and West-European imagination.39 Foreign western explorers, too, such as the Swede Sven Hedin (1893–1897), the Hungarian Englishman Aurel Stein (1900, 1906–1908, 1913–1916 and 1930), the German Albert von Le Coq (1904, 1906, 1913–1914), and the Frenchman Paul Pelliot (1906–1908), were drawn by legends of the ‘lost treasures of Central Asia’, and ventured to discover these desired antiquities themselves.40 The pioneering expeditions and detailed scientific reports 37 38 39 40

Influential publications of that time include Müller 1888; Rendall 1889. For the Aryan myth in Russian scholarship, see Laruelle 2005; 2009; Gorshenina 2014, 402–407. For the Aryan myth in West-European scholarship on the central Eurasia, see Wiesehöfer 1990; Wiedemann 2010; 2017. Gorshenina and Rapin 2001, 38–41. Such as the Oxus Treasure, a hoard of golden objects discovered near Takht-i Sangin which found its way to Europe via India (Curtis 2012). The Oxus Treasure is now on permanent display in the British Museum. Among these, Samarkand stands out as the most evocative and mythologized city; further discussion in Gorshenina 2014b. These Western expeditions were neither large state-funded projects nor conducted with a particular colonial interest in the greater context of world politics (Osterhammel 2008, 151–153; see also Hopkirk 1980). However, the Great Game and the struggle for ‘the heart of Asia’ had greatly aroused their archaeological interest for Central Asia’s treasures.

1 Introduction

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and records of these and many others to follow – both foreign and local – resulted in the discovery of material evidence of the flourishing towns in those Silk Road regions that Von Richthofen had written about. It was in this context that the beginnings of systematic archaeology in Central Asia took place in the late 19th and early 20th century, starting with the first officially authorized excavation of Afrasiab (modern Samarkand in Uzbekistan) – identified as the legendary city of Marakanda (as known by the Alexander historians) whose fame as the jewel of Asia had excited the imagination of poets, travellers, and conquerors throughout history. The beginnings of modern archaeology in Afghanistan, too, were deeply entangled with Russian and European imperial matters. Since 1880, Afghanistan had become a military dominion of British India, effectively functioning as buffer against the Russian encroachment in Central Asia. When Afghanistan won its independence from British rule in 1919, the Emir (and later King) Amanullah turned to France for aid to modernize the country and elevate its prestige through, amongst others, its national heritage. The political interimperial power play on the Eurasian stage thus formed the context for the year 1922, when Orientalist Alfred Foucher signed the Franco-Afghan archaeological convention on behalf of the French government which would grant France archaeological monopoly in Afghanistan, (practically) until the Soviet invasion in 1979.41 The subsequently established Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA) – although meagrely financed and often with serious personal investment under sometimes strenuous circumstances – formed a watershed moment for the systematization of archaeology in Afghanistan. The creation of the DAFA had, however, taken place first and foremost in a diplomatic context, as it importantly signified the strengthening of French influence in a most coveted region.42 Influenced by, and in competition with contemporaneous popular narratives indulging in the 19th century idea of a mission civilisatrice, motivated by travel reports and archaeological activities by other Western parties in neighbouring regions, the DAFA was keen to investigate material remains of Greek culture and civilization, associated with conquerors from the West.43 Elsewhere in Central Asia, after the collapse of the Russian Empire, the 1920s and 1930s similarly saw the rise of several large-scale and innovative multidisciplinary expeditions, such as the TAKE in Uzbekistan (1936–1938) and the YuTAKE in Turkmenistan (since 1946), which signified an important step in the professionalization of Central 41

42 43

Olivier-Utard 1997, 17–33, 36–41; Fenet 2010; 2015; most recently 2021. The convention initially decreed a monopoly of thirty years, but the DAFA remained active throughout the 1960s and 70s. The Emir had modelled the archaeological convention almost exactly after the Iranian-French archaeological convention in Teheran 27 years earlier in 1895, which had led to the successful creation of the Délégation Archéologique Française en Perse (for the negotiations about the details of the convention, see Olivier-Utard 1997, 30–42). Despite political instability, the DAFA has resumed its activities in Afghanistan since 2003; see Bendezu-Sarmiento 2013; 2018; Bendezu-Sarmiento and Marquis 2015. Olivier-Utard 1997, 48, 54. Olivier-Utard 1997, 54; Fenet 2011, 64. Further discussion in Chapter 8.

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Asian archaeology.44 In reaction to pre-revolutionary Russian scholarship and concurrent with massive ethnic nationalist movements across the USSR, Central Asian archaeology became particularly interested in constructing an autochthonous ancient past, focusing on its original ancestral people while minimizing the role of foreign, particularly European influence.45 Research questions in this period were commonly framed to accommodate the search for ethnogenesis, a particularly important research agenda in Soviet archaeology from the late 1930s onwards, reaching its peak in the 1960s.46 Politically, the material evidence for deep, locally rooted ethno-archaeological cultures would support new nationalist narratives propagating self-determination, through the advancement and affirmation of a historically continuous line between the ancient and modern territory and its eponymous people of the newly created states. After the Soviet-Afghan war, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent independence of the Central Asian states in the early 1990s, archaeological activity shortly disrupted because of the difficult economic transition from a Soviet centrally-controlled economy to an independent market economy. Archaeological endeavours in the now independent states were soon taken up again in reorganized and renewed structures, with Central Asian and Afghan researchers entering in collaborative archaeological missions with French, German, Italian, Polish, Japanese, and Russian-trained archaeologists, which resulted in a series of fruitful expeditions over the past decades. 1.2.2 Temporal inbetweenness The time of Hellenistic Central Asia within Classics Narrativized and emplaced as both an exotic periphery and a central heartland, a transit zone of crossroads yet also a locus of meetings, Central Asia’s geographical inbetweenness also locked into the region’s temporal inbetweenness, particularly within Classics. In between ancient (and disciplinary) worlds, Central Asia had no distinct place in studies of antiquity which traditionally focused on the great civilizations of the East (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and India) and particularly those of the West (Greece and Rome). The broad discipline of Classics, practiced across time and space, traditionally refers to the study of Graeco-Roman antiquity, centred on Greek and Roman civilizations around the Mediterranean as the pillars of the humanities and ‘the golden 44

45 46

Gorshenina 2013, 27–29; 2021. For perceptive discussion on colonial dynamics during excavations in Central Asia, see Gorshenina 2019. Concise overviews of the development of archaeology in Central Asia are provided by Gorshenina and Rapin 2001; and regional overviews in Bruno 2021; Lindström 2021; Martinez-Sève 2021; Stančo 2021. Leo Klejn 2012, 138–141 called this “the syndrome of national sensitivity”. Despite the ubiquity of this ‘syndrome’, it should be noted that archaeology developed differently per Soviet state. Shnirelman 1995; Klejn 2012, 135–157; Gorshenina 2013, 28; Fabian 2020.

1 Introduction

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heritage’ of modern Western culture since the Renaissance.47 Hellas in particular plays central role as a powerful commonplace, one that has culturally and intellectually been appropriated in West-European and American scholarship interested to study and trace their cultural heritage to the civilization of ancient Greece (and by extension, Rome).48 Conventional curricula within Classics divide the ancient world in historical epochs typologized by events important to political geographies of Greece and Rome, while marginalizing other regions from scholastic periodization. In accordance with common temporal terminology, a traditional education in Classics thus covers the periods of Archaic Greece, the Classical Age, the Hellenistic Age, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, and Late Antiquity, cultivating knowledge of Greek and Latin languages, philosophy, art, architecture, and history, while other regions, histories, and associated notions and skills can be chosen as distinct but often non-compulsory specializations.49 Although this gradually begins to change, like other inbetween regions, Central Asia’s antiquity frequently enters the academic mind as outsider’s history, a perennial periphery brought to light only when deemed important to the Greek and Roman time-world of the Classics. Within Classics, furthermore, the Hellenistic period too has only relatively recently emerged from a marginal inbetween place in the temporality of antiquity. Following Johann Winckelmann’s division of artistic styles as evolutionary phases within Greek art, historical periodization of the ancient world had long been centred on the great cultural and political achievements of Classical Greece on the one hand, and the military prowess of the Roman empire on the other.50 In fact, it was the Western gaze towards Classical Greece and the Roman empire that defined the temporal limits of the Hellenistic period: Alexander of Macedon and Augustus – two Great Men in Western history. However, conventionally commencing at the death rather than the birth of Alexander in 323 BCE, the Hellenistic age was not associated with greatness, but with the perceived decline of the Greek polis, considered as the embodiment of Greek civilization at large.51 Moreover, pertaining to imperial claims and political activities in the regions east of the Mediterranean, the world of the Hellenistic period was considered to be far away from the centres of civilization. Characterized by increasing ‘Oriental’ influences and accordingly typologized as ‘Hellenistic’ rather than ‘Hellenic’, this period was thought to have contributed little to the foundation of Western civilization and therefore deemed 47 48

49 50 51

Terrenato 2002, 1109; see instructive discussion in Vlassopoulos 2007b. Leontis 1995, 28. In her book, Leontis makes a distinction between Western Hellenism by modern West-Europeans (particularly the British, French, and Germans) and Neohellenism by modern Greeks – both parties “used a different entity and mapped a different kind of homeland” (Leontis 1995, 13). Although this recently began to change; for instructive discussion on the development of standard curricula, its thematic priorities, and the internationalization of the discipline of ancient history, see Wiesehöfer 2017a. Cartledge 1993, 3–5; Alcock 1994, 171–173. For the polis as the uniting factor of Greek history, see particularly Vlassopoulos 2007b, 38–63.

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less relevant and worthwhile to study. Although Hellenistic studies have now gained steady ground in curricula of Classical studies, distinct traces of such temporal interest focused on Greece and Rome are still visible in the structure of educational systems.52 Within conventional history writing, the ‘location’ of Hellenistic-period Central Asia, therefore, not only acquired peripherality in terms of geography, but also in terms of its temporal position in the story of Classical civilization. This double marginality is perhaps most visible in the distinct usage of the temporal marker and cultural category ‘Parthian’. Within traditional narratives of Hellenistic history, the Parthians are frequently (though often implicitly) considered as outsiders. They represent a new Oriental Other due to their non-Greek origins in the Central Asian steppes and in light of the Parthian secession from the Seleukid empire around the mid-third century BCE, simultaneous with the so-called Baktrian revolt.53 The Arsakids developed a dynastic identity through the distinct use of Iranian imagery and practices especially from the first century CE onwards, which has long been interpreted as an ethnic and nationalist claim to Iranism – an ‘indigenous’ break-away from Hellenism.54 Framed as an Iranian invasion of Greek history, the Parthian kings are thus commonly considered as not Greek enough to be emplaced within traditional Hellenistic scholarship. Indicative of such understanding of historical time are Stanley Burstein’s words on the Hellenistic empires of the Ptolemies, the Seleukids, and the Antigonids: “For over two centuries, this system of kingdoms was to provide the framework of Greek life and culture before the expansion of Rome in the west and Parthia in the east put an end to it.”55 Although the Arsakids came to power within the conventional time limits of the Hellenistic period, and although Parthian elites engaged with wider Hellenistic cultural practices, Parthian history is not considered to belong in the periodic division of Hellenistic time, which betrays the conceptual baggage behind the seemingly neutral label of the Hellenistic period. The world of Hellenistic Central Asia: between Classics and Indology While the Hellenistic world was long considered a ‘stepchild’ of Graeco-Roman history, and the Parthians the ‘stepchildren’ of Hellenistic history, the double marginality of Hellenistic Central Asia manifested itself somewhat differently in the historiography of Baktria.56 Similar to Central Asia’s geographical inbetweenness, the region’s ambiguous 52 53 54 55 56

The increasing and developing scholarly interest in the Hellenistic age is not neutral, but had much to do with current identity issues in the present. For a recent discussion, see Wiesehöfer 2017a. Cf. discussion in Chrubasik 2016. See e. g. Wolski 1966; 1983. Such views have increasingly been challenged over the past decades, see notably Wiesehöfer 1996a; Canepa 2017a; Fowler 2017; Strootman 2017; Canepa 2018, 68–94. Burstein 2008, 61. Jong 2015, 94 astutely states that the Parthians are not only the ‘stepchildren’ of Greek history, but also of Iranian history. Further further useful discussion in Wiesehöfer 2017.

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position in ancient temporalities allowed it to become contested ground for scholars to claim its antiquity. This is best illustrated by the now classical dispute between the British historian W. W. Tarn and the Indian historian and numismatist A. K. Narain. Their writings illustrate the increasing tensions between colonial and nationalist historiography, as their views are distinctly contrasted in their seminal books The Greeks in Bactria and India by Tarn (1938) and The Indo-Greeks by Narain (1957).57 Reacting to the neglect of Baktria and India in Classical scholarship, Tarn determinedly proclaimed the Greek kingdom in Central Asia to have been a distinctly Hellenistic state, in line with the kingdoms of the Seleukids, Ptolemies, Antigonids, and Attalids.58 He contended that the history of the Greeks in Central Asia should be treated as a “unique chapter in the dealings of Greeks with the peoples of Asia” and thus an integral part of Greek history rather than Indology: “to omit the Euthydemid dynasty from Hellenistic history, and to confine that history to the four dynasties which bordered on the Mediterranean (…) throws that history at least out of balance.” 59 For Tarn, the Greeks in Baktria and India were unlike the ‘tribal’ Parthians from the Central Asian plains and were to be considered as Europeans who defended their Greekhood “both in blood and civilization”, and “shielded the settled world in Iran from the semi-barbarism of the northern steppes”.60 Tarn’s book was a distinct plea to include the Greeks in Baktria and India in Hellenistic history writing – because it concerned Greeks rather than (and opposed to) indigenous Central Asians. Writing in the aftermath of the Great Game, he implicitly portrayed the Greeks in Baktria and India as analogous to contemporaneous British colonial settlers in India, which had fostered and indulged in the justifying belief that Western imperialism brought cultured sophistication to the East.61 Thus, it was under Greek rule that “the level of Asia was slowly but steadily tending to rise” through the founding of organized and quasi-autonomous towns which, according to Tarn, formed “the real gift of the Greeks to Baktria”.62 Although his 1938 book reads more nuanced than his works on Alexander the Great, Tarn’s views created a resonating legacy of interpretations about Greek rule in Central Asia and its civilizing impact.63 Although his

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

For a broader discussion on this, see Mairs 2006. Tarn 1938, xix–xx, 409–410. Tarn 1938, 409. Tarn 1938, resp. 37, 79. E. g. in Tarn’s description of Antiochos’ ‘hellenizing’ and Demetrios, ‘pro-native’ styles of government in Baktria: “The most important fact in the history of the Greek East is that something not very unlike the modern struggle between nationalism and co-operation was fought out two thousand years ago under the shadow of the Hindu Kush.” (Tarn 1938, 412). Tarn 1938, resp. 33, 124. For Tarn, this was already foreshadowed by Alexander the Great – “one of the supreme fertilising forces of history” – whose rule gave Asia “those possibilities of ethical and intellectual progress.” (Tarn 1948a, 145, 142 respectively). This view was particularly voiced in his book Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind, published in 1933, followed by a more comprehensive work entitled Alexander the Great in 1948, which would greatly influence popular thinking about the Hellenistic period. See Chapter 2.

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historical narrative attracted scholarly criticism, it was through his seminal work that Hellenistic Central Asia decidedly entered the time-world of Classics.64 Published just a decade after the decolonization of India and the emergence of Indian nationalism, the Indian scholar A. K. Narain brought out an evocatively titled book The Indo-Greeks – in direct response to his British colleague. While Tarn positioned his historical narrative in the setting of Alexander the Great and Seleukid rule in Western Asia, Narain chose to approach the Greeks in Central Asia from a distinct Eastern perspective, embedding them in the context of the Achaemenid empire, the aftermath of Alexander’s campaigns, and the rise of the Mauryan empire in India. This resulted in two contrasting, politically inspired accounts, focusing on either the Western (Greek) or the Eastern (Indian) side of the story. For Tarn, the Greek kingdom(s) of Baktria and India were ‘a fifth Hellenistic state’ and an organic part of expanding Greek civilization to Asia. For Narain, on the other hand, these Greeks were not fresh colonists brought by Alexander or his Seleukid successors, but were rather Greeks of Baktria and India: children of older generations of settlers who had been displaced and dispersed to Asia by Xerxes and other Achaemenid kings.65 He argued that when Alexander arrived in Central Asia, many of these earlier Greeks would have mixed and merged with local peoples so that they were thoroughly localized ‘Baktrian-Greeks’ and ‘Indo-Greeks’ rather than pure Hellenes who kept to their Greekhood. According to Narain, these local rulers, did not look back to the Seleucids or to the Greek world in the Middle East for inspiration and help and they never cared to meddle in the struggles of the Hellenistic powers. The new state of Bactria [therefore] cannot be regarded as a succession state of Alexander’s empire; it developed from the revolt of a governor who had the backing of the people. (…) Bactria became independent in the same way as Parthia and possibly other areas close to it.66

Narain’s narrative reflects well his anticolonial claim on the history of Baktria and India as a distinct part of Indian history. Like the Indian freedom movements against the British occupation, the local Greeks of Central Asia gained independence on their own strength, rising out of local revolt against Greek and Macedonian colonists after Alexander the Great. Reversing the narrative of Greek colonists hellenizing (civilizing) 64

65

66

While Tarn’s Greeks in Baktria and India was the first study to treat them as part of Hellenistic history, it was Theophilus (Gottlieb) Siegfried Bayer’s 1738 Historia Regni Graecorum Baktriani: In qua simul graecarum in India coloniarum vetus memoria, published in Saint Petersburg, which addressed for the first time the obscure and fragmented history of the Greek kingdoms in Baktria and India. For the reception and impact of T. S. Bayer’s Historia, see Mairs 2013a; Gorshenina 2017, 160–162; and further discussion in Coloru 2021. Narain 1957, 1–11; 1989 [1989]. The bicultural label ‘Baktrian-Greeks’ and ‘Indo-Greeks’ prioritized the local element; this subtle yet significant difference can also be discerned in Narain’s choice for the book title: ‘the Greeks of Baktria and India’ compared to Tarn’s ‘Greeks in Baktria and India’. Further reflection on the label ‘Indo-Greek’ in Holt 2014. Narain 1957, 10–11.

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indigenous populations, Narain’s Greeks had assimilated into locals: “they came, they saw, but India conquered”.67 Further along in time, the world of Central Asia was claimed again in another anticolonial historical narrative of the Greeks in Baktria. In 1972, the Tadzhik-born Soviet scholar Bobojon Ghafurov published a monumental work with the title The Tajiks: Prehistory, Ancient, and Medieval History, in which he sharply criticized both the ‘Western’ and the ‘Eastern’ views of Tarn and Narain as completely out of balance. Admitting both the Seleukid background and the linkage with the history of India, Ghafurov emphasized that Central Asian culture had an equal share, if not leading role in creating the culture of Hellenistic Central Asia: “The sources of the history of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom lie in Central Asia. Here it emerged and (in Afghanistan) it became strong. Therefore, Greco-Bactria is first of all Central Asia and Afghanistan as well as India and the Hellenistic world.”68 While Narain’s narrative portrayed the Graeco-Baktrian and Indo-Greek kings as local rebels who gained independence on their own strength, Ghafurov argued for a version of history in which it was the mixture of many different peoples that created the ‘genius’ of Hellenistic culture in Central Asia. Although the contrast between these scholars is more pronounced than its scholarly resonance, the historical narrative of Tarn, Narain’s anticolonial inversion of it, and Ghafurov’s emphasis on Central Asian contributions illustrate well the modern claims and frames of the inbetweenness of Hellenistic Central Asia. 1.3 Methodology The case of Hellenistic Central Asia’s double marginality highlights how inbetweenness pervades in various layers of meaning and value attributed to perceived marginal places. The ambivalence of these inbetween places allows ample room for different parties to lay claim on their identification and role as particular spaces – as distinct geographical, political, social, and cultural places. Locating discursive constructions and articulations of inbetweenness is therefore a valuable exercise to shed light on the culturalized assumptions and convictions scholars hold about Hellenism to interpret eclectic material culture in Hellenistic Asia. This will help one central aim of this book, of gaining a deeper understanding of the scholarly heuristics behind what has conventionally been termed by Daniel Schlumberger as ‘l’hellenisme oriental’ and ‘l’hellenisme occidental’ – Eastern Hellenism and Western Hellenism – which form the foundation for a critical exploration towards a translocal approach.69 Engaging with the paradoxes that Hellenism bears in its conceptual foundations, I explain and discuss why and how 67 68 69

Narain 1957, 11. Ghafurov 2011 [1972], 205. Schlumberger 1960; 1969a; 1970

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translocalism and related concepts from globalization research have more heuristic potential to assess cultural inbetweenness beyond ‘East’, ‘West’, and the inbetween. As such, this book contributes to wider conversations on interpreting cultural interactions, encounters, and transformations in antiquity. A comparative approach lends itself well to the analysis of perceptions of inbetweenness through Hellenism. Hellenism, sometimes used interchangeably with Hellenization, conventionally refers to the spread and adoption of Greek culture in lands east of the Mediterranean, through which ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cultures mixed and merged, producing distinct inbetween cultures of sorts. The word Hellenism is used not only to refer to this phenomenon, but also to the cultural model to interpret it. While there is a consensus about the phenomenon – the increasing presence of (elements of) what we recognize as Greek culture throughout Asia in the Hellenistic period is undeniable – there exists intense discussion on the precise meaning and consequences of such presence, and what form of cultural interaction it implies. In order to situate this study in wider discourse, Chapter 2 examines the controversies of the Hellenization debate, tracing the concept of Hellenism along the currents of significant intellectual streams across the 20th and 21st century, until recent trends of hybridity and globalization. It will be shown that the meaning of Hellenism did not remain the same across time, as it developed from a synonym of Hellenization, to a cultural concept distinct from Hellenization. Continuing from these theoretical grounds, Chapters 3 to 7 shape the body of this book and explore different notions of Hellenism that have been used to give meaning to eclectic inbetween material culture across Hellenistic Asia. I examine historical interpretations and narratives of Hellenism at specific archaeological sites from Central Asia and Western Asia (Fig. 1.1) which I discuss as case studies. While both macroregions are situated in the landmass of Eurasia, Central Asia is commonly perceived as the fringe of the ‘Hellenistic world’, in the context of the territorial range of the Seleukid, Ptolemaic, and Antigonid kingdoms in the aftermath of Triparadeisos in 320 BCE and the Battle of Ipsos in 301 BCE which divided the former regions of Alexander’s empire. Although Central Asia played an important role for the Seleukid monarchs and their realm in Asia, Seleukid political activities were largely focused on Western Asia and the Fertile Crescent, a desirable and contested region amidst the Seleukid, Ptolemaic, and Antigonid empires, and therefore (now) considered as the core of the Hellenistic world.70 It is therefore worthwhile to explore how the geographical emplacement of a space as ‘core’ or ‘periphery’ shapes scholarly explanations of Hellenism in these places. The case studies central to this book are prominent archaeological sites across Hellenistic Asia which highlighted their regions in the broader strokes of ancient history. For Central Asia, I selected the city of Ai Khanum (Baktria, modern Afghanistan), the

70

As discussed in handbooks such as Walbank 1981; Green 1990; Erskine 2003; Errington 2008.

1 Introduction

35

temple at Takht-i Sangin (Baktria, modern Tadzhikistan), and the citadel of Nisa (Parthia, modern Turkmenistan), which will be discussed in Chapters 3 to 5, respectively.71 Raising excitement amongst historians and archaeologists alike, the rich material from these sites have become widely known and celebrated, through which the region of Central Asia passed into the cultural canon of Classical antiquity and even onto the pages of modern travel guidebooks. Prevalent views of the main interpreters of Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, and Nisa significantly influence the image of the region as a whole; the choice of these sites is therefore justified by their academic popularity as ‘highlights’ of Central Asia. Other regions, such as Chorasmia and Arachosia, have not been selected for discussion since these are less prominent and less extensively excavated. Conversely, Gandhara, though an important region for the representation of Central Asia, is omitted from this study on the grounds that Gandharan studies is an immense and upcoming field of its own. Chapters 6 and 7 move from Central to Western Asia and examine the royal cities of Babylon and Seleukeia on the Tigris (both in Mesopotamia, modern Iraq). Closely connected to each other, these cities both functioned consecutively as residential cities of Seleukid kings. With similar reasoning as the Central Asian case studies, these prestigious sites have been selected over other compelling cities in the region such as Doura Europos. Each case study chapter follows a similar structure to acquaint the reader with a brief research history, an overview of the site context and its material, and a descriptive analysis of how its main interpreters have perceived and asserted the Hellenism of this material. These descriptions are necessarily presented in the terminology and vocabulary of previous descriptions, which are subject to deeper analysis in Chapter 8. It should be also emphasized that the five sites have each been expertly explored by important scholars in the past, and have been subjected to considerable debate within respective fields. The archaeological sites central in this book should therefore be read as illustrative rather than exhaustive case studies which form the basis of my further analysis. Chapter 8 compares and investigates the (in)consistency of perceptions of Hellenism based on the case studies central in this book. Five interrelated interpretive paradoxes emerge, which will demonstrate that conceptions of Hellenism variously relate to issues of hybridity, localism, ethnicity, syncretism, and philhellenism, which subtly change and adjust the direction, nuance, and agency in the implied cultural dynamics. Exploring how to move forwards from these paradoxes of Hellenism, Chapters 9, then, offers a critical consideration of a translocal approach, based on useful concepts in globalization research. Rather than using globalization vocabulary evocatively, I argue that seriously engaging with globalization theories requires a radical shift in fundamental structures of thinking about Hellenism and localism. In an evocative discussion of how matters would look like from an alternative translocal approach, this book offers novel 71

While the correct name of the archaeological site is Old Nisa (to distinguish it from New Nisa), this book generally uses ‘Nisa’ to refer to the ancient site, as New Nisa will not be discussed.

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directions for interpreting Hellenism that are not only relevant to studies of Hellenistic Eurasia but also to other forms of cultural inbetweenness across time and space in world history. A note on positionality This book investigates the different ways in which cultural inbetweenness is articulated and simultaneously constructed through the model of Hellenism. It does so from a particular perspective and facilitated by a distinct standpoint. As a West-European trained scholar writing in light of the global and digital turns, I approach the subject of inbetweenness from a position that enabled me to draw on a diverse interdisciplinary body of sources, information, and theories to explore Hellenism from a wide angle. The fascination with and theoretical interest in borderland concepts, cultural fluidity, and identity construction is very much a product of today’s globalized, postmodern world. In the face of pivotal events in ‘the global nineties’, with the onset of the Internet Age, the end of the Cold War, the independence of the former Soviet republics, the formal end of Apartheid in South Africa, the Gulf War in the Middle East, the forming of the European Union, the Rwandan genocide, the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the subsequent Yugoslavian wars, the scholarly world has seen a surge in literature devoted to issues of ethnicity, identity, nationalism, and globalization, creating the intellectual wave this study finds itself in. Internet and academic platforms not only granted access to various literature but also made it possible to gain a global view on current interdisciplinary matters and theories, while providing the inspiration and conceptual frame to approach this study. The current globalization paradigm allowed me to critically analyse perceptions of Hellenism with the theoretical apparatus of recent globalization research, as well as to carry out this particular form of research, a geographically wide comparative study of interpretations of material culture, combining sources and methods from ancient history, archaeology, and sociological theories. While reaping the fruits of recent times, there were also several timely challenges. The broad endeavour of theorizing cultural inbetweenness compelled me to tread the waters of archaeological and historical experts whose specialized views are necessarily presented here in broad lines to approximate general tendencies of interpretation. Focusing on these tendencies, I have lessened the conventional emphasis on particular sources of information such as textual and numismatic material, which I deemed not primarily relevant for this study. Moreover, due to linguistic limitations, I have only been able to cursorily study Russian publications which, therefore, do not feature in the highlights of the analysis, although these provide interesting perspectives (particularly concerning Orientalism).72 This book does not aspire to offer an exhaustive study of 72

For which the works of Gorshenina remain immensely valuable; most recently and most relevant to ‘Hellenism’ is Gorshenina 2021.

1 Introduction

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the archaeological sites in Hellenistic Asia or a complete in-depth history of Hellenism at large, but rather represents a critical exercise in theoretically mapping out distinct understandings of Hellenism to interpret inbetweenness and the issues that emerge when confronting these views in comparison. The next chapter explores how scholars have theoretically approached the notion of Hellenism in the past and in the present, laying out the cultural backbone to the body of this study: Hellenism in Central and Western Asia.

2 Hellenism’s great debates Hellenism is an imaginary way of resolving an insoluble antagonism  – the relation of (some) modernity to the ancient Greek past. That is, Hellenism is not a concept, nor is it a substantive thing. It is a relation between a particular part, itself differently imagined over time and therefore not very particular at all, and an ever-changing present. James Porter, 2009, 7

2.1 Hellenism: a history Hellenism is a term shrouded in terminological ambiguities. This cloud of ambivalence is largely due to modern claims to, and associations with Greek antiquity, as pointedly articulated by James Porter. Indeed, Hellenism is not only an interpretive model but also a historiographic example of ambivalent inbetweenness, embodying an ideational space between past and present for scholars to make claims on its meaning. Throughout history, Hellenism has been used to refer to a historical time period, to Greek language, Greek political institutions, Greek ethnicity, Greek culture, Greek civilization, and additionally all things Greek in interaction with non-Greek peoples, religions, politics, and cultures under the dictum of ‘Greek influence’. Even when Hellenism is defined as pertaining to only one of these, there remains considerable room for rather different understandings. The discrepant views of W. W. Tarn and A. K. Narain, discussed in the previous chapter, well underline such interpretive controversy. These scholars not only reflected their time of writing, but also further advanced distinct currents within the modern Hellenization debate. This chapter traces the historiographic currents of this debate.1

1

Although the word as well as ideas about Hellenism circulated long before Johann Gustav Droysen, from antiquity to the Renaissance and the early modern period, this chapter predominantly considers broad contemporary strands of the Hellenization debate in the 20th and 21st century. This chapter is thus not intended as an exhaustive study of Hellenism. Useful overviews complementary to this chapter are, amongst others, Bichler 1983; Funck 1996; Bichler 2008; Strootman 2011a; Bichler 2012; Wiesehöfer 2018.

2 Hellenism’s great debates

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2.1.1 The birth of a concept The word Hellenism is not a modern invention. It derives from similar terms in use throughout antiquity, most notably the word ‘hellenismos’, the verb ‘hellenizein’, and the common nouns ‘hellenistes’ and ‘hellenizontes’ mentioned in diverse Greek literature such as Thukydides’ History, Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations, Aeschines’ speech Against Ktesiphon, Strabo’s Geography, and the apocryphal work 2 Makkabees.2 These terms all stem from the (pro)noun hellen – Greek; yet how ‘Greek’ was understood was subject to great nuance even in antiquity.3 In their earliest ancient usage, Hellenism and cognate terms most often carried a linguistic meaning as they referred to speaking (correct) Greek language. Those who were unable to do so, fell in the rather permeable antithetical categorization of barbarismos (and associated lexical variants) – an onomatopoeia mimicking the babbling sounds ‘barbar’ (‘bla bla’).4 From the Graeco-Persian wars onward, linguistic understandings of Hellenism sometimes also entailed behavioural implications, though less frequently so than we might expect; the most famous passage of Herodotos on ‘to Hellenikon’ can be considered as rather exceptional.5 Nevertheless, it should be acknowledged that an additional cultural layer of Hellenism could be activated in context, underlying the premise that the ability to speak correct Greek also implied the ability to reason, to think individually, have moderation and self-knowledge; the inability to do so, by contrast, then implied “a lack of control, bloodthirsty behaviour, and self-indulgence over food, drink, and sex” that became associated with barbarism.6 Such broader understandings of Hellenism became anchored in later biblical passages in which Hellenism in Hellenistic Judea designated the ‘Greek way of life’ as opposed to Jewish lifeways.7 Modern scholarship added quite substantially to the existing conceptual biography of Hellenism. In the 19th century, Hellenism expanded to become a demarcated research 2 3 4

5

6 7

Thuc. 2.68.5 (ἑλληνίζειν); Arist. Soph. el. 182a. 14 (ἑλληνίζειν); Aesch. In Ctes. 3.172 (ἑλληνίζειν); Strab. 14.2.28 (ἑλληνίζειν; Ἑλληνισμός; οἱ ἑλληνίζοντεϛ); 2 Macc. 4.13 (Ἑλληνισμός). Further discussion in Bichler 1983, 5–22. In the Archaic and Classical periods, ‘Greek’ could be recategorized to include people who were previously perceived as the opposite, barbarians (Hornblower 2008, 38–40). The categorization of ‘Greek’ became even more permeable in the periods of antiquity that followed. Strab. 14.2.28. Hall 2002; 2003 warns that ‘the Greek language’ is a reified abstraction; the ancient Greeks probably did not think in terms of a singular uniform Greek language spoken and understood by all Greeks, but that their linguistic reality was dominated by different dialects, as well as varieties of spoken and written idioms. The same could be said for ‘the Greek culture’. Hdt. 8.144.2 is most famous (yet exceptional) for its description of ‘to Hellenikon’ (τὸ Ἑλληνικὸν, the Greek thing), used to refer to Greekness and explained as the commonality in blood, language, temples, sacrifices, and customs of Greeks – a narrative that supported a construction of Greek (ethnic) identity in the face of the Graeco-Persian wars (E. Hall 1989; and further discussion in Lund 2005; Hornblower 2008; Zacharia 2008a). Plut. Mor. 329 C–D = de Alex. fort. 1.6 is another exception that describes ‘to Hellenikon’ in similar manner. Zacharia 2008a, 25–26. E. g. 2 Macc. 4.13 (Ἑλληνισμός); Acts 6.1 (Ἑλληνιστής as opposed to Ἑβραίοι).

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era in world history, advocated by the German scholar Johann Gustav Droysen, one of the most influential historians of his time.8 In his three-volume Geschichte des Hellenismus, published in a revised final edition of 1877, Droysen coined Hellenism as a new timeworld within Classics, a proper historical epoch worthy to be studied on its own, rather than a stain in the story of civilization – a degenerate intermediary time of collapse and decay in Greek history.9 The essence of this epoch, conventionally defined as the time from the death of Alexander the Great to the Roman annexation of Ptolemaic Egypt (323–30 BCE), would be embodied by Hellenism, which now applied to the fusion of Greek and Oriental cultures.10 For Droysen, it were the conquests of Alexander the Great in the East that initiated the age of Hellenism, a time of cultural Verschmelzung during which the Greek and the Oriental worlds came to be united under the banner of Macedonian kingship.11 The historical event that would foreshadow this were the forced mass marriages between Alexander’s men and Iranian women at Susa in 324 BCE, which were described as a marvellous wedding festival that melded East and West in a way exemplary for the idea of Hellenism.12 With Droysen, Hellenism thus came to refer to a distinct time period as well as phenomena of massive cultural fusion that characterized the epoch. Droysen worked in the intellectual atmosphere of the Prussian School of History which advocated a linear, progressive, and historicist conception of the past. Influenced 8 9

10

11

12

Although Droysen’s work is highlighted here, he was not the only scholar writing about the impact and consequences of Alexander the Great’s campaigns. For concise discussion, see Bichler 1983, 33–53; more recently Wiesehöfer 2018 esp. 606–608. That is, the collapse and decay of the Greek city states; Droysen 1953a [1877] xxi–xxii in reaction to e. g. Georg Grote’s contemporaneous History of Greece which posited a hierarchical distinction between Hellenic (Greek) and Hellenistic (Greek-like) history, the latter being “a faint and partial resemblance of [genuine Hellenism], carrying the superficial marks of the original” (Grote 1857 cited in Richter 2011, 40). For Droysen’s development of the concept Hellenism and his own standpoint in history, see Momigliano 1970; Bichler 1983; Pleket 1988; Southard 1995; Nippel 2003; Bichler 2012; Rebenich and Wiemer 2012; Wiesehöfer 2012; Assis 2014; Wiesehöfer 2018. Droysen frequently used the words Verschmelzung or Versmischung. Influentially so, he referred to this epoch as ‘der hellenistischen Zeit’, which became a conventional period. However, Droysen was quite ambiguous about the limits of this period. His narrative of the age of Hellenism initially ended in 222 BCE (Momigliano 1970). By contrast, the current definition of the Hellenistic period stretches further to include the first century BCE, thus encompassing the full political time-span of Alexander’s successor states. The last Hellenistic ruler was Kleopatra VII of Ptolemaic Egypt whose death in 30 BCE – a year after the defeat of Marc Anthony and Kleopatra at the hands of Octavian in the decisive Battle of Actium in 31 BCE – marked the end of the Ptolemaic kingdom (and the Hellenistic empires at large) and the beginning of Egypt as a Roman province under Rome’s first emperor, Augustus. It should be noted that Droysen did intend to extend the narrative to 30 BCE and even beyond to the seventh century CE, but he never finished these last volumes of the Geschichte (Nippel 2003, 39–40). Droysen begins his work with the famous words: “Der Name Alexander bezeichnet das Ende einer Weltepoche, den Anfang einer neuen” (Droysen 1953b [1877], 3). He did not envision the East as a monolith but acknowledged well the plurality and diversity of ‘the Orient’, whose ‘worlds’ came to be fused with the Greek or Western mind (Wiesehöfer 2018, 600). See also Wiesehöfer 2012. Droysen 1953b [1877] 404. During the Susa marriages, Alexander himself took Stateira, daughter of Darius III, as his second wife after Roxane.

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by important scholars around him such as the Classical philologist August Boekh and the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Droysen wrote his Geschichte with a specific vision in mind. In the preface of the first 1836 edition of the third book, he states: Der Hellenismus ist nicht eine abgerissene unorganische Monstrosität in der Entwicklung der Menschheit; er hat die Erbschaft der Griechenwelt wie des morgenländischen Altertums mit allen activis und passivis übernommen, und mit diesem Gegebenen weiter schaltend und sich weiter arbeitend, entwickelt er ein Anderes, Neues, das so vermittelt immer wieder auf seine nächste Vorstufe zurückweist.13

This ‘next precursor’ refers to the stage of Christianity. Hegelian influence as well as his Lutheran beliefs led Droysen to conceive of world history in theological and teleological light, which shaped the pagan past in the service of the Christian present.14 For Droysen, then, history was a sequential process of distinct stages moving towards European modernity, each stage fulfilling its destined role. The flow of history, coursing from the unification of East and West under Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic kingdoms, to the unification of the German states under the Prussian monarchy in 1871, would be a purposeful development that made perfect sense in the grand scheme orchestrated by God. Venturing to explore the transition from the Classical Greek world to the Christian one – from the world of Alexander to the world of Jesus – Droysen considered Hellenism not only as a distinct time period, but also as an evolutionary link in the human progression towards modern Christian-European civilization. In this progression, Hellenism – “the melding of Europe and Asia” – would have been bound to foster the perfect Graeco-Jewish cultural climate for Christianity (and Islam) to unfold and diffuse.15 Droysen’s Hellenism, however, did not entail a symmetrical, equal fusion of East and West. The cultural bedrock of Christianity created by Hellenism would not only have cultivated the necessary religious syncretism, but also effected the spread of the Greek idea of freedom on a world scale, diffusing from the Aegean to the East in the wake of Alexander’s conquests.16 Thus, Droysen famously praised the age of Hellenism as “the modern time of antiquity” which created the “the first world unity” marked by the universalization of Greek culture and Classical freedom – a historical necessity in the progression towards European modernity.17 Although his theological vision did not prosper much further, Droysen’s Geschichte des Hellenismus impacted subsequent 20th century historiography in such a way, that his work signified the scholarly (re)birth of Hellenism as a distinct epoch in temporal, geographical, and cultural terms.18 13 14 15 16 17 18

Droysen 1953a [1877], x. Momigliano 1970, 144–145; Bichler 1983, 66–74; Southard 1995, 32–68. “Ein lebendiges Glied in der Kette menschlicher entwicklung”: Droysen 1953a, x [1877], x; “Verschmelzung Asiens und Europas”: Droysen 1953b [1877], 307. Southard 1995, 10–31; Assis 2014, 103–112. “Die moderne Zeit des Altertums”: Droysen 1953a [1877], xxii; “Die ersten Welteinheit”: Droysen 1953b [1877], 442. Bichler 2008; 2012; Wiesehöfer 2012; 2018.

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2.1.2 Hellenism, empire, and colonialism Droysen’s Geschichte set the standard of modern understandings of the term. However, because of his own ambiguity when using the word Hellenism, this standard remained quite abstract, leaving ample room for interpretation. Severed from its theological basis, Droysen’s Hellenism developed from a concept primarily intended to signify a time period, into a universal concept to refer to the civilization of the Greek-speaking world of the Hellenistic kingdoms – ‘the Hellenistic world’ – perceived in a variety of fields. Subsequent scholarship emerged on Hellenistic political history, Hellenistic economy, Hellenistic art, Hellenistic religion, Hellenistic philosophy, and Hellenistic literature – all compartmentalized characteristics of the Hellenistic world.19 This novel interest and fascination soon instigated lively debate on the precise meaning of and processes behind Hellenism and its lexical derivatives, most prominently Hellenization. In the early 20th century, British historians appropriated the term and altered its focus, infusing colonial overtones into the main tenets of Hellenism. In positioning the contemporaneous British Empire as indirect heirs to the Hellenistic kingdoms, British scholars engaged with wider intellectual discourse about European cultural superiority over the Orient that justified Western imperialism in the East.20 For Edwyn Bevan, rather than a fusion of Greek and Oriental cultures, Hellenism entailed “[t]he achievement of the Greeks [to bring] freedom and civilization into union.”21 In his influential 1902 book The House of Seleucus, one of the first studies solely focused on the Seleukid empire, Bevan elaborated on Droysen’s aspect of civilization, explicitly connecting Hellenism with the culture of Classical Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE: Hellenism, as that culture may most conveniently be called, was the product of the Greek city-state. (…) We may discern in Hellenism a moral and an intellectual side; it implied a certain type of character, and it implied a certain cast of ideas. It was of the former that the Greek was thinking when he distinguished himself as a free man from the barbarian.22

It was the unique environment of political freedom of the Greek city state that would have cultivated the quality of rationalism, expressed in the Greek philosophical, artistic, and literary production. Greek rationalism would be characteristic of a cultured lifestyle 19 20

21 22

Hellenism also flourished as a concept applied outside the time-limits of the Hellenistic period, see e. g. Bowersock 1990; Leontis 1995; Kaldellis 2008; Zacharia 2008b. Vasunia 2003; Porter 2009; Vlassopoulos 2010a; 2011. Such discourse dominated the late 18th, 19th, and early 20th century, also known as ‘the long 19th century’ as coined by Eric Hobsbawm 1987, 56–57), who characterized this (extended) century as an ‘age of empire’ – a time of a colonial imperialism, novel in its kind. In the age of empire, the title of emperor was claimed by European rulers of Germany, Austria, Russia, Turkey, and Britain, following the fall of Napoleon’s Empire in France. The title was also claimed outside of Europe, e. g. China, Japan, and Persia. See further Osterhammel 2015 [2009]. Bevan 1902, 3. Bevan 1902, 6–7 (emphasis in original), see also 8–9.

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that Bevan deemed civilized and naturally superior to those of ‘Orientals’, something he explicitly connected to modern European civilization – particularly British civilization in colonial India.23 We may say then with perfect truth that the work being doing by European nations, and especially by England, in the East is the same work which was begun by Macedonia and Rome, and undone by the barbarian floods of the Middle Ages. The civilization which perished from India with the extinction of the Greek kings has come back again in the British official. (…) Hellenism lives again.24

For Bevan, Hellenism was not limited to a distinct age of cultural fusion, but was the embodiment of Greek culture per se, perceived as a culturally authentic entity representative of civilization proper. As such, the Hellenistic period was considered to be the second chapter in Hellenism’s history in the world, during which the ‘tribal’, ‘unprogressive’, and ‘despotic’ Orient acculturated to Greek civilization brought by Alexander and his successors.25 Drawing a continuous line between Alexander’s successors and his fellow countrymen in the East, Bevan evidently saw his own time as a modern chapter of Hellenism in the East. Two decades later in 1923, Bevan contributed to another important British publication written by four likeminded historians: The Hellenistic Age. In this book, Hellenism was emphasized as (an epoch of) ‘unity and fellowship of the human race’, during which the ‘intolerant bigotry’ and ‘racial antagonisms’ between Greeks and barbarians had dissolved and transformed into an inclusive human community to which everyone now belonged.26 As such, Hellenism had changed to refer not only to civilization proper but also to a utopian harmonious community. Similar to Droysen’s conception, the cosmopolitan notion of Hellenism as the creation of one big happy family was not intended to be symmetrical – a fusion of equal parties – but essentially implied the debarbarization of the Orient through the missionary spread of civilization from Greece to the East. In this process of civilization, the continuation of (Athenian) Greek culture from Greece’s Classical period and its propagation ‘to all margins of the world’ was considered to be the greatest achievement in the advancement of human history.27 In line with Bevan’s 23

24 25 26 27

Quite explicitly: “We are familiar with the superiority, the material supremacy of European civilization. (…) And whence did the modern European derive these qualities? The moral part of them springs in large measure from the same source as in the case of the Greeks – political freedom; the intellectual part of them is a direct legacy from the Greeks. What we call the Western spirit in our own day is really Hellenism reincarnate. (…) The work being done by European nations, and especially by England, in the East is the same work which was begun by Macedonia” (Bevan 1902, 16–17, 19, emphasis in original). Bevan 1902, 19. The Greek kings refer her to the Indo-Greek kings, which he thus considers as Hellenistic kings. See also Chapter 1, section 1.1.2 and instructive discussion in Mairs 2006. Bevan 1902, 5–6. Bury et al. 1923, 26–27. Bury et al. 1923, 29.

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House of Seleucus, these scholars regarded the Hellenistic age as an exemplary epoch to make sense of and justify contemporary history, drawing analogies between the ancient Diadochs (and subsequent Hellenistic successors) and the modern British as champions of (Western) civilization. The justifying nature of such historical narrative is most clearly voiced by John Bagnall Bury, who states that many Englishmen, in similar fashion to their ‘Macedonian precedents’ in the Hellenistic age, held the opinion that: English governments [in the formation of the British Empire] were never guilty of any aggressive purpose and were only forced by circumstances from time to time to take territories which they did not desire, either in self-defence or for the good of the world.28

Such understanding of Hellenism as (an age of) the spread of civilization i. e. Greek culture, illustrates well how British conceptions were immersed in European ideologies of ancient Greek exemplarity which supported, legitimized, and indulged in a righteous imperial self-representation. Parallel to British colonialism in the contemporary ‘Orient’ – in Egypt, India, and the Strait of Malacca – the penetration of Hellenism in the East was seen as something universally desirable for the good of the world. Through the subsequent works of W. W. Tarn, the idea of the Hellenistic period as an age of world unity under an imperial flag became broadly accepted in the grand narrative of Western (European) cultural history. Apart from his 1938 Greeks in Bactria and India, Tarn’s monograph on Hellenistic civilization as well as his extensive two-volume biography of Alexander the Great, published in respectively 1927 and 1948, left a distinct intellectual legacy which reverberated through generations to come.29 Aligned with earlier colleagues, Tarn defined Hellenism as “the civilization of the three centuries during which Greek culture radiated far from the homeland.”30 Within this process of Greek radiation (also termed as Hellenization), it was clear that Greek culture was conceptualized as an authentic and monolithic entity, a self-contained package imposed (or rather bestowed) upon the East, through which the barbarians of Asia would have become cultured. To Tarn, it were the Greeks under Alexandrian and Seleukid rule who taught the indigenous peoples of Western and Central Asia how to organize their villages and who introduced them to higher culture.31 Accordingly, cultural interaction in this period was conceived of as a Hellenizing acculturative process in which Greek culture was naturally superior while Eastern peoples had no agency other than to absorb

28 29 30 31

Bury et al. 1923, 12–13. Tarn’s 1948 first volume on Alexander the Great was based on his earlier 1933 published chapter in The Cambridge Ancient History (Tarn 1933b). Tarn 1952, 2. Tarn 1938, 124. According to Tarn 1938, 118, the proverbial ‘thousand cities of Baktria’ ( Just. Epit. 41.1, 41.4; Strab. 15.1.3) were all strategically located fortified villages established by the Greeks. For Ai Khanum in Baktria, see Chapter 3.

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and imitate Greek culture from the moment of the colonial encounter on.32 This process of acculturation was considered a unidirectional and diffusionist development initiated by Alexander the Great, who Tarn lauded as a European hero who dreamt of “the brotherhood of man” and “the unity of mankind” based on Greek culture.33 Swayed by Plutarch’s noble portrait of the Macedonian king as an enlightened moral and cultural crusader, Tarn declared that it was Alexander who “succeed[ed] in ultimately giving to (…) Asia not political equality with Greece, but a community of culture”, which constituted “possibilities of ethical and intellectual progress.”34 Tarn’s explanation for the failure of Alexander’s cosmopolitan dream was “simply from there not being enough Greeks in the world” to hellenize Asia.35 Both Bevan and Tarn adopted and rehabilitated the term Hellenism not to describe cultural interaction and the reciprocal amalgamation between various ethnic groups in the Hellenistic East, but to show their European readership how Greek the Hellenistic world really was. As such, Hellenistic history was essentially Greek culture-history. Although Tarn’s Hellenism theoretically underlined a ‘unity of mankind’, his particular (though influential) usage of the words Hellenism, Hellenistic, and Hellenization, clarify that these terms did not refer to a truly mixed unity of Greeks and Orientals, but rather to the zealous patriotic preservation of Greekness of ‘the Greek race’ and the sweeping assimilation of non-Greeks to such Greekness. “What kind of people now were these Greeks whom the Seleukid settlement scattered throughout Asia?”, Tarn posed; “The answer is simple: just Greeks, with all that it implies. Most certainly they were not, as it was once the fashion to suppose, a people of Eurasians and Levantines.”36 Somewhat later in his book, he further states that “Hellenization in the proper sense – the adoption of Greek culture as one’s own culture – is not likely often to have

32

33 34 35 36

Dietler 1998, 296. Although a broad definition of acculturation explains the term as “those phenomena which result when groups of individuals having different cultures come into continuous firsthand contact, with subsequent changes in the original cultural patterns of either or both groups” (Redfield et al. 1936, 149), common usage of acculturation in history and archaeology is steeped in (latent) colonialist or imperialist ideas. For clear discussion and critique, see Cusick 1998; and recently Versluys 2017a, 25–28. Tarn 1948b, 400. Central to this brotherhood would be the Greek concept of homonoia (ὁμόνοια) – ‘being of one mind together’. Tarn explains that homonoia was previously confined to Greeks but expanded with Alexander to include both Greeks and barbarians. Tarn 1948a, 138, 142. Tarn 1948a, 134. Tarn 1938, 34. This is his main reason why the history of the Greeks in Baktria and India should be seen as part of Hellenistic history, because (for Tarn) they were Greek. This is well illustrated in his chapter on why the Greeks could not maintain their hold on India, the place where the Hellenistic world ended: “the Greek race was getting (…) too old and too civilised perhaps for successful colonisation. And though the number of Greeks east of the Euphrates must have been much greater than used to be supposed, there were not enough for ruling so vast a country permanently” (Tarn 1938, 67). This implies that Tarn’s Hellenistic history only included the events and activities of ‘real’ Greeks (as explicitly stated in his introduction: Tarn 1938, xxii–xxiii).

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happened.”37 Thus, for Tarn, the story of Hellenism essentially meant the story of Greeks in the East; a unique episode in Greek history in which their high civilization came to be extended to Asia, but mainly because Greeks themselves travelled with it. 2.1.3 Post-war Hellenism Early and mid-20th century conceptions of Hellenism, basking in romantic ideas of triumphal glory of European civilization over uncultured Orientals and associated with the valiant persona of Alexander ‘the Great Benefactor’, soon began to wear off in the aftermath of World War II.38 Parallels of heroic imperial conquest, indulged in the ennobling idea of the ‘white man’s burden’, moved in an acute tension with the experiential reality of war, and were replaced by (equally presentist) parallels of forcible repression, militant violence, and mass murder in the name of expanding Lebensraum. A year after Tarn’s death in 1958, Classicist Ernst Badian published a slashing paper on ‘Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind’, one of numerous revisionist papers to come that punctured the idealist bubble of Alexander’s greatness.39 Badian criticized Tarn for his mistranslations of the ancient sources and his extensive distortions of events in order to forge and defend a fantastic and glorifying version of Greek history.40 The paper’s resolute conclusion that Tarn’s portrayal of Alexander was an apologetic myth to cover his savage deeds, developed further in Badian’s subsequent publications that put the young king in an extremely negative light, emphasizing the corrupt and atrocious side of Macedonian imperialism. Alexander would have suffered from a severe psychological condition that came with the ‘loneliness of power’, which made him a resentful, cruel, and narcissistic megalomaniac, verging on the edge of insanity. The story of Alexander the Great appears to us as an almost embarrassingly perfect illustration of the man who conquered the world, only to lose his soul. After fighting, scheming and murdering in pursuit of the secure tenure of absolute power, he found himself at last on a lonely pinnacle over an abyss, with no use for his power and security unattainable. His genius was such that he ended an epoch and began another – but one of unceasing war and misery.41

37 38

39 40 41

Tarn 1938, 376. In Nazi Germany, Tarn’s cosmopolitan conceptualization of Hellenism as a ‘unity of mankind’ and Alexander’s ‘policy of fusion’ had provoked deep controversy among German ancient historians, some of whom voiced criticism against the idea of racial mixture (e. g. Schachermeyr 1944), in line with the ‘Nordic thinking’ of Nazi discourse. For useful discussion, see Wiesehöfer 2016. British scholars were not the first to criticize the romantic view of Alexander as portrayed by Tarn and Droysen before him. In fact, Droysen already experienced quite some criticism from his peers in the 19th century. See discussion in Wiesehöfer 2012. Badian 1958b. Badian 1962, 90–91.

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The antithetical portrayal of Alexander also impacted scholarly explanations of Hellenism, which had now become tainted by the bloodshed of Macedonian imperialism and colonization in yet another epoch of ‘unceasing war and misery’. The cynical overturn of appraisal was paradigmatic of the sober world outlook of the 1950s, shared by the generation who had suffered under the massacres, starvations, bombings, and mass destructions of the previous decade of total war. Badian was a Harvard-based professor who had quite a personal history in this regard, as a Jewish refugee who had fled Vienna with his parents from the Holocaust that swept across Nazi Europe in the early 1940s.42 For the Austrian scholar, the conquests and empires of Alexander and the Diadochs were nothing more than reigns of terror, similar to those of contemporary ‘revolutionary’ dictators such as Hitler.43 Badian’s harsh criticism proved persuasive in the post-war period. His 1958 publication can be seen as part of an impactful revisionist wave that shaped much of the subsequent historiography of scholarship on Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic world.44 World War II not only deeply unsettled the intellectual exaltation of Macedonian claims to universal empire, but also profoundly undermined the self-evident superiority of European power – the allied victory in 1945 had not been without years of severe losses of life – which went together with a growing awareness of colonized Others and their experiences across the ages, and so too in Hellenistic times. Such awareness corresponded to the global wave of decolonization, marked by the increasingly successful struggles for independence by grassroots movements in colonial territories against their Western overlords. World War II had left the long-established European and American imperial states and their supremacy in overseas colonies in India, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean severely weakened, which forced them to concede to independence uprisings.45 These social movements and the processes of decolonization and liberation they set in motion deeply shook and restructured the world – and with it, the dominant Hellenocentric narratives and perceptions of ‘European’ colonial powers in the ancient past. Post-war scholarship invested much effort to deconstruct and revise the idealistic character of Macedonian imperialism in the East and the greatness of empire  – be it under Alexander, the Ptolemies, the Antigonids, or the Seleukids. Rather than the cultural heroes of missionary enterprises, the ancient Greeks and Macedonians were now considered to represent the agents of Western exploitative powers that capitalized on resources extracted from colonial territories with only minimal interaction with 42 43 44 45

The Badian family fled from Austria to New Zealand with the help of Karl Popper in 1938–1939. Badian’s grandparents died in the Holocaust (Harris 2017, 3). Badian 1958b, 431; 1961 uses the wording ‘reign of terror’ throughout to characterize Alexander’s rule in the East, a phrase that would be repeated in subsequent scholarship. See e. g. Bosworth 1996; Worthington 1999; Cartledge 2004; Grainger 2007, but cf. Lane Fox 1973; Hammond 1998. The first result was the sovereignty of India in 1947, a dramatic and deeply significant political and ideological victory for self-rule movements across the colonial world.

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local populations. Within this revisionist wave, Hellenism transformed from a positive model of European imperialism to a negative synonym for Greek colonialism. Except for its moral foundation, nothing essentially changed in the basic meaning of Hellenism which, as noted by John Ma, still adhered to the colonial paradigm, only now in elaborated form.46 Rachel Mairs further remarked on this period’s Zeitgeist that “Greeks are still Europeans, but where once, to a European writer, this gave a positive slant to their presence in the East, it has increasingly become something negative.”47 Consequently, the shared context of the Hellenistic world became one of colonial apartheid and exclusivity in which Greeks and Macedonians formed a small ethnic class of elites that held all power while indigenous people were completely barred from positions of influence. The atmosphere in Hellenistic cities were re-envisioned to have been one of overall hostility between conqueror and conquered, with the exception of a few local aristocrats who were willing to hellenize i. e. acculturate themselves up the social scale at the price of their own culture and traditions. In a 1958 paper, the German historian Christian Habicht stated that Hellenism – articulated as ‘Griechentum’ – was extremely exclusive because of the one-sided politics of Hellenistic monarchical society: Höchst bedeutsam ist (…) ihre nationale Geschlossenheit: die Angehörigen dieser Gesellschaft sind fast ausnahmslos ‘Hellenen’, Griechen in vorherrschender Zahl und neben ihnen Makedonen, die jeden falls seit Alexander nach Sprache und Kultur zu den Griechen gerechnet wurden. Einheimische, wie Ägypter, Syrer, Juden, fehlen durchaus, aber eben auch Angehörige der qualifizierten alten Herrenschicht der Perser und der übrigen Iranier.48

Based on an administrative list of several hundred personal names, Habicht calculated that only 2.5 % of positions of influence in the upper layers of Seleukid society were filled by non-Greeks.49 Although the methodology to arrive at this percentage was contested by later scholars, the idea that such administrative exclusivity was emblematic for Hellenistic societies at large was met with wide and continuing resonance in subsequent scholarship.50 In a provocatively entitled book The King is Dead, published in 1961, the American historian Samuel Eddy further argued that such ethno-cultural and political exclusivity shared amongst Greeks and Macedonians would have led to various anti-Hellenic sentiments of amongst local populations, resulting in movements of violence and resistance against upper-hand enclaves of Hellenism.51 Although stating that the specific details of resistance differed from Egypt to Judea to Iran, Eddy asserted the causes to have been generally comparable. According to him, resistance 46 47 48 49 50 51

Ma 2008, 371. Mairs 2006, 22. Habicht 1958, 5. Habicht 1958, 5, but cf. Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1993, 121–125 for critical disagreement. E. g. Walbank 1984, 69–70; Strootman 2011b, 82. Habicht 1958, 6 argued that the Seleukid administration would remain ‘rein griechisch’ throughout. Cf. Holt 2005.

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against Hellenism could emerge from the socio-economic exploitation of Orientals, the debasement and depravation of power and prestige of local elites, laws, and customs, and, above all, the overthrow of local kingship and thereby the disruption of the celestial order by foreign intruders.52 Underwriting the dichotomy between colonial Hellenism and native resistance, the historical narrative of The King is Dead advocated Hellenism as Hellenic imperialism, envisioned as an isolated enclave of migrant expatriated Greeks and Macedonians who kept to their ethnicity, culture, and traditions in a hostile Oriental environment.53 2.1.4 Postcolonialism and the limits of Hellenization The numerous liberation wars, revolutions, and achievements of national independence of former colonies in the 1950s and 60s, and the reactionary anticolonial wave within academia that rose in parallel, facilitated the widespread emergence of postcolonialism. Just as colonial scholarly discourse had been shaped by colonial realities, so too can postcolonial academia be considered a direct consequence of the resistance against colonial oppression in the world. Postcolonialism, an intellectual movement and critical response to institutionalized and systemic Western distortions and misrepresentations of non-Western countries and cultures, gained steady grounds in the 1970s and 80s, instigating a second impactful revisionist wave that gradually decolonized studies of the Hellenistic world.54 In 1975, the Italian historian Arnaldo Momigliano published his seminal work Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization in which he concluded that processes of confrontation and interaction between Greeks and non-Greeks in the Hellenistic period were more variated than the simplistic unitary reaction envisioned in the colonial paradigm – the widespread unidirectional acculturation and passive acceptance of Greek culture by uncivilized and compliant Eastern peoples. Although stating that “Hellenistic civilization remained Greek in language, customs, and above all in self-consciousness”, thus tacitly accepting the view of Hellenism as an unchanged and fixed package, Momigliano emphasized that there was considerable reciprocity and mutual curiosity and stimulation between Greeks and non-Greeks in the Hellenistic age: 52 53 54

Eddy 1961, 328–329. The continuing impact of such ideas can be read in e. g. Burstein 2003, esp. 230–231; 2008, 69. Note the distinction in spelling used in this chapter. ‘Postcolonial’ therefore refers to an intellectual discourse while ‘post-colonial’ refers to the time period – the decades after the decolonization of West-European and American overseas colonies in India, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. In this book, ‘postcolonial’ is spelled without a hyphen to indicate that it not only refers to a period (after colonialism, ergo ‘post-colonialism’), but also and more significantly to a structure of thinking focused on the exposing and undoing of Eurocentric colonial ideologies in a variety of fields (McLeod 2010, 5–6; further discussion in the next section).

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Non-Greeks exploited to an unprecedented extent the opportunity of telling the Greeks in the Greek language something about their own history and religious traditions. (…) More foreign gods were admitted into the Greek pantheon than at any time since prehistory. In turn the barbarians not only accepted Greek gods, but assimilated many of their own gods to Greek gods. It was an unsystematic syncretism which was particularly successful in Italy (Etruria and Rome), left its mark on Carthage, Syria and Egypt, was unsuccessful in Judaea, rather insignificant in Mesopotamia, and affected at least the iconography, if not the substance, of Indian religion through Gandharan art. The notion of a barbaric wisdom gained consistency and acceptance among those who considered themselves Greeks.55

Momigliano saw clear limits to Hellenization – defined as the imposition of, and assimilation to Greek culture – which was perceived to be the weakest in the religious sphere, where it was the indigenous who influenced Greeks rather than the other way around. However, ‘barbarian’ influence and cultural interaction was considered only to have happened on Greek cultural terms; according to Momigliano, Greeks would have been unwilling to learn non-Greek languages so that “Greek remained the only language of civilization”.56 As such, Momigliano’s Hellenism still represented Greek culture. Focusing particularly on the cultural successes of the Romans and the Jews, Alien Wisdom argued that Hellenism, as Greek culture, could be absorbed by non-Greeks without causing serious problems to their own identity, traditions, power, and even superiority.57 Rather than radical assimilation or docile acculturation, Hellenism was now considered as something which could be appropriated and actively used by nonGreeks to challenge and subvert Greek power while propagating their own identity, as exemplified by the Romans and the Jews. The case of Roman Hellenization complicated the nature of Hellenism in ways in which scholars were able to make concessions to the superiority of Greece. In defending Roman acculturation to Greek culture in a 1979 paper, French Classicist Paul Veyne argued that the Hellenization of Rome was neither a powerless conformism to “some foreign superiority to be caught up with”, nor a phenomenon of “amusing exoticism”.58 Rather, Hellenism would have been an internationally understood visual language which craftsmen and artisans could voluntarily and selectively use without Hellenizing themselves – without abandoning and replacing one’s identity for a Hellenic one.59 In Veyne’s eyes, Hellenism could be equated to universal civilization, “pure and simple”,

55 56 57 58 59

Momigliano 1975, 7. Momigliano 1975, 8. Momigliano 1975, 10–11. Veyne 1979, 4. I was inspired to read and cite Veyne here by Miguel John Versluys who was so kind to share with me a draft passage on Hellenization and Hellenism in his Nemrud Dag book before it was published (2017a, 210–211). Veyne 1979, 7.

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and comparable to “what Western civilization is today in the eyes of the Third World.”60 Upholding ideas of the superior position of Greek culture in comparison with nonGreek cultures, he argued that it was in the Hellenistic period that Greek culture developed into a vehicle for civilization and common manners, which endowed Hellenism with a profound authority and prestige for Rome to affirm herself. The barbarian cultural Other which had played a central role in Momigliano’s idea of alien wisdom, had no significant place in Veyne’s view. His idea was that the authoritative cultural power of Hellenism weighed so heavily on the universal mind, that it spread not through political enforcement, but through workshops whose craftsmen and artisans were free to select and use those Greek cultural and artistic models in their own fashion, to express civilization and assert power.61 2.1.5 Postcolonialism, Orientalism, and the paradigm of continuity Whiles insights such as Veyne’s stirred the debate on the role of Greek culture for Rome in empowering ways, they yielded different directions within studies of the Hellenistic world.62 Academic practices in Hellenistic studies – and studies on the ancient Orient – that focused on Greek political and cultural power in the East, became rigorously scrutinized and challenged under the increasingly structural influence of postcolonialism, albeit on a much slower pace than in other disciplines. Seminal in this process was Edward Said’s 1978 revolutionary book Orientalism which critically brought to light the ways in which Europeans (particularly the French and the British) were historically able to describe, manage, (re)structure, and dominate the Orient militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively, through a profound institutional and systemic discourse that culturally naturalized the notion of Western superiority over the Orient, its peoples, and cultures.63 Said argued that academic traditions of researching, ‘knowing’, and thereby (re)presenting the Orient have been, and are intricately connected with a distinct Western discourse of thought as well as with the European domination of the real Orient from the late 18th century onwards. This discourse of thought consists of distorted and pernicious cultural ideas and imaginations based on an ontological, epistemological, and unequal dichotomy between the Western (superior) Self and 60 61 62 63

Veyne 1979, 8. As noted by Versluys 2017a, 211, Veyne’s notion of Hellenization implied a strong cultural value judgement about the superior position of Greek culture in comparison with non-Greek cultures. For the relation between Hellenization and Romanization, and the application of Hellenization to Rome, see e. g. Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 17–28. Said 2003 [1978] 3. Although Said’s work has been the most influential and best known of postcolonial critiques, with resonance across various fields, it should be noted that similar thoughts were voiced by other important and crucial contemporaneous theorists, most notably Fanon 1952; Césaire 1955; Fanon 1963; Ngũgĩ 1986; Spivak 1988; and Bhabha 2004 [1994].

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the Oriental (subservient) Other.64 Such ideas accumulated in a mnemotic library of sorts – a cultural archive of information that upheld a self-perpetuating Western fantasy of the Orient as static (rather than dynamic), exotic (rather than familiar), inferior (rather than superior), feminine and perverted (rather than masculine), spiritual (rather than intellectual), and uncivilized (rather than cultured). These series of stereotypical tropes formed the baseline of Orientalism which, according to Said, was deeply rooted in the modern mind as “a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial style”, to (re) produce an imaginary Orient while justifying the subjugation and suppression of the real Orient.65 Orientalism would be so pervasive, that it can be considered as culturally hegemonic in the broadest sense of the word ‘culture’. To cite Said in full: Orientalism is (…) a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction (the world is made up of two unequal halves, Orient and Occident) but also of a whole series of ‘interests’ which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel) world; it is above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political (as with a colonial or imperial establishment), power intellectual (as with reigning sciences like comparative linguistics or anatomy, or any of the modern policy sciences), power culture (as with orthodoxies and canons of taste, texts, values), power moral (as with ideas about ‘we’ do and what ‘they’ cannot do or understand as ‘we’ do).66

With his critical theory, Said laid bare the overwhelming structural influence, persistence, strength, and consent of ideas that defined and affirmed European superiority – an ideational prism through which the Orient was filtered to fit Western consciousness about it. 67 This had profound implications for the study of Hellenism in the East after Alexander the Great which had been dominated by Western historians and archaeologists whose nations of origin were often historically and politically involved in the regions they researched. Said’s Orientalism rigorously exposed the entanglement between 64 65 66 67

Said 2003 [1978] 2–3. Said’s use of ‘discourse’ refers to the Foucauldian notion: a ubiquitous paradigm produced and reproduced by those in power, which overrides the material actuality of the real Orient. Said 2003 [1978] 2. Said 2003 [1978] 12, emphasis in original. Said 2003 [1978] 6. On Orientalism in Russian and Indian studies, see Bornet and Gorshenina 2014; Schimmelpennick van der Oye 2014.

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colonialism and academic practices, confronting scholars with the active authoritative role that academia played within the colonial paradigm.68 Orientalism showed that their intellectual knowledge, produced through researching and writing about the Orient, held intellectual power that was reinforced by, and further endorsed European colonial projects. Affected by the institutional impact of Saidian Orientalism and building on Momigliano’s thesis of the limits of Hellenization on non-Greek cultures, scholars on the Hellenistic world were prompted to push postcolonial interpretation of Hellenism further. Amongst these was the French iranologist Pièrre Briant, who avidly argued against the ‘annoying tendency’ to neglect local continuities of Hellenistic foundations.69 Similar to Momigliano, he astutely argued that usage of the terms acculturation and Hellenization to describe the social and economic consequences of Hellenistic imperialism severely obscured and reduced complex social realities to the singular meaning of a diffusion of the colonizer’s culture, which glossed over different types and conditions of colonization and reactions of the conquered populace.70 Briant’s main aim was to point out that the colonial settlement of those ‘superior’ Greeks and Macedonians was not as novel and civilizing as previously imagined. Challenging ennobling views on Greek urbanization, he contended that the majority of Hellenistic foundations  – the new Greek cities that Tarn had praised as aggregates of civilization proper – were garrisons and military settlements that occupied fertile regions which had long been discovered, inhabited, and cultivated by local populations, either independently or during Achaemenid rule.71 Briant argued that, in fact, much had remained the same in the Eastern Satrapies of Baktria and Sogdiana, where locals entered in yet another dependency with foreign rulers. Elsewhere in the Seleukid empire, rather than signifying a grand leap in the economic improvement of local life, Graeco-Macedonian rule would have involved lifelong subjection and servitude for indigenous Orientals. Far from the ideal of an integrated society, endorsed by a ‘civilization-for-all’ policy, such Hellenistic set68

69 70 71

In Foucauldian vein, Said 2003 [1978] 39–42 emphasized that power resides in knowledge: those who control the cultural (intellectual) knowledge of the Orient (i. e. by investing and financing science) would be able to politically monopolize and shape the acknowledged ‘truth’ (consensus) about the Orient to serve distinct views. Said particularly focused on the British, French, and Americans as pioneer nations in Oriental studies, which were entangled with colonial and military involvement in the Orient (from Egypt, the Levant, and Iran, to Central Asia, India, Indochina, and Malaysia) in the course of the 19th and 20th century (and one might add the 21st century as well). See relevant discussions in González-Ruibal 2010; Porter 2010; for the use of ancient Orientalist ideas for modern colonial enterprises, see Vasunia 2003. Briant 1978, 62. See also Briant 1982; 1990; 2010 [1974]; other influential scholars include Preaux 1978; Will 1979; Gauthier 1985. Briant 1978, 60. These regions were well established in a dense agricultural and commercial network of villages, connected by pre-existing roads built or improved under Achaemenid rule. Briant 1978, 60–63 thus argued that the deliberate founding of ‘novel’ cities in (the vicinity of) these villages, largely facilitated the success upon which the Hellenistic kingdoms thrived.

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tlements would have been built on principles of segregation, exclusion, and exploitation of local populations.72 Briant’s work drew heavily on parallels he observed between Hellenistic imperialism and modern European colonialism: civic privileges were exclusively reserved for the ‘colons européens’ who formed a closed socio-ethnic upper class community of Greeks and Macedonians, while the conquered rural populations, the ‘paysans indigènes’, formed a valuable resource of exploitable labour force working for the benefits of the colonial administration.73 This implied that the conquered populace remained largely unaffected by (cultural) Hellenization in the process of Hellenistic settlement in Asia, because they were completely barred from such privileges, being isolated from their European conquerors. Briant’s critique on Hellenization and arguments for local continuity anticipated the radical approaches adopted in the 1987 volume Hellenism in the East: The interaction of Greek and non-Greek civilizations from Syria to Central Asia after Alexander, edited by Amélie Kuhrt and Susan Sherwin-White, and their joint book From Samarkhand to Sardis: A new approach to the Seleukid empire, published in 1992. Their explicit adoption of ‘Eastern’ perspectives on the history of Hellenistic Asia can be considered to represent the beginning of a structure and significant break with a predominantly Eurocentric and Hellenocentric historiographical tradition. Aiming to redress the balance in Seleukid studies, Kuhrt and Sherwin-White presented a view of history that explained the Seleukid empire in Asia as an Eastern inheritor of the Achaemenid empire, rather than a Western successor-state of Alexander the Great.74 Integrating sources from other disciplines, particularly non-Greek material, Kuhrt and Sherwin-White and the contributing scholars of Hellenism in the East vigorously argued that the social, political, and economic core of the Seleukid realm was not situated in the Western regions of their empire (Syria and Asia Minor) but in Mesopotamia and western Iran – as it had been under the Achaemenids.75 They were able to demonstrate that not only the Near East but also other provinces much further east of Syria had been of deep interest and sometimes vital importance to the empire – indeed, as was the case for the Achaemenids – which formed a stark contrast to the scholarly undervaluation of these areas. Profoundly reactionary to colonial models of unifying Greekness, one-way cultural acculturation, 72 73

74 75

Briant 1978, 80–81, 88–92. Throughout his paper, he used terms and words which reflect his presentist postcolonial view on Hellenistic imperial settlement in Asia. See Briant 1978, 69, 76; and 62, 67–69, 81, for ‘colonisation européenne’, ‘colons européens’, and ‘paysans indigènes’, respectively. Briant’s reactionary perspectives on Hellenism in the Seleukid empire were shared by other French-speaking scholars such as Édouard Will 1985, whose views on the Hellenistic empires of the Seleukids and the Ptolemies was similarly influenced by the violent and deeply unsettling practices of the French colonial empire in the face of its dissolution. Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1993, 1. Esp. Millar 1987; Sherwin-White 1987; Van der Spek 1987. The radical innovation of this book should not be underestimated: Hellenism in the East established in historiography the central importance of Babylonia in the Seleukid empire.

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interethnic hostility, and administrational exclusivity, these two books aimed to demonstrate that both Greek and local languages were used in Seleukid administration; that the societal hierarchy also included local officials and elites in the top ranks; that local traditions and cultures continued to thrive; and that ethnically driven revolts against Graeco-Macedonian newcomers had been overemphasized in modern historiography. This radically corrective approach to Hellenistic history was motivated by a timely postcolonial awareness about the traditional priority of evidence granted in research on the histories and cultures of the Hellenistic East, which traced and confirmed the establishment, spread, and influence of Greek culture in the East – implicitly considered to embody Western (European) culture. Such priority, as pointed out by Kuhrt and Sherwin-White, had been bolstered, if not generated by the disciplinary segregation of historians from regional specialists such as Assyriologists and Near Eastern archaeologists, which led to a reconstruction of Hellenistic history according to Greek and Latin sources and their subjective bias, leading to a disproportional stress on areas where Greek influence was most visible.76 However, Rolf Strootman perceptively observed that Kuhrt and Sherwin-White and their colleagues had substituted the paradigm of change by a paradigm of continuity through their disavowal of Hellenism and colonial models and their reverse emphasis on the preservation of local structures under pre-Hellenistic Achaemenid times.77 This new paradigm of local and imperial continuity arose concurrently with the rise of interdisciplinary collaboration in the 1980s, influenced by the growing social importance and political awareness of widespread immigration and increasing cultural diversity in West-European nations.78 Postcolonial renderings of Hellenism became gradually anchored in the mainstream. The Hellenistic world was increasingly reassessed as a mosaic-like patchwork of cultures, languages, and ethnicities in which Greeks dominated in some areas and local elites in others, dependant on patterns and forms of both pre-conquest settlement and subsequent colonization. At the same time, more interest and scholarly attention were granted to the limitations of Hellenization and the resilience and continuity of local cultures. Such reassessment is reflected in subsequent handbooks of the Hellenistic world, such as the Companion to the Hellenistic World edited by Andrew Erskine, and most notably Peter Green’s monumental work Alexander to Actium.79 Green positioned himself as thoroughly revisionist in his treatment of Greek cultural diffusion in the East, arguing that propagating the missionary spread of Greek culture to conquered territories was a detrimental myth that idealized and morally justified the harsh reality of economic and imperial exploitation that came with Hellenism.80 Green instead 76 77 78 79 80

Sherwin-White 1987, 1–8; Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1993, 2–3. Strootman 2011b, 28–29. Rossi 2011, 3. Green 1990; Erskine 2003 ; see further Cartledge et al. 1993; Bosworth 1996; Green 1996, but cf. Hammond 1998. Green 1990, iv.

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portrayed the Macedonian and Greek settlers in the Ptolemaic and Seleukid empires as “stupid, bombastic, drunken, cowardly” and “massively indifferent to the language and civilization of any country they happened to be occupying” – a sentiment he deemed to have been reciprocated by indigenous peoples.81 In Green’s historical narrative, the impact of Hellenism – the influence of Greek and Macedonian colonists – had been primarily economic and demographic rather than cultural. When it did occur in the cultural sphere, it would have been merely incidental and subsidiary, … restricted, for the most part, to some curious instances of architectural and glyptic hybridization; some social assimilations among non-Greek rulers and in the administrative sector of the major kingdoms (particularly the Ptolemaic); a few religious syncretizations that transmuted their borrowings out of all recognition (e. g. Isis and Sarapis); and the establishment of the Attic koinē as a useful international language, primarily for administrative and commercial purposes, but also, later, for religious propaganda.82

This revised image of the ‘failure’ of Hellenism translated to the influential view that Hellenism was only a superficial cultural veneer beneath which local cultures continued to thrive. Subsequent scholarship accordingly began to integrate the wide-ranging cultural diversity of Hellenistic kingdoms in their research agenda. The central question of interest no longer revolved around Greek domination or local resistance but on bidirectional processes of Greek and non-Greek fusion, which steered the great debate of Hellenism back to Droysen’s initial idea of inclusive cultural Vermischung. 2.2 New directions: hybridity and hybridization As in the preceding decennia, scholarly interests in multiculturalism and cultural fusion were deeply entangled with social realities, now marked by the gradual integration and naturalization of various cultures, ethnicities, and diasporas within West-European and American nation states at the end of the 20th century. Historians and archaeologists increasingly turned to sociological models and metaphors of cultural mixture and transformation to explain and understand how different ethnic groups culturally interacted in the ancient past. In the social sciences, the concept of ‘culture’ as a fixed unity and a static referential frame had come under profound criticism in the emergent postcolonial wave from the 1970s onwards, to be replaced by new models that advanced more fluid concepts of culture.83 The notion of hybridity became particularly influential in cultural theory of the 1990s, with profound impact on studies of the ancient world from the early 2000s onwards. Challenging binary narratives of unidirectional acculturation and 81 82 83

Green 1990, 313. Green 1990, 316. See e. g. Geertz 1973; S. Hall 1989.

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cultural apartheid between colonists and settlers, hybridity gained particular appeal to reassess and conceptualize ‘Hellenistic culture’ (as well as ‘Roman culture’ in the sister debate on Romanization) as a creative and negotiated fusion emerging from Greek and non-Greek interaction and mixture. Hybridity became the new and more dynamic Hellenism. Though studies of antiquity readily took up hybridity and ‘hybrid talk’ in scholarly narratives, little further thought was given to the usage and implications of this concept. This section takes a brief step back and examines the theoretical baggage and semantic anchorage of hybridity which gave rise to new issues in the debate on Hellenism and Hellenization in the 21st century. 2.2.1 Biological hybridity In common parlance, the terms hybrid and hybridity are used to describe “anything derived from heterogeneous sources” – whether humans, animals, objects, or practices – often with a somewhat pejorative undertone.84 Its original definition, however, was rather specific. The etymology of hybridity can be traced back to the Latin word hybrida which, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, entered the English language in the early 17th century and was distinctly defined as “the offspring of a tame sow and a wild boar”.85 The biological origin of hybridity, referring to the crossing of two animals or plants of different species, engendered certain negative connotations related to the frequent infertility – as in the case of the mule – or decreased vigour of the cross-bred progeny, bolstering the view that the hybrid was inferior to its purebred parents.86 The model of the biological hybrid, together with its derogatory undertone, moved from the natural sciences to the social sciences, when the term was adopted by racial theorists in the 19th and early 20th century to conceptualize human hybridity: the intermixing of people of different races. Theories of race – influenced and framed by an atmosphere of anxiety, xenophobia, and bigotry in the wake of Western colonialism and increasing immigration – considered human races as different species, arguing that ‘miscegenation’ (particularly between white and black people) produced weaker and degenerate human beings.87 Such racialist discourse, drawn extensively from Darwinian concepts of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, strongly implied a natural racial, and by extension sociocultural hierarchy in which ‘pure’ white Europeans filled the upper ranks, while people of colour – including those of mixed-race descent – were condemned to the lowest classes, stigmatized as tainted by their race. Such discourse

84 85 86 87

OED Online 2017 [1989]. In general dictionaries and thesauri, words often mentioned among synonyms for hybrid are ‘half-breed’, ‘half-caste’, ‘mongrel’, ‘mule’, and ‘bastard’. Warren 1884; OED Online 2017 [1989]. Young 2005, 5–7. Stross 1999, 257; Young 2005, 6–18.

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fuelled the development of eugenics movements and racial science in the first half of the 20th century, of which the contentious results, though disavowed by official voices, deeply impacted the lives of generations of people of colour.88 While hybridity as such formed a potent ideological tool for maintaining hegemonic power structures and discourses in both overseas colonies and colonial ‘motherlands’, from the last quarter of the 20th century onwards the term was claimed and redefined by postcolonial theorists, transforming hybridity to the conceptual form in which it entered anthropological, archaeological, and historical debates. 2.2.2 Postcolonial hybridity In the aftermath of Western colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia, the 1980s saw the rapid emergence of postcolonial studies, spearheaded by critical theorists such as Robert Young, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Homi K. Bhabha, who aimed to expose and unravel colonial ideologies and give voice to the subaltern.89 In doing so, many of them challenged Huntingtoninan and imperialist views on ‘civilizational’ encounters and approached cultural mixture as an enabling characteristic of culture and identity, rather than a degrading one. Particularly prominent for this agenda was Homi K. Bhabha’s 1994 seminal work The Location of Culture which revolutionized the concept of hybridity to become a subversive tool of power for marginalized people to disrupt and challenge hegemonic structures. Departing from a poststructuralist stance, Bhabha’s hybridity referred to a metaphorical ‘Third Space’ in between two cultures upon contact in colonial encounter.90 He explained that this intervening space is where any linguistic, cultural, and ideological form of communication between the two cultures takes place, which should be seen as an “interstitial passage between fixed identifications [which] opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierar-

88

89 90

See e. g. the legacy of the 1930 Fletcher Report (Report on an Investigation into the Colour Problem in Liverpool and Other Ports), a notorious British research on mixed-race children born from white women and black men – described in the report as ‘hybrid’, ‘half-caste children’. The research was funded by the University of Liverpool and the Association for the Welfare of Half-Caste Children in the wake of social tensions and riots in Liverpool after the increase in the population of African seamen  – citizens from British colonial Africa. See Fletcher 1930; Rich 1990, 120–121, 130–135; Christian 2008. S. Hall 1989; Said 1994; Hall and Gay 1996; Young 2001; Said 2003; Bhabha 2004; Young 2004; 2005 [1990]. Bhabha’s work is clearly influenced by poststructuralist thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, and indirectly Mikhail Bakhtin, whose philosophical works on politicized understandings of language are considered amongst the founding pillars of poststructuralism and discourse theory.

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chy.”91 While such fixed identifications – colonizer and colonized – are contingent upon their cultural difference, the Third Space would produce a distinct inbetween culture that is “neither the One, nor the Other”.92 Such ambivalence or ambiguity surrounding cultural identification in the Third Space would result from the paradox between the mission civilisatrice of European colonizers and their simultaneous need for distinct segregation from their colonized subjects, with the effect that the colonized indulge in and adopt aspects of the colonizer’s culture, yet always remain outsiders to that group. Bhabha argued that this outsider’s position should not be considered as undesirable; rather, the cultural ambivalence of the Third Space makes room for agonism (negotiation) rather than antagonism (opposition), allowing for the displacement, appropriation, and rearticulation of power and authenticity over the meaning and symbols of culture. Within this Third Space process, meaningful (including authoritarian) cultural symbols would be stripped from their primordial fixity, so that “even the same signs can be [equally] appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew.”93 More concretely, this implied that the enforced adoption of signs of authority – the colonizer’s culture, institutions, practices, and ideologies  – by colonized or marginalized people would never result in a direct and complete replication, but merely in a semblance. Adopting certain cultural symbols or practices that were “almost the same, but not quite” allowed the camouflaging of actual intentions of mockery and menace by the colonized subjects and thus enabled them to undermine hegemonic power under the illusion of submissive assimilation.94 Bhabha’s radical new conceptualization of hybridity thus represented a potential strategy of subversion for subaltern people in colonial and postcolonial engagements, empowering them to challenge hegemonic structures within the dominant rules of engagement. The Location of Culture transformed hybridity into a postcolonial keyword for later theorists, shifting hybridity’s negative racialist associations in the reverse, as its disruptive and mixing character became a constructive tool to break through the colonial-native binary, resist hegemonic discourses, and reclaim subaltern agency. With its emphasis on fusion and subversion, postcolonial hybridity represented an empowering and 91

92 93 94

Bhabha 2004 [1994], 5. Bhabha’s Third Space is closely related to the Richard White’s contemporaneous notion of the middle ground, a neutral zone between colonizer and colonized where cultural negotiation happens; where cultural parallels and congruencies – perceived or real – are used as basis to appeal to and persuade the other of the legitimacy of one’s actions in terms of what is believed to be the other’s cultural premises. This creates a presumed mutual understanding (but more often a creative misunderstanding) and mutual accommodation which would benefit the interests of both (White 2011 [1991], 52–53). For the use of the middle ground in ancient history, see Malkin 1998; 2002; 2005; Antonaccio 2013; Nitschke 2013; Strootman 2013; Miller 2015. Bhabha 2004 [1994], 41. Bhabha 2004 [1994], 55. Bhabha 2004 [1994], 121–131. This is what Bhabha refers to as mimicry – an interstitial (inbetween) practice of imitation by which the ‘Other’ is appropriated while visualizing power. See also Fahlander 2007, 26–29.

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productive way out of essentialist, imperialist, and polarizing thinking about culture and identity formation. However, while Bhabha’s hybridity theory was anchored in distinct situations of unbalanced power relations, the term soon lost its politicized meaning as it entered debates on cultural identity in the study of material culture. 2.2.3 Hybridity in ancient history and archaeology After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the new international and demographic climate of the 1990s ushered scholarly interest in ancient long-distance migrations and sustained connectivities on various levels. Scholars studying cultural interaction in the ancient world came to realize that traditional diffusionist and polarizing models of assimilation and acculturation, driven by active givers (foreign, i. e. Western influences) and sustained by passive takers (subordinate local populations) no longer held valid ground. Stimulated by the contemporary multicultural social climate, research questions increasingly integrated issues of identity, directed at mechanisms of identity, its creative construction, and its situational salience. Archaeologists and historians were now invested to show that in the ancient past, too, bounded cultures, authentic populations, and distinct, internally consistent identities had been the exception rather than the rule – a research goal which would help develop realistic insights for the modern-day situation in an increasing cultural diverse Europe.95 Characteristic for this shift is Margaret Miller’s 1997 book Athens and Persia in the fifth century BC, which was able to demonstrate that Greek culture was not as authentic and culturally consistent as often envisioned but that it had been profoundly receptive to and appropriative of Achaemenid Persian culture long before Hellenistic times.96 Around the same time, Jonathan Hall argued that the criteria for Greek identity were not based on a shared symbolic universe tied together by a uniform race, language, religion, or culture, but were rather often defined along sociopolitical lines – something he captured with the term Hellenicity in his seminal book with the same title in 2002.97 New insights on the ‘cultures within Greek culture’ raised the important question to what extent Greek-styled objects and practices adopted in the East could be considered as Greek and to which degree they then amounted to Greekness.98 Although some scholarship still adhered to a benevolent civilizing notion 95 96

97 98

Versluys 2008, 342–346; Knapp and Van Dommelen 2010, 1–2. Miller 1997; see further Burkert 1992. The thesis of the receptivity of Greek culture to Eastern cultures has been taken to the extreme in the controversial series of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic roots of Greek civilization, in which he argues against what he calls the Aryan, puritist model of Greek culture, contending that Greek civilization was heavily influenced, shaped, and essentially ‘civilized’ by Egyptian and Phoenician settlers from the East (Bernal 1987; 1991. Cf. Lefkowitz and MacLean Rogers 1996; Lefkowitz 1997 for direct response). Hall 1997; 2002. Hall 2003, 24; see also Antonaccio 2009.

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of Hellenism as an unequal cultural mixture, many studies shifted their focus on the social dynamics behind cultural mixture, on the variety of agents, the manifold social affiliations, and the constructed meanings that could result from or could be masked by cultural diversity and similarity. Previously perceived as confronting clashes of totalities (‘Greek’ versus ‘Oriental’), historical moments of cultural contact such as those in the Hellenistic East came to be reassessed as encounters from which a range of different outcomes could emerge – resistance, accommodation, exchange, experimentation, innovation – motivated by a variety of responses, such as confusion, fascination, appeal, tension, and hostility. In the first decade of the 2000s, hybridity thus joined the conceptual repertoire of archaeological and historical terms to describe and analyse that variety of cultural mixtures that resulted not only from ancient colonization, but also from migrations, diasporas, trade, and other situations of culture contact. The appeal and broad applicability of hybridity, pertaining to the sociocultural exchange between any two groups, popularized the concept to such an extent that it soon overshadowed other models of cultural mixing such as creolization, syncretism, métissage, transculturation, and bricolage.99 Hybridity, or rather its active form hybridization, was seen to provide 99

I see these models as differential, competing, yet overlapping theories of inbetweenness. They are concepts which are closely related to hybridity and hybridization, as they seem to describe distinct aspects thereof (Liebmann 2013) and have similarly been used to evoke a wider sense of cultural fusion. The criticism expressed towards hybridity (see next section) are, in most cases, valid to these models as well. Creolization pertains to linguistic fusion in a colonial context, and refers to the merging of a foreign language with a local or other imported language into a blended mother tongue, a process accompanied by sociocultural ramifications (see e. g. Adone and Plag 1994; Chaudenson 2001 [1992]; Cohen and Toninato 2010; Stewart 2016 [2007]; for creolization in globalization studies, see Hannerz 1992; 1996; cf. Palmié 2006). A creole language is a ‘horizontal’ language (rather than a ‘vertical’ acculturation language) permeated by imported lexicons in such a way that it may become mutually incomprehensible to the native speakers of the original languages involved. Although creolization has been used in Classical studies on the Roman empire (see e. g. Webster 2001, 209–225), its use for the Hellenistic East is more problematic due to a greater dependency on visual archaeology than on linguistic evidence. Syncretism is associated with religious amalgamation and is a term that similarly (re)appeared as an influential cultural model during the postcolonial wave (see e. g. Stewart and Shaw 1994; Stewart 1999; Kraft 2002). The term is often used in studies of antiquity as a synonym for the (neutral) mixture of philosophical and religious beliefs, gods, and practices (see e. g. Rostovtzeff 1938; Green 1992; Venetis 2012; but see Webster 1997; Dirven 1999; Bernand et al. 2001). The Hellenistic period has even been annotated as ‘the age of syncretism’ (Grant 1953). Méttisage is a concept often used in French scholarship focusing on colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (see e. g. Laplantine and Nouss 1997; Amselle 1998). It refers to the cross-breeding of ethnic groups through which new cultural identities are formed. The term did not find wide resonance in Classical studies due to the debatable evidence of the extent, nature, and visual manifestation of this process (Wallace-Hadrill 2008, 12). A related term is transculturation, which was developed by the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz 1995 [1940] to describe and explain the convergence of ethnicities and cultures in imperial encounters on Cuba. Like méttisage, the concept did not catch on in ancient studies, although ‘transcultural’ is now commonly used as a casual and trendy adjective (e. g. ‘transcultural interaction’) to underline the transformative nature of the word in question and so avoid implications of static essentialism. The artistic term bricolage is used in cultural studies (Levi-Strauss 1966 [1962]) to refer to the creative processes by which people

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great potential to overcome models of colonial and anticolonial Hellenism. Drawing attention to those ‘third’ spaces in between, hybridity had potential to straddle the Greek-native/barbarian binary in historical and material culture analyses. Within the archaeological context, the material hybrid represented an empirical novelty of forms, an object which resisted traditional culture-historical typological classifications (such as Greek or Egyptian). Such objects did not easily fit into one single typological category but could be identified with more categories at the same time – and therefore with none entirely. Particularly argued by Peter van Dommelen, hybridization was considered useful as a theoretical tool to analyse the creative processes behind these hybrid outcomes and to shed light on the developing creation of new transcultural forms, practices, meanings, and identities of mixed origins, through their interaction and negotiation with various groups, be they ethnic, cultural, or social.100 In colonizing contexts such as Greek settler colonies in the ancient Mediterranean, the notion of hybridization was applied to argue that the presence of Greek-style pottery in local households did not imply that local pottery-users had abandoned their own traditions or that they had simply continued local traditions in Greek guise, but rather that new, culturally hybrid and locally significant identities had been created.101 As such, hybridity would not only challenge essentialist ethnic interpretations of culture-styles but also acknowledge the multiplicity of meanings within larger material culture categories such as Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Babylonian.102 Non-Greeks were no longer considered to have been passively acculturated, but hybridity allowed them active agency in their adoption and experience of Greek culture. 2.2.4 Hybridity and its discontents It is not difficult to see the appeal of hybridity and hybridization for the study of the Hellenistic world, as these terms could explain and accommodate both Eastern and Western aspects of Hellenistic history and culture. Hybridity’s lexical variant ‘hybridization’ drew attention to the reciprocity of Greek and non-Greek cultures and the creative transformative mixing and matching of cultural elements through which new hybrid forms emerged. Yet, both hybridity and hybridization were not without produce new cultural identities through the appropriation and adaptation of materials and objects from a limited range of social or cultural sources. Bricolage did not leave a deep impact in Classics (perhaps due to a general unfamiliarity with the term), although it has been used by some scholars as an innovative tool to replace Romanization (see e. g. Terrenato 1998, and recently Versluys 2013; 2017a). 100 Tronchetti and Van Dommelen 2005, 193; Van Dommelen 2005, 118. 101 Antonaccio 2003; 2005; Tronchetti and Van Dommelen 2005; Van Dommelen 2005; Knapp and Van Dommelen 2010. 102 Antonaccio 2003; 2005. For the diversity within Greek culture, see Hall 2002; 2003.

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problems. While the focal shift from primordial and historically fixed cultures towards transcultural forms and their multivocal significations was an important critical turn, hybridity’s ‘maddenly elastic’ definition and broadly used application transformed the concept into an unstable and controversial trope.103 Hybridity’s gradual distanciation from Bhabha’s solid theoretical foundation had given scholars the freedom to interpret and use hybridity in a variety of ways.104 In scholarly literature from the 2000s onwards, hybridity was increasingly and casually mentioned as a self-explanatory metaphor for cultural blending in the spheres of the visual arts, architecture, religion, literature, philosophy, and political forms due to interaction and connectivity.105 Increasingly so, scholarship used phrases such as hybrid deities, hybrid temples and rituals, hybrid iconographies and styles, and hybrid knowledge, with limited reference to people’s identities behind it – though they often were implicitly assumed to be self-evidently hybrid as well. Ubiquitous general usage of the term gradually illuminated the deeply problematic shortcomings of hybridity, first and foremost what hybridity precisely meant, and to whom it applied. A now common criticism concerns the persistent biological undertones of hybridity and the implication of once pure entities, through which the concept subverts yet also presupposes distinct, original ethno-cultural groups.106 This paradox stems from the biological roots of the term: the existence of hybridity only makes sense in light of pre-existing, unhybridized purities – the original ‘parents’ from which the hybrid derives. Thus, “a key term that (…) suggests the impossibility of essentialism”, hybridity is simultaneously ontologically dependent on that very impossibility.107 Applying hybridity to analytically interpret material culture, therefore also reaffirms those authentic container-like entities which the concept attempts to overcome: “instead of combating essentialism, it merely hybridizes it”.108 Stephan Palmié argued that academic essentialisms can have detrimental effects in the world – as Chapter one illustrated – because they galvanize in a supposedly objective, analytical way Orientalist ideas and descriptions about past and present cultures and peoples that Western scholars consider as ‘Other’ in their ‘anthropologized’, museumized perception of the world.109 With regards to archaeological hybridity, Philip Stockhammer rightly stated that both the pure ‘parents’ and the hybrid derivative are artificial representations of a modern lens that neatly classifies and reifies ancient cultures as primordial, homogeneous, and 103 Kraidy 2005, 3; see further Nederveen Pieterse 2001. 104 For instructive discussions on the varieties of hybridity, see Nederveen Pieterse 2001, 220–224; Burke 2009; Nederveen Pieterse 2009 [2003], 77–101; Ackermann 2012 105 See e. g. Colledge 1987; Voskos and Knapp 2008, 661; Canepa 2010a, 10; Hannestad 2012, 996; Vlassopoulos 2013, 117. 106 This argument has become a common trope in anthropological literature. See especially Friedman 1997, 82–83; 1999, 234–236; Young 2005 [1995], 25. 107 Young 2005 [1995], 25. 108 Friedman 1999, 236. 109 Palmié 2013, 479–480. For related issues, see the edited volume by Werbner and Modood 1997.

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(a)historical essences, through which the scholarly eye can easily detect what falls outside the boat: the hybrids.110 As a result, framing the encounters between Greek and non-Greek cultures as hybridizations, thus methodologically reinforces the existence prior authentic and unitary cultures of Greeks and Natives. In reality, no culture is or ever has been pure, original, or ethnically and geographically limited; “all forms of culture are in a continuous process of hybridity” through interactions with, adaptations to, and external influences which make hybridity rather the “ongoing condition of all human cultures”.111 Thinking in terms of bounded cultural containers, however, persists. The observation that hybridity is perceived through modern museumized taxonomies sheds light on the important question for whom hybridity counts as meaningful: for the modern researcher who establishes the hybrid and its hereditary original sources in neat but constructed classifications, or for the ancient person?112 Convenient labels for ‘hybrid’ material culture styles such as Graeco-Baktrian, Graeco-Egyptian, and Graeco-Buddhist do not answer questions of identity. These labels not only disregard local differences but also leave open the question of ancient awareness of hybridity. If people were conscious about hybridity, would they have defined it in the same way as modern scholars? How meaningful is hybridity without explicit emic consciousness? Some scholars argued that ‘hybridization’ as the active form of hybridity would provide a productive way to circumvent this pitfall, due to the implication of a creative process behind the hybrid outcome.113 Yet, even in the active form problems of temporality remain: ‘hybridization’ does not clarify the precise duration of such creative processes and thus when they are considered to be complete (i. e. when ‘hybrid’ becomes normalized into tradition).114 The term further leaves unanswered whether hybridity measures cultural difference (change) or cultural similarity (continuity); whether hybridity applies to a singular object, a community, or a society at large; and lastly, where precisely agency is situated: who gets to decide on hybridity?115

110 111

112 113 114 115

Stockhammer 2012, 49; 2013, 12–14. See also Jones 1997, 40–55; Pitts and Versluys 2015a, 6. Rutherford 1990, 211; Rosaldo 1995, xi, respectively. Although cultures are often reified as such by both emic outsiders and etic agents, all cultures are inherently emergent because they are historically subject to continuous change through interactions with, adaptations to, and influences from ‘outside’ (Nederveen Pieterse 1994; Schulte 1997; Nederveen Pieterse 2009 [2003]). Friedman 1999, 236. Mairs 2010, 58) rightly remarks that cultural hybridization as a process is not the same as a hybridity identity discourse. See also Deagan 2013; Palmié 2013, 465. Tronchetti and Van Dommelen 2005; Van Dommelen 2005; 2006; see further Kouremenos et al. 2011. Pappa 2013, 28–29; Silliman 2013, 491; 2015, 286–287. Silliman 2012; 2013, 492; 2015, 287; Deagan 2013, 264–267.

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2.3 Current trends: networks, globalization, and global perspectives Increasing critical awareness about the heuristic limitations of hybridity galvanized new directions in studies on the ancient world. Scholarship of the recent decades gradually concedes that hybridity should be a starting point rather than the arrival of analysis, while stories of antiquity now present the ancient world not as a mosaic of unique and sectarian civilizations and culture, but as a vast networked continuum of connectivity, characterized by colonial encounters, cyclical migratory movements, cultural traffic, and various social interactions and exchanges.116 On a Eurasian scale, the first three centuries BCE saw indeed the emergence and interactive competition between the Hellenistic empires in Western Asia, the Mauryan empire in India, the Han dynasty in China, the Parthian, Graeco-Baktrian, and Indo-Greek kingdoms in Central Asia, and the beginnings of the Roman and later Kushan empires in the Mediterranean and south Central Asia, respectively. Various regions across the Eurasian landmass became connected and differentially integrated in timely world empires, which effected increasing flow, traverse, migration, and encounter of peoples, culture, objects, ideas, and technologies.117 Whereas concepts of hybridity highlighted the interlinkage and coming together of different elements through the intensification of such encounters, current scholarship shifted the focus towards the implications of connectivity in practice. 2.3.1 Networks and ancient globalization In an important 2003 paper, John Ma adopted the archaeological concept of ‘peer polity interaction’ to understand the texture of the Hellenistic world. He argued that this texture consisted of vast networks of interactions between city-states across the Hellenistic world, which were sustained by a common (Greek) civic culture. As an alternative for core-periphery thinking (which perceived Hellenism as a spatialized and diffusing phenomenon), Ma approached this shared civic culture as the glue that held together the Hellenistic world as a networked, multipolar realm of ‘equipollent, interconnected communities’.118 Focusing on Hellenistic poleis in the Mediterranean, his paper demonstrated that concrete and symbolic interactions and idioms between 116

117 118

On hybridity as a starting point, see Versluys 2008, 354; Pitts and Versluys 2015a, 6; 2021. On connectivity as a frame for antiquity, see e. g. Bang and Kołodziejczyk 2012; Pitts and Versluys 2015a; Versluys 2017a; Von Reden 2020a; 2021a, and further discussion in Chapter 9, section 9.1.1. Similar narratives were proposed earlier by Braudel 1995 [1949], the tenets of which resurfaced in the early 2000s. For imperial integration in the Hellenistic period, see e. g. Strootman 2013; Kosmin 2014b; Strootman 2014. Ma 2003, 13. The conceptual approach of peer polity interaction was developed by Renfrew and Cherry 1986.

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city states – through public and private buildings, inter-state arbitrations, the recognition of inviolable asylums, and the status of sacred ambassadors announcing religious festivals – these communities communicated with one another as peer polities through a shared culture: a repertoire of forms of interaction, gestures, and behaviours that were deemed symbolically and cognitively acceptable and recognizable across the network.119 Over time, Ma argued, knowledge and recognition of these forms led to a shared civic culture and a ‘transnational’ identity that allowed a variety of travellers – ambassadors, specialists, artists, doctors, and merchants – to mediate through, and fit into different autonomous communities. Ma’s innovative approach is illustrative of the wider millennial scholarly wave within studies of the ancient world which increasingly engaged with social theories to remap and reorient the Hellenistic world as an interconnected world, shifting the field from centric and cellular history to decentralized and networked global history.120 The reoriented emphasis on networks, movements, trajectories, and flows of culture – on cultural routes rather than roots  – provided novel perspectives, arguments, and vocabularies that challenged interpretive tendencies of ethnic absolutism and methodological nationalism that remained influential and pragmatic in research methodologies, despite theoretical nuances.121 Of major influence was the crescendo of globalization theory in historical studies, a new (albeit rather late) wave that came from the social sciences. Despite criticism of globalization as a useful term for the study of antiquity, ancient historians and archaeologists gradually began to join the currents of the global turn, which effected a surge of publications and large international research projects hinting at, or explicitly engaging with globalization research.122 In an early 2005 publication, Richard Hingley prominently stated that Roman culture should be considered as a supraregional ‘globalizing culture’, while Øystein LaBianca and Sandra Scham argued 119 Ma 2003, 18–20. 120 Important publications that can be considered as part of this scholarly wave include Sherratt and Sheratt 1998; Horden and Purcell 2000; Malkin 2003; Morris 2003; Harris 2005; Malkin et al. 2007; Vlassopoulos 2007a; Canepa 2010b; Knapp and Van Dommelen 2010; Malkin 2011. For the difference between world and global history, see Hoo 2022. 121 For ethnic absolutism and methodological nationalism, see Gilroy 1990; Wimmer and Schiller 2003. For cultural routes rather than roots, see Clifford 1997. 122 Most prominent and outstanding among these are Jennings 2011; Pitts and Versluys 2015b; Hodos 2017a; see further discussion in Chapter 9, section 9.1.1. For recent research projects, see e. g. those directed by Miguel John Versluys (2011–2015 ‘Cultural Innovation in a Globalising Society’; 2016–2021 ‘Innovating Objects: The Impact of Global Connections and the Formation of the Roman Empire’) and Sitta von Reden (2017–2023 ‘Beyond the Silk Road’). It should be noted that, although globalization featured prominently on the intellectual agenda of the late 20th century, scholars studying the ancient world remained largely unaffected by the ‘global turn’ in the 1990s. This was not only because of the ubiquitous modernist notion of globalization, but also due to the overall theoretical lag within Classics (Terrenato 2002). It was not until the first decade of the 2000s that the term globalization gradually entered the disciplinary vocabulary of Classical archaeologists and ancient historians (see e. g. Malitz 2000; Witcher 2000; Cancik and Rüpke 2003; Martin and Pachis 2004; Van Nijf 2006; Hitchner 2008; Pitts 2008; Versluys 2009).

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in a 2006 volume on Connectivity in Antiquity that “ancient empires were the original globalizing forces” in a long-term historical process of globalization.123 Another influential book by Irad Malkin reframed the ancient Mediterranean as ‘a small Greek world’ which he presented, using network analogies, as a decentralized global network that emerged and sustained itself through local interactions between different nodes (such as settlements) on the basis of Greek commonalities.124 These early publications were foundational for globalization to take flight in subsequent studies of antiquity. Over the course of the first two decades of the 21st century, theoretically engaged historians and archaeologists such as Martin Pitts, Tamar Hodos, and Miguel John Versluys further argued in a series of pioneering publications that concepts of globalization have great potential to study Eurasian connectivity, beyond the binary interest in Greeks (or Romans) versus natives, by commencing historical analysis from inherently hybrid cultures – or rather, an inherent diversity.125 The 2017 Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization formed a distinct watershed that firmly established globalization in the analytical repertoire of current scholarship. In the introduction, Hodos explains that globalization, … rehabilitates competing, sometimes oppositional perspectives on the nature of connectivity. (…) It enables us to consider the commonalities that gave rise to the -izations in the first place alongside the diverse expressions of those shared practices. It also allows us to recognize the tension between shared practices and the rejection of them, which can happen in the resurgence of local identities in contrast to the merging of practices at the global level. Globalization enables us to consider the interconnections between all these different levels of interaction in a united perspective.126

Tapping into debates of cultural contact, interaction, style, and taste in the ancient world, scholars now increasingly engage with globalization concepts to explain the widening range of cultural possibilities and active choices in light of an expanding oikoumene, with important implications for understandings of Hellenism in the Hellenization debate. 2.3.2 Global perspectives and Hellenism now Said’s Orientalism, Bhabha’s hybridity, and other postcolonial influences left their impact on new generations of scholars who increasingly disavowed the term Hellenization

123 Hingley 2005; LaBianca and Scham 2006, 2. 124 Malkin 2011, 1–64. 125 See e. g. Pitts 2008; Hodos 2010; Versluys 2010; Hodos 2014; Versluys 2014; Pitts and Versluys 2015b; Hodos 2017b. Further discussion in Hoo 2022. 126 Hodos 2017b, 7–8.

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because of its diffusionist implications of a Greek superior culture spreading unidirectionally into an Eastern cultural vacuum. Since the 1990s, Hellenism had already become a less obvious term than Hellenization, although the term could still be used as a synonym for Hellenization-as-acculturation in a more nuanced way.127 Entangled with globalization processes in the modern world and attendant interests in global cultural diversities, previous views that saw Greek style as a direct representation of ethnic or cultural identity fell out of favour, while material culture became key to explore practice-oriented questions of multiple identities in historical contexts.128 Accordingly, a distinction emerged between Hellenization as a process of ethnocultural assimilation and Hellenism as Greek-styled material culture. In 1990, Glen Bowersock stated: Hellenization seems to imply the deliberate or inevitable imposition of Greek ways over local ones. Hellenization in this sense could be thoroughgoing or superficial (…). Yet Hellenism, by contrast, survived: for one thing it was a concept that the ancients talked about, whereas Hellenization was not. Hellenism did not necessarily threaten local cultures, nor was it imperialistic. It seemed to me that Hellenization was a modern idea, reflecting modern forms of cultural domination.129

Hellenism, accordingly, was not to be considered as a process but as a non-imperialistic concept. In 2015, Versluys further built on this semantic distinction: Hellenisation is about culture contact between different regions and thus about the inter-cultural. Hellenism is about concepts associated with those cultures and applied to a different region and/or time period and thus about the intra-cultural. Hellenism, in other words, is always and inherently about social imaginary and about cultural memory. Hellenism, therefore, primarily belongs to the field of cultural production.130

The conceptual discrepancy between Hellenization and Hellenism articulated a subtle but important difference between becoming Greek and doing Greek, respectively, so that Hellenism allowed for cultural code-switching without changing one’s ethnic identity.131 While Hellenization would involve colonization and diaspora movements of ethnic Greek people whose culture transmitted to and acculturated the East, Hellenism would 127 128 129 130 131

E. g. recently, Olbrycht 2017, 4. Versluys 2008; 2013; 2014; and recently 2017 deals with the intersection of material culture, style, and identity at length. See also Hölscher 2004; and most recently 2018. Bowersock 1990, xi. Gruen 1998; Burstein 2003; Traina 2005; Invernizzi 2012, 93. This distinction is similar to what Vlassopoulos (2013, 7–11) calls “the Hellenicity approach” (after Hall 2002) versus “the Hellenization approach”. Versluys 2015, 128 (emphasis in original). See also Strootman and Versluys 2017, 20–21; Versluys 2017a, 209–211. The importance of switching between ‘cultural codes’ for the intersection of identity, material culture, and style is accurately explained by Versluys 2013, 434–436. See also Wallace-Hadrill 1998; 2008. Hellenism as ‘doing Greek’ was already known in Hellenistic times. 2 Macc. 4.9–4.13 refers to non-Greek Jews who acted in Greek ways on the initiative of the High Priest Jason.

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refer to ‘things Greek’ as a cultural means to a social end – a cultural concept, adopted, reinterpreted, and reused as an associative source of social significance by people who may have been, but were not necessarily Greek.132 Greek-doings and Greek-beings thus came to be conceptualized as two different things. The important insight was that diverse people could ‘do Greek’ without actually being or becoming Greek, without identifying as ethnically Greek. Such ideas were especially appealing for explanations of Roman Hellenism; Andrew Wallace Hadrill argued that Hellenism in Roman times was profoundly contextual, which meant that a variety of people could code-switch to Greek in one context and remain Roman in others while they could also ‘be Roman by going Greek’.133 Such conceptualization of Hellenism as a contextual concept was also relevant for the time before the ‘Augustan revolution’; the use of Greek culture in Ptolemaic Egypt and Seleukid Babylonia demonstrated that Hellenism could constitute a profound cultural dis-uniformity and diversity in its production, functioning, associations, practices, and practitioners within different contexts. Rolf Strootman in particular explains how such fluid, ‘non-national’ and ‘non-ethnic’ Hellenism would have functioned in the Hellenistic period: Hellenism became a kind of ‘cultural capital’ in Bourdieu’s sense. (…) Hellenism became a means of defining who did and who did not participate in the imperial order of the Hellenistic kings. (…) Through the adoption of Hellenistic culture, members of local elites were bound to the monarchy. ‘At home’, they could use their (version of) Hellenism as a means to distance themselves from families who did not share in the power and from socially inferior groups. Hellenism presumably structured the progress of vertical interaction between the court and civic elites – between the local and the global – as well as the horizontal interaction between the elites of different cities. The spread and development of Hellenism were a two-way street: Hellenism was promoted top-down (to use a now unpopular term) by the court and was advanced horizontally by various elites who identified themselves with the ruling dynasties.134

For Strootman and others with him, Hellenism made more sense as a template of cosmopolitan court culture. Matthew Canepa similarly interpreted the phenomenon of Hellenism in Asia as a “widespread, coherent and prestigious cultural and linguistic idiom” constituted by “Greek art, urbanism, architecture, science, and the language [which] became primary means of cultural communication to engage with a wider

132 133 134

For a clear and elaborate assessment of these and related concepts, see Strootman 2014, 7–11; Strootman and Versluys 2017, 14–18; Versluys 2017a, 209–211. For Hellenism in an Afghan context, see Parker 2007 and Chapters 3, 8, and 9, section 9.2. Wallace-Hadrill 1998; also Wallace-Hadrill 2008; Versluys 2010; 2015; 2017; and recently Van Aerde 2019. Strootman 2014, 10. Further discussion in Strootman 2011b, 66, 88–89; 2013, esp. 73, 91. For similar ideas about Hellenism among Iranian kings, see particularly Wiesehöfer 1996a; 2000; 2015.

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cosmopolitan world”.135 As a cultural template facilitating various elite movements rather than ethnic movement in itself, historical Hellenism thus gradually became reconceptualized according to globalizing developments discernible in the modern world. Presently, scholarly perceptions of Hellenism as an international, global cultural idiom gains steady ground, though certainly not universally. The general tenets of interpretation within the historiography of Hellenism show that the use and meaning of the term differed across time and space, across the currents of intellectual streams throughout the 20th and 21st century: nationalism, colonialism, anticolonialism, postcolonialism, hybridity, and lastly globalization. These intellectual streams did not develop in a progressive linear way, but should rather be seen as conceptual itineraries of Hellenism which shaped a powerful series of connotations and associations that resonated through modern expectations and explanations of cultural inbetweenness across central Eurasia. As of yet, there is no universal consensus of what Hellenism constitutes. Some scholars uphold the concept of acculturation while others abide by tracing hybridization processes. Hellenization is a term still often employed while globalization has not yet been commonly integrated in the historian’s methodology. Such discrepancies are not only due to the difference in theoretical engagement by archaeologists and Classicists, but also to the specific national, disciplinary, and educational background of scholars, whose values and interests often depend on where, when, and how they were intellectually trained. These differences become particularly visible in the study of material remains by archaeologists and historians studying Asia in the Hellenistic period. In the chapters that follow, I discuss five prominent archaeological case studies across Hellenistic Asia that illuminate how descriptions and categorizations of objects and architecture, and the subsequent interpretations of their historical meaning with regards to Hellenism, can differ considerably. I start where I began, on inbetween grounds: Hellenistic Central Asia.

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Canepa 2017a, 203. Similar views in Canepa 2017b; Haubold 2016; Stevens 2016; Chrubasik and King 2017.

Part II: Cases of Hellenism

3 Ai Khanum on the Oxus 3.1 Introduction We commence the inquiry of Hellenism with a most famous and spectacular site in north-eastern Afghanistan, one that has transformed Hellenistic Central Asia studies into a distinct field, ever since its important discovery in the 1960s: the ancient city of Ai Khanum in northeast Afghanistan.1 Even across broader Hellenistic history, only a handful of sites has gained the same attention and fascination. Located in eastern Baktria, a land known in Classical sources for its abundance, fertility, and thousands of cities, Ai Khanum remains the only extensively excavated city of its size and monumentality in Hellenistic Baktria.2 Despite its obvious historical significance, the site’s ancient original name is not confirmed from ancient literary or documentary sources; Ai Khanum – ‘Lady Moon’ in the Uzbek language – is a modern rather than an ancient designation. However, the city’s location on (what was considered) the ancient Oxus River has prompted scholarly and popular hypotheses: Ai Khanum would have been an Alexandreia (Alexandreia on the Oxus), founded by Alexander the Great; a name-city of one of the Graeco-Baktrian kings (Diodoteia, Diodotopolis, or Eukratideia); or known by a local name (Oskobara or

1

2

According to modern convention, the history of Hellenistic Central Asia is terminologically divided into two kingdoms, based on geographic and stylistic categorizations of coinage. The Graeco-Baktrian kingdom refers to those regions ruled by Greek kings north of the Hindu Kush, from c. 250–130 BCE. When these kings expanded their power south of the Hindu Kush (i. e. when their royal coins are found across the mountains), convention speaks of the Indo-Greek kingdom, from c. 180 BCE – 10 CE, although it should be kept in mind that these kingdoms (or rather, series of kingdoms) were entangled in many ways. Ai Khanum falls within the chronology of the Graeco-Baktrian kingdom. For Baktria as the land of a thousand cities, see Just. Epit. 41.1, 41.4; Strab. 15.1.3. For further discussion on these proverbial thousand cities, see Leriche 2007. Other Baktrian urban sites with Hellenistic layers include Kampyr Tepe, Saksanokhur, Dilbarjin, and Takht-i Sangin (Fig. 1.1), though none of them of comparable stature as Ai Khanum and none of them with similar extensive excavation and publication (see useful overviews in Mairs 2011; Martinez-Sève 2021; and more broadly Ball 2019 [1982]). Recent excavations in the Baktra oasis may yield details on the famed capital city of Baktra (modern Balkh, near the city of Mazar-i Sharif in north Afghanistan) in the Hellenistic period, but current publications mainly focus on the plain’s Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Achaemenid occupation (Lhuillier 2018; Marquis 2018; Lhuillier 2019). For general overviews of Ai Khanum, see Rapin 1990; Bernard 2012; Francfort et al. 2014; Mairs 2014a, 57–101; Martinez-Sève 2014; Lecuyot 2021.

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Ostobara).3 The settlement may of course have gone by several names across its existence, receiving a name-change with every dynasty while being locally known by another name simultaneously. Whatever its ancient designation, it is certain that Ai Khanum developed into a grand royal city in eastern Baktria of local, regional, and transregional importance. History of Ai Khanum An incredibly wealthy region, Baktria was far from an isolated part of the ancient world. Before the coming of Alexander the Great, the region had already been a well-connected and economically significant (even if unruly) satrapy in the Achaemenid empire since the 530s BCE, when Cyrus the Great (r. 559–530 BCE) conquered Central Asia.4 The history of Ai Khanum, however, commences two centuries later, and is bound up with episodes of Macedonian and Greek domination of Baktria: from Alexander’s Central Asian expedition (329–327 BCE), to the region’s incorporation in the Seleukid empire as part of the Upper Satrapies (c. 305 – c. 250/206 BCE), to the semi-autonomous and later independent rule of the Graeco-Baktrian kings (c. 250 – c. 145 BCE).5 The plain of Ai Khanum – the city itself did not exist yet – was probably seized by Alexander during his two warring years in the region in pursuit of Bessos, the satrap of Achaemenid Baktria who killed Darius III in 330 BCE and posed himself as the next Persian king, claiming the dynastic title Artaxerxes V.6 3

4

5

6

The thesis that Ai Khanum was a planned Alexandrian foundation can be rejected on the basis of the settlement’s chronology which post-dates Alexander’s Central Asian campaigns (Martinez-Sève 2015, 25, 28). Moreover, the river junction at Ai Khanum possibly did not include the ancient Oxus river at all, but rather a different, secondary river with the name of Ochus (Grenet and Rapin 2001, 80–81; Rapin 2013, 48–49). The local name Oskobara or Ostobara (‘high fortress’) was opted by Rapin 2003; 2005, 146–147, based on mention by early geographers. The name Diodoteia or Diodotopolis is conjectured from three letters in a Greek monogram on a coin of king Agathokles (Narain 1986 but cf. Holt 1999, 51–52), while the name Eukratideia is based on numerous coin finds of king Eukratides, as well as mention of such a name-city in Strab. 11.11.2 (Bernard 1981, 116), which makes it highly plausible that Ai Khanum in its latest phase was known by this name. See further discussion by Mairs 2014b, 118–120. According to Herodotos (3.93.1; 3.93.3), the Baktrian satrapy brought in 360 silver talents to the Achaemenid imperial treasury, a significant amount compared to the 300 talents that other Central Asian regions combined (Parthia, Chorasmia, Sogdia, and Aria) had to pay, and the 400 talents yielded from the western regions of Asia Minor combined (Ionia, Magnesia, Aeolia, Karia, Lykia, Melos, Pamphylians; see Hdt. 3.90.1). Scholarship of recent decades sheds increasing light on the importance of Baktria for the Achaemenid empire, even if the relations between the empire and the region were volatile at times; see esp. Briant 2002, 745–754; Wu 2010; Briant 2012; Garcia Sanchez 2014; Wu 2017; Henkelman 2018; Lhuillier 2018; Wu and Boroffka 2018; Briant 2020; Wu 2021, for Achaemenid Ai Khanum in particular, see Mairs 2014c. Whether the Graeco-Baktrian kings, before Euthydemos’ treaty with Antiochos III in 206 BCE (Polyb. 11.34), ruled independently or as client kings of the Seleukid empire is quite a matter of debate; see e. g. Lerner 1999, 13–27; Wolski 1999, 43–51; Coloru 2009, 157–173; Overtoom 2016; Brüggemann 2017; Overtoom 2020, 131–49 cf. Tarn 1938, 71–74; Engels 2011; 2014; Chrubasik 2016, 34–52. For Central Asia as an imperial space in its own right, see Morris 2020a. The plain of Ai Khanum (Dasht-i Qala) stretched north of the site; Alexander probably left a military garrison here or on Ai Khanum’s natural citadel (Martinez-Sève 2015, 20–26). Bessos was betrayed

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It is implausible, however, that Alexander was the mastermind of Ai Khanum’s foundation. Though set in a historically significant landscape – as indicated by the long irrigation and cultivation of the plain of Ai Khanum since the third millennia BCE, the presence of an Achaemenid fortress on the plain (Kohna Qala) and a nearby Bronze Age trading site of the Indus valley civilization (Shortugai) – it was not until the first or second quarter of the third century BCE that the foundations for Ai Khanum proper were laid out. Recent scholarship ascribes the beginnings of the urban settlement to an early Seleukid king – Seleukos I (r. 312–281 BCE) or more plausibly his son Antiochos I (r. 281–261 BCE) who held coregency over the Upper Satrapies in Central Asia (294–281 BCE) before succeeding his father.7 Central Asia was of key dynastic importance for the Seleukid empire due to its highly exploitable military, economic, and ideological capital; Antiochos I was the son of Apama, the Baktrian or Sogdian noblewoman his father had married during the mass weddings at Susa in 324 BCE.8 Yet, Ai Khanum’s actual urban bloom and prosper took place much later under Graeco-Baktrian rule, most notably during the reign of Eukratides (r. c. 170–145 BCE). By that time, Baktria had shifted from Seleukid to Graeco-Baktrian reign and had already been governed by at least four Baktrian dynasts, whose rule gained enough renown to receive mention in Classical literary sources: those of the house of Diodotos (Diodotos I and his son Diodotos II, r. c. 240s–220s BCE) and the house of Euthydemos (Euthydemos I, r. c. 220s–190 BCE, and his son Demetrios, r. c. 190–180 BCE).9 Ai Khanum thrived until the middle of the

7 8

9

by his own men and delivered to Alexander who ordered to gruesomely execute him – the details are disputed in the sources (see esp. the sensational stories in Curt. 7.5.36–43; Diod. Sic. 17.83.9; Plut. Vit. Alex. 43.6; cf. the more moderate account by Arr. Anab. 3.30.5; further discussion by Holt 1989, 45–51; Heckel 2020, 174–179). Alexander continued his expedition northwards and founded the frontier post of Alexandreia Eskhate (‘the Farthest’, possibly modern Khujand in Tadzhikistan; Fig. 1.1), after which he perhaps crossed the plain of Ai Khanum again on his way south into India. For Alexander’s expeditions and settlements in Central Asia, see Holt 1989; Dani and Bernard 1994; Lerner 2018; for historical reconstructions of the routes that he took, see Rapin 2005; 2013; Lerner 2016; Rapin 2017. Lyonnet 2012, 157–158; Lecuyot and Martinez-Sève 2013, 214; Lyonnet 2013, 183; Martinez-Sève 2015, 28–30. Baktria’s Seleukid period is defined by two grand eastern anabases, undertaken first by Seleukos I (c. 308–306 BCE – one may add the military expedition in Baktria by his general Demodamas of Milete during the coregency of Seleukos I and Antiochos I), and a century later by Antiochos III (c. 208–206 BCE). Seleukid politics in the Upper Satrapies are discussed in detail by Plischke 2014, 173–314; for the importance of Baktria for the Seleukid empire, see Kosmin 2014b, 59–76; Canepa 2020b; Strootman 2021; for the particularly significant role of the expedition of Demodamas in Baktria for the development of Seleukid ideology, see Nawotka 2017; 2018. Coins further record a second Euthydemos, who was probably a rival of Demetrios, son of Euthydemos I (Holt 2000; further discussion in Glenn 2020, 107–124, cf. Lerner 1999, 109–113). Demetrios was also a name shared by a later king, the rex Indorum, who would have besieged Eukratides in India ( Just. 41.6.4). A tax receipt presumably from Baktria further records the names of Antimachos Theos, Eumenes, and Antimachos, the latter two possibly the former’s sons (Bernard and Rapin 1994; Rea et al. 1994), ruling in Baktria somewhere after Euthydemos and before Eukratides. The precise political history of these kings and their kingdoms is, as said, precarious. Greek and Latin literary sources inform us the names of six, perhaps seven kings, if we count the

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second century BCE, when the city was destroyed and gradually abandoned; it was around this time that groups of nomadic pastoralists from the Central Asian steppes migrated into Baktria, driven southwards by an encroaching nomadic confederation mentioned in Chinese chronicles as the Yuezhi.10 It seems that these movements, as well as the threat of the neighbouring Arsakid empire, drove the Baktrian kings south of the Hindu Kush.11 The details of these power transitions, which sometimes involved competing kings bearing the same name, are rather obscure. The political history of the Graeco-Baktrian (and later Indo-Greek) kingdoms remains largely based on coins, complemented by scarce and elusive references by Classical authors such as Polybios, Strabo, Apollodoros of Artemita, and Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus, whose works were often drawn up significantly later and who were primarily interested in the emergence of Arsakid Parthia rather than Baktria.12 The discovery of Ai Khanum therefore forms a critical watershed for reconstructing the cultural history of Graeco-Baktria, although the site should still be considered unique in terms of its stature, monumentality, and the extensive excavations it received. Historiography of Ai Khanum The material culture at Ai Khanum, as will be discussed below, became famous for its fascinating combination of Greek cultural elements alongside, and seemingly blended with Syrian, Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Central-Asian features. This also led to Ai Khanum’s scholarly prominence as a Hellenistic paradigm – a ‘Shangri-la of modern scholarship’, serving as a perfect culturally ambiguous proxy case to test the prospects and pitfalls of research on culture contact, cultural interaction, and cultural mixture in the Hellenistic world.13 But for all Ai Khanum’s cultural diversity, it was particularly the presence of markedly familiar Greek culture, coupled with the remote distance from the Mediterranean, that captured and embellished the imagination of historians

10 11 12 13

rex Indorum mentioned above: Diodotos I and Diodotos II ( Just. Epit. 41.1; cf. Polyb. 11.34.2; Strab. 11.9.3), Euthydemos I (Polyb. 10.49, 11.34; Strab. 11.11.1), Demetrios (Polyb. 11.34; cf. Strab. 11.9.2, 11.1), Eukratides ( Just. Epit. 41.6.6; Strab. 11.9.2, 11.2), and Menander – an Indo-Greek king who ruled south of the Hindu Kush (Strab. 11.11.1). The contrast with the number of kings recorded on coins is astonishing: the Graeco-Baktrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms (resp. north and south of the Hindu Kush) were ruled by at least thirty more coin-minting kings than known from textual sources. Apart from the now classical historical narratives of Tarn 1938; Narain 1957, essential numismatic works include Bopearachchi 1991; Holt 1999; Kritt 2001; Widemann 2009; and the most recent studies by Bordeaux 2018; Glenn 2020. See also useful introductions by Cribb 2007; Bordeaux 2021; Glenn 2021. A helpful bibliography is provided by Glenn 2016. Sima Qian, Shiji 123 (Watson 1961, 231–236); Fan Ye, Hou Han shu 88.13 (Hill 2015, 29). The Yuezhi were, in turn, driven westerwards by the Xiongnu, another powerful nomadic confederation rising on the Mongolian steppes. Enoki et al. 1994; Abdullaev 2007. On the Parthian threat, see Overtoom 2020, 131–172. Coloru 2009, 123–282 provides instructive discussion. Holt 1999, 13–14; Mairs 2011, 14.

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and archaeologists alike. Located on the proverbial fringe of the Hellenistic oikoumene and moreover the only major Baktrian city that was excavated, Ai Khanum has indeed been given exceptional prominence in scholarly literature as an exotic example of Hellenism.14 Until relatively recently, it was most common to describe the site in terms of its overt Greekness as manifested by the presence of a theatre and a gymnasium in such a faraway corner of the world, considered as unequivocal evidence of the cultural achievements of Alexander the Great and his successors in Baktria.15 The appeal of such assessments has a long genealogy which is influenced by historiographical traditions of colonial thinking about Greek archaeological remains in ‘Far Eastern’ regions. As described in Chapter 1, in the 19th and 20th centuries, developments and practices of archaeology in Central Asia commenced with foreign explorations that were deeply entangled with political-ideological discourses which advanced expansionist interests in central Eurasia by various competitive imperial powers, most notably the British, the Russians, and the French. Such entanglement also echoes through historiographies of Central Asia’s antiquity which was immersed by European and Russian intellectual discourses that claimed and appropriated Alexander and his heirs in Central Asia as part of imperial or national narratives of civilization.16 Until Ai Khanum’s debut in the 1960s, Anglophone scholarship implicitly or explicitly explained the history of the Graeco-Baktrian kings in Baktria and India in parallel with contemporaneous British colonial endeavours in India.17 Francophone scholarship on Baktria was likewise entangled with contemporary politics but in a different way. As touched upon in Chapter 1, the creation of the DAFA in 1922 and their scientific efforts to excavate Afghanistan’s archaeological heritage were fundamentally part of the diplomatic relations between France and Afghanistan – a new state independent from British control – which were cemented in the aftermath of the Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919.18 Alfred Foucher, who represented the French mission and forged the DAFA, was a renowned Indologist specialized in Graeco-Buddhist art and the ancient history 14 15

16 17

18

For Baktria on the fringe of the Hellenistic oikoumene, see e. g. Holt 1989; 2003. The first presentations of Ai Khanum to the public were published by Bernard 1967a and 1982; afterwards, see most prominently, Rapin 1994; Bernard 1997; Holt 2005, 155–164; Bernard 2008; 2012. The reconstruction of the history of Hellenistic-period Baktria was, until the discovery of Ai Khanum, solely based on coinage and fragments in historical sources. For a concise introduction to the intellectual history of Ai Khanum, see Mairs 2014a, 19–26. With relevant theoretical scholarship on identity, historical narratives on Ai Khanum and Bakria more broadly increasingly begin to change; the past half decade has seen an incredible surge in Hellenistic Central Asia studies which resulted in, amongst others, the monumental handbook of Mairs 2021a. Coloru 2009, 25–102; Gorshenina 2017; Coloru 2021; Gorshenina and Rapin 2021. Anglophone scholarship was dominated by the works of Charles Masson (1800–1853), Alexander Cunningham (1814–1893), John Marshall (1976–1958), and W. W. Tarn (1869–1957) – for the latter, see the ensuing controversy with his Indian colleague A. K. Narain, briefly described in the previous chapter. Fenet 2015, 133–138, see now also Fenet 2021. For an excellent and detailed overview of DAFA’s history, see Olivier-Utard 1997.

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of French Indo-China. With instructions from France, Foucher began his mission in Afghanistan with the hope to substantialize in Baktria the ‘missing link’ in the presumed line of cultural transmission between the Mediterranean and the Graeco-Buddhist art of Gandhara (modern northwest Pakistan).19 DAFA’s major archaeological goal of excavating Baktria’s fabled capital Baktra – celebrated in various literary traditions as a great city or even as ‘the Mother of Cities’ – ended in a failure that entailed a series of difficult hardships, no monumental remains, and an embittered conclusion by Foucher that Greek Baktria had been nothing but a mirage.20 In 1961, roughly four decades after DAFA’s first efforts at Baktra, a chance discovery of a Corinthian capital in Takhar province in northeast Afghanistan led to the grand excavations of Ai Khanum that lifted Foucher’s Baktrian mirage.21 The direction of the DAFA had changed hands and was now led by Daniel Schlumberger who surveyed the site in 1964. Paul Bernard soon succeeded Schlumberger as head of the DAFA, taking the lead in the monumental excavations of Ai Khanum from 1965 until 1978. The 1979 Soviet invasion, followed by the Afghan civil wars, suspended the excavations indefinitely, leaving two-thirds of the city unexcavated and unprotected from the ravaging effects of war and conflict in the region.22 Fourteen successful years of exhaustive excavations by Bernard and his team uncovered the spectacular remains of a city which was soon presented to the public as a ‘Greek polis in Central Asia’ – a true outpost of Hellenism in the Far East and a paradigmatic example of the diffusion and robustness of Greek civilization after Alexander.23 This interpretation remained influential and persistent in general histories until today.

19 20

21

22

23

Foucher 1927, 118. For discussion of Foucher’s mission, see Fenet 2010. In Islamic times, ancient Baktra was praised for its greatness as ‘Umm-al Bilad’ – ‘the Mother of Cities’ as referred to in Arabic documents (Burnett 2015) – while Marco Polo described the city in similar fashion in the thirteenth century (Guignard 1983, 65). For the appeal of Baktra, see Bernard 2002, 1292. For the Baktrian mirage, see Foucher and Bazin-Foucher 1942, 73–75, and Kuzmina 1976; Holt 1987; Bernard et al. 2006 for further discussion. According to the report, a Corinthian capital and a carved columnar stand were discovered at Ai Khanum during a hunting trip by the Afghan king, Mohammed Zahir Shah who then informed the DAFA in 1962 (Schlumberger 1965, 42). For a detailed account of the discovery, see Bernard 2001, 971–977. The ruins of Ai Khanum had already been crossed by French and British explorers before its formal discovery, though Foucher seemed to have been unaware of this information (Olivier-Utard 1997, 94–95; Fenet 2021, 162–164). Bernard 2001. The results of the excavations have been published extensively by the DAFA: the series Fouilles d’Aï Khanoum consists of nine volumes (so far), respectively dedicated to the preliminary campaigns of 1965–1968, the propylaia, the main temple, the coins, the ramparts, the gymnasium, the small objects, the palace treasury, and the houses. Information in these volumes still need to be supplied by original reports published in Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (CRAI), Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient (BEFEO), and Bulletin de correspondance hellénique (BCH). Schlumberger 1965; Frye 1966; and most notably Bernard 1967a, 77, 91. Bernard nuanced his opinion in later publications.

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While detailed discussions on Ai Khanum had long been dominated by Francophone scholars, the last decade has seen a particular upsurge of international scholarly and public interest in the Baktrian city. Such interest was sparked on the one hand by the successful worldwide travelling exhibition Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul (2006–2020), sponsored by the National Geographic Society and the Society for the Preservation of Afghan Cultural Heritage, which introduced Ai Khanum and artefacts of Afghan heritage to vast and varied global audiences.24 On the other hand, the massive proliferation of scholarly publications over the past decade greatly contributed to the accessibility and wider dissemination of knowledge and perspectives on the Baktrian city and its broader historical context. The year 2013 saw the publication of the long-awaited volume Fouilles d’Aï Khanoum IV: L’habitat – the most recent in the series of Ai Khanum’s archaeological reports – followed by Rachel Mairs’s 2014 seminal monograph The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia, trailed by her copious amount of scholarly output on Ai Khanum and Hellenistic Baktria at large.25 Francophone scholarship simultaneously saw a momentous rise in publications on Ai Khanum, most notably by Laurianne Martinez-Sève who resumed research and publication of DAFA legacy data of the city’s main sanctuary.26 Most recently in 2021, scholarship on Hellenistic Central Asia reached a new milestone with the publication of the first comprehensive handbook, The GraecoBactrian and Indo-Greek Worlds, which includes a section on culture and identity.27 This chapter, then, leans on these seminal publications to outline Ai Khanum’s architecture and objects while focusing on the methodological grounds on which the city pertained meaning as a case of Hellenism. In reviewing predominant perspectives on Ai Khanum’s 24

25 26

27

The Hidden Treasures exhibition included collections from the Afghan sites of Tepe Fullol, Ai Khanum, Begram, and Tillya Tepe. It opened at the Musée Guimet in Paris (2006) from where it started its tour across the world, hosted by thirteen countries in total: Italy (Turin, 2007–2008); the Netherlands (Amsterdam, 2008); the US (Washington D. C., San Francisco, Houston, and New York, 2008–2009); Canada (Gatineau-Ottawa, 2009–2010); Germany (Bonn, 2011); the UK (London, 2011); Sweden (Stockholm, 2011); Norway (Trondheim, 2012); Australia (Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Perth, 2013–2014); Japan (Tokyo, 2016); South Korea (Seoul and Gyeongju, 2016); and lastly China (Beijing, Jiuquan, Chengdu, Zengzhou, Shenzhen, Changsha, Beijing, Nanjing, and Hong Kong, 2017–2020). It remains unclear where the Afghan artefacts currently reside. Lecuyot 2013; Mairs 2014a; among Mairs’ extensive bibliography, see esp. Mairs 2013b; 2013c; 2014b; 2014d; 2016; 2021b. A general trend may be discerned here: Francophone scholarship on Ai Khanum of the past decade has been predominated by publications by Martinez-Sève (see esp. Martinez-Sève 2010a; 2010b; 2012; 2014; 2015; 2016; 2020a; 2021), while publications by Mairs were leading Anglophone scholarship. Between 2007 and the present time, Mairs and Martinez-Sève have each written well over 20 publications on Hellenistic Baktria, a number that increases by the year. Additionally, other important recent works on Ai Khanum were published by French scholars, particularly associated to the DAFA, such as Paul Bernard (2012), Henri-Paul Francfort (2012; 2015; also Francfort et al. 2014), Bertille Lyonnet (2012), and Georges Rougemont (2012a; 2012b; 2012c; also Rougemont and Bernard 2014), and American scholars such as Frank Holt (2012a; 2012b) and Jeffrey Lerner (2010; 2011; 2014; 2020). Mairs 2021a, Part VI.

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Hellenism, it will become clear that the city’s cultural character has been framed and conceptualized in a distinct relation to ethnic Greek identity.

Fig. 3.1. Map of Ai Khanum (J.-C. Liger and G. Lecuyot in Bernard 2012) © Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan, courtesy of Philippe Marquis

3.2 Site context and features Ai Khanum was the most important city in eastern Baktria, situated at the crossroads of major inland arteries of Central Asia. The site itself was triangular in shape and enjoyed exceptional protection by the landscape on three sides (Fig. 3.1). A natural acropolis of 60 m. high shielded the eastern side of town, while the western and southern sides

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were delineated by the steep river cliffs along the confluence of the Panj river and its tributary, the Kokcha.28 The Panj forms a branch of the mighty Amu Darya, the ancient Oxus river and the principal waterway of Central Asia; Ai Khanum, therefore, technically did not lay on the ancient Oxus, but rather on a tributary thereof.29 The location of the city on a river junction connected its territory with the Kokcha river valley and the Hindu Kush mountains in the south, the Kyzyl Su river valley in the north, and the Pamir-Badakhshan mountains in the east – a most valuable source of lapis lazuli, ruby, and other precious and semi-precious stones, minerals, and metals that could be mined here and in the connected area.30 Fed by regular mountain waters, the favourable environment of the site is further evident from the massive fertile plain that bordered the north side of Ai Khanum, providing a wealth of resources to sustain a sizeable population. Evidence of patterns of small-scale occupation and a large network of irrigation canals that dated back to the Bronze Age, indicate that the plain had been agriculturally exploited since long before the city’s existence.31 The spatial setting of Ai Khanum was thus remarkably strategic, commanding access and control over significant resources and important channels of commerce and communication: networked waterways and overland caravan routes that led into surrounding Central Asian regions and further to India and China in the east, and Iran, the Black Sea region, and the Mediterranean in the west.32 Although evidence lacks for the urban use of the triangular site of Ai Khanum before Seleukid rule, it may be assumed that the area was deliberately selected for its known defensive and strategic benefits in the immediate locality as well in the broader geography of Central Asia and beyond. Chronology and features The chronology of Ai Khanum is not uncontested and has been changed, revised, and corrected several times. Whereas former scholarship entertained the possibility of the involvement of Alexander the Great, more recent scholarship now places the earliest development of Ai Khanum under the first Seleukid king(s) in the first quarter of the third century BCE, between 305 and 280 BCE.33 Over the course of around 150 years, 28 29 30 31 32 33

Leriche 1986. Grenet and Rapin 2001, 80–81 proposed to identify the Panj river with the ancient Ochus river, mentioned in Classical sources. The confusion between Ochus and Oxus is evident. Bernard and Francfort 1978, 36. Gardin and Gentelle 1976, 59–99. For the inland waterways that connected Ai Khanum with the Mediterranean and the Black Sea region, see Lerner 2014. For the geography of Ai Khanum and it surroundings, see Rapin 2013; Martinez-Sève 2021. Lyonnet 2012, 157–158; 2013, 183; see Martinez-Sève 2020b for detailed discussion. While some scholars consider Ai Khanum as a new foundation by Antiochos I (r. 281–261), based on numerous of his bronze coins found in the earliest layers of the sanctuary and on ceramic styles compared to those at the Athenian agora (Martinez-Sève 2010a, 201; Lyonnet 2012, 143–159, 169–170; Martinez-Sève

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the settlement grew into a full city that remained in existence until around 145 BCE.34 While each building can be deconstructed in stratigraphic versions, Ai Khanum’s overall urban development can roughly be defined by three architectural phases and a short phase of reoccupation, based on chronologies from ceramic, numismatic, and archaeological data (Table 3.1). Revisions made by Bertille Lyonnet, Ai Khanum’s ceramics specialist, now place the first phase in the early third century BCE, during which the urban space of Ai Khanum became defined by fortification walls and the earliest (currently known) structures.35 Much of this phase remains unknown. A second phase is marked by an extensive architectural building program and distinct changes in the ceramic assemblage at the beginning of the second century BCE. This coincides with Euthydemos’ treaty with Antiochos III that ended the siege of Baktra in 206 BCE, marking a new era of Baktrian sovereignty.36 It was from this phase on that Ai Khanum started to flourish into a proper city with new grand public buildings being constructed while existing buildings were enlarged or renovated. A third architectural phase took place around the reign of Eukratides, during which two new grand buildings and citywide reconstructions and reparations were carried out in the second quarter of the second century BCE. Some of these were left unfinished when Ai Khanum entered a period of destruction, decline, and a brief reoccupation of the site during the so-called

34

35

36

2015, 28–30), others suggest that the city was not a virgin foundation but rather a refoundation of an older Achaemenid or perhaps even earlier settlement (Leriche 1986, 24, 71–72; Francfort 2005, 338; Mairs 2013b, 100; 2014c; 2014a, 45). The latter position is based on the use of Achaemenid-style ceramics in the oldest building layers, evidence for habitation on the acropolis in the Achaemenid period, the early date of the temples and their Achaemenid analogies, and the longevity of the irrigation networks on the hinterland of Ai Khanum. The ‘fall’ of Ai Khanum is often ascribed to nomadic invasions from the northern steppes, an interpretation increasingly challenged if not dismissed (Lerner 2012, 82–85; Mairs 2013d; 2014a, 146–176; Martinez-Sève 2016; 2018a; 2020a). Most scholars stand by an ending date of c. 145 BCE, based on the mention of a regnal year 24 in an economic text (Rougemont 2012a, no. 117) from the city’s treasury (Bernard et al. 1980, 25–27). Due to the long timespan of 24 years, the document is connected to king Eukratides of Baktria, whose lengthy reign (in contrast to other Baktrian kings) ended when he was killed by his own son, as vividly told by Justin (Epit. 41.6.5). According to Justin (Epit. 41.6.1), Eukratides ascended the throne the same year as Mithradates I (170 BCE), from which a date of 146/145 can be inferred (see discussion in Lerner 2012, 82–83). The terminus post quem is supported by a set of coins in situ, the youngest amongst which were pieces of Eukratides (Bernard 1985a, 97; Holt 2012a, 102–103). Although the date of 145 BCE has become conventional, the consensus is not absolute and has been disputed by various scholars who argue for the city’s demise in the first century BCE, rather than the mid-second century BCE (e. g. Narain 1987, 277–282; Lerner 2010, 69–72; 2011, 103–147; 2012, 83–84). A later date is supported by archaeological evidence of life after 145 BCE, when the city was shortly reoccupied after the first wave of destructions (see recent discussion in Martinez-Sève 2018a; 2020b; 2020a). The architectural phases mentioned here are based on general trends discernible in the eight ceramic periods of 20–25 years each that were established in 1978 and which have been grouped in three phases by Lyonnet 1998 (I–III, IV–VI, and VII–VIII, here indicated as phase 1, 2–3, and 4, respectively), with subsequent revisions on the associated dates (Lerner 2003–2004; Lerner 2010; Lyonnet 2012, 147–155; Lecuyot and Martinez-Sève 2013; Lyonnet 2013; Martinez-Sève 2015). Lerner 2003–2004, 399–400.

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post-palatial period, around the middle of the second century BCE. This phase roughly corresponds to migrations of pastoralist groups into Baktria, although recent scholarship increasingly challenges the common trope that ‘nomadic incursions’ were the sole cause of Ai Khanum’s destruction.37 The layered history of Ai Khanum draws attention to the fact that different buildings derive from different phases of the city’s existence; our modern image of Ai Khanum in its entirety only stems from the third phase, when the last architectural innovations took place. Table 3.1 with rough chronology of Ai Khanum (after Lyonnet and Martinez-Sève)38 Phase

Ceramic Associated date (BCE) period 1) Foundation and I–III First quarter of the third first buildings century onward (c. 305–280 until c. 206) 2) Architectural IV First third of the second building procentury (c. 206 – after 170) gramme V–VI 3) Architectural building programme: (re) constructions and renovations 4) Destruction and VII–VIII post-palatial reoccupation

Second quarter of the second century (after 170 – c. 145) Middle of the second century (c. 145 BCE – some decades after), possibly stretching into the first century BCE

Associated structures Ramparts, main street, main sanctuary, mausoleum of Kineas Palace, propylaia, large private houses, mausoleum inscription by Klearchos, ceramic innovations (e. g. ‘Megarian’ bowls) Theatre, gymnasium, and reconstructions of the palace, propylaia, main sanctuary, and ramparts Domestic reoccupations of the palace district (incl. propylaia, mausoleum of Kineas, gymnasium, and main sanctuary), of the theatre, and of the upper city

The general layout of Ai Khanum (Fig. 3.1) is conventionally divided into a sparsely occupied upper city on the acropolis (la ville haute) and an urban lower city on the river sides (la ville basse). Neither one conformed to a Hippodamian grid plan with regular streets and city blocks, often used for Greek city foundations.39 The hill of the upper city, the highest part of town, rose high above the lower plain and formed a remarkable 37 38 39

See fn. 34. This table is an attempt to schematize the chronology of Ai Khanum and is based on Lyonnet 2012; Lecuyot and Martinez-Sève 2013; Lyonnet 2013; Martinez-Sève 2018a; 2020b. We should be cautious to attach cultural meaning to either absence or presence of ‘Greek’ grid-planning of a city (Mairs 2009). Ball 2000, 304 reminds us that town planning according to a grid system was already practiced in the Indo-Iranian satrapies under the Achaemenids, and that “to assume such town plans in the East to be evidence of western influence is an oversimplification.”

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natural defence. Field survey here revealed the remains of humble dwellings, a cultic open-air podium, as well as a fortified citadel on the far south-eastern corner of the plateau.40 Most of DAFA’s efforts focused on the lower city which had developed over time in a densely built urban space with monumental architecture. The lower plain was cut across by a straight grand street of 1.5 km. long that ran from the main gate in the north to the river cliffs of the Kokcha in the south. In phase three, Ai Khanum’s last architectural phase, the main street brought visitors to a grand theatre, a monumental gateway (propylaia), a main sanctuary, a large residential building, and an arsenal, before heading further south to an area of houses and smaller habitations. Off the principal road was a large urban district that dominated the city centre and was accessed through the propylaia. The gateway and an adjacent staircase navigated the visitor from the main road to a lower-level promenade which routed along two intramural mausolea to a colossal palatial complex.41 Possibly part of this palatial district was the area north of the promenade, where a grand gymnasium, a pool enclosure, and a fountain were built parallel to the western fortifications along the river cliffs of the Panj. In addition to the main street, a secondary north-south road ran along the western ramparts which connected the city centre to two other districts: a wide unbuilt open space north of the gymnasium and an extensive residential quarter south of the palatial complex.42 One large mansion has been excavated here. Another large house stood 150 m. beyond the northern city walls, a short distance away from an extramural temple, while more modest habitations were situated on the wider plain of Ai Khanum, as well as in the north-eastern part of the upper city and against the south-western slope of the acropolis. In the later post-palatial period, the area near the mausoleum south of the promenade and sections of the sanctuary and the gymnasium were shortly reoccupied with small dwellings as well. Places for the common dead were allocated on the other side of the upper city, in a necropolis edged away from the city proper; only one tomb has been archaeologically explored here. The theatre Upon entering Ai Khanum from the north gate, a visitor to the city of Eukratides in the second-century BCE would first encounter the grand theatre on their left, built against the northern slope of the acropolis. The excavations revealed its impressive structure with a height of 15 and a diameter of 30 m., large enough to accommodate over 6,000 spectators – a number more than actually inhabited the city.43 Bearing a capacity

40 41 42 43

Bernard 1976a, 307; Bernard et al. 1980, 457; Leriche 1986, 62–63. Bernard et al. 1980, 7–8. For hypotheses on the uses and functions of such open spaces, including the possibility of a palace garden as at Pasargadai, see Mairs 2014a, 64–65. Bernard 1976a, 314; 1978, 432–433.

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greater than that of the theatre of Babylon (5,000) and slightly less than the theatre at Epidauros (6,200), the theatre at Ai Khanum likely served people from regions far beyond its immediate locality.44 A single coin of Diodotos I or II unearthed in the slope provided a terminus post quem of 240 BCE, but ceramic fragments in the embankment indicated that the actual construction and use of the theatre took place much later, in the second quarter of the second century BCE – shortly before Ai Khanum’s first wave of destruction.45 Together with the gymnasium and the intramural mausoleum (the shrine of Kineas), the theatre is most commonly cited as emblematic of the Greek culture and lifestyle. Its presence at Ai Khanum is therefore often considered as evidence that the city and its inhabitants were Greek pur sang.46 Indeed, many aspects of the building, above all the form and the institution itself, strike as intimately familiar on a par with Classical theatres of the Mediterranean. The theatre of Ai Khanum was likewise a dependant structure built on the natural slope of the acropolis and consisting of typical stepped tiers of seats that overlooked the semi-circular orchestra, the proskenion, and the skene against the spectacular backdrop of the Panj river and the surrounding landscape. That theatrical plays were indeed performed here, or at least that the commissioning ruler or euergetist was aware of such cultural activities, is suggested by a water spout of the fountain near the gymnasium in the shape of a comic theatre mask and the imprinted remains of a Greek text on parchment discovered in the palace treasury, written in iambic trimeter – a meter most commonly used for Greek theatre plays.47 The theatre at Ai Khanum was not only an auditorium for dramatic spectacle and performance but may also have served the needs for other gatherings or assemblies of cultic or political nature, as in the case of Babylon.48 Where Greek theatres in the Classical and Hellenistic periods were conventionally constructed in stone, the theatre of Ai Khanum was entirely built from mudbrick – comparable to the theatre at Babylon and Seleukeia on the Tigris, but otherwise quite unconventional.49 Although this could be due to pragmatism  – there was no stone 44 45 46 47

48 49

Bernard 1978, 432. Bernard 1978, 437; Francfort et al. 2014, 64. Karttunen 1997, 278; Holt 1999, 44; Martinez-Sève 2012, 381. Cf. Traina 2005, 2, who rightly comments that ‘Greek cities’ cannot be treated as a homogeneous category. For the theatrical mask, see: Bernard 1976a, 313. For the fragmented theatre play in iambic trimeter, see: Rapin et al. 1987, 249–259; Schmitt 1990, 41–51; Rougemont 2012a, no. 132. It should be kept in mind that these finds are often interpreted to fit a theatre narrative. As such, they are often discussed in isolation from their actual find-context, as well as their chronology. The water spout may have had nothing to do with the theatre, while the iambic text in the treasury storeroom – deep in the palatial labyrinth – may not have been accessible to the ordinary citizen or even used. Moreover, the iambic text is most probably of an earlier date than the theatre (Rapin et al. 1987), which was added to Ai Khanum’s urban landscape only in the city’s last architectural stage. Van der Spek 2001; Messina 2012a, 25–26; Ristvet 2014; see further Chapter 7. Bernard 1976a, 315; Francfort et al. 2014, 65. The theatre at Babylon used mudbrick alongside baked brick, with an additional substructure of natural rock; limestone was available in the region – the

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quarry in the direct vicinity – there were other constructions at Ai Khanum where stone was used, for instance for the columns in the palace complex. The theatre also had a strict right-angled ground plan and three spacious box seats that stood out and were symmetrically arranged halfway up the koilon on its east, south, and west sides, which provided a great view of the orchestra from a height of 6 m. above it. Visually and socially demarcating features, these loges probably served as honorary seats for privileged persons in society.50 Both the perpendicular design of the theatre and the positioning of the loges midway the seated area, rather than at the front rows on the lowest level of the koilon, are features that rarely occur in contemporaneous theatres in the Mediterranean. The gymnasium On the other side of town, on the street along the western ramparts at the Panj, stood the gymnasium of Ai Khanum. The building was identified as such because of a Greek inscription in situ, a dedication to Hermes and Herakles by two brothers, Straton and Triballos, carved on the base of a limestone bust of a bearded man.51 According to Pausanias, writing in the second century CE, Hermes and Herakles were the patron deities of the gymnasium, which was interpreted to confirm the Greekness of the structure that the excavators were hoping to find.52 The building has received much attention – though only its final phase in which it functioned as a gymnasium has made it prominent. The gymnasium as such appeared in Ai Khanum’s urban landscape during the second quarter of the second century BCE, following the demolition and rebuilding of an older structure.53 The design and function of this preceding structure was different, possibly serving domestic purposes as indicated by the presence of bathrooms and kitchens.54 In its last stage as a gymnasium, the building had an unusually symmetrical ground plan with rigid proportionate dimensions, featuring equally sized rooms and a rectangular exedra on the axis of each of its four sides (Fig. 3.2). Like the theatre, it was built on an excessively grand scale, its northern court alone measuring around 100 m. on each side. The main construction material used was likewise mudbrick instead of stone. Another feature that set Ai Khanum’s gymnasium apart from its Mediterranean counterparts was an uninterrupted circumambulatory corridor around the central courtyard, instead of a

50 51 52 53 54

choice to construct the theatre from mudbrick instead of stone may therefore have been socially significant. For an instructive comparison between the theatres at Ai Khanum, Babylon, and Seleukeia, see Messina 2012a. Bernard 1978, 431–432, 435–436. Bernard 1967b, 318–319; 1968, 276; Rougemont 2012a, no. 98b: Τριβαλλὸς καὶ Στράτων Στράτωνος Ἑρμῆι, Ἡρακλεῖ. Paus. 4.32.1. Veuve 1987, 103. The construction of the gymnasium was left unfinished when Ai Khanum experienced its first wave of destruction. Bernard 1978, 429; Veuve 1987, 43–58, 107–108; Lecuyot 2013, 198.

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typical peristyle.55 This peripheral corridor – a distinctive feature also seen elsewhere in the city – channelled movement in the building by providing only three access points to the central courtyard. In doing so, it not only isolated units in the building but also allowed visitors to bypass clusters of rooms while giving them a sense of preferred direction of movement. Small finds such as limestone sundials and strigil fragments to scrape off sweat and oil from the skin indicate that intellectual and athletic activities associated with conventional gymnasia had taken place here.56 The premises did not provide bathing or washing facilities as would be expected, though Mairs hypothesized spatial and functional connections between the building and the pool enclosure and the fountain on its south and north, respectively.57

Fig. 3.2. Plan of the northern part of the gymnasium at Ai Khanum (J.-C. Liger in Bernard 2012) © Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan, courtesy of Philippe Marquis 55 56 57

Bernard 1976a, 297; Veuve 1987, 33. The exedrai in the north, east, and south sides, however, did have singular columns as indicated by post holes (Bernard 1976a, 293–296; Fig. 3.3). The northern rectangular exedra was adorned with a row of six columns, while the other exedra had two columns. Veuve 1987, 106. Mairs 2014a, 96–97. However, the pool enclosure did not face the gymnasium, but was oriented along the palatial complex.

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Mausolea Southeast of the gymnasium, on either side of the promenade that led from the propylaia to the palatial complex, were two prominent intramural tomb-shrines, both with crypts, burials, and most probably a cult. The larger and most recent one, north of the promenade, was termed by Bernard as the hérôon au caveau de pierre: it contained a family tomb of multiple burials within a semi-circular vault made of the stone – one of the few occasions in which stone was used for construction. Based on ceramic analyses, the two-phased construction of the stone vault mausoleum was dated to the first half of the third century BCE (ceramic periods II–III) and was therefore one of the earliest buildings in town.58 Measuring 30 by 20  m., the structure had monumental dimensions, with a peristyle colonnade and a ground plan that consisted of a distyle-in-antis antechamber leading to two consecutive inner chambers. From there, a central staircase led to the vault underneath, where the remains of an altar were found at the bottom – a clear hint of cultic activity.59 Built with a peristyle and raised on a high podium that echoed religious architecture in Babylonia, the mausoleum has been compared to Greek temples as well as funerary monuments Macedonia and Mesopotamia.60 The crypts were looted, but two sarcophagi and the bone remains of five people have been recovered, amongst whom women and children.61 The distinguished location of this funerary structure inside the city walls as well its architectural form indeed seem to indicate a form of heroization; although their identities remain unknown due to the lack of inscriptions, paintings, or sculptures, scholars suggested they were honoured members of a prominent, perhaps a ruling family, entombed over several generations.62 Despite its monumentality, the stone vault mausoleum has not received as much attention as its smaller but slightly older counterpart, located some 150 m. south of it: the so-called hérôon de Kinéas on the other side of the promenade en route to the palatial complex. The excavators discovered that the mausoleum of Kineas was among the earliest structures of the city, built around the same time as the main sanctuary in the first quarter of the third century BCE. 63 This mausoleum too contained multiple burials deposited over several generations in a crypt below the shrine proper, housing two stone sarcophagi and the bone remains of four buried individuals. The cultic sig58 59 60 61 62

63

Bernard 1975, 188; Bernard et al. 1976, 38. Bernard 1975, 182, Fig. 10, 189; Bernard et al. 1976, 39. For a Greek temple design, see Bernard 1973, 97. For Macedonian comparanda, see Bernard 1975, 188; Bernard et al. 1976, 38–39. For comparison with Mesopotamian religious monuments, see Lerner 2003–2004, 384–386. Bernard et al. 1976, 34–35. Canepa 2010a, 8–9; Mairs 2014b, 112; but cf. Francfort and Liger in Bernard et al. 1976, 39 who rejected the idea of a royal burial, finding it more likely that the occupants (“Greeks or Hellenized Baktrians”) received the large intramural edifice for heroic achievements, because Baktria had not yet claimed independence from Seleukid rule (see fn. 5 for discussion). Lerner 2003, 395.

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nificance of the oldest sarcophagus is indicated by a hole in the lid for libations which could be poured in from the main chamber above it.64 The baked bricks used for the construction of the shrine had a bilingual stamp with a Greek monogram, also found on Seleukid coins from Ai Khanum, next to a possibly Aramaic mark – interpreted by Lerner as evidence that the construction workers and their supervisors used written Aramaic alongside the Greek language.65 During four architectural stages of reconstruction and modification, the mausoleum of Kineas largely retained its original ground plan, similar to the stone vault mausoleum: it was oriented towards the east and raised on a high three-stepped podium, while its inner plan was marked by a distyle-in-antis antechamber preceding a slightly wider main chamber. Some innovations were identified: Stage II of the shrine, concurrent with the city-wide architectural program at the beginning of the second century BCE, saw the expansion of the temenos with a terrace. Later in Stage III, long niches in the mausoleum’s northern and western outer walls were added, which may have allowed passers-by on their way to the palace to place votive offerings without needing to enter the shrine proper.66 It was the discovery of a Greek inscription that gave this mausoleum its fame as one of the pillars of Ai Khanum’s supposed Hellenism. The inscription not only identified the mausoleum’s most prominent occupant but also included references to the Greek world. It consisted of two texts next to each other, engraved on the base of a limestone stele unearthed in the antechamber: 1

ἀνδρῶν τοι σοφὰ ταῦτα παλαιοτέρων ἀνάκει[τα]ι ῥήματα ἀριγνώτων Πυθοὶ ἐν ἠγαθέαι· ἔνθεν ταῦτ[α] Κλέαρχος ἐπιφραδέως ἀναγράψας εἵσατο τηλαυγῆ Κινέου ἐν τεμένει. These wise sayings of earlier men, the words of well-known men, are enshrined in the holy Pytho [at Delphi]. There Klearchos copied them faithfully, and set them up here in the sanctuary of Kineas, blazing from afar.

1

5

64 65 66

παῖς ὢν κόσμιος γίνου, ἡβῶν ἐγκρατής, μέσος δίκαιος , πρεσβύτης εὔβουλος, τελευτῶν ἄλυπος.

Bernard 1973, 96–99. Lerner 2020, 480. See further Bernard 1973, 9–10; Narain 1987, 278–280; Lerner 2003–2004, 384. Bernard 1973, 92; Mairs 2007, 121.

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As a child, be well-behaved. As a youth, be self-controlled. As an adult, be just. As an elder, be wise. As one dying, be without pain.67

The five wise sayings of the second text were identified as verses of the Delphic maxims, three of which (though not the same ones as at Ai Khanum) were inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi – the place of the oracle of Apollo (the Pythia); the full list of maxims is known from a compilation by Stobaios in the fifth century CE.68 The identity of Kineas, mentioned in the first text, and his exact relation to Ai Khanum can only be guessed at, though it is commonly assumed that he was the founding hero, one of the first inhabitants or perhaps a general under a Seleukid king, who received burial and veneration at a distinguished location within the city walls – a common practice in Greek colonial foundations.69 The identity of the other man in the text, Klearchos who copied the Delphic maxims and brought them to Ai Khanum, remains unknown, although scholars often erroneously associate him with Klearchos of Soli, an earlier peripatetic philosopher of the fourth century BCE.70 The date of the inscription is heavily contested and impossible to secure with precision, since the stele was not found in situ. Removed from its original location, one that probably granted it more visibility, the stone was discovered with the inscribed face turned to the wall, as it was reused as a base for a wooden post during Stage IV – the building’s most recent form around the middle of the second century BCE.71 Palaeographical analyses suggests that the inscription was set up in the course of the third century BCE, though it remains unclear and debatable whether this was contemporaneous with or sometime after the first construction of the mausoleum building.72 The later removal of the inscribed stele to its unmemorable find spot in situ must have taken place somewhere before Stage IV, in Stage III or in Stage II (around the beginning of

67 68 69 70

71 72

Robert 1973, 211, 213; Rougemont 2012a, nos. 97a, 97b; transl. Holt 1999, 175. Stob. Ecl. 3.1.173 (Wachsmut and Hense 1958). Rougemont 2012a, 202 with bibliography; see further discussion in Mairs 2014b. Robert 1968, 443–454, with broad scholarly resonance, had proposed this must have been Klearchos of Soli, a pupil of Aristotle who was interested in Iranian and Indian philosophy. However, later scholarship rejected his hypothesis (e. g. Lerner 2003, 393–394), with most recent research now confirming that such identification is indeed impossible since the city did not exist yet (Martinez-Sève 2020b, 360). Bernard 1973, 96. The contested date of the inscription fluctuates between a high date of c. 300–275 BCE concurrent with the foundation of the city (Robert 1968, 427; Bernard 1973, 213; Rougemont 2012a, 207; Martinez-Sève 2020b, 359), and a low date of c. 250/260–220 BCE which postdates Ai Khanum’s first urban developments and the erection of the mausoleum building (c. 250 BCE: Mairs 2014b, 115; 260–220 BCE: Lerner 2003–2004, 389).

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the second century BCE) which indicates that Kineas and the Delphic maxims had lost their significance and sacrality in the city.73 The palatial complex The promenade off the main road led to the heart of the central district: the palatial complex. This colossal ensemble of buildings, covering a surface of 75,000 m2, represented Ai Khanum’s impressive seat of power. The ground plan of the megacomplex has been compared to Achaemenid palatial architecture in Mesopotamia and Iran for its markedly symmetrical organization of space, which is echoed in the majority of public buildings elsewhere in the city (Fig. 3.3).74 Similarly, as in Mesopotamian and Iranian palaces, the palatial complex at Ai Khanum may have had garden areas (paradeisoi) perhaps on the open spaces adjacent to the north and the west of palace, or on the courtyards within its enclosure.75 Approaching the complex via the promenade, visitors would enter the palace from the north and would be welcomed by a grandiose peristyle courtyard which had to be crossed to arrive at the actual entrance of the palace: an impressive hypostyle hall (termed as an iwan, Fig. 3.3: b). The monumentality of this hall was manifested in the ‘forest of columns’: 18 columns organized in 3 rows of 6 that towered over the subordinate visitor and so visually created an atmosphere of verticality.76 On the other side of the hypostyle hall, a similar-sized hall gave further entrance to a narrow corridor, along which were square units of administrative rooms of various functions, two residential quarters with pebble mosaic-tiled bathrooms, a large inner courtyard with a peripteral colonnade, and a storage unit with elongated rooms that has been identified as the palace treasury. The administrative chambers (Fig. 3.3:  c) probably served as formal and ceremonial reception halls, waiting areas, court rooms, council rooms, and offices, though some of these functions may also have been fulfilled by the open space of the grand court, the hypostyle hall, and the hall directly south to it.77 The organization of the compound was such that it constricted administrative rooms within their own sector, insulating the innermost chambers of the palace: the residential units and the treasury. This was due to a modular network of long and narrow peripheral corridors around and between spatial units of the palace, which carefully regulated movement through and between different sections of the complex. The corridors thereby created and isolated zones of activity, while controlling the flow of movement and access with distinct entry points and pathways. Such modular organization was also maintained in other constructions, notably in Ai Khanum’s gymnasium and domestic architecture. 73 74 75 76 77

Lerner 2003, 389. Bernard 1976b, 252–257. Nielsen 1994, 127–128; Farrar 2016, 112–113. For the function of such columned halls, see Gopnik 2010, 203–205. Mairs 2014a, 69–72 provides a spatial analysis of the different sections of the palace and their possible function; see also Nielsen 1994, 124–128.

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Fig. 3.3. Plan of the palatial complex at Ai Khanum (J.-C. Liger in Bernard 2012) © Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan, courtesy of Philippe Marquis

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The palace treasury (Fig. 3.3: e) was added to the complex in the last architectural building phase of the city. This unit was built west of the grand courtyard, with restricted access; a long corridor with a singular point of entry lay between the court and the treasury, while on its south, the treasury was separated from the western residential unit by a smaller yet monumental peristyle inner courtyard, decorated with Doric columns (the cour dorique, Fig. 3.3:  d). The storage unit itself consisted of narrow elongated rooms organized around a plain courtyard – an architectural tradition seen elsewhere in Central Asia, such as at Old Nisa, with the courtyard and a single isolating corridor functioning as the central connector between the individual chambers.78 The DAFA uncovered finds of raw natural materials, jewellery, ornaments, vessels, and other valuables in the depository of the treasury.79 Large ceramic storage vessels (termed as khums) with inscribed Greek texts also record the presence of incense, olive oil, honey, silver drachms and Indian karshapana coins that were amongst the goods in storage.80 These administrational inscriptions, written in Greek, inform us not only about the contents of the storage vessels but also about their financial transaction, the names of treasury personnel, and the administrational apparatus they followed which Mairs analysed as largely ‘business as usual’ (i. e. as under the pre-Hellenistic administration).81 Amongst the treasury staff were individuals with Greek and Iranian names, some of which were markedly local, such as Oxeboakes and Oxebazes  – named after the ancient Oxus river.82 An ostracon with Aramaic writings, discovered by the excavators in the main sanctuary, likewise recorded some Iranian proper names (as well as the continued use of Aramaic).83 One of the chambers in the storage unit may have functioned as a library, as suggested by the fragmental remains of two literary manuscripts, written in Greek: a philosophical text on papyrus in the format of a dialogue and a dramaturgical text on parchment written in iambic trimeter.84 Domestic architecture The residential quarters in the palatial complex were built and structured largely in the same manner as the other contemporaneous grand mansions that the French archaeologists excavated elsewhere in the city; one in the south-western urban district (a residential zone with more habitations), one on the main street, and one outside the

78 79 80 81 82 83 84

Rapin and Khasanov 2013, 55. See further Chapter 5. Rapin 1992a; 1996. Rapin and Grenet 1983, 319–371; Rougemont 2012a, nos. 99–109, 117–120, 149. Mairs 2014a, 43–46; 2016, passim. Rapin and Grenet 1983, 373–381; Rougemont 2012a, nos. 101, 102; see further discussion in Mairs 2014a, 46–52; and now Morris 2020b, 408–410. Bernard 1972, 631–632. Rapin et al. 1987; Rougemont 2012a, nos. 131–132.

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northern city walls.85 According to the archaeological reports, the former two mansions were added to Ai Khanum’s urban landscape in the early second century BCE (phase two), while the extramural house dated to the second quarter of the second century BCE (phase three), during the reign of Eukratides  – a relatively peaceful period to build such a structure beyond the protection of the city walls.86 Constructed from local mudbrick and rectangular in ground plan, these large houses were all built with a compartmentalized ground plan similar to the residential units of the palace, characterized by an open air courtyard oriented towards the north that preceded the living units of the house, separated by a central two-columned porch in between (Fig. 3.4).87 The living units behind the porch included bathrooms and kitchens and were arranged in a modular structure comparable to that in the palatial complex, with long peripheral corridors that isolated different rooms of activity while regulating access and movement within the mansion. The design and layout of these stately houses of Ai Khanum have been archaeologically recognized as a mixture of Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Central Asian elements, though strikingly non-Greek. French archaeologists interpreted such compartmentalizing design to reflect the more hierarchical and segregated structure of the Baktrian household, which they contrasted with familiar Greek houses such as at Olynthus where the central courtyard connected rather than separated space by providing equal access to the different rooms around the court.88 The DAFA also discovered other, more modest forms of domestic architecture in the southern urban district, on the plain of Ai Khanum, in the deeper layers of the gymnasium, on and along the acropolis, and in two post-palatial domestic quarters around the main sanctuary and between the mausoleum of Kineas and the palace. Aerial photography, geophysical prospection, and partial excavations revealed that these habitations had much smaller proportions and did not seem to have followed a structured ground plan. Modest domestic structures both preceded and outlasted the stately residences of Ai Khanum.89

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Only one large house in the south-eastern residential district has been excavated but aerial photography has shown that this quarter contained five or six roads along which residential structures were visible (Lecuyot 2013, 13). Aerial photography and geophysical prospection additionally revealed that the large house outside the city walls was not the only domestic structure on the northern plain: the plain was settled by smaller habitations since the Bronze Age (Francfort 2013, 157). Lecuyot 2013, 131–132; Lecuyot and Martinez-Sève 2013, 211. Bernard 1976a, 289–293; Lecuyot 2013, 193–197, Fig. 73. Bernard 2009, 41–43; Lecuyot 2013, 196–197; 2021 but cf. Mairs 2014a, 84. The ‘Greek’ aspect of Ai Khanum’s housing was limited to architectural decorations (Lecuyot and Martinez-Sève 2013, 209). Lecuyot 2013, 197–199, 211; see now also Martinez-Sève 2018a.

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Fig. 3.4. Plan of the large house in the southern district at Ai Khanum (J.-C. Liger in Bernard 2012) © Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan, courtesy of Philippe Marquis

Religious structures Apart from the two mausolea and the cult for Hermes and Herakles (as gleaned from the gymnasium inscription), religious life at Ai Khanum was facilitated by three structures, located in different places: an extramural temple north of the city gates, the main sanctuary aligned to the main street, and a podium without edifice on the acropolis. Built from local mudbrick, with square ground plans, massively thick walls, and raised on high stepped platforms, these three structures attracted considerable scholarly attention due to their markedly non-Greek appearance. Their commonalities with Mesopotamian and Iranian temple architecture were regarded as most surprising and problematic to interpret, considering the Greek cultural traditions elsewhere in the city.90

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E. g. Rapin 1990, 341; Bernard 2012, 49.

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The stepped podium was discovered on the south-western corner of the upper city, but received minimal publication in the archaeological reports.91 It was set within a square courtyard but seemed to have stood independently without an edifice. The location and direction of the podium, facing the rising sun and the surrounding mountains, combined with the open structure itself, were associated with an open-air cult, with the high stepped tiers of the podium serving as a platform for performing cultic rites and sacrifices.92 The design and orientation of the podium likely followed those of high open-air sanctuaries that were common across Central Asia and the Iranian plateau, long before the Hellenistic period.93 Comparisons have been made to several cultic podium structures of rammed earth (pakhsa) discovered at Kok Tepe and Sangir Tepe in Sogdiana and Pashmak Tepe in Baktria, dated to the Achaemenid period, which offer a regional, pre-Hellenistic context for the podium on the acropolis.94 The other religious structures at Ai Khanum have been labelled as Mesopotamian, rather than Iranian in style, and were similarly located on prominent, highly visible places: the intramural main temple in the central district and an extramural temple just outside the northern ramparts of the city. The latter one was a monumental structure that stood some 100 m. from the city, welcoming the travelling visitor who approached Ai Khanum from the north. Set on a three-stepped platform that elevated the structure by 1.8 m., the extramural temple had a rectangular and strictly symmetrical ground plan that measured around 35 by 20 m., with thick exterior walls decorated with niches.95 The edifice was oriented to the north and was entered by way of a central staircase which cut through the stepped tiers of the platform. The internal organization of the excavated temple (i. e. in its most recent stage) featured a broad and large antechamber that opened up to a central tripartite vestibule with side chambers, and two additional wings accessible from the western and eastern side of the antechamber.96 The three central main chambers were elevated in level and accessible by staircases from the antechamber. This layout was a monumental renovation of an older edifice, one that was similarly organized with a tripartite vestibule but smaller and simpler in design, without the additional side chambers.97 The absence of artefacts and usual lack of inscriptions leave us guessing at the recipient of this temple’s cult, but the continued basic tripartite layout suggest that the two consecutive temples probably housed a divine triad. 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

Mainly in Bernard 1976a, 306–307 with further discussion in Bernard 1990, 54; Boyce and Grenet 1991 based on hitherto unpublished material. Boyce and Grenet 1991a, 181–182. Bernard 1990; Boyce and Grenet 1991, 182–183; see also Shenkar 2007. Classical authors such as Herodotos (1.1311–132) and Strabo (15.3.15) further mention the practice of animal sacrifices on high open-air sanctuaries by the Persians, Medes, and other Iranian peoples. Boyce and Grenet 1991, 182; Rapin and Khasanov 2013, 48–52; Mairs 2014a, 88; Wu 2021, 608. Bernard 1974, 288–289; 1976a, 303; 1990, 53. The niches were slightly different from those in the outer wall of the main temple in the central district because they were not indented. See the ground plan in Francfort et al. 2014, 60. Bernard 1976a, 304.

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The main religious site at Ai Khanum was the sanctuary in the central district: a broad temenos consisting of a public courtyard with a range of smaller structures at its periphery, organized around the inner core of the sanctuary: the main temple. This monumental temple with massively thick walls of local mudbrick was not only one of the oldest structures of the city but also received continuous maintenance: five architectural phases were identified by the excavators, dating from the first quarter of the third century BCE to roughly the first century BCE – when the building was destroyed by a fire.98 The oldest temple was completely levelled and reconstructed somewhere in the first half of the third century BCE, perhaps on commission by Diodotos, whose coins were found in this layer.99 Archaeologically coined as the temple with indented niches (le temple à niches indentées or le temple à redans in earlier publications), this reconstructed shrine retained the same form but with some repairs and modifications, including an elaboration of the inner space and the addition of distinctive triple-indented niches in the exterior walls – a decorative feature familiar in Mesopotamian religious architecture (Fig. 3.5). It further had white-washed walls, was raised on a tiered platform, and had an internal organization of a broad antechamber preceding the main vestibule, flanked by two small side chapels (Fig. 3.5). These features have most often been compared to religious architecture in more ancient and contemporaneous (Hellenistic) Mesopotamia – most notably the temples of Zeus and Artemis at Doura Europos and the temple of Assur in Babylonia – though they also show distinct similarities to sacred architecture in Hellenistic Baktria, particularly the temple at Dilbarjin.100 Like the podium on the acropolis, the temple and the wider sanctuary were oriented to the east and thus faced the rising sun. In the last phase of the city, the post-palatial period, the temple suffered destructions and desecration, turning into a storeroom before the edifice and the wider sanctuary were ravaged by a fire.101

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See Bernard 1971, 414–431; and more recently Martinez-Sève 2010a for a comprehensive overview of the temple’s stratigraphy and architectural features. 99 Martinez-Sève 2010a, 202. 100 Bernard 1976b, 269–272; Kruglikova 1977, 408–409; Downey 1988, 65–67; Bernard 1990, 151–153; Rapin 1992b, 111–120. For instructive discussion of these analogies as part of the Seleukid transformation of sacred space, see Canepa 2013, 340–342; 2015a, 8–13; for the argument that these were part of a Graeco-Baktrian school, see Mairs 2014a, 75–89. 101 Martinez-Sève 2018a, 404–405; 2020a, 105 argues that the fire may have been deliberate, targeted against those buildings associated with Greek domination.

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Fig. 3.5. Plan of the temple with indented niches at Ai Khanum (J.-C. Liger in Bernard 2012) © Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan, courtesy of Philippe Marquis

Several objects found in and around the main temple led to significant debate on the deity and the cult practices. Ivory fittings for cultic furniture, plaster casts, and especially the marble fragments of the foot of a colossal cult statue, all stylistically categorized as Greek, were often connected to the worship of a Greek deity.102 The cult statue was thought to have been acrolithic, with only the extremities made of stone; the discovered foot was sculpted wearing a sandal which was decorated with a winged thunderbolt. The naturalistic style of its execution and the familiar attribute of thunder inspired interpretations pointing to Zeus or a syncretistic form that assimilated the Greek god with an Iranian, Anatolian, and/or a local Baktrian deity, respectively Ahura-Mazda, Mithra, Kybele, or Oxus (Vakhshu).103 Depictions of Zeus were (amongst other gods) 102 103

Bernard 1969, 340; 1970, 327; Francfort 1984, 35–37. For Zeus-Ahura Mazda see: Bernard 1970, 327; for Zeus-Mithra see: Rapin 1992b, 120; Coloru 2009, 277; for Zeus-Oxus see Martinez-Sève 2010b, 13; 2014, 248; 2018b; for Oxus/Vakhshu-Kybele see Francfort 2012. For a consideration of royal patron deities, see Martinez-Sève 2010b. The cult of the local fluvial god Oxus is attested elsewhere at Takht-i Sangin, some 150 kilometres west of Ai Khanum; see Chapter 4.

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also common on the coins of Graeco-Baktrian kings unearthed at Ai Khanum, but it may well be that his imagery served to portray another deity or even multiple male or female deities simultaneously, flexibly rendered by diverse viewers and worshippers. Ultimately, however, the precise identity or identities of the god(s) of Ai Khanum’s main temple remain elusive, considering that our sole evidence is a mere foot. Although the sandaled foot became famed in modern scholarship as evidence for Greek worship at Ai Khanum’s main temple, other objects and structures point to a range of cult practices and therefore open up possibilities of multiple recipients of worship. The temple was part of a wider sanctuary with various differently-sized rooms and a chapel on the north side which also housed a cult statue on a pedestal – only a finger has been found, sculpted in naturalistic style.104 We main entertain the possibility of a ruler cult for a king, possibly Eukratides, who may have received a monumental cult statue in the chapel, and whose family may have been represented in the clay sculptures found in the vestibule of the niched temple.105 At the backside of the temple, vessels for libations turned upside down were buried in a line along the rear wall. They were dated by the excavators to the first until the third phase of the temple, thus indicating that chthonic rites were practiced throughout the majority of the temple’s existence, possibly for a fertility cult as common across Central Asia since the Bronze Age.106 Large stone basins may have served for purification rituals while a large quantity of stone miniature torus-shaped column bases may further indicate some regional cultic practice – similar basins and pedestals have also been unearthed at Takht-i Sangin and Torbulok in Baktria.107 Furthermore, ivory and ceramic figurines of animals, nude females (perhaps fertility goddesses), and horsemen in Asiatic and Persian style, as well as locally produced hemispherical boxes made of schist (pyxides) were found throughout the sanctuary; a mudbrick altar was unearthed at the entrance of the temple; clay anthropomorphic sculptures and plaster casts were found in the vestibule of the temple, possibly representations of royals or deities receiving worship; and a gold-plated silver disk depicting the Anatolian goddess Kybele in a chariot drawn by a lion was found in one of the inner side chapels.108 These finds have led scholars to hypothesize a female deity as the recipients of worship in the sanctuary – Kybele, Anahita, or Oxus itself – although, again, this does not exclude the simultaneous worship of other deities altogether.109 104 Martinez-Sève 2018a, 383. Martinez-Sève will have forthcoming publications on the sanctuary and its chapels. 105 For the cult statue in the chapel, see Martinez-Sève 2018a, 383–384. Abdullaev 2017, 221 further considers the anthropomorphic sculptures in the vestibule to have been representations of royals or nobles which (if the former) would imply a ruler cult at the main temple. 106 Bernard 1970, 327–330; 1971, 427; Francfort 2012, 116–119. 107 Francfort 2012, 110–112; Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 177–179; Lindström 2014, 121; 2017, 170–171. 108 Francfort 1984, 14–29, 39–47, 81–84, 93–104. Similar pyxides have also been excavated at Torbulok in Tadzhikistan. For discussion on the sculptures within the framework of Greek sculptural traditions in Central Asia, see Abdullaev 2017, 221–224. 109 Francfort 2012; cf. Martinez-Sève 2018b, 284–289.

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3.3 Review Ai Khanum attracted massive fascination and interest as it entered modern historical narrative as a typical Greek city in ancient Afghanistan, obtaining the classical status of an outpost of Hellenism in the East. A closer look at its urban features immediately reveals that the situation was more layered and complex. By the mid-second century BCE, public institutions that are recognized as typically Greek, notably the theatre, gymnasium, and the mausoleum of Kineas, existed alongside urban structures with Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Baktrian architectural antecedents, such as the palatial complex, the large houses, and the three religious structures. Not only their coexistence in the same late urban landscape has been perceived and presented as culturally contradictory, but the buildings themselves also incorporated various cultural elements within the same architectural structure. Persepolitan flat torus column bases were combined with Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian capitals that decorated the columns of Ai Khanum’s peristyle courtyards, while the flat roofs of the buildings were embellished with terracotta antefixes in different styles and shapes. Artefacts in styles recognized as Greek (such as the foot of the cult statue), many of which were locally made, were unearthed alongside objects with styles interpreted as West Asian and Central Asian (such as the Kybele medallion and the smaller figurines) in the most important structure of the city: the main sanctuary. Most distinctive across the city’s public and private buildings are those features recognized as Central Asian, if not Baktrian: the strictly symmetrical ground plans, the peripheral corridors for the inner organization of space and regulation of access and movement, and the construction material of local mudbricks, rammed earth, and clay, with only limited use of stone. Moreover, the monumental buildings at Ai Khanum were not functionally exclusive: evidence of a variety of practices provide glimpses in the range of activities and constituencies that frequented Ai Khanum’s buildings. The few inscriptions further allow us to touch upon more concrete aspects of the identities of some inhabitants: palace personnel included people with Greek, Iranian, and Baktrian names, while Greek, Aramaic, and later also an unknown (probably local) language were among the written and spoken languages of the population of Ai Khanum. The Delphic maxims further must have exercised some significance, at least for parts of the population in the early stages of the city, while a man named Kineas, and later Hermes and Herakles as guardians of the gymnasium were amongst the recipients of cultic worship. 3.4 Hellenism and Greek identity Ai Khanum is imbued and attributed with geographical and cultural inbetweenness: its material culture has been perceived by modern eyes as a remarkable mixture of architecture and practices that were archaeologically recognized and typologized as Greek,

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Mesopotamian, Iranian, and Central Asian – and therefore distinctly ‘between East and West’.110 From the onset, due to the site’s chronology in the Hellenistic period as well as the presence of markedly Greek cultural elements in the city’s art, architecture, and institutions, the label of Hellenism was quickly applied to Ai Khanum in the burgeoning literature that followed its discovery. Hellenism became an integral concept to explain and comprehend its material culture and the apparent cultural dynamics. Although scholars throughout the decades concur in the conclusion that “hybridity is a quintessential feature of the Hellenistic-Baktrian material assemblage”, explanations of the implications of hybridity often seem to converge into considerations of the preservation of Greek ethnic identity of the inhabitants of the city.111 How have such interpretations of Hellenism at Ai Khanum taken form? Hellenism and urban identity Since little is known of the earlier phases of the city, most scholars have based their understanding of Ai Khanum on its last architectural phase – a short-lived version of the city, isolated in time and space. Especially the addition of the theatre and the gymnasium in this version of the city has been disproportionately emphasized to group Ai Khanum’s urban characteristics in a single homogenous category – that of a Greek polis. Indeed, the question of ‘the identity of Ai Khanum’ (and by extension its inhabitants) is often readily answered by correlating the archaeological material with passages from literary works by later ancient authors such as Dio Chrysostom and Pausanias – Greek writers of the first and second century CE respectively – who referred to characteristics of Greek cities in passing: Οἴεσθε ἀγορᾶς καὶ θεάτρου καὶ γυμνασίων καὶ στοῶν καὶ χρημάτων εἶναί τι ὄφελοϛ τοῖς στασιάζουσιν; οὐ ταῦτά ἐστι τὰ ποιοῦντα πόλιν καλήν, ἀλλὰ σωφροσύνη, φιλία, τὸ πιστεύειν ἀλλήλοις. ὃταν δὲ τὴν βουλὴν ψέγητε, τοὺς προεστῶτας, τοὺς ὲξειλεγμένους, οὐχ αὑτοὺς ψέγητε; Do you imagine there is any advantage in market or theatre or gymnasia or colonnade or wealth for men who are at variance? These are not the things which make a city beautiful, but rather self-control, friendship, mutual trust. But when you find fault with the Council, with the leaders of the government, with the duly elected officials, are you not finding fault with yourselves?112

110 111 112

Most recently, Lecuyot 2021. Citation from Mairs 2014a, 98. The question of hybridity and ethnic identity has been extensively and critically addressed by Mairs, see especially Mairs 2008; 2013b; 2013c; 2014b; 2014a. Dio. Chrys. Or. 48.9, transl. Crosby 1962.

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Στάδια δὲ ἐκ Χαιρωνείας εἴκοσιν ἐς Πανοπέας ἐστὶ πόλιν Φωκέων, εἴγε ὀνομάσαι τις πόλιν καὶ τούτους οἷς γε οὐκ ἀρχεῖα οὐ γυμνάσιόν ἐστιν, οὐ θέατρον οὐκ ἀγορὰν ἔχουσιν, οὐχ ὕδωρ κατερχόμενον ἐς κρήνην, ἀλλὰ ἐν στέγαις κοίλαις κατὰ τὰς καλύβας μάλιστα τὰς ἐν τοῖς ὄρεσιν, ἐνταῦθα οἰκοῦσιν ἐπὶ χαράδρᾳ. From Chaeroneia it is twenty stades to Panopeus, a city of the Phocians, if one can give the name of city to those who possess no government offices, no gymnasium, no theater, no market-place, no water descending to a fountain, but live in bare shelters just like mountain cabins, right on a ravine.113

Members of the literary elite under Roman rule, Dio Chrysostom and Pausanias were part of the ‘Second Sophistic’, devoted to showcasing invigorative sophistication in Classical Greek paideia and enhancing the status and prestige of their families and hometowns by claiming (and constructing) illustrious Greek pasts.114 From such allusions in literary texts, scholars formed a convenient typology of the Greek city throughout antiquity, which accordingly must feature a market (ἀγορά), a theatre (θεάτρον), a gymnasium (γυμνάσιον), colonnades (στοά), a council (βουλή), government offices or archives (αρχεία), and a fountain (κρήνη). The well-known and well-excavated city state of Athens in the Classical period undoubtedly served as an additional model to support such an urban checklist, projected onto towns and city-foundations in the Hellenistic period. Consequently, although they had been erected or completely rebuilt in different phases, Ai Khanum’s theatre, gymnasium, intramural mausolea, and Greek inscriptions have been singled out as key characteristics of the city, in accordance with those familiar forms that fit the classic image of a Greek city.115 Ai Khanum was not a Greek city in Greece but has consciously been portrayed as a Greek colonial city in Baktria – an outpost of Hellenism implanted in Central Asia after Alexander the Great and thus characterized by a strong Greek culture and a strict division between Greek and non-Greek urban features. Intuitively persuasive, such interpretations have been reproduced ever since the first reports that the DAFA brought forward to the wider public. In 1967, after the first promising excavations, Bernard proudly presented Ai Khanum as the first tangible result of the long search for the “oriental Hellas” – “the nucleus of a Central Asian Greece” that Alexander had left behind in 327 BCE.116 Although the ruins of Ai Khanum as well as its actual chronology still had to be explored further, Bernard was confident enough to state that “although certain oriental features are present, it is first and foremost a Greek polis”.117 In 1968, Bernard’s colleague and epigraphist Louis Robert further enlivened the story of Ai Khanum by as113 114 115 116 117

Paus. 10.4.1, transl. Jones 1965. For instructive discussion, see Swain 1996; Whitmarsh 2005; Pretzler 2007. Scholarly works that produce such ‘checklist’ descriptions are numerous, see e. g. Masson 1982, 69; Green 1990, 332–333; Karttunen 1997, 47, 277–278; Frye 2012, 105; Boardman 2015, 84–86. Bernard 1967a, 71; similar phrasing in Bernard 1982, 148; 1997, 97. Bernard 1967a, 77.

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serting Klearchos as its human representative, portrayed as a Greek patriot with a moral mission to spread Hellenic paideia to the Far East; the inscription with Delphic maxims that he set up in the mausoleum of Kineas would accordingly demonstrate that Ai Khanum was founded as a classic Greek colony, upon oracular decision of Delphi – the navel of the Greek world.118 With immediate, broad, and lingering impact, Bernard’s and Robert’s interpretations not only carried specialist authority but also great intellectual appeal, as it underlined the uniformity and conservation of Greek cultural traditions and Greek ethnolinguistic identity that diffused from the Greek homeland across the Hellenistic world, brought by Greek colonists.119 Over the years, some of the original excavators nuanced their view on the Hellenism of Ai Khanum in the light of new scholarly trends in Hellenistic historiography. In 1994, DAFA member Claude Rapin shifted the focus from the city’s traditional Greekness to its cultural hybridity. This entailed a subtle reframing with further interpretational implications: rather than portraying the city along the lines of a Classical Greek polis, Rapin portrayed Ai Khanum as a “pure Graeco-Baktrian town”, characterized by true “syncretism of Greek and Eastern culture”.120 Despite the emphasis on syncretism and mixture, the material culture at Ai Khanum was explained and further articulated as “deeply influenced by Seleukid Western Hellenism.”121 Similar tendencies to emphasize the Western (i. e. Hellenic) component of the apparent hybrid mixture echoed through contemporaneous scholarship, which presented various Eastern cultures in juxtaposition with and on similar categorical footing as Greek culture. Malcolm Colledge analysed patterns of ‘Greek and non-Greek interaction in the art and architecture of the Hellenistic East’, characterizing that of Ai Khanum as a blended variety resulting from the juxtaposition of Greek and Near Eastern elements.122 Despite his assessment of a progressive cultural hybridization of Greek and non-Greek art and architecture across Western Asia, Iran and Central Asia, particularly towards the second century BCE, Colledge expressed great surprise at the presence of Mesopotamian traditions in the religious architecture at Ai Khanum, contemplating the idea of settlers of Mesopotamian origin among its colonists.123 Colledge’s surprise about Mesopotamian cultural elements betrays a conventional understanding of Hellenism in the Hellenistic period, referring to a predominantly Greek culture associated with Greek settlers, with the admitted presence of other cultural elements – mostly associated with the locality rather than from somewhere else. This common understanding is related to the conveniently 118 119

Robert 1968, 441–450; see further critical discussion in Mairs 2014d. See resonance in e. g. Walbank 1981, 61–74; Holt 1999, 44; Sidky 1999, 236; 2000, 131–132; Burstein 2008, 69–70 [1996] 105; Abdullaev 2017, 214; cf. discussion in Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1993, 144–149; Mairs 2014a, 19–25. 120 Rapin 1994, resp. 200, 197. 121 Rapin 1994, 200. 122 Colledge 1987, 156. 123 Colledge 1987, 142, with the explicit question “But why here?”

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ambiguous label ‘Hellenistic’ which, apart from a designation for the historical period, is used to refer to both traditional Greek culture and cultural mixtures with a distinct Greek component. In such manner, Klauss Karttunen argued that the cities in ancient Baktria had been formed by cultural interaction and so resulted in a Hellenistic Mischkultur, yet Ai Khanum – the only monumental one excavated in Baktria – would be a ‘full Greek polis’.124 This reveals a most common interpretive assumption about cultural mixture in Hellenistic Baktria, namely that a Mischkultur actually pertains to the out-ofplace presence of Greek culture in Baktria, rather than actual hybrid culture. Similarly, in a work that aims to retell the story of the ‘lost Greek kingdom of Baktria’, Homayun Sidky stated that “for most of the empire [in Baktria], ‘racial’ co-existence, such as it was, did not lead to a true amalgamation of cultures, a meeting of minds, or a collaboration between Europeans and Asians”.125 More recently in 2014, Martinez-Sève’s first Anglophone publication on Ai Khanum prominently featured an almost classical title: ‘The spatial organization of Ai Khanum, a Greek city in Afghanistan’. While non-Greek aspects are duly discussed in the assessment of the extent of Greek influences in the city, Martinez-Sève returned to Bernard’s original view by stating that “there is no reason to doubt that Ai Khanoum was a genuine Greek polis.”126 In the framework of Greek poleis and abiding by the ‘urban checklist’ of expectations raised by Classical literary sources, the absence of Greek temples, an agora, and a boule becomes conspicuous and cognitively dissonant; scholars have therefore hypothesized that other non-Greek architecture, such as the palace complex and the temples, probably served those Greek needs for a market place, an assembly, and the worship of Greek gods – as apparently evident by the sandaled foot in the temple of indented niches.127 Attempts to nuance the city’s Greekness by addressing non-Greek urban features, involving the notion of hybridity, still often lean into interpretations that accommodate the idea of the persistent Greekness of the city’s inhabitants. Bernard’s initial presentation of Ai Khanum as an outpost of Greekness in the East, “a true cradle of Central Asian Hellenism”, therefore remained rather influential, whether the city is presented as Greek or hybrid.128 From typology to Greek identity Whether implicitly or explicitly, interpretations of Ai Khanum’s urban Greekness frequently extend to assumptions about the ethnic identity of its inhabitants, particularly associating Hellenism at Ai Khanum with Greek identity. Many scholars particularly 124 Karttunen 1997, 47, 277–288. 125 Sidky 2000, 132. 126 Martinez-Sève 2014, 279; see also Martinez-Sève 2013, 59–61. In the meantime, Martinez-Sève changed her view on Hellenism at Ai Khanum (Martinez-Sève 2016; 2020a). 127 Resp. Martinez-Sève 2014, 279; Bernard 1974, 293. 128 Bernard 1994a, 116.

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find it difficult to imagine the presence of a gymnasium and a theatre at Ai Khanum without a sizable Greek population.129 Bernard and Robert viewed the theatre, the gymnasium, and the Delphic maxims, as the “primary institutions for the maintenance and spread of Hellenism” whose existence at Ai Khanum would visibly demonstrate that Greek colonists, like Klearchos, “strove to maintain the integrity of the civilization they had brought with them”, vigorously preserving their identity by continuing the Greek lifestyle language, and cultural practices.130 Their interpretation largely echoed the ‘Vulgate tradition’ based on Kleitarchos, such as Diodoros’ Library of History in the first century BCE, which stated that the Greeks who had been settled by Alexander in Central Asia had “longed for the Greek customs (ἀγωγή) and manner of life (δίαιτα), and were cast away in the most distant part of the kingdom.”131 However, the Greeks in the narrative of Kleitarchos (resp. Diodoros) had rebelled upon hearing of Alexander’s death in 323 BCE, which predates the city of Ai Khanum by at least half a century (for the Delphic maxims), if not two centuries or more (for the theatre and gymnasium).132 In 2012, Bernard further maintained that the grand dimensions of the theatre and the gymnasium reflected the large number of Greeks in the wider region, stating that “in proportion to the native population, (…) the Greek settlers in the entire Graeco-Baktrian kingdom must have been more numerous than the British were in India, but certainly less numerous than the French in Algeria.”133 Reconstructing Ai Khanum’s society in modern colonial terms proved particularly compelling in scholarly literature, particularly the idea of Greek colonists devoted to preserve their identity in a city built for and by Greeks, who lived in their privileged houses while indigenous populations inhabited the modest dwellings. Most notably, Frank Holt – archaeologist and numismatist of Baktrian coins – envisioned a society where ethnic bitterness and colonial apartheid prevailed: They [the Greeks of Ai Khanum] generally advocated a closed society that exploited other people but walled them off. Accentuating the ‘otherness’ of indigenous peoples helped to assuage the phobia of the Greeks about ‘going native’ like the infamous “wretches” [the Branchidai] found by Alexander years before – Greeks in Mesopotamia and Central Asia who had lost some of their culture to the barbarism. At Ai Khanoum this had not needed to happen. Every essence of Hellenism had been offered them by the Seleucids. Most nomads

129 130 131 132 133

E. g. explicitly, Karttunen 1997, 278. Citations from Bernard 1967a, 97, see further Robert 1968, 420–421; 1973, 235–236. Bernard reproduced this interpretation across several subsequent publications: see e. g. Bernard 1982, 157; 1994a, 101; 1997, 101–103; but cf. nuances in his later publications, e. g. 2008; 2012. Diod. Sic. 18.7 (Transl. Greer 1962): “οἱ δ᾽ ἐν ταῖς ἄνω καλουμέναις σατραπείαις κατοικισθέντες Ἕλληνες ὑπ᾽ Ἀλεξάνδρου, ποθοῦντες μὲν τὴν Ἑλληνικὴν ἀγωγὴν καὶ δίαιταν, ἐν δὲ ταῖς ἐσχατιαῖς τῆς βασιλείας ἐξερριμμένοι.” For this particular revolt, see further discussion in Iliakis 2013. Bernard 2012, 43; see also Bernard 2008.

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were kept at bay by the renewal of a military exclusion zone in Sogdiana, and Greeks and ‘others’ were largely segregated in the city.134

Such gated communities of Greeks and ‘natives’ would be evidenced by the large arsenal with weaponry to guard the Oxus frontier against invading nomads, as well as the proylaia along the main street, which would serve as a checkpoint to protect and segregate the posh Greek section of town from indigenous Others.135 For Holt, a segregated society explained the lavish houses with bathrooms, the palatial district, and the quintessential Greek institutions in the city – areas where Hellenes could indulge in their Greekness, walled off from Hellenistai who lived separately on the acropolis and from other Baktrian farmers, pastoralists, and nomads on the countryside.136 In similar vein, Boris Litvinsky, the principle archaeologist of the Oxus temple at Takht-i Sangin, described Ai Khanum as “a Greek city with a predominantly Hellenic population, thinking, speaking, writing, and reading in Greek and worshipping Greek gods. The native Baktrian residents, though few in number, were evidently utterly hellenized.”137 Related views also circulated in broader Hellenistic studies, such as Peter Green’s seminal handbook on the Hellenistic world, which featured Ai Khanum as a “nucleus of central Asian Greece”, settled exclusively by Greek and Macedonian colonists whose lives represented “an alien enclave, an artificial island of Greek social and cultural amenities almost totally isolated from the indigenous population that it dominated.”138 Blackwell’s 2008 handbook by Malcolm Errington, though more cautious, similarly maintained a colonial divide at Ai Khanum between Greek institutions built for Greek troops and ‘indigenous temples’ built to appease non-Greek populations.139 Hellenism as Greek identity In the 2010s, issues with and interests in migrant identities as well as identity theories rose to significance within historical studies of the ancient world. Notions of ethnicity and imagined communities, most notably by Fredrik Barth and Rogers Brubaker, left a distinct impact on approaches to Ai Khanum’s Greekness.140 Taking due account of the chronology of the city’s urban development, Rachel Mairs, argued that after the first generations of settlers (Table 3.1, phase 1), Baktrian-born descendants must have felt the need to reassert their Greek ethnic and cultural identity by strengthening and 134

Holt 1999, 46; a similarly bleak image is portrayed in Holt 2005, 154–162. For discussion of the Branchidai in connection to ethnic identity of Ai Khanum’s inhabitant, see Mairs 2007. 135 Holt 2005, 156–158, inspired by Polyb. 11.34.3-6. 136 Holt 2005, 160–162. 137 Litvinsky 2010, 36–37; further discussion in Chapter 4. 138 Green 1990, 315, but cf. Parker 2007, 184–185. 139 Errington 2008, 137. 140 Barth 1969; Brubaker 2006.

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reinventing the connection with their imagined motherland and the rest of the Greek world (Table 3.1, phase 2), particularly through the inscription with Delphic maxims, installed later than the actual construction of the mausoleum of Kineas.141 For Mairs, Ai Khanum’s diaspora community was an imaged community in the Barthian sense, whose members, most of whom Baktrian-born, would have imagined and constructed their Greek ethnic and cultural identity along their own lines, with Greekness only asserted in specific arenas where Greek inscriptions were found.142 Accordingly to Mairs, it was in the funerary, religious, and civic spheres where it mattered most to assert a specifically strong Greek identity; other areas marked by non-Greek structures and practices (such as the temples and houses) could be ethnically neutralized and rationalized, thus “allowing Greek ethnic boundaries to be maintained, while incorporating greater cultural diversity.”143 Along the same lines, Martinez-Sève also argued that the Greek public buildings in the period of grand embellishment of the city under Eukratides (Table 3.1, phase 3) reflected a desire expressed by the Greek settler community to reassert their membership in a vast imagined cultural community that stretched from the Mediterranean to Central Asia.144 Both Mairs and Martinez-Sève built their arguments on sociological notions that define ethnicity not as a sum total of cultural similarities and differences but as a contextual affiliative self-construction that could be preserved in spite of cultural changes.145 They accordingly underlined the idea that Greek communities in Baktria consisted of individuals from diverse origins, both from the Mediterranean and the Iranian world, who could construct their Greek identity on their own terms.146 Notwithstanding, Bernard’s original ideas of cultural conservatism by Greeks colonial settlers partly resurfaced in recent notions of Hellenism at Ai Khanum. Her research on violent resistance to Greek domination in the post-palatial period led Martinez-Sėve to reassert Hellenism in a context of a markedly hierarchical society at Ai Khanum, in which Greek culture would be a marker of Greek domination that entailed discriminatory practices against local inhabitants.147 Such practices would focus on showcasing knowledge of pure Greek culture as to distinguish oneself from non-Greeks  – in a cultural, ethnic, and social sense. Martinez-Sève argues that local resentment to dis141 142 143 144 145 146 147

This argument was developed and reproduced across several notable publications: Mairs 2007; 2008; 2010; 2013b; 2013c; 2014b; 2014d. Mairs 2008; 2013e. Mairs 2013e, 450. In other publications, Mairs (2013c; 2014a) nuanced her interpretation of Greek ethnicity, focusing more on cultural rather than ethnic identity. Martinez-Sève 2012, 381–382. Brubaker 2002; 2006, 7–27. For a comprehensive and critical discussion on the culture-historical conflation of material culture and ethnicity, see Jones 1997, 15–39, 106–127; and further Sherratt 2005; Mac Sweeney 2009. Mairs 2008; Martinez-Sève 2012; Mairs 2013e; Martinez-Sève 2013 Further thoughtful discussion in Burstein 2012. Martinez-Sève 2016, 105–106; 2020a, 100–101.

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criminatory practices were responsible for destructions in the post-palatial period, which were targeted at the palace, the sanctuary, and the aristocratic houses. Hellenism then, according to Martinez-Sève, served a distinction associated with Greek domination and would consist of a systemic combination of elements of Greek culture which nevertheless could also be transferred or adopted by non-Greeks in order to become Greeks – and thus become part of the colonial elite.148 In summary, from the onset, perceptions of Hellenism at Ai Khanum have been distinctly associated with shifting ideas about colonial Hellenization and Greek identity. For some, traditional Greek civilized life in the form of cultural buildings, language, and institutions would have transferred from the Mediterranean West to the Baktrian East, to provide ethnic Greek settlers a home away from home in a sea of Central Asian Otherness. For others, both Greek settlers and local inhabitants would have been able to share in Greek culture, though not in equal measure: Baktrians would only be able to partake in society at Ai Khanum if they would hellenize and thereby mitigate their ‘barbarism’ – the reverse dynamic of what Holt envisioned the Greeks to have aimed for with their Greekness. In the scholarly mind, Hellenism at Ai Khanum, thus seems to represent (a desire to express) Greek identity, whether this is understood in an ethnic or a cultural sense. Although Ai Khanum has often been considered to represent Baktria at large, scholarly ideas about Hellenism distinctly diverge in our second case in Baktria: Takht-i Sangin.

148 Martinez-Sève 2016, 104–105.

4 Takht-i Sangin and the Oxus Temple 4.1 Introduction Takht-i Sangin (‘the Stone Throne’) gained fame as one of the most important sites of Hellenistic-period Baktria, next to Ai Khanum. It is the site of the Temple of Oxus, an enormous sanctuary dedicated to the local river deity Oxus (Vakhsh) who was (or was to become) one of Central Asia’s principal deities.1 The temple was discovered at the river junction of the Vakhsh and the Panj on the outer edge of the Kobadian oasis in southern Tadzhikistan, some 150 km. west of Ai Khanum. While Ai Khanum is often portrayed as a Greek city and a centre of Hellenism, the Oxus Temple entered historical narrative as a Baktrian cult place built for local and probably bilingual people who worshipped a local god.2 At the same time, Takht-i Sangin also received recognition as an important site of ‘Eastern Iranian Hellenism’.3 Constructed in the Hellenistic period, the sanctuary’s archaeological remains demonstrated continuous cult activity from Hellenistic to Kushan times. Excavations at Takht-i Sangin yielded around numerous artefacts of various kinds, including a vast number of bronze and ivory weapons, jewellery, furniture, and several art objects manufactured in styles that were considered and categorized as Achaemenid, Greek, Scythian, and hybrid. The Oxus Temple is often associated with the spectacular Oxus Treasure, an extraordinary hoard of precious gold and silver objects discovered in the late 1870s and accumulated by local villagers in the region of Takht-i Kuvad on the south banks of the Amu Darya, just five km. upstream from Takht-i Sangin.4 The geographical proximity between these sites excited appealing speculations that the hoard once belonged to the Oxus Temple and was buried for safekeeping by the temple priests upon the threat of nomadic plunder around 150 BCE – an interpretive topos based on Polybios’ description of the treaty between Euthydemos and Antiochos III in 206 BCE upon the 1 2 3 4

Shenkar 2014, 130. The river god Oxus most probably predated Achaemenid times. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 12; Litvinskiy 2010, 37. Litvinskiy 2000; Shenkar 2012, 136. The circumstances of the find, as well as its exact location, are clouded in contemporary legends. The Oxus Treasure eventually found its way to the British Museum, where it is part of the permanent collection with the most important pieces on display in the section ‘Middle East’. See further discussion in Curtis 2012, esp. 58–61.

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common cause to ward off a nomad invasion from the north.5 Excavations at the Oxus temple yielded many bronze and ivory objects but only few fragments of gold and silver artefacts, while the gold and silver objects from the Oxus hoard – including plaques with figures bearing gifts – would support the theory of temple personnel burying the sanctuary’s most valuable votives at Takht-i Kuvad upon an imminent threat around the mid-second century BCE.6 The connection is possible, but remains conjectural without further evidence. Research on Takht-i Sangin has been dominated by several different parties. After trial excavations in 1956, the first systematic excavations of Takht-i Sangin were carried out by a Soviet archaeological team, the YuTAE: Yuzhno-Tadzhikskaya Arkheologicheskaya Ekspeditsiya, or the South Tajik Archaeological Expedition, headed by Boris Litvinskiy and Igor Pichikyan between 1973 and the 1990s.7 Thirteen campaigns were cut short when Tadzhikistan declared itself independent from the Soviet Union in 1991, after which the country fell in civil war. From 1998 onwards, renewed excavations led by Angelina Druzhinina were taken up by the Academy of Sciences of Tadzhikistan in cooperation with the Miho Museum in Japan until 2010. The results of the renewed expeditions were largely sidelined by Litvinskiy, who allegedly accused Druzhinina of illegitimately claiming the excavations, thereby violating ethical norms.8 Between 2006 and 2012 (2006–2008; 2010–2012), a German project funded by the Eurasia Department of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI) in Berlin on the small finds of the Oxus temple was undertaken by Gunvor Lindström (in cooperation with Druzhinina), which has culminated in several recent publications.9 The involvement of different parties resulted in different views on the temple’s constituency and its implications for conceptualizations and rationalizations of Hellenism in Central Asia, as will be explored further. Since 1999, Takht-i Sangin is on the tentative list for nomination for the UNESCO World Heritage List. 4.2 Site context and features Located on the west bank of the river Vaksh near its confluence with the river Pyanzh – the lower tributary of the great Amu Darya (the ancient Oxus) – with the Teshik-Tash 5

6 7 8 9

Polyb. 11. 34; see further Chapter 3, fn. 34. This theory was proposed by Litvinskiy 1994, 294; 2010, 24, but cf. Bernard 1994b, 101–106, who argues that the Oxus Treasure did not originate from the Oxus Temple, but from an Achaemenid-period temple situated at Takht-i Kuvad itself. This theory received recent support in Rtveladze 2020, 7 who proposes the Achaemenid-period sites of Kalai-Mir and Hirmantepa as potential provenances of the Oxus Treasure. Litvinskiy 2010, 23–24. For concise discussion on the archaeology of southern Tadzhikistan, see Lindström 2021. Shenkar 2012, 136 after Litvinskiy 2000. Lindström 2010; Druzhinina and Lindström 2013; Lindström 2013a; 2013b; 2016.

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mountain ridge looming on the background, the site of Takht-i Sangin commanded a strategic and impressive place for Baktria’s principal sanctuary. Connected to the central waterway of Central Asia, the distinctive area chosen for the sanctuary was marked by scenic contrasts, embedded in a landscape formed by a green flood plain on the one side and a barren river terrace on the other.10 The wider settlement of Takht-i Sangin stretched along a valley of 2 km. with a rectangular citadel at its midst: the location of the sanctuary. Surrounding the citadel were some habitations near a water cistern, a settlement south of the mound, a round tower on its north, and a heavily looted necropolis. The citadel was walled by thick stone walls, flanked at the corners by defensive towers, and surrounded by a moat. The strategic location and the protection of man-made structures rendered it impossible to approach the site from dry land, as it was locked in by the mountain ridge on the west, by the river on the east, and by the defensive ramparts on the north and south.11 The site was dated to the Hellenistic period, which led the excavators to propose that the settlement was the Hellenistic city Oxeiana on the Oxus, as described by Klaudios Ptolemy.12 Excavations, however, mainly focused on the massive sanctuary within the walls of the citadel, the largest sanctuary of Baktria – almost three times larger than the main temple at Ai Khanum. The shrine within the sanctuary was identified as the Temple of Oxus, thanks to the discovery of a votive gift bearing a dedicative inscription to the god Oxus. The sanctuary The sanctuary covered a walled square surface of 100 by 100 m. that marked the sacred premises: a courtyard and a grand temple.13 Like other Baktrian religious architecture such as at Ai Khanum, it was constructed with large unburnt mud bricks, with massive walls, and oriented toward the rising sun in the east. The visitor would access the precinct through a monumental gateway that opened onto the courtyard. The temple proper behind the courtyard retained a strictly symmetrical two-fold ground plan throughout its existence (Fig. 4.1) – a layout recognized as Iranian, with similarities to Bronze Age temples of Syria and Mesopotamia but constructed with building techniques dating to the Baktrian Bronze Age.14 The eastern front part consisted of three square blocks that formed a rectangular façade. The northern and southern squares mirrored each other in measurement and ground plan, which included small rooms with altars, while the middle square formed the temple’s main entrance: an impressive eight-columned 10 11 12 13 14

Lindström 2016, 286. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 1994a, 48. Rapin 1998, 207–208, 211, 215; Druzhinina 2009, 122. See Ptol. Geog. 6.12.5 for Oxeiana on the Oxus; cf. mention of Alexandreia Oxeiane in the same list: Ptol. 6.12.6. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 13. Pichikyan 1992, 21–22; Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 92–100, 111; Shenkar 2011, 120, 130.

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iwan that opened onto the central hall. Set in another square thick-walled block, the central hall dominated the western rear part of the edifice. The central hall had four columns with torus-shaped column bases and was on three sides surrounded by long L-shaped corridors that served the storage of votive gifts.

Fig. 4.1. Map of the Oxus Temple at Takht-i Sangin (Lindström 2016) © Deutsches Archäologisches Institut – Eurasien Abteilung, courtesy of Gunvor Lindström.

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The chronology of the sanctuary stretches over a long time span, from the Hellenistic period until the early third century CE, and has been divided into three phases – the second being an interlude about which little is known (Table 4.1).15 The first founding phase is not fully uncontested, but is generally ascribed to the late fourth or the early third century, lasting until the first half of the second century BCE.16 This phase has therefore been termed by the excavators as the ‘Seleukid-Graeco-Baktrian’ phase, subdivided into three stages.17 The first saw the erection of the temple proper with its central hall and surrounding corridors, and the preceding iwan flanked by two square sections. At the same time or some years later, the courtyard and the defensive walls were added, which established the perimeter of the sacred precinct. In a second stage, the courtyard’s northern and southern area were reconstructed. The third stage then saw the addition of four towers in the corners of the courtyard, as well as two monumental stone altars in front of the south-western and north-western towers, in the period between the end of the third until the beginning of the second century BCE.18 Table 4.1. Rough chronology of Takht-i Sangin (after Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002; Lindström 2016) Phase 1) ‘Seleukid-Graeco-Baktrian’ phase

2) Disruption and reconstruction phase 3) ‘Yuezhi-Kushan’ phase

15 16

17 18

Associated date Associated structures Late fourth/early third centu- • Stage 1a: Temple proper; ash pits ry BCE – first half of second century BCE (until c. 140/130 • Stage 1b: Courtyard, defensive walls BCE) • Stage 2: Reconstructions • Stage 3: Towers; stone altars (late third/early second century BCE) Second half of the second • Central hall: Votive pits; century BCE (after c. 140/130 ash pits BCE) • Courtyard: Bronze casting workshop Late first century BCE – third • Continuation of votive century CE and ash depositions • Reconstruction of towers

Druzhinina 2001, 281; Lindström 2013a, 302–303; 2016, 299–300. Litvinskiy & Pichikiyan, as well as Druzhinina agree on a founding date of the temple at the end of the fourth century BCE or the beginning of the third century BCE, based on the large brick format. Conversely, Lindström (2013a, 302) is inclined to a third century founding date around 280 BCE or even later under the first Graeco-Baktrian kings in the mid-to-late third century BCE (personal communication 18.4.2017). Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 65. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 57–59, 87–92.

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After the ‘Seleukid-Graeco-Baktrian’ building phase, the excavators identified a phase of disruption during which the sanctuary was damaged  – though not plundered or completely demolished – in one or two destruction waves in the second quarter of the second century BCE, between 160 and 140/130 BCE.19 This phase also saw restoration and reconstruction activities in the second half of the second century BCE, shortly after 140/130 BCE, during which the sanctuary’s votive gifts were removed and compiled in the corridors. In the late first century BCE, the sanctuary entered its third phase – termed as the ‘Yuezhi-Kushan phase’ – when it was rebuilt and continued to be in use for the next four centuries until the early third century CE. The iwan and adjacent wings Providing entrance to the temple, the columned porch stood out at the centre of the triplicated façade of the building. This porch, termed by the excavators as an iwan (a vaulted hall opening on one side) invited the visitor to enter the shrine through a ‘stone forest’ of eight columns organized in two consecutive rows. A single Ionic capital was found here, which could indicate that the columns were topped by Ionic capitals – stylistically analysed as ‘the Asia Minor type’ and dated to the end of the third or beginning of the second century BCE.20 The column bases consisted of removable two-tiered tori on plinths whose measurements allowed the excavators to reconstruct the height of the porch to nearly 7 m. high.21 Such column bases were similar to the ones unearthed at Ai Khanum and were stylistically labelled as ‘Achaemenid’ or ‘Persepolitan’. Several stone fragments of altars were further discovered in the northern part of the iwan and in front of the doorway to the central hall.22 The iwan was flanked by two tower-like wings, identical in their square ground plan and measurements. Both blocks housed two rooms (resp. rooms 5–6 and 7–8) that connected to a corridor (resp. corridor 4 and 5). Multiple small white-washed clay altars were unearthed in the corners of rooms 5 and 7 in the southern and northern block respectively, including a larger central sacrificial altar in the northern block.23 The walls of these rooms were scorched and the altars were surrounded by depositions containing the layered remains of ashes, charcoal, and clay, which led Litvinskiy and Pichikyan to designate these rooms as atashgah – a later Persian term for chambers where the everlasting sacred fire burned – and by extension, the whole sanctuary as a

19 20 21 22 23

Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 183–184. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 1998. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 51. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 53. The main altar was found at the centre of room 7 of the northern block, surrounded by 5 smaller alters; room 5 of the southern block housed 5 small altars in total. See Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 40–45.

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Zoroastrian fire temple.24 The narrow (1.25 m. broad) entrances from the iwan to these ‘altar chambers’ suggests that access to these rooms was restricted to temple personnel only, possibly indicating a heightened extent of sanctity.25 Although it is tempting to ascribe a Zoroastrian nature to the Oxus Temple on the basis of these ‘fire chambers’, especially in light of recent studies that demonstrated the presence of ritual structures and features associated with Zoroastrian practices in pre-Islamic times, caution should be made to label the Oxus sanctuary as a fire temple at large.26 Among the excavated remains in the northern chamber as well as in the wider temenos were also numerous animal bones, possibly for sacrifices or sacred meals which – depending on the particular animal and their sanctity – may have been in tension with Zoroastrian practices, at least those around the sacred fire.27 In any case, though fire did evidently play an important role at the Oxus sanctuary, much remains indefinite about Zoroastrian architecture and rituals before the Sasanian period, when the oral traditions of the Avesta became variously codified.28 The central hall The iwan provided access to the central hall: a large square hall supported by four columns with stone bases and with an interior of white-plastered walls. As the rest of the edifice, the central hall was oriented toward the east and surrounded by massive walls. At its midst, aligned to the inner corners of the column bases, were two rectangular cultic places made from gypsum and gravel. Additionally, a square stone altar pediment reserved for a cult statue stood in the north-western corner of the hall, with the remains of two round pedestals on top of the altar, which the excavators stylistically dated to the Hellenistic period.29 Litvinskiy and Pichikyan discovered two dozen ash pits in the central hall, mostly concentrated around or near the corners of the column bases.30 These pits contained the layered remains of ash and charcoal and were deepened or created anew shortly after 140/130 BCE.31 Some of the pits reached down to the foundation layer, indicating that 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31

Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 39, 97, 101. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 38–39. For instance the use of the Zoroastrian calendar in the economic ostraca of Nisa (Bader 1996); see discussion in Grenet 2015. Earlier Achaemenid-period temple structures at Sangir Tepe, Kindyk Tepe, and Kizyl Tepe (all located in Central Asia) have been discussed as a possible fire temple as well, for which see Rapin and Khasanov 2013; Mokroborodov 2018; Sverchkov and Wu 2019. The animal bones included those of birds, small livestock, cows, horses, and donkeys (Druzhinina et al. 2009, 72–76, 83). For useful discussion on animal sacrifice in ancient Zoroastrianism, see De Jong 2002. Foundational for pre-Islamic Zoroastrianism is Boyce and Grenet 1991 and specifically for Central Asia, Grenet 2015. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 22; Lindström 2016, 289. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 21. Lindström 2013b, 110.

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the practice of depositing ashes already took place in the first phase of the sanctuary.32 Around the mid-second century BCE, votive pits of various depths and sizes had been dug, mostly in the south-western corner of the central hall. These votive pits contained hoards of Kushan coins of the second century CE, as well as depositions of discarded, timeworn, or broken votive objects, the majority of which dated to the second and first century BCE.33 These as well as other votive gifts in storage may have been originally presented to the god in the temple courtyard or in the iwan; Lindström argued that an overabundance of offerings made it necessary to clear these areas from time to time by transporting the votive objects to the peripheral corridors (to be stored on shelves or in caskets) or to the central hall (to be deposited in votive pits).34 At least two votive pits, found nearly or completely empty, are indicative of plunder in later times.35 However, considering the late date of the coin hoards and their location close to the votive pits, Lindström suggested that in Kushan times, cultic personnel from the temple itself may have searched for and removed valuable or recyclable votives from the second century BCE pits in order to rework them into new gifts, for which they dedicated coins in return.36 Some non-recyclable parts of the votives would have been placed back and rededicated as pars pro toto. Lindström’s hypothesis is compelling and supported by the fact that most gifts were found in small pieces, that there were little bronze finds amongst them, and that there was a bronze casting workshop on the courtyard, dated to the second phase.37 This possibility takes into account that votive gifts, once dedicated to the god, were not supposed to leave the sacred premises, according to the principle of ouk ekphora.38 The corridors The central hall was surrounded on three sides by elongated peripheral corridors, set in the same thick-walled quadratic block on the western rear side of the temple. The hall communicated directly with corridor 1 on its south and corridor 3 on its north; corridors 2 and 6 surrounded the western side of the hall and were only indirectly accessible through the preceding corridors. The peripheral corridors were used throughout the temple’s use-life and probably served as storage galleries (treasuries) for votive gifts. According to Lindström, these offerings were mostly secondary depositions, originally 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 24; Lindström 2013b, 110. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 20; Lindström 2013b, 112. Lindström 2013a, 305; 2013b, 113; 2016, 292. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 97. Lindström 2013a, 305; 2013b, 110, 113; 2016, 303. Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 182–3; Lindström 2013a, 305; 2013b, 113; 2016, 304. Although such storage practice may have had a much more general meaning, ouk ekphora has been identified as distinctly Greek by Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 182; Lindström 2013b, 113; 2016, 292.

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from a more accessible and visually presentable location in the sanctuary (the iwan or the courtyard), but cleared and relocated to the corridors at a later stage for storage.39 Deposited at different use levels, the objects were grouped in votive collections that were more or less sorted according to type or material. The majority was accumulated in corridors 2 and 6, where the votives were probably organized and stored on wooden shelves, in baskets, or caskets.40 Corridors 2 and 6 had destructions layers dating to the second quarter of the second century BCE, which may be connected to Parthian or Yuezhi incursions into Baktria.41 Over 8,000 (fragments of) objects were unearthed, made of gold, silver, bronze, ivory, clay, alabaster, natural and precious stone. The majority of the offerings were weapons and war-related votives such as arrow heads, daggers, sheaths, and lance tips which were dedicated throughout the temple’s use-life. While the youngest votives from the ‘Yuezhi-Kushan phase’ reveal an increasing focus on war-related dedications, a wider variety of offerings is present in the older collections from the third and second century BCE.42 Amongst these, alongside weapons, were engraved schist vessels (pyxides), gold plaques, silver and bronze plates with relief images, bronze appliqués of Erotes (Cupids), small stone pedestals shaped as the bases of columns, a large number of ivory and bone objects, amongst them numerous miniature flutes, an ivory rhyton, and ivory plates with hunting scenes, and polychrome anthropomorphic clay and alabaster statues including ruler portraits, sculpted in different styles. Numerous of these objects were stylistically characterized as Achaemenid (gold plaques; ivory objects) and Greek (some of the clay statues), but also as culturally hybrid – labelled as Indo-Gandharan (a silver seal), Scytho-Siberian (an inlaid golden hilt-pommel with panther depictions in relief), Graeco-Baktrian or Parthianising (some of the clay statues).43

39 40 41 42 43

Lindström 2013a, 302–303; 2013b, 103–104. Evidence of such large caskets, plastered on the inside and decorated with gold foil on the outside, were found in the east ends of corridors 1 and 3. See Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 112; Lindström 2013b, 110–111. Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 184; Lindström 2016, 295. Lindström 2013a, 305. Some of these objects have received exclusive focus in several publications to explore their cultural origins. See Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 1983; 1994b; 1995a; 1995b; 1995c; Litvinskiy 2003; 2006.

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Fig. 4.2. The Atrosokes votive altar at Takht-i Sangin (National Museum of Antiquities, Dushanbe, Tadzhikistan. Picture by author, September 2016)

The Atrosokes altar The most famous and widely discussed object of the material corpus of the Oxus sanctuary is a votive gift in the form of a small stone altar, topped by a bronze statue of a naked satyr-like figure playing a double flute (Fig. 4.2). The miniature altar was unearthed at the far northern end of corridor 2 and has been dated to the second century BCE. The bronze figure was visually similar to known representations of the Greek river god Marsyas. Importantly, the votive altar bore a Greek inscription, which reads the following text: 1

Εὐχὴν ἀνέθηκεν Ἀτροσώκης Ὄξωι Atrosokes dedicated this ex-voto to the Oxus.44

44

After Rougemont 2012a, 196, no. 95.

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This dedicatory inscription confirmed the identification of the shrine as the Temple of Oxus. Oxus (in Latin) or Oxos (in Greek) is the transliteration of the Indo-Iranian name for the local river, Vakhsh. Vakhsh or Vakhshu would signify ‘spoken word’ or ‘spirit’, while the Central Asian rendering of ‘spirit’ could also be translated to ‘running water’, invoking both the river and the spirit embodied by it.45 As the personification of the principal waterway in the arid lands of Central Asia, Oxus was a god ranked high in the region’s sacred hierarchy and became a main deity of Baktria and Sogdia in later centuries, endowed with the epithet ‘king of gods’.46 The other name in the inscription, Atrosokes, was identified to be etymologically derivative from ancient Iranian language, signifying ‘he who possesses the power of fire’.47 Although his name was local or regional, the dedicator composed the inscription in perfect Greek, following conventional dedicatory formula. The temple courtyard The temple was preceded by a large courtyard of 60 by 20 m. Four towers were erected in the corners of the courtyard in the third stage of the sanctuary’s first building phase (the ‘Seleukid-Graeco-Baktrian phase’) – at the end of the third or the beginning of the second century BCE. In the same period, monumental stone altars with Greek letters that replaced earlier clay altars were placed in front of the south-western and north-western towers.48 Close to the centre of the courtyard, a large altar made of adobe bricks was found, which the excavators dated to the beginning of the third century BCE.49 In the southern part of the courtyard, a deep well and two cisterns were discovered by Druzhinina in the later excavations. The first cistern in the south-eastern area of the courtyard was a mud brick pit, while the second cistern in the south-western corner of the courtyard, adjacent to the deep well, was probably connected to a bronze casting workshop of the third quarter of the second century BCE.50 The later excavations also discovered a fountain structure that preceded the workshop, consisting of a hardened landing from which a stairwell led down eastwards to a deep shaft. The structure was built sometime after the temple edifice and the surrounding consecrated wall, and was operational in the third and second century BCE – the sanctuary’s first phase. Over the course of the second century BCE, the fountain shaft was filled with fragments of broken small objects that may have functioned as votives in 45 46 47 48 49 50

Holt 1999, 153. However, for a discussion on whether Vakhsh was limited to the Oxus, see Lerner 1999, 24–25. Shenkar 2014, 130. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 1981, 153; Litvinskiy et al. 1985, 103–119; Bernard 1987, 113; Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 10. For an informative discussion on the name and its origin, see Schmitt 1990. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 87–92. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 59; Lindström 2016, 289. Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 173–174, 180 fn. 21.

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the sanctuary. Amongst these were the broken pieces of a large white limestone basin, which has been interpreted and termed as a perirrhanterion – a cultic water basin on a cylindrical stand which, according to Greek practice, was used for ritual purification before entering the shrine.51 The basin bore a fragmented dedicatory inscription to Oxus: vac. ΟΥΟΞΟΙ vac. Ὄξ[ωι vel -ου] … to/of Oxus … to/of Ox[us].52

The engraved text was dated paleographically to the first half of the second century BCE – the same date as the inscription on the Atrosokes altar.53 According to conventional Greek dedicatory formula, the second broken-off word would have been the dative or genitive of Oxus (‘to’ or ‘of Oxus’). The complete first word (‘Yoxoi’) is not recognized as correct Greek; Askold Ivanchik suggested that the repetitive but slightly different dedication to Oxus may reflect an early attempt to transcribe the local Baktrian pronunciation of the deity in Greek letters – anticipating the increasing use of Bactrian written in Greek script from the first century CE onward.54 After a period of disruption in the second half of the second century BCE – concurrently with the destruction layers in temple corridors 2 and 6 – the fountain shaft and stairwell were filled with debris and broken votive pieces. Upon the filling, a bronze casting workshop was established that replaced the fountain structure. C14 analysis of charcoal samples, paleographical studies, and an in situ coin of Heliokles I (c. 145–130 BCE) allowed the excavators to establish a date of the second half of the second century BCE, during which the bronze casting workshop was positively in use.55 The workshop consisted of a long oval cavity stretching from east to west which contained several pits, including a bronze-casting pit.56 The function of the workshop as a bronze casting foundry was identified through the fragments of seven clay casting moulds for large

51 52 53 54 55

56

Druzhinina 2001, 263; Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 177–179. After Rougemont 2012, no. 96. Druzhinina 2001, 279; Ivanchik 2011, 71, 73. Ivanchik 2011, 73–74; Veksina 2012; Ivanchik 2013, 137–139; see recent discussion in Huyse 2020, 170–171. Kuwabara 2010; Veksina 2010, 236; Druzhinina et al. 2011, 25; Ivanchik 2011, 69; Veksina 2012. Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 175, 180–181 propose a more limited period of the third quarter of the second century BCE. No ceramics from the Kushan period were found in the filling of the bronze casting workshop, and the Heliokles coin was found in the layer atop of the broken fragments of the large moulds, which gives a terminus ante quem for the operational time of the workshop: before 130 BCE. The bronze casting pit is termed ‘Object 6’ and is discussed in its workshop context by Druzhinina et al. 2009, 71; Druzhinina and Khudzhageldiyev 2009, esp. 111–112; Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 180.

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bronze cauldrons, at least three of which bore Greek dedicatory inscriptions on the rim.57 One inscription survived in full, and contained the following informative text: Εἰς ᾽’Οξον ΚΑΤΑΦΡΑΖΥΜΕΝΑ ἀνέθεσε Ιρωμοις Νεμισπου μολρπαλρης χαλκίον ἐγ ταλάντων ἑπτά. To the Oxus (…), Iromois, son of Nemiskos (or Nemises), molrpalres, dedicates a bronze cauldron of seven talents.58

According to Ivanchik, the flawed Greek grammar and the squared cursive lettering of the inscription indicate that the person who composed the text had limited knowledge of the Greek language and was probably not a native Greek speaker, unlike Atrosokes; although it may well be, vice versa, that this person knew Greek well enough to sufficiently adapt and transform it to suit the Bactrian language.59 The name and patronym of the dedicator, Iromois Nemiskou, are not known in Greek and Iranian onomastics; Ivanchik suggested that Iromois, son of Nemiskos, could have been a local Baktrian or a Saka pastoralist who consecrated this cauldron to Oxus in the second half of the second century BCE, just after the encroachment of the Yuezhi into Baktria.60 The bronze casting workshop was probably established here because it was close to the temple premises and easily accessible for its priestly personnel. In accordance to the principle of ouk ekphora – which dictated that votives, once given, could not leave the sanctuary – valuable (parts of) objects that were not presentable anymore would be selected from the votive repertory and recycled in this bronze casting workshop.61 4.3 Review The sheer size of the Oxus Temple of Takht-i Sangin indicate that this was one of, if not the most important sanctuary of Baktria. The temple was constructed according to local building techniques from large unburnt mud brick and with massive walls. Located on the highest point of the site and oriented towards the east, the temple with its colossal, strictly symmetrical ground plan has been labelled as distinctly Iranian with additional analogies to Syrian and Mesopotamian religious architecture. The single 57 58

59 60 61

Druzhinina et al. 2009; Druzhinina and Khudzhageldiyev 2009, 108–119; Druzhinina et al. 2010, 63–79; 2011, 19–25. After Rougemont 2012a, 271, no. 96bis. Cf. the different translations by Ivanchik 2011, 63; 2013, 126–130 and Druzhinina 2009, 128–132; Veksina 2010; 2012, 108–109; 2014. There has been some debate on how to interpret μολρπαλρης. Whereas Rougemont is more cautious, leaving the word untranslated, Ivanchik interprets molpalres as ‘seal-keeper’. Ivanchik 2011, 59, 62. Ivanchik 2011, 63. Druzhinina and Lindström 2013, 182.

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capital unearthed in the iwan may suggest that more columns were decorated with Ionic capitals. The column bases, however, were recognized and labelled as Persepolitan, with a round torus on a square double plinth. Instead of a main sacrificial altar, there seem to have been several altars or cult places of stone and clay – amongst which two Greekstyled altars – dispersed in different areas of the sanctuary yet symmetrically arranged relating to the temple’s main axis.62 Considerable ash remains around the altars and the numerous ash pits dug in the central hall suggest that fire played an important role in the Oxus Temple since its foundation. In the Hellenistic period, a limestone basin may have stood in the eastern front part of the courtyard, possibly serving ritual purifications before entering the sacred premises. While much remains unknown about the precise rituals involved in dedicating votive gifts, the location and find context of the votive depositions suggest that they were organized and stored in the corridors in the rear part of the temple, possibly after they were on display elsewhere in the front part of the sanctuary, in the iwan or on the courtyard. Among the votive depositions – the majority of which were weapons of later date – were objects stylistically labelled as Greek, Achaemenid, Gandharan, Skythian, and Iranian, including prominent art works such as clay and alabaster portrait sculptures and ivory objects with scenic relief images. Around the mid-second century BCE, after one or two waves of destruction, ash pits were added or deepened and votive pits were dug in the central hall, as part of the sanctuary’s reconstruction. During this period, a bronze casting workshop was active on the courtyard, possibly for the recycling of votive gifts. The few inscriptions at Takht-i Sangin were all in Greek – though not all in perfect standard Greek.63 Although the Greek language and script was evidently used by some of the temple’s constituency, the names of the dedicators – insofar known from two examples – are recognized as Iranian or Baktrian. The venerated god of the sanctuary was Oxus, although the possibility of more deities should not be excluded. 4.4 Hellenism and religion Like the city of Ai Khanum, the sanctuary of Oxus is characterized as a cultural mixture of architecture and practices that were recognized and archaeologically labelled as Greek, Iranian, and Baktrian. Yet, Hellenism perceived at Takht-i Sangin is described and rationalized in a different way than Hellenism at Ai Khanum.

62 63

Three ‘altars’ (two large platforms on the sides and one of clay in the middle) and two pedestals were set on the courtyard, one or more stone altars in the iwan, three in the central hall (two of gypsum, one of stone), and numerous altars in the so-called ‘altar rooms’ in the flanking wings. Rougemont 2012a, 196–199, nos. 95–96bis.

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Between Greek and Iranian While interpretations of the French excavators left an intellectual legacy of Ai Khanum as a traditional Greek polis, the Soviet excavators of Takht-i Sangin promoted an Iranian-Baktrian interpretation of the Oxus Temple from the onset, identifying the sanctuary as a Baktrian fire temple and as such, the oldest of its kind – a prototype.64 They compared its layout with known fire temples across Iran in (much) later times, which similarly were built on a square ground plan, with a domed iwan and a four-columned central cult place surrounded by peripheral passageways. For Litvinksiy and Pichikyan, the evidence of fire offerings on the altars, the two altar rooms, the numerous ash pits, as well as the name of Atrosokes, would undoubtedly point to religious practices connected to Zoroastrianism.65 These would exist alongside Greek practices, as indicated by the Greek-styled stone altars on the courtyard.66 Accordingly, they concluded that the temple’s constituency consisted of mostly Baktrians who practiced their “local indigenous religion alongside a minority of Greeks, who undoubtedly were bilingual.”67 The fire-temple interpretation has been heavily criticized by Paul Bernard, Michael Shenkar, and others, considering our extremely limited knowledge of pre-Sasanian fire temples. No term relatable to ‘fire temple’ is known from the Avesta – the oldest source on Iranian religions – while the earliest reliable evidence for the existence of fire temples, as well as the earliest known details about Zoroastrian cult practices, stem from the Sasanian period, centuries later.68 Bernard moreover pointed out that the function of the ‘fire chambers’ could only be established as such for the temple’s last phase, which means that the cult may have been reformed (long) before that time.69 While the oldest ash pits in the central hall do suggest that fire worship was amongst the cult forms practiced during the Hellenistic period, it remains problematic and anachronistic to label the sanctuary as a Zoroastrian fire temple.70 For Henri-Paul Francfort, there was nothing particularly Iranian or Greek about the Oxus temple and its cult. Similarly arguing against the Zoroastrian interpretation, Francfort emphasized that the suggested practice fire rituals does not necessarily imply that fire was the central and divine object of adoration.71 Comparing the sanctuaries and associated objects related to cult practices at Takht-i Sangin and Ai Khanum – both located at the confluence of the Oxus with another river – he firmly concluded that both 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Pichikyan 1992, 20–30; Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 1994a, 52; 2002, 96–100, 108–109. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 101. Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 109. Litvinskiy 2010, 37. Koch 1993, 177–183; Bernard 1994, 86–90; Grenet 2005, 378; Shenkar 2011, 118, 120; Francfort 2012, 124; Shenkar 2011, 118; 2012, 138; Lindström 2013a, 100–101; 2016, 288–289. Bernard 1994, 86–96. Subsequent scholarly literature has retained the Iranian interpretation of the Oxus Temple, though omitting its rendering as a fire temple. See e. g. Shenkar 2011. Francfort 2012, 124

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shrines were inherently Baktrian. According to Francfort, the small stone column altars, schist vessels, Achaemenid-styled objects, clay anthropomorphic sculpture, and the female representations present at both sites would point to a Baktrian cult, centred on Oxus – the god of water and fertility.72 Votive gifts of female representations, including a common silver gilded plate with a depiction of Kybele found at both Ai Khanum and the Oxus temple, would further suggest that Oxus was a female deity, perceived as in the guise of Kybele for Greeks and hellenized Baktrians, and in the guise of an Iranian female god (Nana or Anahita) for locals.73 While the Oxus Temple represented an Iranian fire temple for Litvinskiy and Pichikyan, and a traditional Baktrian temple for Francfort, serving a predominantly Baktrian constituency, Matthew Canepa argued that the sanctuary reflected  – but not fully replicated – Babylonian temple architecture as part of the religious building policy of the Seleukid kings. He proposed that the combined architectural elements of the Oxus Temple – like other Seleukid-era temples – did not stem from long-standing local or Achaemenid traditions but from Seleukid settlement, patronage, and innovation of provincial cults and temples: “if a local cult existed at the site, it was appropriated and enhanced as a part of Seleukid policy”.74 As for the temple’s constituency, the onomastics and religious practices at Takht-i Sangin would demonstrate that individuals with Iranian names had no problem employing Greek language and cult practices, while Greeks could also worship at local cults for local deities.75 Focusing on cult practices instead of the temple’s architecture and ground plan, Lindström argued that the original excavators downplayed the presence and significance of Greek cultic activities.76 Admitting that the temple, with its Iranian ground plan, flat roof, and mud brick construction, cannot be considered typically Greek, Lindström called attention to those cultural elements that would also not suit a purely Iranian conception of the Oxus Temple. In addition to the Ionic Greek capital, the Greek-styled clay sculptures, the Greek inscriptions, and the limestone perirrhanterion, the votive depositions themselves would bespeak of Greek cult practice and therefore represent Greek religious traditions. The depositions of votive gifts in the corridors and later also in the central hall – a cult practice that continued throughout the temple’s uselife – would be in accordance to the principle of ouk ekphora, which Lindström closely connects with Greek practice.77 This principle would explain the layered history of the temple: the mid-second century saw the opening of additional votive pits in the central 72 73 74 75 76 77

Francfort 2012, 113–116. Francfort 2012, 109–110, 121–131. Shenkar 2014, 119 argues that Kybele could be equated with Nana – an important Central Asian deity  – and suggests the possibility that Oxus, Nana, and Kybele received a cult as a divine triad at Takht-i Sangin and Ai Khanum. Canepa 2015a, 84, see also 79. Canepa 2015a, 85. Lindström 2016, 289–292. Lindström 2013a, 113–114; 2013b, 305; 2016, 292.

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hall to hoard objects that were not presentable anymore because they were aged, ugly, or broken after the wave(s) of destruction, as well as a bronze casting workshop to rework valuable (parts of) objects from the votive repository. Considering the sanctuary’s founding date in the Hellenistic period, Lindström argued that the practice of votive depositions must stem from Greek cult practice, brought from the Mediterranean and the Near East by Greeks who came to settle in Baktria.78 Hellenism as syncretistic symbiosis For Litvinskiy and Francfort, Hellenism at Takht-i Sangin pertained mainly to the visual artistry of the objects, whereas Canepa and Lindström approached Hellenism in relation to the temple’s Seleukid foundation, the Greek-styled objects, and distinct deposition practices. In all accounts, there is common acknowledgement that the structure of the Oxus temple was Baktrian (or at least wider Iranian), while the Atrosokes altar is mentioned as the perfect embodiment of the symbiosis of Iranian-Baktrian and Greek traditions that characterized the Oxus Temple: a Greek-styled votive altar topped by a statue of a Greek-styled river deity, bearing an inscription in perfect Greek language which testifies to a man with an Iranian name who dedicated the object as a gift to the Baktrian deity Oxus. This particular object has been considered as representative for the cultural character of Takht-i Sangin at large, which received attention and interpretation in broader studies as a syncretistic synthesis, “an odd mix of Greek and local”, with ample room for indigenous agency.79 This stance is perhaps most illuminated by Litvinskiy’s typology of distinct zones of ‘Hellenization in Baktria’, the tenets of which continue to resurface in later interpretations.80 The first zone would be characterized by Greek poleis and colonies as at Ai Khanum where, according to Litvinskiy, a population of Greeks and hellenized Baktrians retained a homogeneous culture and lifestyle in line with the Greek Mediterranean. The third zone would be predominantly Baktrian with only few elements of Hellenism pertaining to architecture, ceramics, and fortifications. In between was the second category – the zone of hybridity – which was where the Oxus temple belonged. This zone would be marked by a hybrid ‘Graeco-Baktrian’ cultural phenomenon that resulted from interactions between Greeks and Baktrians. According to Litvinskiy, this zone, … was more complicated, because it was connected with the internal transformation in varying degrees of the semantic meanings of particular images, customs and rituals. One of the variants of this model is the correlation of phenomenon of extraneous culture with the isomorphic phenomenon of the indigenous culture and its incorporation by the indigenous

78 79 80

Lindström 2013a, 113–114. Lindström has changed her view in the meantime. Boardman 2015, 87. Litvinskiy 1994, 296–297; 2000, 218; Litvinskiy and Pichikyan 2002, 107; Litvinskiy 2010, 37–38.

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peoples in the same or in a slightly altered form, consisting of the same or hybrid meaning; Atrosokes is one such example. I conclude that in the Hellenistic era up to the first century B. C. large city centers, including those with temples, like the Temple of the Oxos, served as ‘melting-pots,’ where art, technology and ideas fused to create a new intense historical and cultural synthesis, thereby becoming the Baktrian school of Kushan art.81

Litvinskiy’s view of the Oxus temple as a cultural ‘melting pot’ which fused and synthesized different cultural traditions into a new mixed culture had distinct resonance in subsequent interpretations of Hellenism as a syncretistic mixture at Takht-i Sangin.82 This culture could be disentangled in distinct original elements that were perceived to have formed the multicultural melting pot: Greek altars, Greek clay statues, Achaemenid ivories, and an Iranian ground plan, which would reflect the ethnicities of the multicultural society that formed the temple’s constituency: Greeks, Iranians, Scythians, and Indians.83 Conceptualizations of Hellenism at Takht-i Sangin thus seem to be more inclusive than at Ai Khanum, with an emphasis on the symbiotic coexistence of multiple influences and peoples. We can discern a comparable yet slightly different conceptualization of Hellenism elsewhere in Central Asia. The next chapter will move westwards from Baktria to Parthia, illuminating the subtle differences of interpretations of Hellenism in Central Asia.

81 82 83

Litvinskiy 2010, resp. 37, 43. E. g. Lindström 2009b. Litvinskiy 2010, 41; Lindström 2009a, 131.

5 Old Nisa 5.1 Introduction The earliest and one of the most important sites in Parthian archaeology, Old Nisa forms a particular case of Hellenism.1 Its ruins lay at the foot of the Kopet Dagh mountain range in modern Turkmenistan, some 17 km. west of the capital Ashgabat. Known as Parthaunisa or Nisaia in Isidoros of Charax’s Parthian Stations, the citadel of Nisa, if not its very foundation, was closely linked to Arsakes I (r. c. 246–224 BCE): the leader of Aparna nomadic pastoralists who invaded Seleukid Parthia, killed its satrap Andragoras, and became the eponymous founder of the Arsakid dynasty and empire.2 According to Isidoros, Arsakes received his kingship in the city of Asaak, the place of everlasting fire, while Nisa was the location of the royal tombs.3 Asaak was never discovered, but Nisa’s stately grandeur indeed hints at the site’s dynastic importance, though not necessarily as an imperial capital.4 Somewhere in the second century BCE, Nisa was (re)named Mithradatkert which translates to ‘fortress of Mithradates’, most probably referring to Mithradates I (r. 171–131 BCE), the fifth king of the Arsakid dynasty.5 It was under 1

2

3 4 5

The term Arsakid stems from the eponymous king Arsakes I. The term Parthian derives from the geographic name Parthava (the region under the Achaemenids) and Parthyene (the region under the Seleukids) in modern Turkmenistan. Although the term is geographic in origin, ‘Parthian’ has been used in ancient and modern texts with much wider coverage, referring to people (namely the aristocracy), language (ancient Pahlavi), and imperial territory under Arsakid rule (see Invernizzi 2011a for an instructive discussion). ‘Parthia’ as used here refers roughly to the geographic region, while ‘Arsakid’ refers to the dynasty, although the two can overlap. Isidoros of Charax, Parthian Stations, 12. For discussion on the localization of Parthaunisa, see Pilipko 1989. Andragoras had defected from Seleukid rule sometime earlier (Strab. 11.9.3; Just. Epit. 41.4; Amm. Marc. 23.6.2). The precise chronology and the terms of Andragoras’ revolt, his murder, and the ensuing instalment of Arsakid rule remain unclear but we can assume that Parthia had seceded from Seleukid sovereignty by the 230s. For discussion, see Lerner 1999, 13–44; Chrubasik 2016, 65–122; Overtoom 2016, 984–1013; and most recently Olbrycht 2021, 73–100. Isidoros of Charax, Parthian Stations, 11. For Asaak’s significance in broader Arsakid kingship, see Olbrycht 2016. The dominant interpretation that Nisa was a capital city of the Arsakids (e. g. Invernizzi 1998a, 45; Dąbrowa 2010, 128, but cf. Olbrycht 2021, 195), in the sense of a royal residence, has recently been discarded: according to Lippolis 2019, 76, the site of Old Nisa shows no traces of settlement. For the identification of Nisa as Isidoros’ Parthaunisa and as a royal foundation by Mithradates I, see Invernizzi 2004, 133–137. The ancient name Mithradatkert (Mthrdtkrt) is recorded on two ostraca

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Mithradates I that the Arsakid kingdom expanded to an enormous empire, a powerful player on the global stage, as he conquered and expanded territories to the west, most notably Media, Babylonia, and Elymais in the 140s and 130s BCE.6 Although some architectural structures predate the reign of Mithradates I, nothing conclusive can be said of the site’s function before the second century BCE. It is clear, however, that Nisa became a principal dynastic and perhaps even religious centre of the Arsakid empire, as reflected in the monumentality of its art and architecture.7 Apart from Isidoros’ mention of Nisa as a relevant geographical place on trade routes between Syria and India, and perhaps an allusion to the region of Nisa by Pliny the Elder, nothing is known about the actual site from written sources.8 In fact, literary sources about the socio-cultural organization of the Parthians at large are notoriously scarce. The Parthians spoke an Iranian language that became known as Parthian, which was adapted and used as court language as well as in the imperial administration, alongside Greek.9 However, ancient Iranian ‘literature’ was largely oral and performative in nature, which contrasts to the abundance of literary sources in Greek and Latin languages. Therefore, apart from Arsakid material culture, Parthian history largely depends on partisan outsider accounts: a handful of Roman authors who generally held no deep interest in the Arsakids or the Parthians, nor held them in particular high esteem. Mentions of the Parthians by Justin (in his Epitome of Pompeius Trogus’ now lost work), Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus predominantly pertain to the geography of Parthia and to Arsakid military and diplomatic conflicts with the Seleukids and the Roman Empire.10 The significance of Nisa is therefore not to be understated, as its excavation and study provided a wealth of unique insights into social, cultural, and ideological matters of the early Arsakid kings. The Nisa district was first discovered in the late 19th century and has been extensively investigated by several different archaeological missions from the 1930s onwards. More than eighty years of excavations at the citadel uncovered the monumental remains of massive mud brick structures, richly decorated architecture,

6 7 8 9 10

found in the northern sector of the citadel (Diakonoff and Livshits 2001, nos. 681, 1693). Concise overviews of Arsakid history are provided by Wiesehöfer 1996b, 115–149; Dąbrowa 2012a; Hauser 2013; Gregoratti 2017; Canepa 2020a; Fabian 2020a; for more exhaustive treatments of Arsakid Parthia, see Shayegan 2011, 60–227; Olbrycht 2021. The term ‘monumental art’ refers here to its use by the excavators, particularly in describing the rhytons and marble statues from the Square House and the larger-than-life sized clay statues from the Round Hall. See below. Pliny the Elder makes mention of Nisiaea, a district of Parthyene (Plin. HN. 6.112). For recent discussion on Isidoros’ Parthian Stations, see Hartmann 2017; Hauser 2017; Schmitt 2017; Schuol 2017. Schmitt 1998, see also Diakonoff and Livshits 2001. Just. Epit. 41–42; Strab. 11.9; Plin. HN, 6.41, 6.44, 6.112; Tac. Ann. 2.1–4, 6.31–37, 6.41–44, 11.8–10, 12.10–14, 12.44, 15.1–31. For the collection and discussion of the image of the Parthians in literary sources, see Wiesehöfer 1998; Lerouge 2007; Hackl et al. 2010; Wiesehöfer and Müller 2017; as well as Dąbrowa 2017.

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and spectacular works of art.11 The first archaeological excavations were undertaken by the Soviet mission Yuzhnaya Turkmenistanskaya Arkheologicheskaya Kompleksnaya Ekspeditsiya (The South Turkmenistan Archaeological Complex Expedition; YuTAKE, 1946–1967) headed by Mikhail Masson and Galina Pugachenkova, both based in Tashkent.12 Research at Nisa continued with more systematic excavations carried out by the Turkmen Ashgabat mission headed by Viktor Pilipko (The Parthian Expedition; 1979–1991) and by expeditions of the Russian Academy of Sciences at Leningrad, led by Vadim Masson (The Leningrad Mission; 1982–1986), and at Moscow, led by Gennadiy Koshelenko (The Moscow Mission; 1985–1986, 1990–1991). With Turkmenistan’s independence, extensive excavations were continued by the joint Italian-Turkmen expedition of the Centro Ricerche Archaeologiche e Scavi di Torino per il Medio Oriente e l’Asia (CRAST; 1990–present) under the direction of Antonio Invernizzi and Carlo Lippolis.13 In 2007, the site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List. The Nisa excavations, especially the large intricately carved ivory rhytons and the Greek-styled marble sculptures unearthed amongst the finds, received special attention in scholarly discussions on Parthian art and its relation to Hellenism. Highly influential in this debate was Mikhail Rostovtzeff ’s now classic 1935 essay Dura and the Problem of Parthian Art in which he coined Parthian art as a distinct stylistic category characterized by frontality.14 Assessing the material culture from the westernmost regions of the Arsakid empire, particularly from Doura Europos in the Syrian desert, Rostovtzeff contended for the emancipation of Parthian art from Greek art. In his argument, he downplayed the impact of the latter on the former to challenge dominant Hellenocentric views that the Arsakid kings and Parthian elites were nomadic barbarians who had little cultural impact and who merely borrowed culture rather than possessing their own.15 Although Rostovtzeff was criticized for his methodology concerning the chronology and uniformity of what he defined as Parthian art, the discovery of Nisa spectacularly 11

12

13 14 15

For the history of the Soviet and Russian archaeological missions, see Masson and Pugachenkova 1982, 9–13; Pilipko 1994; 2001, 10–124; 2018, 51–61. For the history of the Italian-Turkmen archaeological mission, see Lippolis 2011a. Well-documented archaeological reports and related papers are published frequently in the journal Parthica. For a concise overview of the history of research of Parthia at large, see now Bruno 2021. The first archaeological investigations were undertaken by Alexander Marushchenko in the 1930s, which determined the presence of monumental structures (Pilipko 1994, 101–103). After World War II, the YuTAKE under Masson and Pugachenkova further explored the site which yielded, amongst others, the spectacular ivory rhytons that aroused scholarly interest across the globe. However successful and innovative, detailed reports by the YuTAKE remained unpublished (Invernizzi 2008, 9). The most recent campaign took place in autumn 2019, with preliminary notes published in the same year (Lippolis et al. 2019). Rostovtzeff 1935. For good discussion of the debate around the definition of Parthian art, see Invernizzi 2011a; Ellerbrock and Winkelmann 2012, 197–244; Hauser 2014; Invernizzi 2014; Jacobs 2014; Wiesehöfer 2014; Dirven 2016. E. g. Colledge 1977, 138–144. The idea that the Arsakids held to their nomadic heritage in managing their empire, is discussed and heavily criticized in Hauser 2005.

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supported his underlying assertion that Arsakid rule was neither culturally weak nor a disaster for Hellenism.16 Throughout time, the Nisa excavations profoundly impacted the debate on Parthian art, the early Arsakid kings, and their relation with Greeks and Greek culture, all of which is captured in the ambiguous notion of Philhellenism. This chapter aims to explore and disentangle the conceptual framework that structured how Hellenism at Nisa has been defined, perceived, and explained. 5.2 Site context and features Ancient Nisa was founded near a pre-existing village, set in the wider geographical area of Parthia: the historical region south-east of the Caspian Sea at the north-eastern edge of the Iranian plateau, bridging the border of modern Turkmenistan and Iran (Fig. 1.1). Parthia had been incorporated in the Achaemenid empire as the satrapy Parthava, which was later renamed to Parthyene under Seleukid rule. Around the mid-second century BCE, control over the region was seized by Arsakes I, but it was not until a century later, under the reign of his great-nephew Mithradates I, that the dominion of Parthia vastly expanded east and westwards to include large parts of Baktria, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Media. The geographical region of Parthia itself was roughly demarcated by the slopes of the Kopet Dagh to its north and the Binalud mountain range to its south, sandwiched between two great deserts: the Karakum and the Daht-e Kavir. The land was characterized by mountains, foothills, and fertile oases that were fed by mountain streams and rivers, most notably the Atrek. Nisa itself was not directly integrated in a riverine system but was well-irrigated through an organized water-supply system of terracotta pipelines and drains that ran through its locality.17 The city would be one of the Parthian Stations (mentioned by Isidoros) on the Persian Royal Road that led from the Mediterranean basin to Seleukeia on the Tigris, and from there to the Caspian Sea, the Hyrkanian plain, and across Parthia towards Antiocheia in Margiana (Merv), where it further branched out in the so-called Northern and Southern Silk Routes to China.18 Situated in a fertile and well-irrigated region, commanding important transregional overland roads, Nisa thrived as an important and vibrant hub for centuries to come.

16 17 18

For critical comments, see e. g. Schlumberger 1969, 73–75. On the water supply of Nisa, see Lippolis 2019, 76–79. Isidoros of Charax, Parthian Stations, 8–12. For Isidoros’ description of this route, see Hartmann 2017; Hauser 2017; Schmitt 2017; Schuol 2017.

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The site The archaeological district of Nisa encompasses two fortified natural mounds on the western and south-eastern fringes of the village Bagir, located on the outskirts of the Turkmen capital Ashgabat. The two tells were home to a vast settlement area and the royal citadel, which were labelled by the excavators as New Nisa (Novaia Nisa) and Old Nisa (Staraya Nisa), respectively.19 New Nisa on the western fringe of Bagir covered a large surface of 18 ha. and probably constituted the ancient city proper: its walled settlement, set within an extended inhabited area, has been dated from the Bronze Age until the 17th century CE, with substantial Islamic layers.20 The town grew into a major caravan city on the so-called Western Silk Roads and flourished well into the Middle Ages. Its Arsakid layers, however, remain largely unexplored. Only two archaeological investigations have been carried out here while the majority of attention remained focused on Old Nisa – the object of study since the YuTAKE missions.21 Whereas New Nisa had probably been the settlement proper, its counterpart Old Nisa, a kilometre southeast of it, constituted the royal citadel: an imposing fortress of 12 ha. protected by strong ramparts of 9 m. thick and 20 m. high, which were additionally flanked by 48 brick turreted towers. The area within the fortifications had the shape of an elongated polygon and was characterized by uneven terrain (Fig. 5.1). Visitors entered the citadel through the western ramparts, on the side of New Nisa. The spatial layout of the walled city is marked by three distinct building complexes in the northern, central, and south-western areas of the site. The northern section contained the so-called Square House, the largest edifice in the city; the central section opposite the main entrance housed the Central Complex, a set of ceremonial buildings organized around a large courtyard; and the south-western section enclosed the South-Western Complex, a large complex with different functions.22 The eastern and south-eastern sections of the citadel are currently explored by Turin archaeologists.23

19 20 21 22

23

The two sites are currently known as Taze Nusay and Konye Nusay – New Nisa and Old Nisa. For the settlement dynamics in the whole Nisa district, see Lippolis 2019. Masson and Pugachenkova 1982, 5. Invernizzi 2004, 133–137 proposed that New Nisa must have been the Parthaunisa mentioned by Isidoros, while Old Nisa was the fortress of Mithradates (Mithradatkert). Lippolis and Messina 2015, 39–40. I retain the terms proposed by the YuTAKE and continued by the CRAST, such as ‘Central Complex’, ‘Red Building’, ‘Round Hall Building’, ‘Square Hall’, ‘North-Eastern Building’, and most recently ‘South-Western Complex’ (see Invernizzi 2018, 270–272 for discussion; cf. terminology in Pilipko 2018). New excavation areas in the south-eastern and eastern sections have been opened in the 2007–2012 seasons. From here onwards, I will use ‘Nisa’ to refer to Old Nisa.

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Fig. 5.1. Map of Old Nisa (Lippolis 2019) © Archive Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino, courtesy of Carlo Lippolis

The archaeologists of the various expeditions have been cautious in stating a definite chronology of Nisa’s monuments; the remains of the buildings did not allow a securely dated stratigraphy, while the founding and ending date of the city remain equally hypothetical.24 Only two dates recorded on ostraca provided chronological anchors for 24

For notes on earlier, pre-Arsakid phases of the Nisa district, see Lippolis 2019, 82–83. For discussion on the last phase(s) of Nisa, see Lippolis 2013a.

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the earliest functioning of the citadel: the years 151/150 and 148/147 BCE.25 Apart from these, useful indications led the excavators to propose a possible general chronology between the third century BCE and the first century CE (Table 5.1). Pilipko identified roughly three phases of the citadel.26 The first, so-called ‘archaic’ phase is a highly ambiguous period, possibly with more intermediate stages, which was thought to have taken place somewhere around the mid-third century BCE – based on the foundation of the Arsakid kingdom, as well as some early ceramic finds – until the date of the first ostracon around the mid-second century BCE.27 This phase stretched from the earliest beginnings of the citadel to the construction of the Central Complex, which post-dated the erection of the Red Building and some masonries underneath the Square Hall and the North-Eastern Building. The second phase entailed an extensive building programme in the central section of the citadel around the mid-second century BCE, which saw the erection of the (rest of the) Central Complex: the Round Hall, the Tower Building, the Square Hall, and the North-Eastern Building. This grand phase is connected to the (re) foundation of the city as Mithradatkert (‘fortress of Mithradates’), as known from two inscribed ostraca, during which the city is thought to have transformed into a grand dynastic centre. The third hypothetical phase took place in the early first century BCE, when significant restorations and renovations were carried out in the Central Complex. Then, somewhere in the second half of the first century CE, the citadel declined and ceased to function, a period marked by gradual abandonment.28 In Islamic times, the citadel was resettled from the 11th to the 16th century CE.29 Table 5.1. Rough chronology of Nisa (after V. N. Pilipko 2008) Phase 1) ‘Archaic’ phase

25 26 27 28 29

Associated date C. second half of the third century BCE – early second century BCE (possibly with more intermediate stages)

Associated structures • Citadel • Fortification walls • Water system • Red Building • Structures under the Square Hall • Structures under the North-Eastern Building

Diakonoff and Livshits 2001, nos. 2673, 2663. Pilipko 2008, 46–50; see further useful discussion in Lippolis 2011b, 215–218. Balakhvantsev 2005, 185; 2015 argues for an earlier foundation by the one of the first Seleucid kings at a time no later than 250 BCE, somewhere in the late fourth or early third century BCE. This interpretation, however, has not gained wide support. The last and most recent ostracon records a date of 13 BCE (Diakonoff and Livshits 2001, nos. 478, 606). See further discussion in Lippolis 2013a. Pilipko 2001, 354–369; Lippolis and Messina 2015.

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Phase 2) Extensive building programme

Associated date C. mid-second century BCE

3) Restorations 4) Decline and abandonment

C. early first century BCE C. second half of the first century CE

Associated structures • Central Complex: Round Hall, Tower Building, Square Hall, some renovations of the Red Building • North-Eastern Building Central Complex Gypsum spheroids in specific areas of the Red Building and Round Hall Building

Fig. 5.2. Plan of the Central Complex at Nisa (drawing by C. Fossati, from Lippolis 2006) © Archive Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino, courtesy of Carlo Lippolis

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The Central Complex The central area of the citadel was aligned to the western fortification walls where the main entrance to the city was situated. This area was dominated by the Central Complex: a group of five buildings organized around a massive central courtyard (Fig. 5.2). The Soviet and Italian excavators ascribed a stately and ritual nature to this ensemble of structures and proposed that they were built on royal command for the celebration of the Arsakid dynasty.30 A recent report by Lippolis on the spatial organization of the site highlighted the sloped terrain that defined the area of the Central Complex and which divided the built space in a lower northern terrace and an upper southern plateau where the main buildings were located.31 The façades of the so-called Red Building (3 in Fig. 5.2) and the Tower Building (4 in Fig. 5.2) were lined along the southern side of the main courtyard, while the Square Hall (5 in Fig. 5.2) and the North-Eastern Building (6 in Fig. 5.2, also labelled as the ‘Palace’) dominated the eastern side of the court. Situated behind the Red Building and the Tower Building, the Round Hall Building (7 in Fig. 5.2) was the only structure that could not be directly accessed from the main courtyard. Along the courtyard’s northern limits was an avenue to the main entrance (2σ in Fig. 5.2), which led from the fortification walls to the North-Eastern Building on the lower terrace; according to Pilipko, the difference in elevation created the visual effect that the main buildings on the higher upper terrace could only partially be seen by visitors entering the citadel.32 While the structures all reflect various reconstructions and building phases, the excavators ascribed the erection of the Central Complex as a whole – apart from the earlier constructed Red Building – to an extensive building period around the mid-second century BCE, presumably under Mithradates I who transformed the Arsakid kingdom into an empire.33 The Red Building Much archaeological interest was invested in the Red Building: the oldest and possibly the most significant construction of the complex, situated at the southwestern corner of the main courtyard, adjacent to the western rampart. This imposing edifice was built on virgin soil and was dated to an obscure period before the construction of the rest of the Central Complex, possibly around the mid-late third or early second century BCE.34 Invernizzi and Lippolis established that throughout its existence, very little of 30 31 32 33 34

For an overview of interpretations of the Central Complex, see Pilipko 2008, 35. Lippolis 2019, 79–81 provides detailed discussion on the planimetric organization of the site. Pilipko 2008, 37. For the reconstruction of the sequence of the buildings, see Pilipko 2008, 43–47. Invernizzi and Lippolis 2008, 83–84, 366. Masonry of the Round Hall was leaning on the southern outer wall of the Red Building, which led the excavators to confirm an earlier (unspecified) date of the latter (Gabutti 1996, 175; Lippolis 2004, 56). There is no conclusive evidence for the citadel’s first

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the original layout and the decoration of the Red Building was altered, which speaks to its importance in relation to the other buildings.35 It had a grandiose square ground plan measuring 40 m. on each side and was constructed of mud brick, with stone bases that supported wooden columns and terracotta decorations on walls. Its internal layout consisted of a deep four-columned portico-like façade with two flanking rooms that preceded a tetrastyle central hall. This central hall was surrounded on three sides by similar-sized rooms and three narrow outer corridors on the building’s perimeter. Access to the central hall was restricted and indirect; the surrounding rooms only opened outwards to the peripheral corridors, facing away from the hall, while only the far south corridor provided passage to the central hall via a narrow opening (3 in Fig. 5.2). Such a layout with elongated corridors that regulated access, paralleled those of Ai Khanum’s palace, gymnasium, and domestic sections, and were thus considered by the excavators as part of Central Asian architectural traditions that existed since the Bronze Age.36 Compared to the other buildings in the Central Complex, the use of stone was relatively abundant in the Red Building, as it was implemented for the architectural decoration of the façade, the three-stepped stairway leading up to the portico entrance, and the Achaemenid torus-shaped bases of the four wooden columns in the central hall.37 The Red Building was named by the archaeologists as such due to the extensive use of red and purple coloured plaster of the walls of the outer façades and at least four internal rooms.38 The portico-façade was further adorned with a long ‘frieze’ of stone relief slabs uniquely positioned at the base of the wall. The stone slabs were polychrome painted and decorated with egg-and-dart pattern and vertical flutings – ornamental motifs often found in Greek architecture. This bright wall decoration deeply contrasted with that of the innermost central hall which, with its unadorned white-washed plastered walls, created a sober and solemn atmosphere possibly connected to a sacral function.39 Like the walls, the floors of the Red Building were delicately prepared with several layers of plaster.40 In a late phase of Arsakid occupation, ritual objects in the form of gypsum spheroids with coin impressions were deposited close to the walls, both inside and outside the building.41

35 36 37 38 39 40 41

building phase(s); therefore, the construction of the Red Building was placed somewhere between the foundation date of the citadel and the construction of the Square Hall. A definite foundation date of the citadel is not archaeologically substantiated, but has been presumed to be concurrent with the rise of the Arsakid kings in the mid-third century BCE (Pilipko 2008, 46). The fortification walls may however date to pre-Arsakid Hellenistic times (Pilipko 2001, 338–339). Invernizzi and Lippolis 2008, 84. Invernizzi and Lippolis 2008, 365–384; Invernizzi 2011b, 652. Menegazzi 2008. Invernizzi and Lippolis 2008, 84. Pilipko 2008, 38. Invernizzi 2011b, 652. Invernizzi and Lippolis 2008, 139.

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The unchanged architectural form throughout all building stages, the relative abundant use of stone, the careful treatment of the walls and the floors, and the later deposition of gypsum spheroids, led the Italian excavators to hypothesize that the Red Building was an official pavilion where exceptional ceremonies related to the celebration of Arsakid kingship took place, comparable to the function of a residential palace.42 The Tower Building The façade of the Red Building continued into that of the Tower Building on its east, which together formed the southern side of the main courtyard. Contemporary to the construction of the Round Hall, the erection of the Tower Building was dated to the second building phase around the mid-second century BCE. The Tower Building was the only building with two floors. Its façade slightly mirrored the one of the Red Building, constituting a deep columned portico with two flanking rooms which preceded the inner area.43 The nucleus however was different, characterized by a rectangle with three square towers jutting out of its corners; the Round Hall, aligned to south of the Red Building and the Tower Building, replaced a fourth tower in the southwestern corner. Central to the inner area was a massive solid substructure of mudbrick, with a second floor on top with columned structures which were accessible through staircases leading up from the three towers in the building’s corners. The monumental remains of terracotta decorations and wall paintings have been found amongst the debris on the upper floor. The clay sculptures may have been statues of kings and heroes which were possibly arranged and displayed in some sort of ancestors’ gallery.44 Invernizzi analysed the wall paintings, although extremely fragmentary, to have depicted an equestrian battle of horsemen wearing Iranian garments, which were considered to represent a specific historical or mythical event, important for the Arsakid dynasty.45 The minimal usable spaces on the ground floor, the difficult accessibility of the inner area on the second floor, and the presence of clay sculptures and equestrian wall paintings, led to interpretations of the building’s sacrality. However, considering there is no real space for religious ceremonies, the interpretation of a temple has been abandoned for the hypothesis that the Tower Building may have served a form of dynastic glorification of the Arsakids’ mythical or historical past.

42 43 44 45

Lippolis 2004, 176; 2009, 60–62; Invernizzi 2011b, 652–653. In earlier publications, the Red Building was considered a palace, the place where the kings resided. The portico’s roof was however supported by two brick trilobate columns in the front, and four wooden columns with stone torus-bases at the centre of the porch. Invernizzi 2011a, 228. Invernizzi 2001a, 151–153.

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The Round Hall Building Aligned to the south of the Red Building and forming the southwestern corner of the Tower Building, the Round Hall Building was the only building of the Central Complex that did not open onto the main courtyard. Instead, the main entrance was situated at the southern façade. The building constituted a thick-walled square structure with a majestic inner circular hall that gave the edifice its archaeological name. Access to the inner round hall was sectional and indirect; from the main entrance, a narrow corridor led the visitor to three passageways on the south, the northeast, and northwest sides of the hall. The southern passageway was later filled up, making entry to the inner space even more limited. In the two northern passageways, two basins of a later stage were unearthed which had likely served some sort of ritual purpose.46 The walls of the round hall were covered with white-washed plaster at the base and the centre, and were sloped in and upwards forming a vaulted roof, plastered in purple red.47 Depositions of distinctive gypsum spheroids with coin impressions or rattling seeds in them – similar to those found in the Red Building – seem to indicate that some ritual practices took place here in later times.48 On the ancient floor, remains were found of mud brick columns and monumental larger-than-life sized statues of unbaked clay, which possibly stood lined up against the walls of the round hall. The statues were all sculpted in what has been recognized as a Classical Greek style; at least five male or female figures were identified, wearing costumes recognized as Greek and Iranian. One of the figures was recognized as a warrior. Early interpretations of the YuTAKE excavators proposed that the statues represented Olympian gods; however, the remains are too fragmented to make definite conclusions. Current hypotheses by the Italian archaeologists labelled the building as a dynastic heroon or mausoleum, a celebratory space dedicated to the memory of one of the early Arsakid kings or their ancestors (real or mythological).49 The withdrawn location off the main courtyard, the monumentality, the unique layout, and the findings in the inner space seem to support a sacral or ceremonial function of the Round Hall Building, though the specific ritual practices that took place here remain unknown. Amongst the statues, a portrait head of a bearded male was unearthed with the facial features of Mithradates I, based on his coinage. This led archaeologists to hypothesize that the 46 47

48 49

Invernizzi and Lippolis 2008, 33, 38. Blasi et al. 2008; Masturzo 2008. The Soviet and Russian excavators (Pugachenkova 1958, 104; Pilipko 2008, 40–41) reconstructed the roofing as a wooden pavilion roof, separate from the walls of the circular halls. The walls themselves were thought to have been vertical and divided into two registers, of which the upper one would have been decorated columns and sculptures. Updated measurements carried out by the Italian mission seem to indicate a vaulted roof instead – a dome resting directly on the ground. See Invernizzi 2016 for coverage of the discussion. Messina 2008. Similar objects have been found at nearby Mansur Depe, a temple site of the Parthian period. Invernizzi 2001b, 308–310; 2001a, 141–147; Bollati 2008, 191–192.

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Round Hall was the nucleus of the ruler cult of Mithradates I, perhaps combined with the celebration of other members of the imperial family.50 The Square Hall Building The Square Hall Building on the eastern side of the main courtyard may similarly have served a ceremonial function. It was constructed in the citadel’s second building phase around the mid-second century BCE, when the majority of the Central Complex was erected. Two older monumental structures with large rooms and porticos preceded the edifice of the Square Hall Building, the construction of which incorporated parts of the previous walls in a foundation platform in order to match the terrain with the other structures of the Central Complex.51 As the other structures of the Central Complex, the Square Hall Building was thickwalled and constructed of dried mud brick on a quadratic ground plan with a large central inner hall. The inner hall was similarly square in shape and was decorated with four central columns – a layout which was to be retained throughout its many reparations and alterations. From the main courtyard, there were three entrances leading into the square hall. Opposite the entrance in the hall’s eastern wall, a small passage led into a small room that opened onto the central space of the citadel, an area which possibly was laid out as a garden.52 There was another small passageway in the hall’s northern wall leading to an elongated corridor-like room which was connected to a small square annex, the so-called White Room, which led to the North-Eastern Building.53 At a later building stage, the round columns in the square hall were replaced by brick four-lobed pillars, and the two northernmost entranceways were closed up. Corrugated triangular pillars jutting out of the façade were added to the building’s exterior, while the walls of the inner hall were decorated with a continuous series of half-columns or niches. Somewhere during this later stage, monumental statues of unbaked clay were deposited in the White Room: highly naturalistic sculpted male and female figures in Greek-styled armour and draperies, one of whom represented a warrior. These sculptures may have been standing in the central hall, possibly in a gallery at a height of 3 m high; based on the easy accessibility and the clay statues, current hypothesis holds that the Square Hall Building functioned as an audience hall, with sculptures representing members of the ruling dynasty or ancestors.54

50 51 52 53 54

Dąbrowa 2009; Invernizzi 2011b, 657. Pilipko 1994, 106. These structures do not date before the Arsakid era, and can therefore be placed somewhere within the wide range of the first building phase of the city. Invernizzi 2011b, 658. The Square Hall was previously thought to belong to the North-Eastern Building, which together would form one structural block representing the Arsakids’ residential palace. Pilipko 2008, 39, 48.

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The North-Eastern Building The main entrance to the citadel is thought to have led from the western rampart to the North-Eastern Building. This area was partially excavated; a large monumental, possibly ceremonial courtyard with the monumental decoration of half-columns in the outer northern wall has been unearthed, as well as open porticoes, unroofed spaces, and several service buildings where large storage vessels were deposited at a later stage.55 Some structures of the North-Eastern Building – those labelled as the ‘central house’ – date to an earlier phase which possibly relates to the foundation of the citadel. In early publications, this area has been labelled as a palace, but information on the exact function of the complex is too scanty to say anything conclusive about its nature and purpose.

Fig. 5.3. Plan of the Northern Sector at Nisa (after Koshelenko 1985)

The Northern Sector The northern part of the citadel was dominated by the so-called Square House (Fig. 5.3, left edifice), situated north of the Central Complex. This monumental building was the largest at Nisa, containing a greater capacity than any other structure in the city. The Square House is therefore thought to have held major importance as one of the 55

Invernizzi 2001b, 301–302; Lippolis and Manassero 2015, 116–118.

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principal ceremonial venues of the citadel, together with the Red Building.56 Its mud brick construction is dated to around the mid-second century BCE, concurrent with the erection of the Central Complex.57 With its central square courtyard, surrounded on all sides by a series of three interlinked similar-sized rectangular rooms, accessible from the court through columned porticoes, and one main entrance, the building’s layout conformed to regional traditions for palatial architecture.58 Each of the 12 rooms were built with deep monumental mud brick benches lined against the walls, while four wooden columns parallel to the main axis held up the flat roof. Based on the structure’s monumentality, the identical rooms, and the presence of massive benches in them, Invernizzi considered the Square House to have functioned as a venue for egalitarian banquets and meetings.59 The broad benches would have originally functioned as seats or beds on which people reclined, in line with the banqueting traditions of the Mediterranean and Western Asia, while the identical rooms in which these meetings took place would point to the egalitarian organization of Arsakid society in tribes and clans. Invernizzi determined that the Square House was later rebuilt, possibly in the first century BCE – a period of agricultural and economic growth, marked by several restorations and renovations in the citadel, during which its role changed from a ceremonial space to a storage building or treasury. In this phase, the columned porticoes and the inner rooms were gradually walled up and sealed, and a wealth of various valuable objects were deposited on the benches in the rooms. Amongst these were the famous ivory rhytons: 48 large horn-shaped drinking vessels of different sizes and with intricately carved relief decorations.60 The rhytons had an inconveniently placed drinking hole, no handles, and were too large and heavy to be common drinking vessels for daily use; the horns are therefore likely to have had some ceremonial function instead, possibly for sacrificial libations.61 Their large size suggest that they were not imports but local or regional products, carved by several different artisans, possibly belonging to the same school, who worked them in Central Asian style but depicting Greek iconographic motifs and scenes, such as the Olympian gods and Dionysian ritual processions.62 One of the vessels (rhyton no. 76) bore a Greek inscription with the name of Hestia, the goddess of the hearth.63 Other classes of objects stored in the rooms were common and parade weapons, lavishly decorated textiles, metal figurines in Greek and Iranian iconography which had been part of furnishings and vessels, and marble statues – at 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63

Invernizzi 2011b, 655. Invernizzi 2000, 13. Invernizzi 2000, 17–18, 30–33. Invernizzi 2001b, 298–299; 2011a, 654–655. The rhytons have received full publication in Masson and Pugachenkova 1982; Pappalardo 2010. Masson and Pugachenkova 1982, 38–42, 139. Masson and Pugachenkova 1982, 36, 91–136; further discussion in Invernizzi 2008; 2013; Lippolis 2014. Rougemont 2012, no. 77. See further discussion in Pappalardo 2010, 217-222.

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least five of them – of Greek gods sculpted in Classical and Archaic Greek styles.64 In the third and last building phase of the Square House, a half-column  – possibly an altar – was built opposite the entrance in the late Parthian period. East of the Square House was a smaller storage building (Fig. 5.3, right edifice), which the excavators tentatively dated the second century BCE, possibly stretching into the first century CE.65 More than 2,000 inscribed ostraca have been found here; all in the Parthian language, written in Aramaic script, and using the Arsakid calendar.66 The inscriptions were largely administrative in nature and testify to a well-structured economic system, documenting standard formulas of the delivery, receipt, payment, and storage of wine; the vineyards that distributed it; and the officials in charge – all with Iranian (Parthian) personal names.67 The receipt and storage of wine also implies its consumption and may thus support the banquet-hypothesis. The storage of wine and the presence of at least five vineyards are further recorded on ostraca elsewhere in the citadel.68 Another smaller structure, possibly of the same period and labelled by the Soviet excavators as the khumkana, has been unearthed adjacent to the south-eastern corner of the Square House (Fig. 5.3, middle edifice).69 This edifice consisted of a single rectangular room with an internal organization reflecting that of the rooms in the Square House; a row of seven wooden columns were raised along the central axis of the space, while deep benches lined against the walls. At a later stage, this monumental space was reused for the storage of large vessels – khums – to which the edifice owes its archaeological name. The South-Western Complex The South-Western Complex, situated in the south-western corner and leaning against the ramparts, has been unearthed during the most recent and ongoing excavations. The complex was constructed from square mud brick for the inner and pakhsa for the outer walls, and consisted of the so-called South-Western Building and the Eastern Building built against it, together forming a single complex. The life span of the compound is preliminarily ascribed to the period between the late second century BCE until the early first century CE, based on the ostraca found here.70 The South-Western Building was oriented towards the north, where its façade was sparsely adorned with some terra64 65 66 67 68 69 70

For the metal sculptures, see Invernizzi 1999. For the marble statues, see Invernizzi 2009. Lippolis and Messina 2008, 55–61; Lippolis and Manassero 2015, 119–120. Diakonoff and Livshits 1960; 2001. Bader 1996, 255–263; Lippolis and Manassero 2015, 128–130. For Parthian onomastics in the Nisa ostraca, see Schmitt 1998, 177–194; 1999; 2016. Livshits and Pilipko 2004; Lippolis and Manassero 2015, 128–129. Written sources, e. g. Sima Qian (Shi Ji 23 = Watson 1961, 235), mention the production of wine in Parthia. Pilipko 200, 163–173. Lippolis 2013b, 114. One of the ostraca record a date of 107–68 BCE, during which the building was definitely in use (Lippolis and Manassero 2015, 128).

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cotta architectural decorations.71 The nucleus of the edifice was a large open courtyard, around which rows of simple rectangular rooms were organized (Fig. 5.4) – a recurring ground plan for storage buildings across Central Asia. In several excavated rooms, small ovens, fire places, working benches, plastered basins, and other cooking and preparing facilities have been unearthed, as well as large khums, clay sealings of the vessels, and fragments of moulds for large-scale naturalistic horse sculptures.72 No objects were found, but the unearthed structures seem to suggest that activities in the South-Western Building were related to food production, processing, stocking, and storage.73 Discovered ostraca indicate that wine, flour, and oil were amongst the products stored here.74 While storehouse activities of the Square House in the north seem to have been related to the accumulation of valuable objects in various types of containers, those in the South-Western Building were of quite different nature, related to the storage of food in khums.75 Other activities, as indicated by the moulds, suggest that one or more rooms may have functioned as workshops for craftsmen.76 Excavations on the Eastern Building adjacent to the South-Western Building are still ongoing, but its initial schematic ground plan has been interpreted to relate to residential and warehouse activities. The excavators therefore hypothesize that the Eastern Building may have functioned as a residence for a high official whose responsibilities were related to the activities in the South-Western Building.77

71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Lippolis 2013b, 96. Lippolis and Messina 2008; Lippolis 2010; 2013b. Lippolis 2013, 96–112. Lippolis 2013b, 114. Lippolis and Manassero 2015, 134–135. Lippolis 2010, 41–44. Lippolis 2013b, 112.

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Fig. 5.4 Plan of the South-Western Complex at Nisa (Lippolis 2019) © Archive Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino, courtesy of Carlo Lippolis

5.3 Review The towered walls of Nisa protected a massive fortress which enclosed a series of monumental buildings arranged in three nuclei across the citadel: the Northern Section, the Central Complex, and the South-Western Complex. The site’s archaic phase remains obscure; most buildings date to a period marked by an extensive building programme around the mid-second century BCE, during which the citadel appears to have been transformed into a grand ceremonial centre for the Arsakid dynasty under the reign of Mithradates I. While the southern section seems to have been dedicated to buildings with a mostly utilitarian function, the Central Complex as well as the Square House in the north functioned as the nuclei of a range of sacral and ceremonial activities to celebrate and glorify the Arsakid dynasty. The specific rituals performed here cannot easily be defined and remain conjectural. The Red Building was proposed to be an official pavilion where exceptional ceremonies would have taken place, possibly providing

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the space for royal activities usually connected with a residential palace, although this remains elusive. The function of the Round Hall was suggested to be a dynastic heroon or mausoleum to serve the ruler cult. The Tower Building was also thought to have served some sacral purpose connected to the glorification of Arsakid mythical or historical past, while the Square Hall was suggested to have been an audience hall. The large Square House in the north possibly constituted one of the most important structures, where people assembled and participated in commensal feasts and banquets, before the building changed into a storehouse of valuable objects in the first century BCE. All monumental buildings in the citadel were constructed of dried mud bricks and beaten clay (pakhsa) and were laid out on regular ground plans familiar across eastern Iran and Central Asia: thick-walled, quadratic in form, and following a symmetric and concentric scheme with a central inner hall and peripheral corridors which both connected and isolated the inner spaces. Layered, sometimes chromatic (particularly red) plaster was used for defining and visually accentuating the flooring, the walls, and the façades – a technique often used in Iranian palatial architecture – while structural decorations which were recognized as Greek, such as acanthus-leaved Corinthian capitals, Doric metopes, and palmettes, were applied in terracotta.78 There was a limited use of sand stone, reserved for the stone-slab frieze of the Red Building and the torus-like bases of the wooden columns. Cultural objects unearthed at Nisa also reflected a combination of sorts. The ivory rhytons were decorated with friezes depicting Greek iconographic scenes, but were carved by different artists in Iranian style and technique. The marble sculptures in the Square House were recognized as ‘purely’ Greek in style, just as the fragmented larger-than-life sized clay statues in the Round Hall and the Square Hall: these were figures sculpted in naturalistic Greek style wearing Greek and Iranian armour and draperies. The numerous inscriptions on ostraca found in the citadel were all drawn up in the Parthian language and mention names which are all related to the Avestan tradition.79 5.4 Hellenism and Philhellenism The monumental architecture and art of Nisa played an important role in discussions about Arsakid and Parthian history and culture. Marginalized both in terms of cultural importance and political power, the Arsakids have attracted limited or negative scholarly attention until relatively recently.80 Considered as merely a transitional phase

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Lippolis 2009, 54–59; 2011; Lippolis et al. 2017. Schmitt 1998, 177–194. For biased perceptions on the Arsakid kings and the Parthians in general, see e. g. Drijvers 1998; Ehrhardt 1998; Rajak 1998; Van Wickevoort Crommelin 1998; Wiesehöfer 2005; Dąbrowa 2012b, 21–25; Wiesehöfer and Müller 2017.

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between the Achaemenid and Sasanian periods of rule across Eurasia, Arsakid history was labelled as post-Hellenistic or pre-Sasanian. Likewise in terms of geography, Parthia was seen as peripheral to, and therefore less important and interesting than the Mediterranean. Such negative attitudes were largely influenced by the paucity of both archaeological as well as written source material produced by the Arsakids themselves. Much of what we know is based on non-local etic accounts by later Greek and Roman historians, whose prejudiced and often uninformed narratives created an unfavourable antagonistic version of the Parthians as the (new) Oriental and nomadic Other.81 As a result, Parthian art was considered as derivative, imitative, and unoriginal.82 The Nisa excavations instigated a surge of renewed interest in the Arsakids, as they unexpectedly yielded a significant amount of Greek-styled art objects as well as a large corpus of ostraca in the Parthian language which documented an intricate system of financial administration, most of it related to the reception and storage of wine. These findings profoundly challenged dominant views that the Parthians were uncultured crude barbarians. While the architecture of the Arsakid fortress has been recognized as predominantly Iranian or Central Asian, combining Achaemenid and eastern Iranian elements common in other Central Asian sites such as Ai Khanum and Takht-i Sangin, much of the discussions on Nisa’s cultural character has focused on those object classes which reflected the most Greek elements, namely the ivory rhytons and the marble statuettes unearthed in the Square House. The artistic production of the ivory rhytons – drinking horns that were particularly common across Achaemenid Eurasia – were seen as iconic representations of early Arsakid culture as a whole, which has been characterized by scholars as culturally composite, resulting from “a willingness to borrow style and motifs from Greek and earlier Near Eastern cultures and to recombine them to create new forms.”83 With regards to the Greek style of, or elements in the Nisa rhytons and statues, such “willingness to borrow” tends to be described and characterized as Philhellenism. This term derives from the royal epithet ‘philhellene’ proclaimed on Arsakid coins circulating in West Asia and is often translated as ‘Greek-friend’ or ‘Greek-admirer’.84 Although the precise implications of the royal epithet in ancient contexts are ambiguous, the term has been adopted as a modern explanatory concept representing Arsakid rule, culture, and interactions with Greeks at large. Similar to Hellenism, Philhellenism thus became an umbrella term for scholars to refer to a range of Greek-related matters under Arsakid reign, which gave rise to two interrelated issues that require consideration here.

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Dąbrowa 2012, 21–25. Herzfeld 1941, 286–287; Colledge 1977, 143. For excellent methodological commentary on the negative evaluation of Parthian art, see Dirven 2016. Downey 1986, 580. See also Herzfeld 1941, 305–306. The legend ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ MEΓAΛOΥ ΑΡΣΑΚΟΥ ΦΙΛΕΛΛΗΝΟΣ (‘Basileos Megalou  Arsakou Philhellenos’, of king Arsakes the Great, Philhellene) circulated on coins from Seleukeia on the Tigris from the reign of Mithradates I onwards (Sellwood 1980, type 13).

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Political and cultural Philhellenism The first pertains to the contentious nature of motivations of Arsakid kings to politically accommodate to Greek subjects who had settled in Seleukid Asia, a question that emerged from assessing Greek impact and influence on Arsakid political and ideological practices, particularly from the mid-second century onwards. It was during this time that the Arsakid kingdom in Parthia expanded and transformed into a supraregional empire from Central to West Asia, bringing former Seleukid territories with considerable minorities of Greek or Greek-speaking settlers under their control. Although later historians under Roman rule mention that Mithradates I, upon his invasion of Seleukid West Asia, was allegedly met with defiant hostility mustered by these communities, literary, numismatic, and administrative sources indicate that Greek(-speaking) subjects maintained their upper class positions after Arsakid victories over Seleukid attempts by Demetrios II Nikator (139 BCE) and Antiochos VII Sidetes (129 BCE) to reclaim Mesopotamia.85 Greek cities in Mesopotamia retained considerable autonomy, were granted additional privileges such as municipal minting rights and high military and administrative positions, and it was under Mithradates I that the philhellene epithet came to be featured in the royal title on coin legends for the first time.86 With the expansion and transformation into an empire, early Arsakid kings further continued imperial structures and output that had existed under the previous Seleukid administration, including coin traditions such as the drachm (in adapted weight), with royal portraits on the obverse, Greek gods on the reverse, and the use of Greek language.87 Correlating coinage with policy, scholars such as Edward Dąbrowa have contended that Greek and Greek-speaking socio-economic elites in urban centres such as Seleukeia on the Tigris, Babylon, and Susa could exert such power and influence, that the Arsakids

85

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Greek hostility, in the form of Greek support to Seleukid attempts to reclaim Mesopotamia, are mentioned by Joseph. AJ 13.184–185; Tac. Ann. 11.8; Just. Epit. 36.1.3. However, as examined by Shayegan 2011, 125–126, 136, the Astronomical Diaries mention no such hostility, but rather a strong cooperation between Greek subjects and Arsakid kings. For a critical analysis of the Astronomical Diaries with regards to Arsakid-Seleukid warring in Mesopotamia, see Shayegan 2011, 60–150. For a critical discussion of Arsakid numismatics, see Alram 1998. Edward Dąbrowa points out that if there had been Greek resistance i. e. Greek support for the two Seleukid marches against the Arsakids, then it did not prompt serious political or social repercussions after the instalment of Arsakid rule in Mesopotamia under Mithradates I and his successor Phraates II; see Dąbrowa 1998, 44–45; 2005a, 80–81; 2005b, 66. The philhellene epithet became widespread on coins of subsequent rulers until at least the first century BCE, such those minted by Artabanos I (r. 127–124) and Mithradates II (r. 125–91 BCE) (Sellwood 1980, resp. types 22 and 23). Wolski 1984, 154 however, remarks that the epithet only featured on currency circulating in Mesopotamia, not in other Arsakid dominions. Dąbrowa 2011a; 2011b; further discussion in Fabian 2020a. However, it must be noted too that the Arsakids increasingly integrated Iranian coin traditions from Mithradates II onward, such as the beard, the tiara, and the torque, as well as the seated archer wearing the kyrbasia on the reverse; see Sellwood 1980, esp. types 28, 29; 1983.

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were compelled to assuage their hostility.88 It was thus argued that the reason for Arsakid kings to proclaim themselves as ‘philhellenes’, make concessions, and grant privileges to cities with large Greek and Greek-speaking minorities, would have been to acquire their loyalty and support necessary against imperial competitors in the power strife for West Asia: the Seleukids and later the Romans.89 Opposing the idea of the Arsakids passively adopting Greek culture, this rationale advanced an understanding of Hellenism – in the form of Greek coin legends, coin portraits and imagery, Greek civic culture – as a sheer propagandistic tool to declare Arsakid favouritism towards their Greek and Greek-speaking subjects in Mesopotamia: a shrewd strategic appeasement that served the survival and stabilization of their rule. Advocating a more nuanced cultural understanding of Philhellenism, other scholars such as Jozef Wiesehöfer argued that Philhellenism did not signify an entirely instrumental strategy on the part of the Arsakid kings. They agreed that the fashioning of coin legends in Greek language, coin imagery in Greek style, and maintaining existing administrational structures, probably served political reasons indeed: to solicit support from Greek and Greek-speaking subjects and provide them a sense of continuity from Seleukid to Arsakid rule. However, according to these scholars, Arsakid kings and court members were simultaneously well-versed and deeply engaged in Greek culture and therefore genuine in its propagation and integration in the idiom, imagery, and ideology of their empire.90 This argument emphasizes the cultural finesse of the Arsakids and is buttressed by numerous cases that underline the Greek paideia of Arsakid royals, such as that of king Orodes II (r. 57–38 BCE) whom Plutarch described to be such familiar with Greek language and literature, that he could well apprehend and appreciate the Greek theatrical performances at the wedding banquet of his son Pakoros.91 Hellenism – referring here to the Greek education of royal court members and resultant cultural output – was therefore proposed to be coexistent with other cultural forms of royal expression and communication such as Persianism, especially in later Arsakid reigns.92

88 89

90 91 92

Wolski 1984, 154; Dąbrowa 1998, 46; Olbrycht 2010, 133; Dąbrowa 2011c. On a detailed assessment of Mithradates I’s campaigns against the Seleukids and conquest of Mesopotamia, see Dąbrowa 2005a. Wolski 1984, 154 moreover proposed that the real nature of Arsakid imperial rule was Philiranic rather than Philhellenic, as the wider royal idiom and imagery of the Arsakids accommodated more to Iranian elites than any other ethno-social group. For a critical in-depth discussion on the thesis of an Iranian i. e. Persian revival in the imperial programme of the early Arsakids, see Shayegan 2011. Huyse 1996, 67–69; Wiesehöfer 1996a; 2000; 2007, 127–130; 2015. Plut. Vit. Crass. 33.2. On Parthian Persianism, see Fowler 2005; Canepa 2017a; Fowler 2017; Strootman 2017; Versluys 2017a, 213–219.

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Philhellenism and originality The question whether the Arsakid kings accommodated to Greek and Greek-speaking subjects because they genuinely acculturated to Greek culture or because of pragmatic motivations, closely relates to the second issue around Philhellenism that emerged from its ambiguous meaning in modern scholarship: the question of cultural originality against cultural dependency. In 1984, Józef Wolski published an important methodological paper on Arsakid Philhellenism in which he rightly criticized the Hellenocentric lens through which scholars had approached Arsakid history. He pointed out that in both ancient (Greek and Latin) and modern historiography the Arsakids had been consistently, even traditionally, negatively portrayed and assessed as crude barbarians unable to bring about anything important, progressive, or original on their own merits.93 As a consequence, cultural and political achievements under Arsakid reign came to be attributed to a presupposed dependency on superior Greeks and Macedonians whom the Arsakids would have imitated to create their empire and shape its cultural contents. Such interpretations that regarded the Parthians as politically and culturally oblivious while undermining Arsakid independency and originality, were closely tied to visions of history that viewed the political defeat of the Seleukids by the Arsakids in Mesopotamia as a cultural catastrophe for Hellenism: a radical break with the preceding period of perceived cultural progress under Macedonian reign. It is noteworthy how the Parthian period is often treated as distinct and excluded from the Hellenistic period, despite important continuity and overlap of two momentous centuries during which networks of power, culture, and commerce were held in place. Although scholarship of the last decades has put much effort in defending Arsakid cultural originality or creativity, expectations of Arsakid barbarism and dependency in the notion of Philhellenism still echo through research methodology to assess and interpret the art and architecture of Arsakid Nisa. Masson and Pugachenkova’s 1959 Parfjanskie ritony Nisy (The Parthian Rhytons of Nisa), followed by the English translation in 1982, was the first study fully dedicated to the Nisa rhytons. In their analysis of the sculptural decoration, the YuTAKE excavators subdivided the vessels into two types: Hellenistic and barbarian, based on the bodily proportions and the facial types of the figures sculpted on the friezes which adorned the upper part of the rhytons. The Hellenistic group would reflect ‘the classical canons of Greek beauty’ with expressive facial features full of emotion, while the barbarian type would be characterized by faces which could hardly be differentiated from one another – plump, not rendered, and with hieratic motionless expressions.94 This barbarian 93 94

Wolski 1984, 146–148, see also 1989. This observation has resonated throughout subsequent scholarship. For the problems on ancient sources and its impact on research history on the Arsakids and their dealings with Greeks and Macedonians, see Hauser 2001; Wiesehöfer 2003; 2015. Masson and Pugachenkova 1982, 91–92.

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type was recognized when the sculptural rendering was interpreted to lack ‘classical harmony’, ‘dramatic strength’ or ‘lyrical gentleness’, features which they self-evidently categorized to belong to Greek art.95 For Masson and Pugachenkova, it were these Greek features that gave the objects great artistic value, despite that “elements of local traditions intrude conspicuously, even in such thoroughly Hellenistic subjects such as the Olympic gods.”96 Throughout their analyses, the stylistic elements of the figures on the friezes appear to be measured and assessed along the artistic standards of the modern category of Classical Greek art. The rendering of depicted Olympic gods such as Zeus, carved in a different way than the sculptural ideal of Greek art that they envisaged, resulted therefore in the interpretation of the figure as a ‘composite Asian Zeus’, of the ‘Graeco-Parthian deity type’ as perceived in other sites such as Doura Europos and Commagene. That the rhytons departed from idealized archetypical models and subsequently could not be categorized as purely Greek or purely Iranian, was rationalized as the result of a ‘Parthian-philhellene interpretation’ of local subject matter, which “reveals great complexity and syncretism of original elements.”97 Emphasizing that non-categorization marks creative ingenuity, Masson and Pugachenkova argued that this composite Arsakid Philhellenism did not entail a slavish imitation of Greek art, but only a superficial adoption of Hellenism – a guise underneath which the Arsakids were highly original. Despite their noticeably apologetic hypothesis that the rhytons were no imitative but rather creative products of Arsakid Philhellenism, locally commissioned by Parthian noblemen, the YuTAKE excavators still seem to consider the actual artists who carved the vessels to be experienced sculptors from elsewhere, possibly from former Seleukid centres or Graeco-Baktrian provinces that came under Parthian dominance.98 The idea that non-local (Greek) artists from Baktria were involved in the production of the Nisa rhytons, has also been supported by Paul Bernard, the director of the Ai Khanum excavations. In a 1985 paper on the depiction of Greek poets in the figural scenes on the rhytons, Bernard argued that the vessels were not only made by Greeks, but were also meant for a Greek rather than a non-Greek audience.99 Bernard evaluated the iconography of the scenes to be “so purely Greek, that it could only speak to a cultivated Greek.”100 According to Bernard, literary evidence provided no sufficient base for the thesis that the Arsakid court and aristocracy were deeply affected by Greek culture.101 95 96 97 98

Masson and Pugachenkova 1982, 99, 102. Masson and Pugachenkova 1982, 92. Masson and Pugachenkova 1982, resp. 94, 149; see further 105–106. Masson and Pugachenkova 1982, introduction to the translation [1977], 1. See also Barnett 1968, 49 and resonance in Invernizzi 2013, 87–88. 99 Bernard 1985b, 89. 100 Bernard 1985b, 74–75: “II ne s’agit donc pas d’une interpretatio parthica du thème des Muses comme on a pu le penser, mais d’un sujet si purement grec qu’il ne pouvait parler qu’à un Grec cultivé” (emphasis added). 101 Bernard 1985b, 87–88; Manassero 2018.

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While conceding that the marble and big clay sculptures in the Square House and Round Hall may have been produced locally, Bernard maintained on the basis of the stylistic unity of the carvings – evaluated to be too refined for Parthians to fully understand and appreciate the Greek literary references in the figural scenes – that the rhytons must have been spoils of war from a conquered Greek city in Seleukid or Graeco-Baktrian territory, where they were produced for and within a Greek community.102 Hellenism as communicative medium Bernard’s claim that the Nisa rhytons were commissioned by a Greek client did not take strong root in subsequent historiography. With the renewed excavations of the Italian-Turkmen team headed by Invernizzi and Lippolis from the 1990s onward, new interpretations entered the debate on the art of Nisa. The reassessment of the corpus of the rhytons as well as the marble statues, was an important aim of the Nisa excavations, as part of the larger project focusing on “the legacy of Alexander the Great and the origins of Parthian art: Research on the spread of Hellenistic culture in Asia and on its effects in Parthian and Sasanian times” by the Archaeological Research Centre in Turin.103 In 2010 as part of the Turin project, Eleonore Pappalardo published a fully updated and exhaustive volume on the corpus of ivory rhytons, in which she reassessed the iconographical and stylistic features of figural depictions on the vessels. Abandoning the Hellenistic-barbarian subdivisions of earlier YuTAKE research, Pappalardo’s analysis established eight thematic groups based on known Greek iconographic models and, independent from these, eight style-groups based on criteria of formal similarities in composition and style. The method of analysis of these groups is based on the identification of the (cultural) prototype used to model the iconographic features, assessing the extent to which they derived or deviated from (modern classifications of) Greek art. The figure of Hera, for example, recurs in three different attitudes; she has a pair of wings on her head, which are absent in the western repertoire. The adoption of three different models in rendering Hera is probably due to the lack of a unitary archetype, perhaps associated to the absence of a local deity ideologically and iconographically corresponding to Zeus’ wife. This hypothesis could be corroborated by the almost absolute analogy in the way of rendering Hera and Demeter, probably due to the lack of an Oriental iconographic pattern for the former.104

Pappalardo argues that the unconventionally depicted figure of Hera with wings on her head – an artistic ‘anomaly’ – can be explained through a passage of Lucian of Samosata,

102 Bernard 1985b, 88–91; see also Boardman 2015, 77, 88–91. 103 Centro Scavi di Torino 2018a. For the marble statues, see Invernizzi 1999. 104 Pappalardo 2010, 327.

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a rhetorician writing in the second century CE.105 The passage describes Athargatis at Hierapolis (in modern Syria), a goddess who is associated with Hera and whose statue in the Syrian city is described as having the attributes of other deities, amongst whom Athena. That Athena often had wings on her helmet – an attribute which is not mentioned in the passage – would account for the peculiar wings of the Hera-figure on one of the rhytons. This rather strained reasoning illuminates the method of explaining perceived visual anomalies by searching for supporting information from Western Asia. Although these elements are perceived as anomalies deviating from ‘standard’ Greek originals, Pappalardo concludes that such peculiar features are “not to be referred to Hellenic prototypes, but [to the] outcome of syncretism with local iconographic traditions.106 Pappalardo’s impressive detailed analysis of the style-groups which identified specific hands based on technique, composition, and style, is more convincing, which also serves as the groundwork of her main conclusions.107 In contrast to Bernard’s view of the stylistic homogeneity of the friezes, the reassessed corpus of rhytons revealed profound and dominating heterogeneity; it became clear that the vessels, although a unified whole in terms of material, form, and arrangement of components, actually reflected a distinct internal variety in the employed styles and techniques for the same iconographic themes.108 While Pappalardo’s analysis suggests that the vessels had the same provenance – arguably a local workshop in Nisa itself – the hypothesis emerged that they did not share the same hand, and possibly neither the same chronology, implying that the rhytons, rather than being commissioned en masse at the same time, were carved by different generations of craftsmen (between the mid-second and the late first century BCE, based on the chronology of the Square House) who adopted and adapted various carving methods from previous artisans over the course of time.109 The reassessments of the ivory rhytons by Pappalardo, as well as the analyses of the marble statues by Invernizzi in a separate monograph, considerably shaped the current view and definition of Hellenism in Arsakid Parthia. Particularly influential were the numerous publications of Invernizzi, the former director of the excavations of both Nisa and Seleukeia on the Tigris – projects which both focused on the spread and impact of Hellenistic culture in Asia – who argued for a more dynamic syncretistic interpretation of the Nisa rhytons and the marble statues, and by extension, the site as a whole.110 He solidified the idea that the early Arsakid kings would have deliberately chosen and adopted Greek figurative language – “the artistic taste that was dominant throughout Asia” – to express their own religious or ideological conceptions.111 As the lingua franca, 105 106 107 108 109 110 111

Luc. Syr. D. 23. Pappalardo 2010, 327. Pappalardo 2013. Pappalardo 2010, 330–331; 2013. Pappalardo 2013, 55–6. Invernizzi 2001a; 2004; 2005; 2007; 2011b; 2011a; 2012. See also Lippolis 2014. Invernizzi 2011b, 659.

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Greek art would have been used as a visual vessel for Iranian thought, not only for the ivory rhytons and the marble statues, but also for the stately buildings of the site, which reflected dominantly eastern Iranian and Central Asian trends in concept and architecture, but with Greek trends in structural decorations. That the figurative scenes on the rhytons revealed specific iconographic themes and styles that were chosen from the wide artistic koine of Greek models at hand, would suggest that the Arsakid kings actively selected Greeks forms that could be connected with Iranian conceptions and, as such, could be “read in a Graeco-Asiatic and Irano-Arsakid perspective”, expressing their regional and transregional interests in the best way, i.e. with the broadest communicative reach.112 In line with the wider context of the site, these interests were political and ideological, relating to the legitimization and celebration of Arsakid kingship.113 For Invernizzi, it is there where the “true Greek miracle” and “the success of Hellenism” lies, “in this capability of Greek art to lend its own language maintaining an open dialogue alive, while satisfying the needs of other cultures and civilizations”.114 Nevertheless, it is often thought that such Greek iconographic and stylistic elements could be executed by no other than Greek artists. Invernizzi argues the craftsmen who carved the Nisa rhytons must have been “Greeks of Asia, and more specifically of Central Asia, perhaps of Parthia herself.”115 In his argument for Greek art as the artistic lingua franca, serving a wide range of interests and expressions, Invernizzi assumes that this meant that itinerant Greek artists were employed in different regions of Asia by a variety of (non-Greek) peoples: the prince, the priest, the common people, and the entire community.116 This argument received broad historiographical resonance. In his 2015 monograph The Greeks in Asia, John Boardman remarks the following on the cultural character of Nisa: When we deal with architecture the ground plans tell as much or more about cultural affiliations, commonly eastern, than the above-ground ornament, which is often Greek-inspired. But in the other arts too, including painting, as at Nisa, Hellenistic styles are developed, clearly by Greek artists working in the east, but often for new masters. (…)

112 113

114 115 116

Invernizzi 2011a, 204. See also Invernizzi 2005; Manassero 2008; 2012. It is however debatable whether all figurative forms used necessarily related to the general interpretation of the site as a ceremonial centre to propagate Arsakid royal ideology. Dirven (2013, 638) argues that “it is by no means impossible that the use of Hellenistic art had more down-to-earth connotations and served as symbolic capital because it was the art of the dynasty that the Parthians had defeated.” Invernizzi 2012, 92, 94 (emphasis added). Invernizzi 2011b, 665 Invernizzi 2012, 93–94.

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[T]he majority of the pure Greek styles of design and workmanship make clear their sources, even though their customers and patrons may have been Greek, Macedonian, Persian or Parthian.117

The same thought is shared in a forthcoming paper by Manassero who, upon assessing the provenance of the rhytons, comments that “full mastery of Greek culture is quite unlikely to have been possessed by the Arsakids.”118 Thus, although Nisa is characterized by its creative and original use of Hellenism as a communicative medium, it seems that scholars restrict the ‘Parthian creativity’ to the authoritative delegation of the actual task of producing ‘pure Greek styles’ to Greek artists. Here we can discern the indirect effect of Philhellenism as cognitive framework for the understanding of things Greek at Nisa. How different have scholars perceived Hellenism in a city famed for its Greekness? Zooming in on southern Mesopotamia, the next chapter moves westwards from Central Asia to Western Asia, and assesses how Hellenism took its conceptual form in the case of Seleukeia on the Tigris.

117 118

Boardman 2015, 75–77. See also Colledge 1967, 143: “Many using this [Hellenistic style] were of course of Greek descent themselves.” Manassero 2018, 299.

6 Seleukeia on the Tigris 6.1 Introduction The riverine regions of Babylonia enjoyed considerable historical significance in central Eurasia’s antiquity, where kings would heavily invest in royal and urban centres over the course of successive empires. In the Hellenistic period, Seleukeia on the Tigris was one of the major cities in Mesopotamia, situated nearby ancient Opis on the Tigris and at some 60 km. northwest of ancient Babylon.1 At the end of the fourth century BCE, Seleukeia was founded by and named after Seleukos I Nikator (r. 312–281 BCE), the Macedonian general under Alexander the Great and former satrap of Babylonia who secured monarchical rule in Western Asia and Central Asia during the Diadoch wars that ensued after Alexander’s death.2 Set in a historically significant landscape defined by important ancient cities, Seleukeia became the first residential seat of the Seleukid empire, a city of kingship representing new royalty in Western Asia and replacing Babylon as long-standing leading city in the region.3 As such, Seleukeia did not merely function as royal residence, but was also a political, administrative, and commercial ‘capital’ in Western Asia.4 Under Seleukos’ son and successor Antiochos I Soter (r. 281–261 1 2

3

4

Hereafter referred to as Seleukeia. Strab. 16.1.5; Plin. HN, 6.122; App. Syr. 58; Paus. 1.16.3. There has been much debate on the precise founding date of the city, which was likely to have taken place somewhere after Seleukos’ return to Babylonia after the Battle of Gaza in 312 BCE, and before the Battle of Ipsos in 301 BCE (Cohen 2013, 163) which secured Seleukos’ power in Western Asia. Plin. HN 6.122; Joseph. AJ 18.372; Tac. Ann. 6.42. A Babylonian cuneiform document concerning the Diadoch wars (Grayson 1975, 115–119 no. 10, rev. 40; cf. BCHP 3, rev. iv. 25’ = Finkel et al. 2020) records the destruction and plundering of Babylon, which Sherwin-White 1983b, 270 connected with the move of the royal centre (in the region) from Babylon to Seleukeia. Numismatic evidence indicates a severe decrease of output of the imperial mint at Babylon sometime after 308 BCE, before or around the time of a new mint at Seleukeia (Taylor 2015, 72–73). Furthermore, practices of dislocating and reorientating places that reminded of previous and/or rival power seems to have been integral to Seleukid imperial strategy (Canepa 2018, 44–47; 2020b). However, at least one of the three palaces at Babylon, built by Nebuchadnezzar and elaborated by the Achaemenids, continued to be used as royal palace in the Seleukid period (Grayson 1975, 115–119 no. 10, obv. 20; cf. BCHP 3, obv. i. 39.20’ = Finkel et al. 2020), while the city at large remained ideologically important in Seleukid ideology (Capdetrey 2007, 35–38). Seleukeia housed a major royal mint, producing a large portion of the coins that circulated under the first Seleukid kings (Le Rider 1998). Later newly-founded Seleukid ‘capitals’ in Western Asia

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BCE), part of Babylon’s population may have been resettled to Seleukeia to supply its populace.5 According to Strabo, writing around the turn of the first century BCE to CE, Seleukeia exceeded Babylon and thrived to become one of the largest metropoles of the Graeco-Roman world, reputedly with 600,000 inhabitants, positioning itself among great cities at the time such as Alexandreia in Egypt and Antiocheia in Syria.6 The constant political and symbolic importance of Seleukeia’s historical landscape is reflected in imperial efforts to claim the region. The Parthian conquest of the city by Mithradates I (r. c. 171–138/132 BCE) around 141 BCE embodied a significant event for the course of the Arsakid empire. Mithradates I additionally built his new residential city Ktesiphon nearby Seleukeia, on the east bank of the Tigris.7 Although Ktesiphon came to play a more significant role in subsequent rule of the region, Seleukeia continued to be in use throughout Arsakid rule until the early second century CE, when the city was burned down by the Roman emperor Trajan in 117 during his war on the Parthians, and eventually fully destroyed by the Roman general Avidus Cassius in 165.8 In modern scholarship, Seleukeia on the Tigris is often referred to as a prominent nucleus of Hellenism in Western Asia – “a great centre for the spread of Greek culture”.9 Much of what we know of Seleukeia in the first three centuries BCE, however, stems from later Graeco-Roman authors, such as Livy, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio, who mention Macedonian and Greek settlers living in the city.10 Flavius Josephus additionally names Syrians (Baby-

5

6

7

8

9 10

(Antiocheia on the Orontis, Seleukeia in Pieria, Laodikeia on the Sea, and Apameia) were probably modelled after Seleukeia on the Tigris. For instructive discussions on royal capitals, see Boucharlat 2007 (though from an Achaemenid perspective); Strootman 2014, 67. Plin. HN. 6.122; Paus. 1.16.3. Such resettlement is also hinted at in a Babylonian chronicle (BCHP 5, rev. 7’–9’ = Finkel et al. 2020; cf. Grayson 1975, 119–121 no. 11, rev. 7–9 in which the line is considered too damaged for translation), but questioned by Van der Spek 1993, 97–98, who argues that the chronicle refers to a Babylonian delegation of members of the Esagila temple council that was sent to Seleukeia, rather than a forced, permanent deportation of Babylon’s citizenry. Strab. 16.2.5; Joseph. AJ 18.372. The number of 600,000 inhabitants is probably an exaggeration, especially considering the estimation by Boiy 2004, 233 for Babylon, based on a maximum population density of 200/ha. According to the same calculation, Seleukeia would house an absolute maximum of 110,000 inhabitants, based on its surface of c. 550 ha., which still exceeds Babylon’s population at that time (50,000 at most; see also Chapter 7). Whatever the precise number, Strabo’s mention of it indicates that the city and its population was extremely large compared to other settlements, and that it was considered grand by ancient standards. The last Seleukid monarch who reigned over Seleukeia was Demetrios II Nikator (r. 145–139; 129–126 BCE). Upon his defeat, he was captured and held prisoner by Mithradates in 139/138 BCE, a period which left a profound ‘Parthian’ mark on Demetrios’ second reign. For discussion, see Messina 2003; 2017, 32; Nabel 2017, 31–34. This chapter only discusses the site’s Hellenistic period, which is defined in this book as roughly the first three centuries BCE, thus including the period conventionally labelled in scholarship as the ‘Parthian period’. As I have stated in the beginning of this book, I will only use the term ‘Hellenistic’ to indicate the period, unless otherwise stated. NB: the exact location and topography of Ktesiphon in relation to its Seleukid ‘twin city’ and to the river course of the Tigris, is a matter of continuous debate. See Hauser 2007 for a useful discussion. Martinez-Sève 2003. Liv. 38.17.10; Tac. Ann. 6.42; Cass. Dio 40.16.

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lonians) and Jews among Seleukeia’s population in the first century CE.11 Evidence of the famed city remained long limited to ancient written sources, as it was not until the 20th century with the rise of professional archaeology in the Middle East, that Seleukeia materialized archaeologically. In the 1920s, the city was discovered at the artificial, man-made mound Tell Umar and subsequently excavated by an American team directed by Leroy Waterman and Clark Hopkins of the University of Michigan on behalf of the American School of Oriental Research of Baghdad, over the course of six seasons in 1928–1932 and 1936–1937.12 Renewed excavations were taken up in the 1960s by the Italian CRAST, whose fourteen extensive campaigns were directed by Giorgio Gullini and Antonio Invernizzi (1963–1976), and Elisabetta Valtz (1985–1989, now Valtz Fino). The American, and to a greater extent Italian excavations yielded a significant and extraordinary amount of clay sealings (among which bullae) from public and private archives, as well as a great number of terracotta figurines which dated predominantly to Parthian rule.13 Because much of the city and its culture remains archaeologically obscure, interpretations on Seleukeia’s Hellenism have concentrated on these figurative objects – the small arts – which were analysed to be Greek, Babylonian, and hybrid in style and execution. This chapter outlines the architecture and objects of Seleukeia in the first section, and how scholars have interpreted their historical meaning with regards to Hellenism in the second section. 6.2 Site context and features The archaeological site of Seleukeia is located at some 30 km. south of modern-day Baghdad in Iraq. A consciously planned royal foundation nearby the core region of Babylonia, the historical city commanded one of the most important junctions of trade and communication routes in Western Asia. Founded in the floodplains on the west bank of the Tigris and connected to the confluence of the Euphrates and a royal canal which flowed into the city, Seleukeia and its environment were surrounded by the two great rivers that defined most of Mesopotamia’s history. The Tigris and the Euphrates linked the regions of Mesopotamia to the Persian Gulf, facilitating commerce and connection with the Arabian Peninsula and its seacoast, and across the Indian Ocean (Fig. 1.1).14 Additionally crossed by a branch of a royal canal, Seleukeia was not only abundantly supplied and well-connected by navigable inland water, but was also integrated in an extensive network of overland routes: a northern trans-Iranian one led eastwards to 11 12 13 14

Joseph. AJ 18.372. Cohen 2013, 159 comments that Josephus’ Syrians probably referred to native Babylonians, and that they were not citizens of the polis. The excavations were funded by the Toledo Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art. For brief research histories of the Italian excavations, see Messina 2006, 15–25; 2010a, 11–21; Menegazzi 2014a, 1–8. Strab.16.1.9. For an archaeological view on the material connections between these regions, see Potts 2016.

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Ekbatana (Media) and onward to the Iranian highlands, Baktria, and Margiana – where it joined the so-called Northern and Southern Silk Routes to China – while a southern one followed the Tigris downstream towards Susa and Persis. Intersecting at Seleukeia, these key routes traversed westwards to Sardeis and Ephesos across the Syrian Desert, northwards to Anatolia and Armenia, and southwards to Africa.15 The city’s strategic setting was further strengthened by the site’s own exploitable economic resources. Said to have been “the most fertile of the whole East”, Seleukeia’s hinterland provided a steady and robust agricultural basis to feed its inhabitants as their numbers grew over time.16 Thanks to the increasingly extensive use of canalization and irrigation networks, Seleukeia probably did not depend on large imports of grain.17

Fig. 6.1. Map of Seleukeia on the Tigris, showing the Italian and American excavations (Menegazzi 2014) © Archive Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino, courtesy of Carlo Lippolis. Italian excavations: 1. Tell Umar (theatre); 2. Archives Square (northern agora); 3. Sample on the southern slope; 4. Stoa 5. South Square (southern agora) American excavations: 6. Tell Umar; 7. Heroon; 8. Temple A; 9. Temple B; 10. Dwelling block G6; 11. ‘Theatre’ 15 16 17

Hopkins 1972, 155; Kosmin 2014b, 146–147, 166–167. Plin. HN 6.122: “agrum totius orientis fertilissimum”. Van der Spek 2008, 40–45.

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The city Seleukeia was set in a river valley between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and extended across a massive surface of at least 550 ha.: a mega-city according to ancient standards.18 Writing from a first century CE perspective, Pliny the Elder described the outline of the city walls in the shape of an eagle with spread wings, although it requires some imagination to gather this from its current archaeological outline.19 Though the city walls remain undiscovered, aerial photography of the site suggests that Seleukeia’s outer limits followed the natural shape of the environment, which was bound by the curve of the Tigris in ancient times.20 A stable feature throughout the site’s chronology, Seleukeia’s urban layout followed a ‘Hippodamian’ grid plan which organized the city orthogonally in large rectangular blocks of approximately 70 by 140 m. in size, some of the largest in Eurasia (Fig. 6.1). A branch of a royal canal cut across the grid plan from east to west, drawing water from the Tigris and acting as a main street in the urban landscape. Geophysical survey and aerial data further indicate that the site was set in an ancient network of canals for irrigation, some possibly predating the city foundation.21 However, the oldest occupation levels (those before the second century BCE, i. e., Level VIII according to Italian chronology) have only been partially reached by the Italian missions and remain rather obscure. Most of the accumulated archaeological knowledge stems from a period spanning the first century BCE to the second century CE (Levels VII–III in Table 6.1).22 Table 6.1. Rough chronology of Seleukeia on the Tigris (after Messina 2010) Phase Seleukid phase

Occupational level Associated date and structures VIII Third – second century BCE Foundation; Archives Square; Tell Umar Seleukid-Parthian VII–III Early second century BCE – c. second century CE phase23 Major reconstructions and new buildings Theatre with small temple (VII–VI) South Square (III) Parthian-Sasani- II Long period of abandonment an phrase Small structures and burials atop of Tell Umar 18 19 20 21 22 23

Messina 2006, 11. Plin. HN 6.122: “situm vero moenium aquilae pandentis alas”. Cf. Hopkins 1972, 2, Fig. 1.1. Gullini 1966, 15, Pl. 1. The course of the Tigris has shifted over time; see Messina 2010, 16–18; Bonfanti et al. 2016, 258–260 for discussion. Gullini 1966, 12; Lanza et al. 1972, 31–39; Bonfanti et al. 2016, 260. The chronology and temporal terminology retained here follows Messina 2010, 13. Cf. Hopkins 1972, 6. This phase is divided by Messina into several subphases, following a classical structure of an intermediate phase (Levels V–IV, c. first century CE) that precedes a Parthian phase (Level III, c. second century CE).

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Late-Sasanian phase

I

Sixth century CE Construction of a defensive tower-like building at Tell Umar

Although excavations have not been carried out city-wide – roughly 95 % of the site remains below surface – the efforts and results of the American and Italian campaigns provide useful general impressions.24 The northern city section above the royal canal seems to have been dominated by public official buildings, while the middle and southern area – at least the parts that were excavated – were designated for houses and shops. The city was dotted with several mounds, of which the semi-circular one of Tell Umar in the northern part of town was the most prominent. Tell Umar was thought to have been a religious structure, but was later identified by the Italian excavators as an urban theatre (1 in Fig. 6.1).25 Later in a late Sasanian phase, a defensive tower-like structure was built atop of the mound.26 Just southeast of Tell Umar, the city grid plan was interrupted by a vast open square (4 in Fig. 6.1; Fig. 6.2), conceived to be the main city square due to its prominent location close to the theatre. Termed as the Archives Square, this northern agora had a highly public character: it was flanked by a stoa on its east and a massive public archive building on its west, both dated to the Seleukid phase.27 It has been suggested that this public quarter was integrated in an official palatial district (basileia), a royal quarter protected by canals that simultaneously provided direct access to the waters of the Tigris.28 The urban arrangement of this palatial district off-centre rather than in the middle of the city, seems to simulate the spatial organization of other Mesopotamian cities such as Babylon, Niniveh, and Nimrud.29 Somewhere after 141 BCE in the later Parthian phase, the northern agora transformed with new structures, perhaps shops and dwelling houses, that were built atop of remains of buildings that bordered the square.

24

25

26 27 28 29

Only parts of the city have been excavated. The American campaigns focused on Tell Umar; a building just south of the mound (which they hypothesized to be a heroon dedicated to Seleukos I Nikator); and a residential area (Block G6). The Italian campaigns continued the excavations at and south of Tell Umar, and specifically concentrated on the archive building that they discovered in their first seasons. Earlier scholars such as Hopkins (1972, 9–11), Colledge (1987, 154), Downey (1988, 52–24), Sherwin-White and Kuhrt (1993, 172) argued for an interpretation of Tell Umar as a sanctuary of Mesopotamian character – perhaps a ziggurat. With the renewed Italian excavations, this interpretation has been rejected in favour of its identification as a theatre, with a small temple adjacent to it (Invernizzi 1990, 19–23; 1994, 9–12; Messina 2010, 114–160; 2011, 161–162). In search for religious structures, the American excavators hypothesized two other mounds in the northern area to be temples (Hopkins 1972, 119–126; Downey 1988, 60–62; 8 and 9 in Fig. 6.1), but there is no evidence to support such an identification (Hannestad and Potts 1990, 107). Messina 2010, 203–209; 2018. Invernizzi 1972; 1973; Messina 2006. Ristvet 2015, 164; Canepa 2018, 48. Ristvet 2015, 164.

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Apart from Tell Umar and the Archives Square (the northern agora), Block G6 was also an area of archaeological focus (10 in Fig. 6.1), which received extensive excavation in the American campaigns. Situated south of the canal, roughly in the middle of town, Block G6 was a large rectangular zone of private houses and irregular rooms crossed by canals, with occupational levels dating to Seleukid-Parthian phase, from the second century BCE to the second century CE.30 Some of the dwellings were organized with an open courtyard and a large porch, sometimes with two columns in antis, that preceded an inner (sometimes pillared) room. Dated to around the first century CE, such organization was recognized by the American archaeologists not as local Babylonian but rather described as Graeco-Iranian, due to architectural analogies with Aegean house plans in the Hellenistic period and religious and domestic architecture in Iran under Parthian rule.31 Particularly the form of the vaulted porch, identified as an iwan, became a widespread common feature of Iranian architecture under the Arsakids. The burial forms detected in Block G9, as well as around the South Square, corresponded to Babylonian and wider Mesopotamian funerary practices: deceased persons were buried in vaulted tombs and tombs of baked brick underneath the floor boards of houses or in alleyways between the dwellings.32 A fourth area of focus was the South Square (also termed in the reports as the porticoed street), excavated by the Italian mission.33 This was a second agora on the outer extremity of the southern part of town (5 in Fig. 6.1), which seemed to have been dedicated to activities of commercial nature. The square opened onto a large street that ran from west to east along the southern limits of the city, towards the port of the Tigris.34 No public buildings of the Hellenistic period have been unearthed here, but remains of dwellings comparable to those in Block 9 suggest that at least a portion of the population had resided here.35 The open space of the agora itself seems to have been levelled in the Parthian phase.36 During this period smaller rooms, identified as shops or workshops for handicraft, production, and trading activities, organized around the levelled open space, were added to or reconstructed from existing dwellings. Information about Seleukeia’s civic life has to be complemented by ancient written sources, which record the existence of various civic offices which existed in an efficiently organized administrational system.37 Polybios, writing in the second century BCE, mentions the office of epistates (governor), while seal inscriptions from the archive 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Level III in American chronology, see Hopkins 1972, 28. Hopkins 1972, 29–34. Negro Ponzi 1970, 34–35; Hopkins 1972, 35–37; Negro Ponzi 1972, 25; Messina 2006, 144–150. Graziosi 1968; Negro Ponzi 1970; 1972. The reports of the South Square are published only in preliminary form. Graziosi 1968, 44. Negro Ponzi 1972, 24. Level III in Negro Ponzi 1970, 31, 34. More a more extensive overview, see Cohen 2013, 159–160.

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building further record the presence and activities of a hieromnemon (magistrate for religious matters), an agonothetes (leader of sport festivities), a tamias (treasurer), a gymnasiarch (leader of the gymnasium), a bybliophylax (guardian of archives), a chreophylax (guardian of debts), and a paraphylax (guardian of public order, a police chief).38 By the time of Plutarch’s writing in the mid-first century CE, the city had a senate (gerousia) of 300 members: a council of elderly, wise, and wealthy men, which is also attested in later times by Tacitus.39 Other written sources make note of additional civic councils, referred to as adeiganes and boule.40 Although the relations between the gerousia, adaiganes, and boule are unclear, the mention of these offices indicate the general importance of civic gatherings.41 The overall written evidence suggest the presence of civic institutions not yet archaeologically discovered, such as a gymnasium, a sport arena, an assembly house, and an administrational or palatial treasury. Still, it remains unknown whether these institutions shared built space, and to what extent they already existed or continued from before the time that written sources about them were drawn up, in the second century BCE or later. Tell Umar The artificial mound Tell Umar was the most prominent tell of the city, rising 13 m. high above the urban plain and directly overseeing the northern agora. The mound was identified as the substructure of a monumental civic theatre and was dated to the Seleukid and Parthian phases, built during or after the reign of Antiochos III (r. 223–187 BCE) and in use until the late Parthian phase.42 While the building itself was recognized as one of the pillars of Greek culture and lifestyle, its construction was not. Despite that the size of the bricks corresponded with those commonly used for public buildings in the Aegean region, Seleukeia’s theatre, like at Ai Khanum, was completely built from dried local mud brick – a widely attested technique in Mesopotamia, Iran, and Central Asia, but rather unconventional for Greek theatres in the Aegean Mediterranean.43 An additional rarity was a small building that protruded from the theatre’s western façade, identified by the Italian excavators as a Mesopotamian temple which dated to the Seleukid-Parthian phase (Levels VII–III).44 In its oldest Seleukid layers, this small 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

For epistates, see: Polyb. 5.48.12. The presence of a hieromnemon, agonothetes, and tamias are mentioned in an inscription on a stele (McDowell 1935a, 258–259). For the gymnasiarch (gymnas[iarchos]), the bybliophylax, the chreophylax, and the paraphylax, see McDowell 1935a, 128–138, 254–256. Plut. Vit. Crass. 32; Tac. Ann. 6.42. For adeiganes, see: Polyb. 5.54.10. Coins from early first century BCE to the mid-first century CE, struck at Seleukeia, mention the word boule in their legends, see McDowell 1935b, 104, 224–226; Roux 1998, 24, 58. Cohen 2013, 160. On the Babylonian assembly in Seleukeia, see Harrak 2002. Messina 2006, 66–69. Invernizzi 1990, 19–23; 1994, 9–12; Messina 2010, 114–160; 2011, 161–162. Messina 2010, 114–160; Menegazzi and Messina 2011, 123–129; Messina 2012a, 18–19.

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structure consisted of two or three small square rooms that opened up onto a large courtyard; a ground plan familiar to Mesopotamian architecture.45 Later, early in the Seleukid-Parthian phase, the structure transformed into a modular suite consisting of square rooms, where small pedestals for cultic purposes were unearthed. Possibly (though not decisively) linked to these pedestals were the deposition of animal (canine) remains below the walls in the foundation layers, which reminded the excavators of a familiar Mesopotamian ritual practiced during re-foundations of religious buildings.46 Although there seemed to have been no direct connection between this temple and the public archive at the nearby agora, the excavators analysed significant analogies in their ground plans with modular layouts of Mesopotamian sanctuaries and ziggurats which often contained archives.47 Whatever its precise use, considering its prominent and visible location – close to the main agora and an integral part of the theatre complex – this temple probably played an important public, perhaps civic role. The archive building Much of Seleukeia’s archaeological prominence is based on the discovery of an immense public archive. The presence and practice of archives at Seleukeia was determined by both the American and Italian archaeological missions. Two private archives within domestic Block G6 had earlier been unearthed by the American team in 1930, yielding 166  clay sealings of commercial documents belonging to merchant families.48 More numerous were the findings of the Italian excavations, which yielded a massive public archive building on the west side of the northern agora (also termed as the Archives Square, Fig. 6.2), discovered and excavated at the feet of the Tell Umar mound between 1967 and 1972.

45 46 47 48

Messina 2010, 155–157. Messina 2012a, 18–19. Messina interestingly remarks that this ritual is described in cuneiform tablets from Uruk under Seleukid reign: it was called kalu and involved the sacrifice of young puppies. Messina 2011, 163; 2012a, 27. McDowell 1935c, 26–42; cf. Hopkins 1972, 30; Invernizzi 1968a, 72.

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Fig. 6.2. Map of Seleukeia on the Tigris, showing the Archives Square in relation to Tell Umar (Menegazzi 2014) © Archive Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino, courtesy of Carlo Lippolis

The archive building is not only the sole monumental building that received extensive excavation at Seleukeia, but also represents the largest archive of the Hellenistic period. 25,000 (fragments of) clay sealings were unearthed: inscribed or stamped clay lumps used to seal documents, hardened and preserved by a fire that burned down the edifice. The documents were probably made of papyrus or parchment; all of them were destroyed by the fire, though in some cases fragments of the strings that tied them together survived.49 The archive building was uncovered in the oldest occupation level (VIII) and remained in use until somewhere before 129 BCE – a terminus ante quem based on a seal impression bearing a portrait of Demetrios II (r. 146–139; 129–125 BCE).50 Many 49 50

Invernizzi 1968a, 73. Invernizzi 1998b, 110; see methodological discussion in Messina 2007b

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of the sealings were dated to the period between the last quarter of the third century BCE and the first quarter of the second century BCE, indicating significant archival activity during Seleukid rule.51 The archive building was built with mud bricks on a modular ground plan, consisting of two narrow, elongated suites, each of seven rooms, stretching across a total length of 140  m. An axial pathway led between the suites, communicating with individual entrances to the chambers; access between them or independently from the outside was not possible.52 The rooms were all identical in ground plan; they were rectangular in form and were divided into two sections by a system of pillars which supported a flat or vaulted roof of perishable material. The western walls had plastered niches; carbonized wood and the remains of nails suggest that archival documents had been stored on wooden shelves or cupboards, mounted inside the indentations.53 The south section bore little to no remains of sealings, but it did include a room with a large quantity of household objects such as dishes, pottery, and storage jars.54 Thus, although the structure had a clear primary function of storing and safekeeping documents, it seems that the building served broader activities which probably related to administration. The independent body of the archive building were rendered unique by the Italian excavators; other known archives around the Mediterranean were usually integrated within wider structures such as houses, palaces, or temples.55 The ground plan of the building was further analysed to have distinct analogies with Mesopotamian religious structures, such as the temple of Anu within the Bit Resh sanctuary at Uruk where several archives were unearthed.56 The building’s ‘Mesopotamian’ architecture has been set against the civic institution it represented and the contents that it hoarded. Although a large amount of clay sealings were labelled as bullae – a specific type of sealing that bore seal impressions and were typically used in Mesopotamian archives – many of the pieces had Greek inscriptions.57 These, as well as the inscribed Greek texts on the sealings found in the private archives, only offer a general glimpse of the contents of the associated documents, the majority of which recorded transactions and taxations, such as those of salt.58 Apart from Greek inscriptions, many sealings also bore figural impressions which stirred particular scholarly interest. These stylized figures depicted portraits, animals, and a range of gods that were

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Invernizzi 1968b, 36–37; 1972, 29. Messina 2007a, 113–114, 121. Invernizzi 1968b, 34; Messina 2007a, 114. Invernizzi 1968b, 35–6; 1972, 22. Messina 2007a, 118–120. Messina 2006, 60–63; 2007a, 121–124. Messina 2009, 178. Invernizzi 1972, 23; Mollo 1996; Bollatti et al. 2004a, 3–21.

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analytically classed in Greek or Mesopotamian cultural-iconographic categories; most common among them were Athena, Apollo, Tyche, and the Mesopotamian god Nabu.59 The terracotta figurines A third highlight in Seleukeia’s archaeology is the enormous amount of terracotta figurines which was brought to light in various excavation areas. Over 11,000 (fragments of) figurines were unearthed at the Tell Umar mound, at the Archives Square, in domestic Block G6, and at the South Square.60 The majority of figurines was yielded on the south side of the Archives Square – an area marked by a series of small rooms, including a coroplastic workshop – in a heaped-up condition, dumped in deposits, pits, or amassed in filling layers of structures.61 The objects mostly dated to the Parthian phase, although some oldest fragments appear to date to the late Seleukid phase, around the mid-second century BCE.62 Although their specific use-context is difficult to reconstruct, the figurines provided valuable insights in the artistic production and cultural demand of a relatively cheap and therefore widely accessible object class. The range of figurines at Seleukeia has been thoroughly documented and analysed in catalogues of the American and Italian missions.63 These miniature objects mostly represent anthropomorphic subjects: Greek deities, nude and dressed women, nude and semi-nude male figures, reclining figures, couples in erotic scenes, children, musicians, horse-riders, dancers, and theatrical masks.64 Many of these have been analysed and artistically labelled as Greek – a category contrasted by subjects with a long Mesopotamian history. Interestingly, the Italian excavators remarked that these Greek subjects, such as the dancers and the theatrical masks, were of specific iconographic types which did not necessarily enjoy the same popularity in contemporaneous Mediterranean use and production.65 Different tools and techniques could be identified, which affirmed handmade figurines or figurines cast in moulds. The excavators assessed that around 70 to 80 % of the total amount had been produced with a double mould – an innovative technique not used in Mesopotamia before this period, but common in the Aegean region.66 The variety of forms, motifs, and styles among the figurines have been grouped and categorized as Greek, Babylonian, and hybrid – a combination of Greek, Babylonian, or Persian elements. 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Bollatti et al. 2004b. See also Herbert 2003, 70, Fig. 5. Several seal impressions were interpreted to be syncretic deities, most common among them Apollo-Nabu. Menegazzi 2014, 44–45. Menegazzi 2009; 2016a. Menegazzi 2016a, 398. Van Ingen 1939; Menegazzi 2014a. Invernizzi 1990; 1993a; Menegazzi 2012, 158; 2014a, 59–63. Menegazzi 2012; 2014a, 61; see also the conclusion in Invernizzi 1993a, 164. Menegazzi 2012, 158; cf. 2014b, 121; 2019, 397.

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6.3 Review Seleukeia on the Tigris, the first residential city of the Seleukid empire in Western Asia, is better known from ancient written sources than from archaeology. Greek and Latin written sources from the second century BCE or later mention that there were several councils on civic and religious matters, as well as a gymnasium, a place for athletic festivals, and a palace representing the imperial seat, although they remain undiscovered at present. The sources also attest to the city’s population, which included Greek and Macedonian settlers, as well as Syrians (Babylonians) and Jews. The majority of written, as well as material evidence about Seleukeia, however, dates to a period when the city had already lived its first two or three centuries. Excavations at the site have only uncovered around 5 % of the city, and have concentrated on roughly four areas: Tell Umar, the Archives Square (northern agora), the domestic Block G6, and the South Square (southern agora). Based on archaeological remains, it can be substantiated that in the first three centuries BCE, the city was organized on a ‘Hippodamian’ grid plan and that there was a monumental theatre, large blocks of houses, and a main city square adorned with a stoa and a public archive building – civic institutions and characteristics that are shared in contemporaneous Greek cities around the Mediterranean basin. The general use of mud brick, the plan of the archive building, the small temple on the west flank of the theatre, and the intramural burial practices have been recognized as distinctly Mesopotamian, supported by regional analogies. The organization of some of the houses further included Iranian architectural elements, such as the vaulted hall – the iwan. There is no conclusive evidence for large religious structures or religious practices in the city, other than indications of cult activity at the small temple mentioned above. Most discussions about Hellenism in Seleukeia during the Hellenistic period are formed around assessments of the small arts: the glyptic and coroplastic objects. Clay sealings with seal impressions and terracotta figurines have been unearthed in enormous quantities, mainly in the public archive building and in workshops on the south side of Archives Square, respectively. These small objects reflect, integrate, or combine Greek, Mesopotamian, and sometimes Iranian elements in motif, style, or production technology, often to the extent that they are categorized as hybrid. 6.4 Hellenism and hybridity The mix of cultural elements perceived in Seleukeia’s material culture has prompted debate about whether the Seleukid residential city represented a Greek city in the East or a Babylonian city under Graeco-Macedonian rule. Despite fractional archaeological evidence considering the city’s immense size, Seleukeia has been famed as a centre of Greek civilization and has been labelled, like Ai Khanum, as an outpost of Hellenism

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in the East.67 Often associated with the spread of Greek culture throughout Mesopotamia, interpretations on Seleukeia’s Hellenism are undoubtedly influenced by the information available and presented by Classical authors. Tacitus is illustrative here, who described Seleukeia in his time as “a walled town which, faithful to the memory of its founder Seleukos, has not degenerated into barbarism.”68 With a clear reference point, founded by Seleukos I as his imperial seat in Western Asia, Seleukeia on the Tigris enjoys a rather exclusive position in the scholarly mind compared to other Babylonian cities, embodying ‘real Hellenism’ rather than a superficial Greek veneer.69 As we will see, Tacitus’ implication that Seleukeia’s walls protected its (Greek) urban culture and identity from barbarism, remained significant in modern scholarship. A Greek or Babylonian city? The narrative and interpretation of Seleukeia’s undeniable ‘real Hellenism’ are most notably shaped and voiced by Antonio Invernizzi, the field director of the Italian excavations, particularly in the 1990s. For Invernizzi, Seleukeia was “the greatest centre of Hellenism in Asia”, a status which he saw embodied by the presence of a theatre and an agora, and strongly endorsed by the craftsmanship and artistry of the glyptic and coroplastic objects.70 Material evidence of the city’s ‘Hippodamian’ grid plan would further affirm the typical Greek lifestyle of its inhabitants, as the organization of urban space in separate allotments would accommodate a distinct social structure emanating from Greek democratic traditions.71 Seleukeia’s urban layout would breathe a truly ‘Greek spirit’ – a phrase that implies a radical contrast to the character of Babylon, described by Invernizzi as ‘the greatest of Oriental metropolises’.72 The comparison between Seleukeia and Babylon draws out distinct normative expectations, which are brought to light in the following passages: The life of a large metropolis like Seleucia – a life influenced by great historical events such as the struggle for the Seleucid throne and, later, the wars between Parthia and Rome – is not likely to have preserved unchanged, frozen, as a fixed layout for more than five centuries. (…) in Babylonia, the great cities of the past seem to have remained completely foreign to the new trends and new planning necessities brought into the foreground in the capital. This is not at all surprising, of course, because a considerable continuity of life can be observed

67 68 69 70 71 72

Hopkins 1972, 151; Invernizzi 1991, 180. “(…) saepta muris neque in barbarum corrupta, sed conditoris Seleuci retinens.” Tac. Ann. 6.42 (Transl. Jackson 1937). Oelsner 2002a, 183, fn. 1. See also Briant 1999, 13. For Babylon, see Chapter 7. Invernizzi 1994, 9–12. This phrasing of Seleukeia as a great centre of Hellenism, is particularly reproduced in the entry on Hellenism in Encyclopaedia Iranica (Martinez-Sève 2003). Invernizzi 1994, 7. Invernizzi 1991, 180; resp. 1994, 1.

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in every field in Babylonian society between the ancient age – the Achaemenian and the Neobabylonian period – and the new one – the Seleucid and the Parthian period.73

Invernizzi implies here that Seleukeia’s Greek urban layout represented an innovative revolution that embodied historical dynamism in Mesopotamia where Babylonian cities, by contrast, had remained stagnant for centuries, fixed in a vicious circle of perennial tradition. According to such logic of temporality and historical change, it would be unthinkable for a Greek city to have remain unchanged, while stagnant continuity is to be expected for a Babylonian city.74 A second important point can be abstracted from Invernizzi’s publications in the 1990s which profoundly influenced common understandings of Hellenism at Seleukeia. Despite limitations in archaeological evidence, scholarly narrative often connects Seleukeia’s urban identity as a Greek metropolis in Asia to the ethno-cultural identity of the inhabitants for whom the city was envisioned: If we consider that the shape of the urban structures may have a close connection with the dominant culture of the dwellers, it will be tempting to conclude that in Seleucia the settlers were essentially of Greek origin.

Invernizzi makes concessions for local Babylonians to have been part of the city’s population, considering the location of Seleukeia – in Babylonia. He continues to explain how these locals would have had related to Greek culture: The vitality of Greek culture – and even more its up-to-dateness, sustained by its political and economic weight in contemporary society – was naturally such as to exert a direct, more or less intense influence on forms of mind and of cultural expression in completely different milieus such as the oriental ones in which it was spreading. There is no doubt that a large part of the local, Babylonian milieu had been favourably receptive. (…) In any case, though traditional culture was still living here, as is shown by the seal impressions of Babylonian and Achaemenian type found in the Archives, Greek culture was clearly prevalent and subjects of different descent may also have turned to it as a perfectly adequate means of expression. This is precisely indicated by, among other things, the terracotta figurines representing Babylonian subjects in a purely Hellenistic style: in this respect, the significance of the naked female figures in standing attitude with the arms extended against their sides is particularly clear. For, at least in the beginning, such documents illustrate the service rendered by Greek handicraft to the local Babylonian milieu, rather than the conversion of the Greeks to local beliefs.75 73 74 75

Invernizzi 1994, 4 resp. 6. For excellent analyses of Hellenocentric temporalities with regards to Western Asia, see Bahrani 1998; Vlassopoulos 2007b, 101–122. Invernizzi 1994, 8. See also Invernizzi 2012, 91, but cf. Invernizzi 1993b, in which Seleukeia’s Greekness is hardly present.

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Invernizzi’s interpretation embodies often-repeated ideas about cultural interaction in Western Asia in the Hellenistic period. The passage implies that cultural transfer would have moved in one direction – more specifically, that inhabitants who were not Greek or Macedonian would naturally receive, imitate, and adopt Greek culture as their own. Their agency is conceptually restricted to an uncomplicated innate desire to hellenize, to advance up the cultural ladder. In the same logic, Greeks and Macedonians, possessing high culture, are imagined to have been resistant to acculturation in an antiquated local culture. In a more recent paper, Invernizzi repeats this argument, stating that that was where the great success of Hellenism lay: “a success great at such an extent that the archaic principles of the Oriental representations were adapted and changed in a more or less profound agreement with the modern forms of Greek naturalism.”76 Portrayals of Seleukeia as a grand Greek polis starkly compare with the views of Vito Messina, who partook in the later Italian excavations, taking up the task to publish the reports. While working closely with Invernizzi, Messina envisioned Seleukeia rather as a Babylonian polis, where local life largely continued under a new ruler. The historiographical controversy around Seleukeia’s identity is clearly shown in the juxtaposition of two publications: The Babylonian polis of Antiochus by Messina, and Séleucie du Tigre, métropole grecque d’Asie by Invernizzi.77 While the latter emphasized the city’s gridiron ground plan, the presence of a theatre, a stoa, and a monumental agora as representations of Greekness, the former directed attention to local elements such as the general use of mud brick (even for the theatre and the stoa), local burial customs, the small Mesopotamian temple at the theatre, and the ground plan of the archive building, interpreting them as “Babylonian elements that characterized the origin of the city”.78 Starting from a local point of reference, Messina argued that structures that integrated both Greek and Mesopotamian traditions within the same urban context (such as the houses, the temple complex, and the buildings on the Archives Square) would not only reflect the cultural norms of the people, but would also be part of deliberate Seleukid policy to embrace local culture and gain support of local elites through the claim of universal kingship, presented in Greek and Babylonian forms.79 For Messina, Seleukeia represented first and foremost a royal city, built for Greeks and Babylonians in their cultural image of ‘the polis of the Basileis’ and ‘the city of Sharru’, as documented in Greek and cuneiform sources, respectively.80 Though Invernizzi and Messina both agreed that the city was not solely inhabited by Greeks and Macedonians, they placed weight on dif76 77 78 79 80

Invernizzi 2012, 92. Invernizzi 1991; Messina 2011. Messina 2012b, 169; see also Messina 2010, 114–160; 2012b, 173–174. Messina 2011, 160–165; 2012b, 174–175. Recent scholarship increasingly emphasized such deliberate policy of local engagement, see especially Strootman 2013; Kosmin 2014a; Canepa 2015a; and now Messina 2021. Messina 2011, 165. Sharru, from which al sharruti (city of kings) derives was the Akkadian designation for king, as recorded in Babylonian cuneiform documents (Sherwin-White 1983b).

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ferent cultural components of the city, resulting in different historiographic outcomes: Seleukeia as a Greek city made by and for Greeks and Macedonians, compared to Seleukeia as a Babylonian city built by Greeks and Macedonians, for Greeks, Macedonians, and Babylonians alike. In the former case, the city would accommodate to the desires and needs of Greeks and hellenized non-Greeks, while the latter case suggests the exact opposite by virtue of a distinct ‘Babylonianized policy’ of the first Seleukid kings.81 Greeks, Babylonians, and cultural hybridity Broad interpretations about the identification of the city as a whole – based on Seleukeia’s monumental structures dated to the Seleukid phase – engaged and entangled with more specialized assessments about the coroplastic and glyptic art objects. The numerous clay seal impressions from the archives and the terracotta figurines from various locations, introduced another layer of meaning, hinting more explicitly at the ethno-cultural identification of Seleukeia’s inhabitants. The analysis of artistic styles used in the clay sealings – an object class that was mostly used by merchants and officials – allowed scholars to sketch a picture of the artistic production and cultural norms of these higher classes of society: civic, aristocratic, and royal elites who deposited documents sealed by notarized pieces of clay in public or private collections. The seal impressions gained scholarly renown as a predominantly ‘Hellenistic’  – understood as overwhelmingly Greek – corpus, based on the iconography, style, and inscriptions.82 In a 1984 paper, Invernizzi recognized various types of motifs and styles used for the seal impressions, which could be placed along the range between two “well separated cultural poles, that of Hellas and that of Mesopotamia”.83 Within this range, the majority of the seals could be typologized in the direction of the Hellas group, which Invernizzi termed ‘Asiatic Hellenism’: elite art imported from the Greek world by Greeks and Macedonians and taken over by locals. Similar ideas about the direction of cultural interaction, described above, can be recognized in the following passage: If the owners of seals whose subject or style is Hellenistic are not necessarily of Greek and Macedonian stock (we may here recall Alexander’s mixed marriage policy and the colonised indigenous names) it is likely that most of them were members of the Graeco-Macedonian Hellenistic colony.

81 82 83

For the phrase ‘Babylonianized’, see Messina 2014a, 123 Herbert 2003, 70. For the American and Italian catalogues of the clay sealings, see McDowell 1935a; Bollatti et al. 2004a; 2004b; 2004c. Further instructive discussion in Invernizzi 1993b; Messina 2007b; 2009; 2014a; 2021. Invernizzi 1984, 28; see also Invernizzi 2012, 93–94.

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(…) While it would not be surprising to see seals of Hellenistic type and style adopted by persons of local stock, it would indeed be surprising to find those with local motifs and styles adopted by people of Hellenic origin.84

Accordingly, the (much lower amount of) sealings that would fit the Mesopotamian group, by virtue of their non-Greek visual imagery, would indicate the local origins of the people producing these seals. That local Babylonian seals were at all present in the corpus, would demonstrate “the survival of social groups and their attachment to their own cultural traditions.”85 Again, two familiar yet important implications can be abstracted from such reasoning. The first is the point that, although not all seals could be unequivocally ascribed to the Greek or Mesopotamian group, both the craftsmen who made them and the users who carried out archival administration, are assumed to belong to and identify with culturally contained ethnic communities. Whether on the level of production or usage, the people behind these seals are envisioned as collectives: they are thought of as either Greeks (amongst whom hellenized Babylonians) who kept solely to Greek artistic production, or Babylonian cultural survivors who, by not adopting Greek art styles, would act out of ‘national cultural pride’.86 The second point is related to the first. The idea that Hellenism in the form of Greek art was deemed so naturally and universally desirable, combined with the idea of culturally contained communities, raises familiar preconceptions about the use of local art forms, namely that they would represent a conscious rejection of Hellenism. Consequently, according to such reasoning, this would make the alternate adoption of Babylonian elements by ethnic Greeks an impossibility. While arguments of Greek cultural predominance, linked to Graeco-Macedonian imperial power, have been influential in analyses of the clay seal impressions, the terracotta figurines showed Greek and Babylonian artistic traditions in roughly equal measure and have therefore been interpreted with greater multidirectionality in mind. Cheap and easy to produce, terracotta figurines were not only constrained to aristocratic circles – assumed to be Greek or hellenized – but were used by the masses, too. The combination of Greek and Babylonian elements, often within the same figurine, has prompted modern interpretations of cultural hybridity or cultural merging, which would have resulted from the sustained interaction between Greek settlers and local Babylonians. For Wilhelmina van Ingen, who catalogued the material from the Michigan excavations, the typological identification of the figurines as culturally hybrid would be particularly significant, as it would indicate that “there is not [a] gradual change from Hellenistic to Oriental types and styles that has usually been assumed for Seleucid and Parthian art”,

84 85 86

Invernizzi 1984, 28. Invernizzi 1984, 29–30, emphasis added. Invernizzi 1984, 29; see also Oelsner 2002a.

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but that they culturally mixed simultaneously.87 Yet, although acknowledging the visual hybridity, many scholars abided by dualistic typological approaches that categorized and assessed the figurines as (deriving from) either Greek or Mesopotamian originals, with extended ethno-cultural implications of Greeks living segregated from Babylonians.88 For figurines that complicated clear ascription to purely Greek or Babylonian traditions, new categories were created to accommodate hybrid variations on these visual norms. In her 1995 comparative analysis of figurines from Babylon and Seleukeia, Kerttu Karvonen-Kannas of the made a stylistic-typological-chronological distinction between ‘traditional Mesopotamian types’, ‘Persian types’, ‘Western types’, ‘new variations’, and ‘primitive types’. The predominance of figurines belonging to Western types, led her to conclude that the figurine production in Seleukeia “was clearly more western than in Babylon.”89 These differences, according to Karvonen-Kannas, “no doubt reflect the respective character of these cities, (…) [as] Seleucia would appear to have been a more significant centre than others.”90 It seems that, for Karvonen-Kannas, the use of ‘Western types’ of styles in the production of figurine would represent and manifest the extent of Greek influence on Seleukeian society at large. More recent works developed more nuanced approaches by labelling the figurines not as holistic aggregates according to either Greek or Eastern types, but deconstructing the terracottas more finely in terms of production techniques, subjects, motifs, style, and scale. Yet even within such smaller, fine-tuned typologies, tendencies to reproduce the Greek-Eastern dichotomy lingers on. In 2014 upon describing the subjects of the figurines, Roberta Menegazzi from the Turin excavations pragmatically divided them in ‘subjects of the Near Eastern tradition’ juxtaposed to ‘subjects of Western inspirational models’.91 In similar fashion, she described the styles used as ‘Greek influenced/ of genuine Western inspiration’ or ‘stylized and rigid, with a complete absence of naturalistic interest’, while she articulated the production techniques – double-moulded or single-moulded – as either “a technical novelty that came with Seleucid coroplastic craft” or “stemming from ancient old millenary traditions in Mesopotamia”, respectively.92 According to Menegazzi, the use of Western subjects, the double mould, and Greek-inspired styles, would therefore translate to ‘a strong Western influence’ on the figurine production in Seleukeia:

87 88 89

90 91 92

Van Ingen 1939, 8. The notion of ethnic segregation in Hellenistic Babylonia is most prominently voiced in Van der Spek 2005a; 2009. Karvonen-Kannas 1995, 31–39, 116–117. Because Babylon was not as ‘Western’ as Seleukeia, Karvonen-Kannas asserts that in Babylon, “Western conceptions naturally influenced other areas of life, but the figurines are almost the only surviving evidence of this process. Many of the motifs and technical features of the figurines came from the west.” Karvonen-Kannas 1995, 117–118. Menegazzi 2014a, 59–63. Menegazzi 2014a, 49, 67–68.

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On the one hand the pervasiveness and ductility of Greek artistic culture is worth noting, on the other hand, the ability of the Seleucian artisans in the re-interpretation of external cultural stimuli is extremely significant as well as it offers new forms to very ancient and deeply rooted beliefs.93

For Menegazzi, Seleukeia’s terracotta figurines represented good examples of “the strength and vitality of the Greek element and, at the same time, the persistence of the local Mesopotamian tradition”, which would enter in interaction and dialogue with one another, creating a new artistic and cultural language.94 Her analysis showed, however, that Greek and Mesopotamian features of the figurines were not merely juxtaposed but rather mixed and merged in different combinations. Particularly significant was Menegazzi’s revelation that the artisans employed only a finite series of Greek models, limited to specific recurring themes – some of which were not even that popular in Greece and Asia Minor.95 Stating that the distribution of these Greek features in the eastern Mediterranean was rather heterogeneous, Menegazzi emphasized that the appropriation and elaboration of only selected elements of the Hellenistic iconographic repertoire was highly meaningful, arguing that these Greek themes were probably most compatible with local tastes.96 Another study of the terracotta figurines builds further on Menegazzi’s work, continuing on the idea of cultural hybridity. In a series of publications, Stephanie Langin-Hooper argued that the terracotta figurines of both Seleukeia and Babylon demonstrate significant cultural hybridity from the onset, undermining any claims of exclusivity of either category of ‘cultural influence’.97 Focusing on social networks, Langin-Hooper consciously attempts to deemphasize the traditional focus on rigid taxonomies along ethnic lines by deconstructing the figurines in descriptive categories such as production technique, body positioning, and head ornamentation. Her conclusion is that the specific function and practicality of a feature may have been considered more important than the cultural origins of the technology or style: These figurines were more than just hybrid; they were hybrid with a purpose, carefully crafted to cross ethnic divides. Such examples of inclusive hybridity within the figures from Hellenistic Babylonia indicate that ethnically based categories of ‘Greek’ and ‘Babylonian’ were not exclusionary social divisions. Rather, terracotta figurines were co-creators of a social reality in which ethnic and cultural difference was smoothed over and made into a less operational part of daily life.98

93 94 95 96 97 98

Menegazzi 2014a, 60–63; see similar phrasing in Menegazzi 2012, 158–159; 2014a, 55–60. Menegazzi 2012, 157. Menegazzi 2014a, 79. Menegazzi 2012, 161. Langin-Hooper 2007; 2013a; 2013b; 2020. Langin-Hooper 2013b, 96.

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Shifting the focus from the identity of ethnic Greeks in relation to ethnic Babylonians, Langin-Hooper’s draws attention to social dynamics rather than ethnic ones, additionally highlighting the active role of the figurines as material actors and coparticipants in the social world, which reflected and evoked expressions of various social identities by its users. In a most recent monograph, Langin-Hooper also engaged with globalization, further highlighting the cultural and social choices made with figurines that resonated locally as well as globally, and arguing that heterogeneous kinds of forms and motifs operated on a local level, not just static ‘traditional’ ones.99 In summary, then, Hellenism at Seleukeia has been interpreted and conceptualized along distinct familiar lines of Greekness and non-Greekness, with questions directed at the royal and urban identity of the city and later on at the small arts. Seleukeia’s material culture would reflect both Greek cultural dominance as well as interactions between Greek and Babylonian actors apparent in the material culture. Especially with regards to the numerous terracotta figurines, ideas of cultural hybridity, mixing, and merging has been particularly influential, allowing for artistic creativity on the part of Seleukeian artisans – both Greeks and Babylonians. The next chapter provides entry into conceptualizations of Hellenism elsewhere in Mesopotamia, the great city of Babylon, which will demonstrate how scholarly perceptions of Hellenism here are related yet distinctly dissimilar to Seleukeia’s case.

99

Langin-Hooper 2020, 203–246; see further discussion in Chapter 9, section 9.2.4.

7 Hellenistic Babylon 7.1 Introduction In both scholarly and non-academic literature, Babylon has donned the status as the greatest of Oriental cities for a reason. Of all of Mesopotamia, Babylon speaks most to the ancient and modern mind’s imagination of the Orient due to long-lasting literary traditions and reinventions. By the second century CE, there was an established GraecoRoman tradition that counted Babylon’s hanging gardens and its phenomenal city walls among the most magnificent wonders of the ancient world, adding to the city’s by then illustrious past.1 Although Babylon’s association with Oriental despotism already existed in Classical sources, Biblical writings significantly added to its renown: in The Apocalypse of John, dated to the first century CE, the city was personified as a whore, the mother of abominations, and the place where all earthly sin accumulated.2 Both Babylon’s splendour and infamy as wonder and whore of the Orient became immortalized and mythologized in Western cultural consciousness, in which the historical 1

2

Detailed descriptions of Babylon’s hanging gardens and city walls can be found in Diod. Sic., 2.10; Strab. 16.1.5; Curt. 5.1.31–35; Joseph. AJ 10.11.1; Joseph. Ap 1.19. A famous Hellenistic epigram (Anth. Pal. 9.58) by a certain Antipater, compiled by Philip of Thessalonika (first century BCE/CE) in The Garland of Philip and later incorporated in the Palatine Anthology, a mid-tenth century CE manuscript, is one of the earliest extant literary works to list the walls of Babylon and the hanging gardens as two of the seven wonders of the ancient world (Brodersen 2007 [1996], 10; Clayton and Price 2013 [1988], 12). The epigram is commonly attributed to Antipater of Sidon, a Greek poet of the second century BCE, although Dalley 2013, 34 rather ascribes the poem to the later Antipater of Thessalonika who wrote after 11 BCE, an interpretation in line with Gow and Page’s interpretation and translation edition of the Garland authors (Gow and Page 1968, 68–69). Whoever the precise author was, Antipater’s poem praising of seven magnificent monuments became canonical in later times (see e. g. Philo of Byzantium, The Seven World Wonders, 1.1–4), listing the pyramids of Egypt; the hanging gardens (and walls) of Babylon; the chryselephantine statue of Zeus at Olympia; the temple of Artemis at Ephesos; the mausoleum of Halikarnassos; the colossus of Rhodos; and the lighthouse of Alexandreia. It should be noted that Herodotos had described Babylon’s splendid city walls (1.181; as well as the Gizeh pyramids in 2.124–136) already in the fifth century BCE, though curiously without mention of the hanging gardens. Revelation 17.5. Scholars have debated whether Babylon was an encoded reference to Rome, considering the persecution of Christians throughout the Roman empire in the latter decades of the first century CE (Slater 2003; Biguzzi 2006). In any case, in The Apocalypse of John (or The Book of Revelation), Babylon clearly epitomized the evil enemy of Christians and their values.

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city transformed into a paradoxical cultural referent for a place of exotic beauty, urban might, and architectural magnificence, as well as a place of ruin and decay, despotism and decadence, hubris and heresy.3 Babylon, in other words, is a fundamental case of cultural inbetweenness. Despite its prominence in Classical and Biblical literary traditions, the actual history of Babylon has been of marginal interest to historians and is therefore rather obscure to the general mind.4 Even after the decipherment of cuneiform script in the 19th century, Babylon’s history remained highlighted through a handful of famous rulers: the Amorite king Hammurabi (r. 1792–1750 BCE) under whom Babylon rose to political prominence and who commissioned one of the oldest known law codes in Mesopotamia; the legendary Assyrian warrior queen Semiramis, possibly the historical Shammuramat, second wife of the Sargonid king Sennacherib (r. 704–681 BCE) and regent of the Neo-Assyrian empire which included Babylon at that time; and the Chaldean king Nebuchadnezzar II (r. c. 605–562 BCE) who infamously sacked Jerusalem and exiled the Judeans to Babylon – an episode in Jewish history known as the Babylonian captivity, which came to an end under Persian reign of Cyrus the Great (r. 559–530 BCE).5 There is no doubt that the city’s history reached far back in antiquity. The oldest textual evidence documenting Babylon’s existence dates to the reign of the Old Akkadian king Shar-Kali-Sharri around 2200 BCE, when Babylon was a provincial centre.6 Under its numerous dynastic rulers, the town grew to become a leading religious, cultural, and royal city of great geopolitical and ideological importance. A central city throughout the first three millennia BCE, Babylon was desired, conquered, and ruled by the dynasties of the Sargonids, the Amorites, the Kassites, the Aramaeans, the Assyrians, the Chaldaeans, 3 4

5

6

For the rich array of allusive meanings, tropes, and traditions about Babylon, see Scheil 2016; from a different perspective and on the ancient Near Eastern city at large, see also Liverani 2016. For general and disciplinary interest in Babylon, see Boiy 2004, 1–3; 2007; for disciplinary interest in Near Eastern history at large, see also Van de Mieroop 2013. Books solely dedicated to the actual history of Babylon are rather scarce; exceptions (among which very recent ones) are e. g. Oates 1979; Boiy 2004; 2010; Beaulieu 2018; Radner 2020; Dalley 2021. It was only under Hammurabi and Nebuchadnezzar II that Babylon positioned itself as the centre of a Babylonian world empire. Josephus (AJ 10.11.1) refers to Nebuchadnezzar as creator of the hanging gardens, using Berossos as his source. This identification is in line with the earlier description by Diodoros (2.10.1), who explicitly ascribes the construction of the gardens not to Semiramis but to a later Assyrian king (possibly Nebuchadnezzar II). Diodoros’ mention indicates the existence of another tradition that attributed the architectural wonder to Semiramis. For discussion on the identity and symbolism of the literary character of Semiramis, see Dalley 2013, 155–178; Stronk 2016, 525–542; Droß-Krüpe 2020, 68–90. Boiy 2004, 3 The evidence concerns a cuneiform text which records king Shar-Kali-Sharri as royal sponsor of the foundations of the temples of Anunitum and Ilaba at Ka.dingir.ra (Gelb and Kienast 1990, 54, D-27; Frayne 1993, 183, year name (k); Lambert 2011, 71). The early town of Babylon was known in the Sumerian language as Ka.dingir.ra, which was read in Akkadian as Babilu or Babilim, ‘Gate of the God’ (see for discussion Lambert 2011). An earlier existence of the town in the period between 2600 and 2450 BCE has been suggested on the basis of a limestone inscription that mentions a ruler who built the temple of Marduk at Bar.ki.bar (Bar.bar), an early Akkadian toponym that may be associated with Babylon (Sollberger 1985; Lambert 2011, 72–76).

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and the Achaemenids, before rule passed on to Alexander the Great, succeeded by the kings of the Seleukid dynasty from the fourth until the second century BCE.7 Babylon’s history continued under Arsakid reign and lasted until at least the third century CE.8 Considering the city’s long existence of 2,500 years, the Hellenistic era is a rather late phase in Babylon’s ancient history. Scholarly attitudes toward Hellenistic Babylon have been deeply influenced by the temporal positioning of Seleukid and Parthian rule as Babylon’s ‘late antiquity’, as well as by Graeco-Roman literary narratives of a severe decline of the city starting in late Achaemenid times and culminating when the Seleukid royal seat moved to the Tigris.9 Until at least the foundation of Seleukeia on the Tigris, however, Babylon remained a royal residence of ideological, cultural, and scientific importance under Alexander and the Seleukid kings. Highlighted by the important events of Alexander’s entry into the city in 331 BCE, his death in the city in 323 BCE, and Seleukos’ return to Babylon in 311 BCE – the inaugural start of the Seleukid Era, the dynasty’s new calendrical system – Hellenistic Babylon has been viewed and approached as a meeting point between East and West.10 Until relatively recently, Babylon’s inbetweenness translated to meagre interest in Hellenistic Babylon(ia) by both Assyriologists and ancient historians who regarded the region as peripheral in time (and space for the latter) and as not Babylonian or Greek enough.11 Such scholarly interest had also shaped archaeological objectives of the earliest excavations which tended to Babylon’s deep antiquity. It is for this reason that the majority of current archaeological information still stems from the city’s impressive appearance in its ‘golden age’ under 7

8 9

10 11

The political history of Babylon is conventionally divided in several time periods: the Early Dynastic period (2900–2350 BCE), the Old-Akkadian period (2350–2100 BCE, rule of the Akkadian Sargonids); the Neo-Sumerian period (2100–2000 BCE, rule of the third dynasty of Ur); the Old-Babylonian period (2000–1595 BCE, rule of the Amorites), the Middle Babylonian period (1595–1155 BCE, rule of the Kassites; 1158–1027, rule of the second dynasty of Isin), the Neo-Assyrian period (911–626 BCE, rule of the Assyrian Sargonids), the Neo-Babylonian period (626–539 BCE, rule of the Chaldaeans), the Achaemenid period (539–331 BCE, rule of the Achaemenid Persians), the empire of Alexander III of Macedon (331–323 BCE), the Seleukid domination (320–315, 311–141 BCE), and the Parthian domination (141–61 BCE, rule of the Arsakids). For a summary of Babylon’s political history, see Boiy 2004, 99–192 (from Achaemenid rule onwards); Boiy 2010, 14–38 (from the earliest period until the Neo-Babylonian empire); for chronological concerns surrounding Babylon’s history, see Beaulieu 2018, 20–22. For discussion, see Hauser 1999; Boiy 2004, 186–192. For descriptions of Babylon by Graeco-Roman authors, see Diod. Sic. 2.9.9; Strab. 16.1.5; Plin. HN 6.122; App. Syr. 58; Paus. 1.16.3, 8.33.3; Cass. Dio. 68.30.1. Astronomical Diaries also mention that “the citizens of Babylon went out to Seleucia” (Sachs and Hunger 1988, 344–347, no. 273B rev. 34’36’). Although partial resettlement of Babylon’s population to Seleukeia did take place, cuneiform texts also attest to Babylon’s continued importance as a religious and scientific centre throughout the Hellenistic period while its immediate environment in the middle Euphrates area experienced accelerated settlement and market growth and development rather than decline (Van der Spek 2008, 35–39). E. g. Potts 1997, 276–282. For the role of Babylon in the invention of the Seleucid Era, see Capdetrey 2007, 35–38; Kosmin 2018, 26–35. Karvonen-Kannas 1995, 11–15. See also fn. 4, this chapter.

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Nebuchadnezzar II, who had extensively rebuilt, magnified, and embellished the city in the sixth century BCE. Later periods of Babylon’s existence, associated with its decline under foreign rulers, were therefore considered less interesting and received less thorough and systematic assessment, an attitude that shaped the practical agenda and research ethos of archaeologists and historians to come. Preceded by numerous travels and expeditions to the ruins of Babylon by French and British explorers in the 19th century, the first scientific excavations of Babylon took place in the early 20th century by the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft (DOG) in collaboration with the Königliche Museen zu Berlin (now the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) – where one can still admire Babylon’s iconic blue-glazed Ishtar gate on permanent display in the Pergamon Museum.12 The excavations were directed by Robert Koldewey, an architect by training whose aim was to dig up the fabled city in its belle époque during the Neo-Babylonian period (625–539 BCE).13 The grand undertaking of the excavations and the exquisite discoveries they yielded would make Koldewey famous as one of the greatest German archaeologists in history. Between 1899 and 1917, over 200 workmen unearthed Babylon in an unbroken series of excavations, extending across 18 summers and winters until the fall of Ottoman-ruled Baghdad at the hand of British troops at the end of the First World War.14 Koldewey’s excavations were guided by detailed topographical descriptions of Babylon by Graeco-Roman authors, Herodotos in particular. Consisting of archaeologists and architects, his team accordingly focused on finding the monuments reported in the Histories such as the fabled ziggurat Etemenanki – associated with the Tower of Babel from Biblical writings – while archaeological finds were framed and explained through a Herodotean filter.15 Scholars have now convincingly argued that is highly improbable that Herodotos actually visited Babylon himself.16 Nevertheless, the results from the German missions still form the essential foundation to archaeological knowledge of Babylon, alongside smaller-scale archaeological activities in later years.

12

13 14 15

16

A British team of Assyriologists, led first by Henry Rawlinson, then by Hormuzd Rassam as agents of the British Museum, had excavated at Babylon in the decades before Koldewey, resulting in the famous discovery of the Cyrus Cylinder from Babylon’s Marduk temple in 1879. These excavations are however considered as unscientific; Rassam (on mandate of British authorities) and his excavators were fully focused on finding cuneiform clay tablets, resulting in severe damage to stratigraphic and archaeological contexts. Rassam was scapegoated by the academy. For discussion, see Reade 1993; 1999. Boiy 2010, 41–42. Koldewey 1913, iii. Van der Spek 1997. Herodotos’ description (Hdt. 1.178–187) similarly focused on Babylon’s ‘golden age’, although he mistakenly assimilated the Neo-Assyrian period with the Neo-Babylonian period under Nebuchadnezzar II (Romm 2014, 67 fn. 181). The German archaeologists also aimed to find the fabled hanging gardens (not mentioned by Herodotos), though without success; see Dalley 2013, 13–27 for discussion. Rollinger 1993; Van der Spek 1997; Henkelman et al. 2011; Rollinger 2014.

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In the 1960s, the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities and Heritage (SBAH) commissioned a series of restoration works and some exploratory excavations, which they entrusted further to the Italian CRAST in 1974. Supplementary excavations were conducted by the DAI from 1957 until 1972, while a joint Iraqi-Italian team directed by the CRAST additionally surveyed and excavated in a domestic quarter from 1987 to 1989.17 Since the 1990s, the volatile political situation in Iraq rendered it impossible to continue systematic archaeological excavations at Babylon, while years of looting, vandalism, neglect, and armed conflict in the wake of the Gulf and Iraq Wars (resp. 1990–1991 and 2003–2011) have tragically resulted in the site’s ravaged state.18 From 2009 onward, the SBAH, the World Monuments Fund, and the U.S. Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation collaborated in ongoing heritage conservation projects under the heading of ‘The Future of Babylon’, aimed to protect, preserve, and restore the city’s fragile remains.19 As part of these projects, the CRAST, now directed by Carlo Lippolis, conducted an interdisciplinary geoarchaeological research project between 2008 and 2011, using aerial photography and remote sensing to survey ‘Babylon from above’.20 Another international collaboration with the SBAH and the World Monuments Fund was led by the Swedish Assyriologist Olaf Pedersén; this project engaged with modern geographical information systems and resulted in productive digitizations of the site and its excavation history, though with a strong focus on the city’s Neo-Babylonian period.21 In was only in 2019 that Babylon was accepted as a UNESCO World Heritage site. This chapter focuses on Babylon’s urban features in the Hellenistic period and considers the way in which Hellenism has been conceptualized by modern scholars. It will become clear that the notion of Hellenism at Babylon not only has very different connotations than Hellenisms in other cases reviewed in this study, but is also tangled with, and countered against concepts of Babylonian localism. 17

18

19 20 21

For the activities commissioned by the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities, see Orchard 1963, 108–109. For the activities by the Italian-Iraqi team, see Bergamini 1988; 1990. For Italian activities at Babylon between 1974 and 2008, see Parapetti 2008. See now also Pedersén 2021 for an integrative overview of the excavations and their results. Gibson 2003; Bogdanos 2005; Schipper 2005; Van Ess and Curtis 2009; Russell 2010. During his reign in the 1980s and 1990s, Saddam Hussein ordered the restoration and adaptive rebuilding of ancient Babylon to serve and bolster the legitimacy and ideology of his dictatorial regime, inspired by Nebuchadnezzar II. He adjusted, changed, and renamed several important monuments, including adding an opulent presidential palace to Babylon’s urban landscape, despoiling the archaeological site in the process (Schipper 2005, 261; Van Ess and Curtis 2009, 9–12; Russell 2010, 14–15). After the fall of Saddam in 2003, Babylon was used as a military basis by US and later Polish soldiers (Bahrani 2006; 2008, 169), which led to grave acts of vandalism, severe unnecessary damage, and sustained destruction of the site (Moussa 2008; Van Ess and Curtis 2009, 13–19; Russell 2010, 16–27, 140–564; Moussa 2011). Due to the archaeological catastrophes described above, Babylon has been rejected several times for the UNESCO World Heritage List. It was only in July 2019 that Babylon was finally accepted as a UNESCO site. Moussa 2011, 46; World Monuments Fund 2017: www.wmf.org/project/future-babylon. Lippolis et al. 2011; 2013. Pedersén et al. 2010; Pedersén 2011; 2021.

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7.2 Site context and features The ancient city of Babylon in southern Mesopotamia lies adjacent to the modern city of Hillah, some 85 km. south of Baghdad in central Iraq. In the first millennium BCE, Babylon’s political, military, and economic dominance owed much to the city’s ecological terrain of the fertile alluvial plain between Mesopotamia’s two most important rivers.22 The city not only commanded an enormous territory rich in agricultural and other exploitable productive resources, but also had broad access to commercial and communication channels to the wider world beyond Babylonia. Strategically located on the banks of the Euphrates and on a short distance from the Tigris, Babylon and its densely canalized hinterland were intricately connected in riverine, maritime, and overland trade and settlement networks that spanned from Syria to Mesopotamia, stretching to Armenia, Arabia, Baktria, and India, and which had existed since the Old-Akkadian empire in the second millennium BCE.23 In the Achaemenid period under Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE), these networks improved and were integrated in what Herodotos had referred to as the Persian Royal Road: a network of roads, routes, and stations between Sardeis in Lydia, Susa in Persia, and the Central Asian satrapies – as attested in documentary texts – that facilitated fast communication and tax-collection across the vast regions of the empire, within which Babylon continued to be an important node.24 According to Herodotos, Babylon’s territory yielded one third of the entire tribute levied across the Asian satrapies under Achaemenid rule, indicating the fiscal significance of the city as a major centre of agricultural production.25 Demographic dynamics echoed this: the late first millennium BCE, including the Seleukid and Arsakid periods of rule, saw an enormous upsurge in population density and urban settlement across Babylonia, undermining the misleading report by Strabo that Babylon had transformed into a great desert.26 The city The most important local ancient source on the topography of Babylon is the cuneiform text Tin.tir = Babylon, dated to the twelfth century BCE. A hymn to praise the city as a great religious centre, this text particularly focused on describing Babylon’s numerous temples and sanctuaries in the Middle Babylonian period, during which the city experienced urban and demographic expansion.27 Comparisons with excavated remains 22 23 24 25 26 27

Potts 1997, 1–42. For the water management at Babylon, see Pedersén et al. 2010, 132–135. Smith 1981, 175–176; Potts 1997, 254–273; 2016. Graf 1994; Briant 2012; Colburn 2013; 2017; see now also Henkelman 2018 Hdt. 1.192. See also Van der Spek 2008, 38–42. Cf. Wiesehöfer 2011. Strab. 16.1.5: “ἐρημία μεγάλη ‘στὶν ἡ Μεγάλη πόλις.” For demographic dynamics of Babylonia, see Smith 1981, 178–179. For the historical and socio-cultural context of Tin.tir = Babylon, see George 1992, 1–31. Archaeological remains suggest that Babylon’s city walls may even date to this period (Lippolis et al. 2011, 4).

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indicate that some of the city’s main religious buildings from this time continued to be restored and reused without massive changes until the sixth century BCE – the focus of Koldewey’s excavations.28 At its peak under Nebuchadnezzar II, considerable urban and population growth doubled the size of the city’s walled territory from c. 400 ha. to a surface of c. 900 ha., if not more.29 As one of the largest metropoles of its time, Babylon was estimated to have housed a population of up to 180,000 inhabitants in the Neo-Babylonian period, which likely decreased to a maximum of 50,000 and 20,000 under Seleukid and Parthian rule, respectively.30 The production of coins at Babylon massively increased in the last quarter of the fourth century BCE, during which the city not only held its position as political and administrational centre, but also became a major royal mint under Alexander and Seleukos I.31 Throughout its existence, the Euphrates (2 in Fig. 7.1) flowed through the city, dividing the urban space in an eastern half and a western half on the left and right river banks, respectively. Over time, the river gradually changed its course to the west.32 Archaeological remains indicate that the city’s basic town planning was retained across the centuries. Stretched astride the Euphrates, Babylon was laid out on a regular quadrilateral ground plan with two fortified urban perimeters that tended to the population growth over time: the inner city (planned in the Middle Babylonian period) and the outer city (the enlargement in Neo-Babylonian times). These defensive perimeters were marked by turreted city walls, fabled for their colossal size – broad enough for chariots drawn by four horses to pass through, according to Herodotos.33 Parts of them have been excavated: the boundaries of the outer city were lined with massive double walls of 7 and 7.8 m. thick (termed the ‘Osthaken’ by the German excavators; Fig. 7.1), which were preceded by a moat and an embankment, while the walls of the inner city on the east river bank measured a thickness of 7.2 and 6.5 m.34 There were several entry points in the outer walls, each featured with monumental gates and procession streets, named 28 29 30

31

32 33 34

George 1992, 13–16; Pedersén 2021, 18. Boiy 2004, 233; Pedersén 2021, 19. Ambitious plans to rebuild the city began under Nabopolassar, the father of Nebuchadnezzar II. Hauser 1999, 228; Boiy 2004, 233; Van der Spek 2008, 34–38; cf. Pedersén et al. 2010, 136 who estimate a maximum population of 300,000 inhabitants in the Neo-Babylonian city. There is no information from Classical and cuneiform sources on the population size of Babylon in the Hellenistic period. Demographic estimations are therefore difficult to make, though rough population figures have been drawn on the basis of funerary inscriptions, skeletal remains, and the inhabited surface of the (walled) city. For discussion on the demography of Hellenistic Babylon, see Boiy 2004, 226–234. Pirngruber 2017, 117–120; for detailed discussion see Le Rider and de Callataÿ 2006. The increase of Babylonian coins was part of a broader historical process of monetary transformation across central Eurasia, which resulted in a burst of coinage production and circulation during and after Alexander’s conquests (Le Rider 2003, 267–334; Bresson 2005; see further Jursa 2007, 86–89; Pirngruber 2017, 42–46 for increasing monetization of Babylonia since the sixth century BCE). Koldewey 1913, 16–23; Lippolis et al. 2011. Hdt. 1.179.3, echoed by Koldewey 1913, 1–2. Koldewey 1913, 1, Fig. 2; Wetzel and Unger 1930, 70–74. The 7.8 m. thick wall was additionally accompanied by a moat wall of 3.3 m. thick.

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after principal deities. Eight gates are mentioned in cuneiform sources while excavations have archaeologically substantiated four of them, including the lavishly decorated Ishtar gate in the northern wall of the inner city (near 9 in Fig. 7.1).35

Fig. 7.1. Map of Babylon in the Hellenistic period (Van der Spek 2009) © Mikko Kriek, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, courtesy of Bert van der Spek and Mikko Kriek

35

Tin.tir V.49–56 (George 1992, 22); cf. Hdt. 1.179.3 (“hundreds of gates”). For the excavations, see Wetzel and Unger 1930.

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Babylon’s cityscape featured several mounds which overlooked the lower plains of the city, functioning as visible urban markers. These mounds as well as the lower districts of the site are now known by their modern names: Babil, Kasr, Sahn, Amran, Ishin-Aswad, Merkes, and Homera. Situated along the river in the highest and northernmost corner of the outer city, the mound Babil housed the so-called ‘summer palace’ of Nebuchadnezzar II (1 in Fig. 7.1) which probably served a defensive function.36 On the lower plain south of Babil, just north of the inner-city wall, stood the bit akitu: Babylon’s New Year temple (3 in Fig. 7.1). This temple possibly formed the starting point of a monumental processional street that routed into the walled inner city, crossing the citadel Kasr – the most important mound during the Neo-Babylonian period, crowned by the main palace of Nebuchadnezzar II. This enormous royal complex consisted of a northern and southern part (resp. 4 and 7 in Fig. 7.1) that housed the palaces of Nebuchadnezzar II and his father Nabopolassar (r. 626–605 BCE), respectively. The palatial complex was directly connected to the richly decorated Ishtar gate through which the processional street ran, both richly decorated with tiered relief images of animals representing the gods Marduk (Babylon’s divine patron), Ishtar, and Adad. From the mound Kasr, the grand procession road led further south into the inner city, heading towards the sacred districts now known as Sahn and Amran: the locations of the ziggurat Etemenanki and the main temple of Marduk, Esagila (resp. 14 and 15 in Fig. 7.1), which was connected to an enormous temple complex. This nucleus of religious structures formed the centre of the city. At some point, debris of the upper part of Etemenanki was used to create the artificial tell Homera in the eastern part of the inner city.37 The mound Homera is the location of Babylon’s theatre (12 in Fig. 7.1) and the so-called ‘palaistra’, both roughly dated to the reign of Alexander the Great or the Seleukid kings thereafter. Diodoros of Sicily, writing in the first century BCE, also mentions the presence of an agora in the city which was set on fire by Himeros, the governor of southern Mesopotamia under the reign of the Arsakid king Phraates II (r. 139/8–128 BCE).38 The structure of a market place, however, has not been archaeologically substantiated, though an open space on the Homera has been suggested as a possible location.39 Apart from monumental buildings, Babylon contained several residential quarters mostly located in the district of Merkes just east of the city centre, between Amran and Homera. Koldewey’s excavations were confined to the eastern city  – on the east bank of the Euphrates – where the majority of principal buildings of Babylon’s heyday under 36 37 38 39

Boiy 2004, 9, fn. 2 notes that Babil has disputedly been termed as a ‘summer palace’ merely on the basis of ventilation shafts. Reade 2000, 203 opts for the more neutral term ‘outer palace’, although this has not caught on. Koldewey 1913, 300. Diod. Sic. 34.21; see also Just. 42.1.3 on the cruelty of Himeros. For the motives of Himeros, see Wiesehöfer 2015, 336–337. Schmidt 1941, 832–833; Boiy 2004, 11, 290.

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Nebuchadnezzar II were located. As mentioned above, later periods were less consistently documented and researched so that archaeological finds need to be complemented with information from other source material to infer which buildings were still in use in the Hellenistic period (Table 7.1).40 At present, an estimated 1.5 % of the total area of the city at its greatest extent has been excavated, leaving the majority of the megacity still underground.41 On the basis of the available evidence – a combination of cuneiform texts, Graeco-Roman writings, Greek inscriptions, and the archaeological remains – the impression is created that Hellenistic Babylon’s basic urban topography did not differ radically from its Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid versions, though with some exceptions. Table 7.1. Rough chronology of Babylon (after Koldewey 1913) Phase 1) Neo-Babylonian period (grand building programme)

2) Achaemenid period 3) Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic period under Seleukid rule

4) The Hellenistic and post-Hellenistic periods under Arsakid rule

Associated date

Associated structures (added or changed) 604–538 BCE • City walls and gateways • Processional way • Summer palace (Babil) • Main royal palace (Kasr) • Residential quarters (Merkes; IshinAswad) 538–331 BCE • Decline of Etemenanki? • Apadana in the royal palace (Kasr) 331–139 BCE • Homera mound from Etemenanki debris • Theatre (Homera) • Gymnasium (unknown location) • Agora (unknown location) • Peristyle in two houses (Merkes) 139 BCE–226 CE • ‘Palaistra’ (Homera) • Colonnaded street (Kasr) • Houses and graves atop the palaces (Babil; Kasr)

Palatial structures Constructed during Nebuchadnezzar II’s grand building programme that formed the foundation for the city’s urban layout for centuries to come, Babylon’s baked brick palaces on the Babil and Kasr mounds, in the north and centre of town respectively, were 40 41

For written sources about Hellenistic Babylon, see, particularly, Oelsner 1986; 2002b; 2002c; Boiy 2004, 73–98; Heller 2010. Pedersén 2011, 20.

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still active in post-Neo-Babylonian periods. Upon his return to Babylon from his eastern campaigns, Alexander the Great shortly resided in the northern ‘summer palace’ before he died in 323 BCE.42 Babil’s high and strategic location in the northernmost part of the city undoubtedly added to its continued use long after the construction of the ‘summer palace’ in the sixth century BCE. Occupation layers of this palace from the Hellenistic period are marked by Greek-styled roof tiles and plaster reconstructions of sections of the complex, although is unclear whether the palace retained the same function as under the Neo-Babylonian kings. From perhaps the 240s or 220s BCE onward, the mound started to be reused for funerary and possibly domestic purposes, as suggested by the remains of a Greek tomb stone and Parthian graves and mud brick structures built atop of the palatial ruins.43 It is certain that the grand main palace on the Kasr mound saw more active usage than the northern ‘summer palace’ during the Hellenistic period. The main palace was an enormous, massively fortified structure that spanned across the inner-city wall which divided the complex in a northern and southern part, both with expansive outworks (5 and 6 in Fig. 7.1).44 The complex had been built with royally stamped tiles bearing the name of their royal commissioner, Nebuchadnezzar II, who had not only built his own palace but also completely rebuilt that of his father.45 The southern palace of Nabopolassar was the oldest, most prominent, and most extensively excavated section of the palatial complex. It consisted of 5 grand courtyards (the largest of which measured 55 by 60 m.) and 50 smaller courtyards, framed by numerous suites of rooms or chambers for diverse purposes, almost 600 in total.46 Roads or corridors around and between the units formed an intricate intramural communication system. The three courtyards closest to the Ishtar gate had an official character while the remaining western two courts were private and residential quarters, strictly separated from the public section. South of the main courtyard – at the centre of the southern palace – was the throne room: a colossal space measuring 17 by 52 m., with 6 m. thick walls which were lavishly decorated with blue and yellow glazed brick panels showing painted ornaments of palmettes, floral reliefs, and lions – an impressive sight for visitors.47 Graeco-Roman literary sources mention that Babylon was destroyed by an Achaemenid king which would have caused the city to fall into ruins.48 Although such ideas have been echoed in scholarly approaches and methodologies, it should be kept in 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

Wetzel et al. 1957, 24. Koldewey and Wetzel 1932, 59–62; Wetzel et al. 1957, 24–27; Reade 2000, 204. For the excavations of the palatial complex, see: Koldewey 1913, 23–179; Koldewey and Wetzel 1931; 1932; Pedersén 2021, 89–134. Koldewey and Wetzel 1932, 4–5. Koldewey and Wetzel 1931, Pl. 2; see further discussion in Pedersén 2021, 92–112. Koldewey 1913, 103–104. Classical sources mention either Darius I (as punitive action against Babylonia’s revolt) or Xerxes (upon his return from Greece) as the culprit; see Hdt. 3.150–159; Diod. Sic. 17.112.3; Strab. 16.1.5; Arr. Anab. 3.16.4–5, 7.17.2.

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mind that these ancient authors wrote in a distinct cultural-ideological literary tradition that Othered ancient Persians, aligning them with contemporary Iranians (whether Persians or Parthians), as enemies of the Greeks and Romans. Excavations indicate that restoration and renovation works were carried out at the southern palace in the Achaemenid period, during which a monumental columned hypostyle hall – apadana, termed as ‘Perserbau’ in the excavation reports – typical to Achaemenid palaces was added to the complex, as well as a stone monument to Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE).49 Alexander the Great and the Seleukid kings also invested in building activities here, as indicated by dated remains of Greek-styled tiles and Hellenistic black pottery.50 Numerous cuneiform sources mentioning the palace in politico-religious events further support the continued service and royal importance of Babylon’s main palace well into the Hellenistic period.51 In the period of Parthian domination, Kasr and the area of the palatial complex was repurposed for houses and graves, as at the Babil mound, although no precise date has been provided in archaeological reports.52 Religious structures The old cuneiform text Tintir = Babylon records the presence of at least forty temples scattered across the city in the 12th century BCE.53 Based on documentary sources from Babylon, scholars were able to confirm the existence of 18 of them in the Hellenistic period.54 Of the eight archaeologically discovered temples, roughly half of them were still active in Hellenistic times, with building histories going back to the Neo-Babylonian period. All temples seem to have been dedicated to Mesopotamian gods, although syncretistic assimilation was a known possibility. Those structures that were excavated had similar architectural features: these temples were constructed from mud bricks (sometimes strengthened by baked bricks laid in gypsum mortar), with baked-brick floors, massive exterior walls decorated with niches, shallow fluting, and sometimes

49 50 51

52 53 54

Koldewey 1913, 126–129.; Wetzel et al. 1957, 25. For the stone monument, see Seidl 1999a; 1999b. A cuneiform text from late Achaemenid times supports the continued use of Babylon’s palace, see Grayson 1975, 114, no. 9, obv. 8. Wetzel et al. 1957, 43–48. For activity during the reign of Alexander, see e. g. Sachs and Hunger 1988, 190–191, no. 328 rev. 26’; BCHP 1, obv. 11 (but cf. Grayson 1975, 112, no. 8 obv. 11). For activity during Seleukid rule, see e. g. Sachs and Hunger 1988, 376–377, no. 261C rev. 12’; Sachs and Hunger 1989, 88–89, no. 237 obv. 13’; 202–203, no. 204C rev. 15’; 332–333, no. 187 A rev. 12; Grayson 1975, 115–119, no. 10, obv. 20, rev. 7 (cf. BCHP 3). Koldewey 1913, 182; Wetzel et al. 1957, 27. Roof tiles were found on the palatial courtyards, possibly to cover the open space for domestic purposes. See Hauser 1999, 214–215 for concise discussion. Tintir IV (George 1992, 58–62). Boiy 2004, 80–92, 263–277; Van der Spek 2005b; 2006, 264–265.

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white gypsum plaster, and were built on a typical ground plan consisting of one or more inner courtyards surrounded by suites of rooms and smaller courts.55 Located in the city centre, Babylon’s main temple complex Esagila, dedicated to Marduk, remained active in its function in Hellenistic times. It remains unclear whether this was also the case for the ziggurat Etemenanki, which was closely associated with the Esagila complex. During Achaemenid rule, the ziggurat was allegedly destroyed by Xerxes (r. 486–465 BCE) as a reprisal for Babylonian uprisings in 484 BCE, though the actual destruction of the temple tower is a point of considerable scholarly controversy.56 Diodoros and Arrian do mention that Alexander the Great had intentions to restore Etemenanki, just before his death.57 According to Strabo, Alexander’s rebuilding plans were left unfinished after 323 BCE, because the Seleukid kings (in Strabo’s account) were rather indifferent to Babylonian religion.58 This later literary tradition could be interpreted as an indication that Etemenanki was and remained in ruins when the Seleukids came to reign. There are no written documents that record the ziggurat’s actual use-life during the Hellenistic period (although activity at Etemenanki could be obscured by mentions of Esagila at large), yet archaeological remains cannot unequivocally prove deliberate destruction and decay.59 Furthermore, while Classical historiography often featured Achaemenid kings as savage destroyers of temples, it may well be that such portrayal constituted a Greek literary trope of Oriental hubris, shaped by the Persian sack of the Athenian acropolis and its temples in 480 BCE while serving an ideological contrast to Alexander as civilizing liberator of, and restorer in the East.60 In light of Near Eastern traditions of ruler legitimacy that required kings to care for their cities and sanctuaries, it is probable that the ziggurat may have been used for some time during the reign of Alexander and the early Seleukid kings, although perhaps not in its original function.61 Later during Arsakid rule, a large mansion and a grand street with columns of baked brick, built atop of the old precinct wall (peribolos) of Etemenanki, was added south to the ziggurat and north of Esagila.62 Although these structures have received 55 56

57 58 59 60 61 62

Hannestad and Potts 1990, 107; Pedersén 2021, 273–279. Such a layout was typical for Babylonian architecture and has been termed ‘Hürdenhaus’ or ‘Hofhaus’. The thesis of Xerxes’ destruction of Etemenanki is advocated, amongst others, by Schmid 1981; 1995 and most notably Waerzeggers 2003–2004; with acceptance by Van der Spek 2006, 266–270; Jursa 2007; George 2010, but cf. Kuhrt and Sherwin-White 1987; Rollinger 1998; Funke 2007; Heller 2010, 290–302; Kuhrt 2014; Wiesehöfer 2017b; Rollinger 2021, 506–512; see also historiographical discussion in Messerschmidt 2015. Diod. Sic. 17.112.3; Arr. Anab. 3.16.4. Strab. 16.1.5. Scholarly consensus has now been reached that the Seleukid kings actively engaged with Babylonian religion. See this section, further below. There were severe damages to the main staircase of the ziggurat, although their precise cause and dating remains problematic. For archaeological discussion, see George 2005; Allinger-Csollich 2011. Kuhrt and Sherwin-White 1987, 77; Sherwin-White 1987, 8–9; Funke 2007; Heller 2010, 302–304; Wiesehöfer 2017b. Kuhrt 1990; Rollinger 1998; Allinger-Csollich 2011, 268–267; Kuntner et al. 2011; Rollinger 2021, 508. Koldewey 1913, 179; Wetzel et al. 1957, 32–33; Hauser 1999, 223.

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little archaeological attention, they do speak for Arsakid royal investment and interest to carry out reconstructions in this area. Testimony of enduring offerings at Esagila, the main temple of Marduk which bore the same name as the entire temple complex, is provided by Hellenistic-period cuneiform sources, including those dated to Arsakid domination.63 The temple was excavated by the DOG in 1910, which revealed an enormous quadratic mud brick construction of 79 by 86 m., oriented to the east and with a symmetrically organized layout.64 More intricately adorned than other temples in Babylon, its massive exterior walls were decorated with regular tower-like projections and four large double-framed gates (one in each wall), flanked by two additional towers. A large inner courtyard of 37.5 by 31.2 m. which opened onto the east was surrounded by several units of smaller rooms and in the corners of the edifice, four smaller inner courts. The main court gave entrance to two inner chambers in the rear western section of the temple – an anteroom and the central shrine – where the cult statues of Marduk and his consort Sarpanit resided.65 Throughout Babylon’s existence, Esagila remained the principal sanctuary and the religious-economic centre of the city, owning enormous tracts of land which were managed and cultivated by numerous and diverse temple personnel. Private archives a well as the so-called Esagila archive, a large corpus of economic documents with ration lists and receipts issued by the temple, not only attest to a broad range of labourers but also to the importance of the temple complex as a major driver of the economy during the Hellenistic period.66 Although the evidence for royal patronage, financial investment, and participation of the kings in the temples and its cults is considerably lower in the Hellenistic period than in Neo-Babylonian times, Esagila’s high priest (shatammu) and the temple council (kinishtu) remained prominent institutions with significant local authority beyond temple matters, under whose instruction Alexander and subsequent Seleukid kings made sacrificial offerings to Marduk.67 Bilingual cuneiform texts in Ak63

64 65 66 67

For the excavations of Esagila and Etemenanki, see Wetzel and Weissbach 1938; Schmid 1981; 1995; Pedersén 2021, 139–165. For cuneiform sources on Esagila in Hellenistic times, see e. g. Sachs and Hunger 1988, 178–179, no. 330 rev. 4’–8’ (under Alexander’s reign); Sachs and Hunger 1989, 330–333, no. 187 A rev. 4’–18’ (year 124 of the Seleukid era, i. e. under the reign of Antiochos III the Great, r. 223/2–187 BCE). For cuneiform sources on Parthian kings offering at Esagila, until at least c. 75 CE, see Sachs and Hunger 1996, 98–99, no. 144 rev. 17’–18’; 204–205, no. 133B rev. 22’–24’; see further discussion in Hauser 1999, 223–227. Wetzel and Weissbach 1938, 4–8. Wetzel and Weissbach 1938, 7–8, 72–73. The east side of the temple was flanked by a large additional wing whose specific function and relation to the cult remains unknown. Boiy 2004, 17–99, 240–254; Van der Spek 2004; see further Jursa 2006; Clancier 2009. Arr. Anab. 3.16.5; Van der Spek 1987, 61–64; Van der Spek 2000, 437–438; Van der Spek 2006, 272; for further discussion on Esagila’s shatammu and kinishtu, see Boiy 2004, 194–204; Clancier 2012, 305–307. The difference in evidence may be due to timely changes in the means of documentary writing, which significantly changed from clay tablets to perishable materials such as leather and papyri; see Beaulieu 2014, 26–28; Clancier and Monerie 2014, 182; Dirven 2014, 213–214 for discussion.

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kadian-Sumerian from Hellenistic Babylon allude to the use of traditional cult songs, incantations, and prayers, the format of which can be traced back to the Kassite period, though it can be assumed that these practices had changed somehow throughout time.68 The continued historical importance of Babylon’s main temple is also evidenced by the famous Antiochos Cylinder from Ezida, the temple of Nabu in the nearby town of Borsippa. Written in archaic Akkadian language and in standard ceremonial formula, the cuneiform inscription on the cylinder prominently mentions the completed rebuilding of the temple of Esagila by Antiochos I’s own will and hands.69 Despite the new city foundations of Seleukeia and Ktesiphon, Seleukid and Arsakid interest in Esagila and some of its temple cults is documented to have lasted until at least 93 BCE.70 Apart from the main temple Esagila, Babylon’s New Year temple, the bit akitu, was also active in Hellenistic times, as was the celebration of its annual festival until at least 80 BCE.71 Since Neo-Babylonian times, Marduk and his son Nabu stood at the centre of the Akitu festivities and attendant rituals, and it seems that this continued to be the case during Seleukid times.72 Hellenistic-period cuneiform tablets further confirm the continued existence of the Neo-Babylonian temple of Ninurta and the temple of Nabusha-hare (12 in Fig. 7.1), excavated in the areas of Ishin-Aswad and Sahn, respectively.73 Investment in these two gods made sense in Seleukid royal ideology. In the Mesopotamian pantheon, Ninurta was the warrior god of agriculture and fertility whose myth, as defender of the cosmic order, was closely associated with Marduk (the Mesopotamian equivalent of Zeus) and Herakles.74 Both Zeus and Herakles were gods favoured by Alexander the Great and Seleukos I, featuring prominently on their coins.75 But it was especially Nabu, the god of wisdom and writing, who gained unprecedented prom68 69

70 71 72 73

74 75

Oelsner 1986, 208–209; Boiy 2004, 25; Linssen 2004, 14 with bibliography. Wetzel and Weissbach 1938, 29. The Antiochos Cylinder was discovered by Rassam in Borsippa in 1880. The cylinder is on permanent display in the British Museum (BM 36277). For translations and commentary, see Kuhrt and Sherwin-White 1991; Beaulieu 2014; Stevens 2014. NB: it should be kept in mind that the Antiochos Cylinder is an isolated artefact; no other similar inscriptions have been found in Babylon and Mesopotamia. Further discussion in Chapter 9, section 9.2.4. Van der Spek 1985, 547; 1998, 253–254. Grayson 1975, 277–278 no. 13b = BCHP 12; Sachs and Hunger 1989, 330–331, no. 187, rev. 10’; see further Linssen 2004, 79–86. The precise archaeological location of the New Year temple is not conclusively confirmed; see Kose 2004; cf. Boiy 2004, 85–86; Pedersén 2021, 267–268 for discussion. Erickson 2019, 83–84. For detailed discussion on the Akitu festival, see Black 1981; Sommer 2000; Bidmead 2014. For the temple of Ninurta in Hellenistic times (until at least 199 BCE), see Sachs and Hunger 1996, 234–235, no. 198B rev. 13’; George 1997, but cf. Boiy 2004, 10. For the temple of Nabu-sha-hare in Hellenistic times, until at least 78 BCE, see Sachs and Hunger 1996, 502–503, no. 77B rev. 16’. Though not archaeologically discovered, the temples of Isin, Gula, and Ishtar of Babylon received reparations during Parthian reign (Van der Spek 1998, 253), while records of festivals for Gula and Ishtar of Babylon also account for cult activity at these temples (Linssen 2004, 117–118, 120–121). Brenk 1991; West 1997, 461–469; Annus 2002, 119–121, 168–171. For the role of Zeus and Herakles in Seleukid ideology, see Anagnostou-Laoutides 2017, 161–71; Erickson 2019, 36–39, 131–136. The association with Herakles was also reinforced by Antiochos I and Antiochos II.

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inence in Seleukid dynastic mythology in which Nabu was assimilated with Apollo, the patron deity of the Seleukids. Recent scholars convincingly argued on the basis of numismatic and archaeological evidence that Antiochos I associated himself with Apollo-Nabu, thus representing himself as son of Zeus-Marduk which laid the foundations of a dynastic ruler cult.76 Such a ruler cult may have been installed around 220 BCE for Seleukos I or Seleukos II (r. 246–226 BCE) and his sons, Seleukos III (r. 226–222 BCE) and Antiochos III (r. 223/2–187 BCE), and was perhaps built on local cultic practices of sacrificing to the king as known in Achaemenid Babylon.77 Though not archaeologically discovered, the temples of Gula, Ishtar of Babylon, Zababa, and Madanu received reparations during Arsakid reign, while records of festivals for Gula and Ishtar of Babylon also account for cult activity at these temples in the early first century BCE.78 The theatre Hellenistic Babylon is archaeologically mostly defined and highlighted by the mound Homera in the east of the inner city: the location of Babylon’s theatre (12 in Fig. 7.1) and a large rectangular building labelled by scholars as a ‘palaistra’. They were situated on the south-western part of Homera and were new types of architecture in the city’s urban landscape, though built with local material – mud bricks, with terracotta and gypsum for architectural decorations. With foundations partly built from recycled baked bricks, probably from Etemenanki, the mud brick theatre of Babylon was monumental in scale and construction. With a height between 14.5 and 18 m. and a diameter of 25 m., it was estimated to accommodate around 5,000 spectators.79 The central circular space of the orchestra was overlooked by a large semi-circular auditorium, crossed by nine smaller staircases and one broader central staircase – a feature considered as unusual for conventional theatres around the Mediterranean basin. The stage building behind the orchestra was decorated with twelve Doric half-columns; no roof-tiles were discovered here, which led the excavators to believe that the stage building had a flat roof, in accordance with the rest of the city’s monumental buildings.80

76 77 78

79 80

Erickson 2011; Haubold 2013, 135–142; Strootman 2013; Beaulieu 2014; Kosmin 2014a; Erickson 2018; 2019, 62–115; cf. Stevens 2014. Van der Spek 1985, 557–562; Boiy 2004, 293; Linssen 2004, 124–128; Van der Spek 2016; Erickson 2018. For sacrifices for Achaemenid kings, see Henkelman 2008; Rollinger 2011. Van der Spek 1998, 253; Linssen 2004, 117–118, 120–121. There were several temples dedicated to the goddess Ishtar; only one, the temple of Ishtar of Akkad, has been archaeologically discovered and excavated in the Merkes area, though the building’s chronology does not reach the Hellenistic period (Reuther 1926, 137–141). For the measurements, see Wetzel et al. 1957, 8. For the estimation of spectators, see Bernard 1978, 432. For the orchestra, koilon, and skene, see Wetzel et al. 1957, 4–8, 17–19.

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Although Babylon’s theatre has not been dated with certainty, most scholars agree that it must have been built during the early Hellenistic period or shortly before.81 The theatre underwent aggrandizing reconstructions in the mid-second century BCE, probably under Antiochos IV (r. 175–164 BCE), and was completely rebuilt centuries later under Arsakid rule, in the first or second century CE, as attested by a Greek inscription mentioning reparations by Dioskourides.82 During this second rebuilding phase, the so-called ‘palaistra’ was constructed adjacent to the stage building. Over the course of centuries, the theatre probably served multiple functions, facilitating not only cultural entertainment but also socio-political meetings. The Akkadian word for this building has now been identified as the bit tamartu which meant ‘house of observation’ – a literal translation of the Greek word ‘theatron’.83 In the Astronomical Diaries, the bit tamartu was documented to be the meeting place of the pulite, a group of people headed by a pahatu who read messages from the king on leather documents.84 The pahatu (or pahat Babili) seems to have been a person of authority with certain governing tasks and was possibly appointed by the king. It is now established by Van der Spek that ‘pulite’ was the Akkadian transliteration of ‘politai’ – the Greek word for citizens – and that ‘pahatu’ may have been the Akkadian equivalent to ‘epistates’, the Greek word for governor.85 The ‘palaistra’ A massive rectangular mud brick building, built against the southern edge of the stage building of the theatre, has commonly been interpreted as a palaistra, a Greek wrestling school.86 The physical proximity as well as the close cultural relation between this building and the theatre – both considered as pillars of the Greek paideia – have led scholars to believe that the Homera mound was built to constitute a Greek city quarter.87 The building’s ground plan followed the ideal layout of a Greek palaistra as described by Vitruvius, with a central colonnaded court of 28 by 29 m., surrounded by a series of rooms 81

82 83 84 85 86 87

Koldewey 1913, 299; Wetzel et al. 1957, 19–20; Van der Spek 2001; but cf. Schmidt 1941, 843. See also fn. 8. Koldewey associated the construction of the whole mound Homera with the reign of Alexander the Great; he also proposed that a mud brick platform in the middle of the mound may have been the pyre for Hephaistion, mentioned in Diod. Sic. 17.115 (Koldewey 1913, 301–302). Wetzel et al. 1957, 19–22; Van der Spek 2001, 445–446; see further Potts 2011, 240–248 for discussion. The Greek inscription has been dated paleographically; for the text and translation, see Schmidt 1941, 815; Schmidt in Wetzel et al. 1957, 49–50. Van der Spek 2001, 446. Sachs and Hunger 1996, 134–35, no. 140 A rev. 5’–6’; 230–31, no. 132D2 rev. 15’; 278–279, no. 124B rev. 17’; 326–327, no. 118 A rev. A19’; 454–455, no. 87C rev. 30’. Van der Spek 2001; echoed in Potts 2011, but cf. Boiy 2004, 205. See further below. Koldewey 1913, 297–298, Fig. 253; Wetzel et al. 1957, 16–17. Koldewey 1913, 299; Oelsner 1986, 123–124; Sherwin-White 1987, 21; Oelsner 2002a, 190; 2007, 219; Olbrycht 2014, 136, but cf. Potts 1997, 279. Conclusive evidence for such a separate Greek quarter, for Greeks only, has not been substantiated.

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of similar size. As such, the rectangular building at Babylon covered a massive surface of c. 812  m.2 which, however, was relatively modest compared to Hellenistic-period palaistrai in Greek cities such as Delphi, Athens, and Olympia that measured 1,200 m.2, 2,500 m.2, and 4,500 m.2, respectively.88 It is therefore not with complete certainty that this building fulfilled the same functions as those strictly associated with palaistrai in the Aegean region.89 The edifice is not securely dated, but it is commonly thought to have been constructed simultaneously with Babylon’s theatre. A clay tablet unearthed at the theatre with a Greek inscription of a victor’s list, recording the winners of athletic competitions in the year 111/110 BCE, alludes to the additional presence (or perhaps co-functioning) of a gymnasium, though the actual building has not archaeologically been substantiated.90 This inscription mentions the office of a gymnasiarch as well as the names of victorious young men (ephebes and neoi), all with Greek names and patronymics. The theophoric names on the list linguistically integrated Greek gods who were known to have been associated with Mesopotamian gods, such as Dio (Bel), Apollo (Nabu), Artemis (Nanaia), and Herakles (Nergal and Ninurta).91 The inscription dates to the period of Arsakid control over Babylonia, which provides a chronological anchor of the functioning of the gymnasium and associated athletic festivities. Domestic quarters The mound Merkes in the middle of Babylon’s inner city housed a large area of residences with extensive and continuous occupation layers from Nebuchadnezzar’s time until Arsakid domination, though some houses possibly suffered destruction and abandonment in the late Achaemenid period.92 Private houses dated to Arsakid rule were also unearthed atop of the ruins of palaces, as well as in the area between Etemenanki and Esagila. Much of Babylon’s residential quarters remain unexplored but the limited areas that have been excavated show considerable formal and functional similarities in the dwellings from the Neo-Babylonian era to later periods, though some houses had fallen into ruin.93 The houses in the Merkes area, which was organized on a pattern of straight streets, seem to have been constructed in mud brick or sand stone and had flat roofs. Although the size of the houses differed, they all had a comparable layout typical for Babylonian houses in the first millennium BCE: access to the domestic space was 88 89 90 91 92 93

For the description of an ideal palaistra, see Vitr. De arch. 5.11. For the measurements of excavated palaistra, see the catalogue in Von den Hoff 2009, 263–271. See also Kirk 1935; Downey 1988, 14. Hassoulier 1909, 352–353, no. 1. Van der Spek 2005a, 406–407. For material and archival evidence concerning the destruction or abandonment of houses, see Baker 2008, in line with Waerzeggers 2003–2004. Reuther 1926, 147–148.

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provided by a single doorway from the outside, while the inside was organized around a central courtyard surrounded on four sides by (suites of) rooms, with the main room on the south side of the court.94 This type of dwelling, identified as a single entrance courtyard house, was common in much of Western Asia as well as in the eastern Mediterranean, though other house types existed.95 In the Hellenistic period, a peristyle was added to the architecture of two of the houses in Merkes.96 Amongst the small finds in Merkes that date to the Seleukid and Parthian domination were many cuneiform tablets, as well as thousands of fragments of terracotta figurines of mainly human figures, produced in styles that have been labelled as Mesopotamian, Persian, Western, and combined variations.97 Merkes’ Hellenistic layers also yielded pottery and amphora handles in Greek style, as well as glass pastes.98 Rather than outside the city walls (as in the case of Mediterranean cities), the dead were buried within, underneath, or in between living quarters, as well as in the ruins of the city walls, often in a sitting position.99 The custom of intramural in-house burials is known from long-standing regional traditions and was practiced across the city throughout its existence. Houses seem to have been built not only near the dead, but also near the gods or at least near shrines that used to have cultic significance. Clusters of dwellings were found grouped around Esagila and Etemenanki, around the ruins of the old temple of Ishtar of Akkad in Merkes, and near the temple of Ninurta in Ishin Aswad.100 Institutions, peoples, and languages Written sources inform about the religious and civic institutions presiding in Babylon in the Hellenistic period. Apart from the king and his court, two local administrative institutions have been highlighted in scholarship with relevance for interpretations of the functions of the theatre. The first concerns the temple institution, in which the earlier-mentioned shatammu and kinishtu of Esagila held the highest local civil and administrative power, at least until the beginning of the second century BCE.101 Their long-standing religious authority stretched into political and economic spheres and seems to have been acknowledged by the Seleukid and Arsakid rulers, although there may have been several imperial offices to keep them in check, as suggested by the mention of the paqdu (a temple representative) and the zazakku (a royal temple treasurer) 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

Koldewey 1913, 279. Baker 2014, 15–16. Reuther 1926, 148. Koldewey 1913, 271–279; Karvonen-Kannas 1995, 31–37. Wetzel et al. 1957, 42–41, 51–58. Koldewey 1913, 265–270; Reuther 1926, 152–153; Grabowski 2014. Koldewey 1911, 33, 36; Wetzel et al. 1957, 30–33. For discussion on these temple institutions, see Boiy 2004, 194–204; Boiy and Mittag 2011; Clancier 2012.

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in cuneiform texts.102 The second local institution of a more civic nature seems to have been developed in Hellenistic times. Van der Spek analysed the frequent combination of the terms ‘pahatu’, ‘pulite’, and ‘bit tamartu’ in the Astronomical Diaries and argued for the presence of a distinct Greek civic community whose members assembled and organized themselves in the theatre under the authority of a civic governor.103 Babylonian sources also mention the peliganaanu, an Akkadianized word for the bouleutic council of elders known in ancient Macedon as the peliganes – a civic institution that also presided in Seleukeia on the Tigris.104 Throughout its existence, Babylon’s enormous walled surface housed an unsurprisingly heterogeneous population, consisting of several groups, cultures, and communities. Onomastic evidence suggests that the city was home to Babylonians, Greeks, Jews, Arabs, and Iranians, and probably also several other linguistic or ethnic minorities, including people with mixed heritage.105 Examples of persons taking on a double name – for instance, a Greek name coupled with an Akkadian name – testify to the existence of bicultural if not multicultural social practices, which were not uncommon in Hellenistic Babylon and elsewhere in Western Asia.106 The Akkadian language, written in traditional cuneiform script on clay tablets, predominates the corpus of written sources from Hellenistic Babylon.107 The majority of these texts, written according to traditional documentation practices, are formal records such as chronicles, astronomical diaries, temple receipts, and other administrational writings. Sparse individual examples of inscriptions and ostraca in Aramaic and Greek are known, mostly related to the buildings in which they were found, such as the theatre. 7.3 Review A most famous and prestigious of ancient cities, Babylon is often described and envisioned in its Neo-Babylonian form, since archaeological excavations mostly focused on uncovering the city at its peak under Nebuchadnezzar II. Archaeological material The zazakku is mentioned in Sachs and Hunger 1989, 476–477, no. 168 A rev. 13’. For instructive discussion of the zazakku and the paqdu, see McEwan 1981, 25–27; Van der Spek 1986, 62–63; Boiy 2004, 209–210. 103 Van der Spek 1986, 75–88; 2001, 453–454; 2005a, 396–398; see also Boiy 2004, 204–209. 104 BCHP 18 rev. B3’; cf. Polyb. 5.54.10. For further discussion of the evidence, see Van der Spek 2005a, 398; 2009, 109. 105 Boiy 2004, 294–295; Van der Spek 2009, 103–106. 106 Haussoullier 1909, 362–363; Sherwin-White 1983a; Boiy 2005; see also Langin-Hooper and Pearce 2014. Apart from the combination Greek and Akkadian, double names could also include an Aramaic component coupled with an Akkadian or Greek one. There is further evidence for the use of an Iranian-Greek double name in Parthian times. For similar naming practices in Hellenistic Syria and Egypt, see e. g. Stager 2005; and Broux 2015; Coussement 2016, respectively. 107 Oelsner 1986, 191–224, 248–250, 252–255. 102

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in combination with written sources suggest that the city’s urban topography did not change radically in the Hellenistic period. The urban landscape was largely dominated by the massive palace complex and the many temples, built in regional architectural styles, techniques, and materials. Written sources and a Greek inscription mention the presence of an agora and a gymnasium in the late second century BCE, though both structures remain archaeologically elusive. The main palace (and possibly also the ‘summer palace’) functioned as royal residence of Alexander the Great and the Seleukid kings, while temple authorities and rituals seem to have retained their form and practice. Etemenanki may have fallen out of use at some point in the Hellenistic period; temple bricks from the ziggurat were recycled for the construction of the mound Homera and its theatre in the eastern part of the city. Several temples, including the main temple Esagila, were restored in Hellenistic times though without massive changes to their Neo-Babylonian ground plan and architecture. All temples were dedicated to Mesopotamian gods; certain deities that gained (new) prominence could be associated and identified with Greek counterparts that were meaningful in Seleukid ideology, such as Marduk (Zeus), Nabu (Apollo), and Ninurta (Herakles). The city did not feature newly built Greek-styled religious architecture, although a ruler cult to the Seleukid dynasty may have been installed from the late third century BCE. Funerary practices in Hellenistic Babylon seem to have followed regional traditions of burying the dead not outside the city, but in between and underneath dwelling houses or city walls. From the second century BCE onward, a new civic institution of pahatu and pulite is gleaned from cuneiform sources, possibly founded for Babylon’s Greek inhabitants whose activities were closely connected to the theatre. At a later stage under Parthian domination, a palaistra-like edifice was added to the theatre’s stage building in the first or second century CE. The street pattern of the residential quarters, as well as the basic ground plans and features of the houses, remained largely unchanged in their layout, although some houses were modified with an additional peristyle. In Hellenistic Babylon, people could take on double names, while cuneiform scribal traditions continued to be widely practiced, alongside a more limited use of Aramaic and Greek script. 7.4 Hellenism and localism It is clear that Babylon was no new foundation. And it is because of its impressively long history, dating back to the third millennium BCE, as well as the fact that its urban landscape remained largely dominated by structures that existed or were rebuilt for centuries, that Babylon continues to be perceived and described as the emblematic and eternal Oriental city. Indeed, Babylon’s ancient prestige as marvel of the East – mirabilium orientis in the words of Curtius Rufus – carried on in modernity, with a most profound impact on the archaeological objectives of the DOG, set on uncovering the

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city’s golden age.108 For Koldewey’s team and many who followed, Babylon’s Hellenistic period represented the beginning of the end of the allegorical eternal city which, in turn, shaped a distinct agenda for historians to proceed from. Babylon, the Oriental city Historical narrative about Hellenism at Babylon has therefore been dominated by two aspects. The first is the city’s juxtaposition to Seleukeia on the Tigris. It has long been assumed that the foundation of Seleukeia in southern Mesopotamia was a major, if not decisive factor in the decline and demise of Babylon, a view heavily shaped by outsider narratives of later Graeco-Roman authors who described a drastic drainage of Babylon’s populace on royal command, to supply Seleukos I’s new imperial centre with Greek inhabitants.109 Although archaeological and cuneiform evidence contradict the picture of a deserted city in ruins, the particular geopolitical context of these two cities in southern Mesopotamia, one ancient capital on the Euphrates and one new capital on the Tigris, forged a distinct notion of Hellenism as the ultimate ruin to Babylon’s former splendour, embodied by the foundation of Seleukeia. A single sentence from Van der Spek’s 1982 publication exemplifies this line of thought: “the Oriental city of Babylon had to suffer in order to make the new Greek polis Seleukeia prosperous.”110 Such understanding held broad scholarly resonance, reproducing a traditional contrast between the cultural identities of Seleukeia and Babylon – the former of Occidental, the latter of Oriental character – despite that both cities reflected a mixture of cultural elements in their architecture and objects in the Hellenistic period. This contrast engaged with a long-standing historiographic discourse that juxtaposed the politico-economic organization of Eastern and Western cities, anchored in polarized preconceptions about Oriental despotism of the Near Eastern city and democratic self-government of the Greek polis.111 While Greek cultural features were part of the urban and social structure of both settlements, Seleukeia has commonly been presented as a full Greek polis, a “centre of Hellenism” for Greeks in Mesopotamia, in stark contrast with common views of Babylon as a stronghold of Babylonian culture, often presented as a surviving “Mesopotamian city with a few Greek accents.”112

108 109 110 111

112

For mirabilium orientis, see Curt. 5.1.29. See fn. 9, this chapter. Van der Spek 1985, 546, but cf. his later publications, e. g. Van der Spek 2006, 272. Most notably voiced by Rostovtzeff 1941, 1031; Finley 1973, 17–28, proceeding from early Marxist theories of a distinct Asiatic mode of production. For useful discussions on this juxtaposition, see Lewis and Wigen 1997, 91–103; Vlassopoulos 2007b, 101–122; Liverani 2016; see also Von Reden and Speidel 2020 addressing the juxtaposition within historiography on the ancient economy at large. Phrasing according to Invernizzi 1994, 9 and Boiy 2004, 97, 291, respectively. Cf. Chapter 6, section 6.4.

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Such narrative has not only been framed by historiographic traditions but was also bolstered by archaeological interest in Babylon’s more ancient history, especially its cuneiform material. In the 1970s and 1980s, the systematic and increasing publication of Babylonian cuneiform texts provided an enormous wealth of information about Babylon’s religious life, culture, and science across the centuries. This time also saw an emergent generation of ancient historians that aimed to bring the city’s Hellenistic period into focus with new local Babylonian evidence. Momentous in this line of research were the publications of Hellenism in the East (1987) and From Samarkhand to Sardis (1991) in which Kuhrt and Sherwin-White and their colleagues addressed unbalanced methodologies that only traced evidence of Greek culture in the Near East, inferring imperial importance from it while overlooking local contexts.113 Calling for a turn to Babylonian cuneiform texts, these authors alternatively argued that the Seleukid kings adapted to existing Near Eastern frameworks of kingship and royal ideologies, rather than imposing foreign Greek culture and lifeways. A succinct statement from Hellenism in the East, again by Van der Spek, sums up this view for Babylon: “Babylon continued to be a primarily non-Greek city with traditional Babylonian government, although a Greek colony was established there.”114 In the same volume, Sherwin-White admitted that “the existence at Babylon of a Greek theatre, a gymnasium and an agora (…) probably does mean that the Greek community at Babylon was organized as a polis,” a statement which she specified by explaining that only the Greeks on the Homera mound were organized as a tiny micro-polis, not the city at large.115 Subsequent scholarship embraced the view that Hellenism at Babylon did not constitute a full Greek transformation of the city, but consisted of rather minor changes limited to the instalment of a Greek apoikia in the east of the city.116 This idea of limited Hellenism rather than full Hellenization was pushed further by Van der Spek, who theorized in a number of publications that Greeks and Babylonians in Babylon lived in ethnic and political apartheid, each with their own cultural life and civic institutions.117 Whereas Greek citizens were headed by the pahatu (epistates), guided by a council of elders (peliganes), and assembled in the theatre (the bit tama113 114 115

116 117

See also Chapter 2, section 2.1.5. Van der Spek 1987, 67. For earlier views on Babylon as a Greek polis, see: Rostovtzeff 1928, 185; Tarn 1938, 187; Oelsner 1986, 125. Sherwin-White 1987, 21; Sherwin-White and Kuhrt 1993, 157–158, see also Kuhrt and Sherwin-White 1994, 325–236; echoed also in Oelsner 1986, 125: “Damals erhielt Babylon in Zusammenhang mit den Hellenisierungsbestrebungen des Herrschers [Antiochos IV] offenbar den Status einer hellenistischer Polis, was jedoch auf das Leben in der Stadt kaum größere Auswirkungen gehabt haben dürfte.” See e. g. Briant 1990; McKenzie 1994, 66; Oelsner 2002c; 2002b; 2002a. Cf. recently Strootman 2013; Beaulieu 2014; Dirven 2014; Kosmin 2014a; Clancier 2017. See also Chapter 8, section 8.6; Chapter 9, section 9.2.4. Most notably Van der Spek 2001, 446–455; 2005a; 2009, with resonance in e. g. McKenzie 1994, 64–65; Olbrycht 2014, 136, but cf. Clancier 2017. See further below.

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rtu), Babylonian citizens would fall under the authority of Esagila’s shatammu and kinishtu and assembled in a different building mentioned in cuneiform texts, the bit milki (‘house of deliberation’). According to Van der Spek, Babylon’s society would therefore be a segregated one, in which Babylonians kept to their ancient-old traditions while a small privileged group of Greeks on the Homera formed an ethnic enclave within a foreign Oriental metropolis. The notion of an ethno-political divide between Greeks and Babylonians virtually reinforced the paradigm that Babylon continued to be the emblematic and eternal Oriental city it had been for centuries, as exemplified by Michael Pfrommer’s concluding statement in a 2009 paper: Man würde sicherlich zu weit greifen, Babylon als griechische Stadt zu apostrophieren. Der Theater-Palästra-Komplex zeigt nur, dass man durchaus bemüht war, auch in orientalischen Umfeld griechische Architekturakzente zu setzen.118

Despite that the traditionally named requirements for a Greek polis were met by Babylon’s theatre, palaistra-gymnasium, agora, and Greek inhabitants, scholars almost naturally abide by Babylon’s Oriental essence. Hellenism and the survival of local traditions The temporal-cultural dichotomy between Babylon and Seleukeia as representatives of the old Babylonian world order and the new Greek world order, respectively, is deeply entangled with the second aspect that dominated historical narrative about Hellenism at Babylon: the survival of local Babylonian traditions in the face of foreign, non-Babylonian rule. Because of infamous Graeco-Roman descriptions of Babylon’s destruction by the Achaemenid kings and the dominant conceptualization of the Hellenistic period as the beginning of the city’s dying end, scholars on Hellenistic Babylon were compelled to frame their findings in terms of the survival of ‘indigenous’ culture and traditions during the city’s ‘late antiquity’. Additionally, the archaeological excavations unearthed a city with century-old layers of history, providing the modern viewer with an impression of Hellenistic Babylon as overwhelmingly Mesopotamian indeed, with a prevailing quantity of pre-Hellenistic (and pre-Achaemenid) buildings and architecture and with relatively scarce Greek cultural elements in its material culture. New abundance of excavated Babylonian texts further documented century-old scribal, political, economic, and cultic practices performed at Babylon, which allowed Assyriologist Paul McEwan to state that changes in Hellenistic Babylon were absolutely minimal: “Wherever possible, the Hellenistic rulers used native cultural material for their administration and disturbed the indigenous institutions as little as possible. Those changes that were made conformed as much as possible to the old patterns.”119 Orientalist Joachim Oelsner, 118 119

Pfrommer 2009, 121. McEwan 1981, 190.

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though admitting that the extent of Babylon’s Hellenization was impossible to tell from current material, likewise concluded: “Insgesamt wird man davon ausgehen dürfen, daß sich in den alten Städten die Hellenisierung der babylonische Bevölkerung in Grenzen hielt.”120 In similar vein, though focused on socio-spatial planning, Invernizzi stated that Babylon’s urban layout, especially in the residential areas of Merkes, did not experience a planning revolution since Neo-Babylonian times, which implied that unlike Seleukeia, Hellenistic Babylon “still firmly adhered to the practices of a settlement organized in relation to the continuity of life of the two main pre-Seleucid centres, the Marduk temple and perhaps the royal palace.”121 The common thread is clear: rather than an assimilation or even adoption to Greek practices, life in Hellenistic Babylon largely continued in its traditional ways as it had always done. Although the survival of ‘indigenous’ life organization in Hellenistic Babylon, despite the new additions of a theatre, palaistra, and agora, continued to dominate historical narrative in modern scholarship, it should be kept in mind that only a small amount of the city was excavated and that writings on perishable material, such as parchment and papyrus, have not been passed down in the evidence. Clay tablets often survive the test of time in the alluvial environment of southern Mesopotamia, while parchments and papyri with Greek, Aramaic, and possibly other writings rarely do so. The traditional philological nature of Assyriology (which informed its boundaries of interest) and the relatively late development of historical methods in the discipline, further meant that scholars of cuneiform tended to be rather uncritical with their sources.122 Looking through the lens of Babylon’s written sources, the wealth of cuneiform tablets and the paucity of writings in Greek and other languages, could readily be understood in the frame of local life continuity in Hellenistic Babylon as a whole. Indeed, according to ancient historian and Assyriologist Tom Boiy, Hellenism in Babylonia was not the rich cultural mixture Droysen had envisioned, nor a broad diffusion of Greek culture, but rather pertained to small privileged containers of Greek culture imported by Greek colonists to have a civilized life in a continuous ‘barbarous’ environment: The Greeks were not interested in a mixture of their own culture with those of the conquered people, but they wanted to keep their own lifestyle and start a new life that was a more or less exact copy of what they knew in Greece, Macedonia or the Greek cities in Asia Minor. Since civilised life was in Greek eyes in the first place a city life, Alexander and his successors founded a large amount of new ‘Greek’ cities to please the colonists. Because of the preference for cities there was no homogeneous spread of Greek culture in the Ancient Near East, but there were small islands of Greek culture in a large sea of indigenous cultures.123 120 121 122 123

Oelsner 1986, 265. Invernizzi 1994, 7. Wiesehöfer 2017a, 73. Boiy 2004, 288–289.

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Boiy proceeds to state that indications of Greek influence in Babylon’s material culture beyond the architecture on the Homera, such as the cuneiform tablets with double names and Greek pottery, seal impressions, and figurines, “may be the result of Greek influence, but they are not necessarily linked with persons of Greek origin.”124 For Boiy, Greek culture as such could also be used by Babylonians for aesthetic and pragmatic reasons, though without deep impact on the existing autochthonous civilization: “daily life in Hellenistic Babylon cannot be described ‘Greek’ or ‘Hellenistic’, but rather ‘Babylonian with some Greek elements’”.125 Boiy’s view exemplifies common interpretation of Greek culture in Babylonia, considered to have been limited to newly founded cities such as Seleukeia or otherwise not particularly profound in its influence. The paradigm of the survival of ancient-old Babylonian culture in the form of deep local continuity, despite changes in political domination, holds some implicit cultural justification: Babylonians did not need foreign civilization – they were already cultured on their own. Although recent scholarship has taken up new directions, taking into account profound Seleukid innovations anchored in existing Babylonian traditions, the continuity of local culture remains a common and powerful theme in discussions of Hellenism at Babylon. In comparison with Hellenism at Ai Khanum and Seleukeia on the Tigris, it is especially striking how the presence of the same Greek features have led to distinctly different scholarly understanding of what Hellenism constitutes and signifies. The next chapter delves deeper into the comparison, investigating what scholarly conceptualizations of Hellenism at Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, Nisa, Seleukeia, and Babylon have in common and where they diverge into paradox.

124 Boiy 2004, 291. 125 Boiy 2004, 296.

Part III: Eurasian Localisms

8 Paradoxes of Hellenism The review of major scholarly perspectives on Hellenism at Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, Old Nisa, Seleukeia on the Tigris, and Babylon, sheds light on how the notion of Hellenism has assumed distinctly different forms in the scholarly mind. Comparing the underlying tenets of these forms, this chapter attempts to disentangle the ways in which conceptions of Hellenism – as exemplified by the main interpretations of archaeological material of the five case studies – are shaped and structured by specific philosophical stances towards the material at hand. I follow here Bas van Fraassen, philosopher of science, who understands empiricism not merely as a set of contingent factual beliefs, but rather as a philosophical stance: an “attitude, commitment, approach, a cluster of such – possibly including some propositional attitudes such as beliefs as well.”1 Philosophical stances, then, are clusters of “pragmatically justified metaphysical perspectives, or ways of seeing. They are particular orientations on the world, or ways of seeing facts. Such ways of seeing are typically justified both in terms of their epistemic fruits, and in terms of their coherence with one’s values.”2 The varied intellectual perceptions of Hellenisms can be explained as interpretations that lean into different paradigmatically justified beliefs and established expectations about the role and meaning of Greek material culture at the archaeological sites under review here. As will be argued, these distinct interpretations prompt a peculiar series of paradoxes that emerge around five interrelated themes: ethnic identity, religious syncretism, Philhellenism, artistic hybridity, and the notion of localism. 8.1 Baktria, Parthia, and Babylonia: a comparison Let us first have a closer look at the invariable and variable elements at play in the comparison of the Central Asian and West Asian case studies. As I stated in the introduction of this book, in modern historiography, Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, Nisa, Seleukeia, and Babylon are all prominent sites that have highlighted the histories of the regions and the cultural landscapes in which they are set. It was through their archaeological discovery 1 2

Van Fraassen 2002, 47–48. Boucher 2014, 2319 (emphasis in original).

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and excavation that Baktria, Parthia, and Mesopotamia entered the swathes of ancient history, becoming empirically known to wider scholarly and non-academic audiences. Four of the five sites received global attention. Nisa and most recently Babylon carry the status of official UNESCO World Heritage site which boosted international publicity and promotion of their universal cultural value. Takht-i Sangin, formerly associated with the spectacular Oxus Treasure – a most celebrated collection on permanent display in the British Museum – has been on UNESCO’s tentative list since 1999. Ai Khanum, together with a number of other Afghan sites, obtained unique massive public interest through the international touring exhibition Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul at major museums across globe. Financed by the National Geographic Society, UNESCO, and the Society for the Preservation of Afghan Cultural Heritage, this exhibition was organized to keep invaluable cultural objects safe from plunder and loot in the face of the dire political instabilities in Afghanistan. With the Taliban takeover of the country in August 2021 and the alarming situation that unfolded, the preservation and safeguarding of Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage continues to be of immense international concern. In antiquity, the five sites were no less prominent, operating as networked hubs located either at confluences of major waterways or nearby important overland routes at an envisioned nexus of East and West. The material effects of such strategic and central positioning contributed to their character of inbetweenness in modern scholarship, as reflected in general presentations of the material culture of Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, Nisa, Seleukeia on the Tigris, and Babylon as culturally between East and West: as culturally mixed, amalgamated, contradictory, or otherwise elusive. Although Hellenism plays a dominant role in such interpretations, how this phenomenon and its social dynamics is asserted, framed, and explained is done in contrasting and sometimes contradictory ways by different (or sometimes even the same) scholars. Ancient variations and intersections Although the archaeological sites have all been considered in scholarship as regional highlights (if not regional representatives), as culturally ‘inbetween’, and in association with Hellenism, they also vary at several points. Ai Khanum, Seleukeia, and Babylon were urban settlements and capital cities that functioned as royal residential seats of important imperial (or imperial-aspiring) players on the Eurasian stage. Old Nisa, though intimately connected with the Arsakid empire and possibly a place of seasonal royal residence too, manifested a fortified ceremonial centre rather than a city with settled inhabitants (which was at New Nisa) while Takht-i Sangin embodied a single sanctuary. The Oxus Temple has not distinctly been associated with royalty, although it undoubtedly received royal funds as the largest sanctuary of the region. Except for Nisa, all case studies experienced historical transitions in rulership, from Achaemenid to Seleukid rule in the case of Babylon; from Seleukid to Arsakid rule in the cases of Babylon and Seleukeia; and from Seleukid to Baktrian rule in the cases of Ai Khanum and Takht-i

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Sangin, which influenced the direction of modern scholarly debates concerning the cultural character of these sites. The reviewed sites also differ in their documented dating, despite their common existence and functioning in the Hellenistic period (fourth to first centuries BCE). While the chronology of Ai Khanum, Nisa, and Seleukeia are largely set in the Hellenistic era, the sites of Takht-i Sangin and Babylon have a much longer life-span. The foundation of the Oxus sanctuary is dated to the Hellenistic period, after which it remained in long use over the course of three centuries, well into the Kushan era. Conversely, Babylon’s Hellenistic period was quite a latecomer considering its occupation history stretching back to the second millennium BCE. Another aspect of variation concerns the prominence and representation of the sites in ancient written sources. Both Babylon and Seleukeia are widely known from ancient literature as they were famed in antiquity as royal capitals of Alexander the Great and Seleukos I, respectively. Due to their (relative) geographical proximity to and political entanglements with the Mediterranean regions, Greek and Latin texts about Babylon and Seleukeia (though written by outsiders and/or authors of a later date) are not only greater in number but also more informative about cultural matters than written sources from or about Baktria. Furthermore, Babylon’s long history of existence ensured the steady accumulation of written texts in Babylonian cuneiform, produced in the region or the city itself. By contrast, before their archaeological discovery, Ai Khanum and Takht-i Sangin were virtually unknown from ancient written sources, though scholars have tentatively associated these sites with name-cities of Alexander the Great that were mentioned by various ancient authors. Historical Nisa, despite enjoying significant ideological importance as an early royal site of the Arsakid kings, is shrouded in myth and therefore not represented in ancient written sources, with the exception of a short mention of ‘Parthaunisa’ or ‘Nisaia’ by Isidoros of Charax in his exploration of trade routes, written in the early first century CE. Although the Nisa excavations yielded a wealth of economic ostraca, informing about the distribution and the consumption of wine, further written sources about social and cultural matters from the early Arsakid kings or the Parthians themselves are notoriously rare. Modern scholarship must additionally engage with longstanding complex Graeco-Roman literary discourses that featured Iranians – ‘Oriental’ barbarian enemies whether they were Persians or Parthians – as cultural Others and sometimes as cultural ‘friends’.3 Modern variations and intersections The modern history of excavation and research on Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, Nisa, Seleukeia, and Babylon also varies and intersects at several points. The five sites are all situated in countries with modern histories of colonialism or imperialism and have

3

See informative discussion in Sonnabend 1986, 228–299; Schneider 1998; Lerouge 2007.

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been partly, if not fully excavated by Western (West-European and American) expeditions, sometimes in joint ventures with domestic archaeologists, especially in later years. Their pioneering efforts and first interpretations were pivotal for the narrative history of the sites and their broader regions, especially for those that were virtually or completely unknown from ancient testimonies. The French DAFA excavated at Ai Khanum, the German DOG at Babylon, the American ASOR-Baghdad at Seleukeia, and the Italian CRAST at Babylon, Seleukeia, and Old Nisa. Conversely, Takht-i Sangin in Tadzhikistan and Old Nisa in Turkmenistan – both young nations with a history of occupation by the Russian empire and the USSR – had been extensively excavated by Russophone Soviet archaeologists of the YuTAE and the YuTAKE, respectively, before takeover by or cooperation with foreign and international missions (Table 8.1). Table 8.1. Countries and institutions involved in the excavations of Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, Old Nisa, Seleukeia on the Tigris, and Babylon. Archaeological site Ai Khanum, Afghanistan Takht-i Sangin, Tadzhikistan

Countries involved in the excavations France; Afghanistan USSR; Tadzhikistan; Japan

Associated institutions • DAFA (1964–1979)

• YuTAE (1973–1990s) • Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Science of Tadzhikistan, in cooperation with the Miho Museum (1998–2010) Old Nisa, Turk- USSR; Turkmenistan; • YuTAKE (1946–1967) menistan Italy • The Ashgabat Institute of History of the Academy of Science of TSSR (the ‘Parthian Expedition’, 1979–1997) • The Leningrad Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences (the ‘Leningrad Mission’, 1982–1986) • The Moscow Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Science (the ‘Moscow Mission’, 1985–1986, 1990–1991) • CRAST (1990–present) Seleukeia on the USA; Italy; Iraq • University of Michigan on behalf of Tigris, Iraq ASOR-Baghdad, in cooperation with the Toledo Museum of Art and Cleveland Museum of Art (1928–1932, 1936–1937) • CRAST (1963–1976, 1985–1989) Babylon, Iraq Germany; Italy; Iraq • DOG, in cooperation with the Königliche Museen zu Berlin (1899–1917) • DAI (1957–1972) • CRAST (1987–1989)

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That the excavations were funded and carried out by several institutions under the aegis of nation-states is part of the intricate ways in which the ancient past and the production of its archaeological and historical knowledge have been entangled with visions and identities of the present. It is now well-known that modern political interests of colonial, imperial, and diplomatic nature often drive and proliferate academic interests in antiquity, thus shaping reconstructions of the past.4 The alignment of ancient Greek civilization with (some) modern civilization can be found in the rationales for excavation of the five sites under review, with significant impact on the identification, formulation, and historical interpretations of Hellenism in each case. Research valorization of the CRAST and DAFA excavations included phrases of tracing ‘the spread of Hellenistic culture in Asia’, associated with ‘the legacy of Alexander the Great’, in their main research objectives at the time.5 This shaped and steered subsequent research designs – including the object of study, excavation rationale, scholarly norms, and heuristic tools – towards a tendency to prioritize traces of Greek cultural traditions. By contrast, the scholarly enterprises of the YuTAE at Takht-i Sangin and the YuTAKE at Nisa were probably formed by discourses of historical autochthony of Central Asian cultures and peoples with minimal input of foreign influence, influenced by the distinct political and intellectual climate of the Soviet Union’s (republican) nation-building project.6 That archaeological research is never a fully neutral venture, is further illustrated by the connected trajectories of individual archaeologists and their role in the larger institutes they represented. YuTAKE’s interests in autochthonous culture and civilization may be exemplified in Galina Pugachenkova’s career, a pioneering female Tashkent scholar who began her collaboration with Mikhail Masson with a background in architectural studies and became highly interested in the fine arts of ancient Central Asia. After the spectacular discovery of the Nisa rhytons, she founded the Uzbekistan Art Expedition and continued to excavate at Khalchayan and Dalverzin Tepe (both Baktrian sites from Kushan times; Fig. 1.1), the discoveries of which would become known as great examples of ancient Baktrian art.7 The Centro Scavi di Torino, active at three of the five case studies under review here, worked in a distinctly different intellectual context. The CRAST was founded in 1963 on the initiative of Giorgio Gullini, who specialized 4

5 6 7

This observation is argued most explicitly in Said [1987] 2003, 1–110. Important research publications that similarly highlight the historiographical entanglement of the ancient past and the modern present include Vlassopoulos 2007b; González-Ruibal 2010; Vlassopoulos 2010b; Lianeri 2011; Gorshenina 2014a; Fabian 2018; Gorshenina et al. 2019, passim; Von Reden 2020a, passim. Phrase from the CRAST website, Centro Scavi di Torino 2018a (accessed February 2018); for DAFA’s comparable objectives in Baktria, see Bernard 2002, 1291–1292 and informed discussion in Fenet 2021. For development of the YuTAE, see Lindström 2021; for YuTAKE, see Pilipko 1994; Bruno 2021. For instructive discussion of Russian and Soviet scholarship on Central Asian antiquity, see Fabian 2020b, 603–609; Morris 2020c. Gorshenina 2020, 149–150. For Dalverzin Tepe and Khalchayan see Pugachenkova 1966; 1971; Pugachenkova and Rtveladze 1978.

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in the history and archaeology of Greek and Roman art. Gullini’s Classical training and interest in ‘the great Mediterranean cultures’ undoubtedly played a role in the formation and direction of Turin’s archaeological endeavours in Iraq and Central Asia.8 Interestingly so, Antonio Invernizzi led the excavations at both Seleukeia and Nisa – in that significant order – which influenced his interpretational lens and expectations of the latter in some way. Entanglements of research interests may also be discerned in the intellectual careers of archaeologists at other sites. Boris Litvinskiy took part in the Soviet expeditions at Nisa, before directing the YuTAE missions at Takht-i Sangin; Paul Bernard was a trained Classical archaeologist who, as member of the École française d’Athènes, had excavated in Greece before succeeding Daniel Schlumberger as head of the DAFA and the Ai Khanum excavations; and Laurianne Martinez-Sève had been engaged with Hellenistic terracotta figurines from Susa before working on the extensive legacy data of DAFA’s work at Ai Khanum. Likewise, Gunvor Lindström, who collaborated closely with Angelina Druzhinina in publishing the Takht-i Sangin excavations, specialized in Hellenistic sealings at Uruk (Mesopotamia) prior to her DAI project on ritual practices at the Oxus Temple. These archaeologists laid these groundwork of historical interpretations, as subsequent scholars have to engage with scholarly traditions of earlier excavations and outline their projects in the most productive way as to both incorporate and progress from the material at hand. By no means do I intend to minimize the extensive work of these archaeologists, but rather to make explicit that these scholars, as anyone, were and are products of their time and space, working in a specific frame of reference and inquiry. Although the invaluable undertakings of these archaeologists massively increased our understanding of the sites, trained new generations of diverse archaeologists, and developed significant international collaboration while contributing to the protection and understanding of cultural heritage, it is also important to articulate the often unspoken yet important role of the ways in which archaeological remains, their analysis, understanding, and eventual incorporation in narrative history are informed by disciplinary frameworks, research valorizations, directed academic interests, and individual scholarly trajectories. Interpretations of Hellenism in Western Asia and Central Asia The combination of modern and ancient variations and intersections influenced interpretations, expectations, and standards of Hellenism at the five sites and how they were incorporated in historical narrative. Although each Hellenism shares the basic association with Greek culture – understood in the broadest sense of the word – the preceding chapters have illustrated that scholarly perceptions of Hellenism can be at distinct odds about what it precisely entails, with different narrative overtones in each case (see Table 8.2). 8

Centro Scavi di Torino 2018b (accessed February 2018); the CRAST website is currently under maintenance.

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Table 8.2. Summary of general interpretations of Hellenism in the case studies, simplified Case study

Indicia of Hellenism

Communis opinio on the nature of the site Ai Khanum Greek institutions, Greek polis Greek inscriptions, Greek art Baktrian temple Takht-i Sangin Greek inscriptions, Greek art, Greek ritual practices Old Nisa Greek art, Greek Parthian cerearchitectural deco- monial complex rations Seleukeia on Greek institutions, Greek polis the Tigris Greek inscriptions, Greek (mixed) art Babylon Greek institutions, Babylonian city Greek inscriptions, Greek (mixed) art

Communis opinio on the majority of people Greeks

Inference

Real Hellenism

Baktrians

Syncretistic Hellenism

Parthians

Philhellenism

Greeks

Real Hellenism; Hellenism as hybridity

Babylonians

Superficial Hellenism; real Hellenism segregated from localism

This table presents the common indicia of Hellenism of each site and the inferences on Hellenism that follow from them. It should be pointed out here that comparison necessarily generates simplifications in order to productively examine contrasts and correlations. And it is indeed in their juxtaposition that striking discrepancies on Hellenism emerge. Hellenism at Ai Khanum finds its prominence in historical narrative largely through the presence of buildings that represent Greek institutions (the theatre, the gymnasium, and the mausoleum), the presence of Greek inscriptions (most notably the Delphic maxims inscribed by Klearchos and dedicated to the sanctuary of Kineas), and the presence of Greek art in the form of sculptural remains in Greek style, particularly the sandaled foot decorated with a thunderbolt from the main temple. These indicia of Hellenism have most often been associated and interpreted as ethnic manifestations, essentially embodying pure or real Hellenism i. e. practiced and expressed by Greeks. Voiced by Bernard, Robert, and Holt, the prevailing scenario considered to fit such interpretations of Hellenism depicts Ai Khanum as a Greek colonial city for ethnic Greek settlers in the Far East, who strongly kept to their cultural traditions far away from home. In historical narrative, Ai Khanum’s perceived Hellenism therefore predominantly pertains to Greek ethnicity in a colonial setting, although Mairs and Martinez-Sève have articulated such Hellenism to be an imagined tradition in the Barthian sense:

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community traditions that were considered as Greek by later generations of settlers, but which were not necessarily in accordance with those in Greece itself. The idea of Hellenism as an expression of ethnicity, as a cultural attachment to ethnic traditions, is much less prominent in the case of Takht-i Sangin. Hellenism perceived at the Oxus Temple is largely described and characterized as religious syncretism, exemplified by the presence of Greek votive objects, Greek ritual practices, and Greek inscriptions, combined with inscribed Iranian names and an architecturally Iranian temple. The Atrosokes altar became the epitome of such syncretistic Hellenism: a hybrid object which combined Greek art (the small Greek votive altar topped by a Marsyas figure) and Greek language (the dedicatory inscription), which was inscribed by an Iranian person (Atrosokes) for a Baktrian deity (Oxus). Such interpretations of hybridity also carried weight through the amalgamation of Iranian and Greek elements in the practices, imagery, cultic activity, and architecture of the sanctuary. Some elements gained interpretive priority over others: while Litvinskiy and Pichikyan highlighted the ash dedications and the Iranian form of the temple, Druzhinina and Lindström emphasized the use of anthropomorphic imagery and the mode of storage of the votives, interpreting these as distinctly Greek practices according to the rule of ouk ekphora. The philosophical stance underlying perceptions of Hellenism at Takht-i Sangin, as opposed to Hellenism at Ai Khanum, concedes more interpretive room to accommodate the involvement of non-Greek actors. Rather than a singular ethnic Greek identity, the focus here is on syncretism, making the mixture in religious imagery and cultural practices imperative for Hellenism at Takht-i Sangin. In other words: what people do matters more for Hellenism’s significance at the Oxus Temple, rather than what people are. While Hellenism at Ai Khanum was framed in terms of ethnic Greekness, and Hellenism at Takht-i Sangin in terms of religious syncretism, comparable indicia of Hellenism led to a distinct interpretation of non-Greekness at Nisa, namely Philhellenism – the love or admiration for Greek culture by extraneous actors. According to both the Soviet and the Italian excavators, Nisa’s Philhellenism would be represented by the presence of ‘high quality’ Greek art – especially the ivory rhytons and the marble and clay statues – and the use of Greek architectural decorations. The former has been referred to as ‘monumental art’, to describe these objects as aesthetically grand.9 The conspicuous lack of Greek architecture, temples, and inscriptions would additionally underline the non-Greekness of the actors in question – the consumers of Nisa’s buildings. Scholarly understandings and historical narrations of the site’s Hellenism particularly concentrated on the interpretatio iranica – how Greek artistic styles served as communicative medium, as bodily vessels to express Arsakid religious and ideological ideas. Although Invernizzi and Mannassero, amongst others, have voiced the opinion that the Greek art works were made by itinerant Greek artists, narrative formulations 9

Although size also mattered: the ivory rhytons were much larger than normal drinking vessels, while the statues of unbaked clay were larger than life-sized.

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of Hellenism at Nisa are not founded on Greek ethnicity but on royal court culture (and taste) of the Arsakids in connection (and competition) to Hellenistic kingship across Asia. Moving from Central to Western Asia, now commonly considered as a vibrant centre of the Hellenistic world, we see that scholarly perceptions of Hellenism at Babylon and Seleukeia are just as varied as their Baktrian and Parthian counterparts. Yet, they have been grouped and referred to as ‘Western Hellenism’ in contrast to the latter’s ‘Eastern Hellenism’, based on Schlumberger’s influential distinction.10 The indicia of Hellenism at Babylon are recognized in the city’s Greek institutions – the theatre, palaestra, and agora – and some Greek inscriptions, amongst them an athletic winner’s list inscribed on a clay tablet. However, the fact that ancient buildings and institutions from Babylon’s previous periods still dominated the city skyline, combined with active practices of cuneiform traditions, led to the general view that Hellenism at Babylon was a superficial veneer underneath which older Mesopotamian culture and traditions continued to exist if not thrive. Though conceding that the inhabitants could have multiple ethnic identities, as suggested by double names in documentary texts, Babylon’s Hellenism has largely been explained in marked opposition to Mesopotamian localism, in which case Hellenism embodied foreign matter – representing that which was not indigenous. Contrastingly, in preference to superficial semblance, Seleukeia on the Tigris is often thought to have embodied real Hellenism. This expectation is much influenced by ancient testimonies that made record of the city as a great Hellenistic centre to which Greeks and Macedonians (and with them, Greek civilization) were transferred from Babylon. Like Ai Khanum, Seleukeia has been envisioned by scholars as an outpost of Hellenism in the East, indicating that Mesopotamia and Baktria – despite the massive distance between these regions – were both equally considered as remote enough to be outposts. Parallel to both Babylon and Ai Khanum, the indicia of Hellenism at Seleukeia are discerned from the presence of Greek institutions: the theatre, a city square, a stoa, an archive building, and according to the sources, a gymnasium, and several civic councils. Additionally, the city was organized along a Hippodamian grid plan, which has been interpreted as a distinct testimony of Seleukeia’s ‘real Hellenism’, facilitating Greek life in a polis built by and for ethnic Greeks. Conversely, focusing the interpretive lens on the small arts, ideas of ethnic and cultural hybridity enter historical narratives, as these objects were considered to illustrate cultural flexibility in terms of hybrid practices by both Greeks and Babylonians. In scholarly narrative, Seleukeia’s Hellenism is therefore highlighted through two aspects: Greek ethnicity (in city-wide interpretations) and social identity (in interpretations on the small arts). Comparing these dominant interpretations to historiographic trends in the Hellenization debate (Chapter 2), it is interesting to note how the overtones in general 10

Schlumberger 1969; with scholarly resonance in e. g. Invernizzi 1984, 28; Litvinskiy 2000; Shenkar 2012, 136. For a recent discussion about ‘Eastern Hellenism’, see the papers in Leriche 2015.

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conceptualizations of Hellenism at each site appear to follow certain tendencies in contemporary intellectual articulations of cultural contact and cultural change in the Hellenistic period. How Ai Khanum’s Hellenism has largely been interpreted, has much in common with Hellenism as envisioned by Tarn, Bevan, and Eddy: as colonial culture produced by and for ethnic Greeks who desired to maintain their Greekness in an Oriental environment, which explained the apparent Greek and non-Greek division in the city’s layout and structures. The conceptualization of Takht-i Sangin’s Hellenism is perhaps most in line with Droysen’s initial vision of an inclusive, syncretistic Verschmelzung, while Nisa’s perceived Hellenism resonates Momigliano’s limits of Hellenization and the emphasis on the ‘alien’, combined with Veyne’s concept of Roman Hellenization which posed Greek culture as a universal, visual language of civilization. Hellenism at Babylon seems to be largely asserted along the lines of Kuhrt and Sherwin White’s continuity paradigm, envisaged as a cultural layer which sustained and thriving local traditions. Lastly, considerations of Hellenism at Seleukeia on the Tigris, on a city-wide level, echo ideas of colonial Hellenism such as by Bevan and Tarn; yet, on the level of the small objects, interpretations of Hellenism have more in common with the archaeological appropriation of Bhabha’s postcolonial notion of hybridity: the creation of something wholly new from the combination of Greek and Babylonian traditions. By no means do the tendencies outlined here imply that archaeological and historical interpretations of the five case studies were universal in mind. This is illustrated by interpretive divergence between Invernizzi and Messina – both part of the Italian mission at Seleukeia – about the urban identification of the city as Greek or Oriental. The Soviet expeditions make it similarly clear that scholarly views on Hellenism cannot be homogenized.11 Litvinskiy and Druzhinina had distinctly different ideas about the nature of the Oxus Temple: while Litvinskiy chose for an Iranian interpretation of the temple, Druzhinina opted for a more Greek-oriented characterization. The point here is that the most influential interpretations – those views through which the site and the region have entered the mainstreams of ancient history – have advanced from different leading philosophical stances on culture contact and Hellenism. As a result, the things associated with Hellenism diverge in every case through which it is (and has never been) consistently or uniformly Greek. While some may discern and discuss forms of ‘Western Hellenism’ and ‘Eastern Hellenism’ to distinguish how Greek culture was expressed in Mesopotamia from what Greek culture represented in Parthia and Baktria, the comparison of the case studies actually demonstrate that interpretations of Hellenisms at Seleukeia and Ai Khanum have more in common than the perceived Hellenisms of Ai Khanum and Takhti Sangin, Ai Khanum and Nisa, or Nisa and Takhti Sangin. In turn, in conceptualizations of Hellenism at Babylon and Nisa, local agency seemed to weigh greater on the scholarly mind than ethnic Greekness, which make these

11

See recent discussion in Gorshenina and Rapin 2021.

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geographically disparate Hellenisms closer in interpretation than the Hellenisms at Babylon and Seleukeia. Thus, although Hellenism is generally understood in reference to Greek culture, it is clear that this broad concept has the propensity to be articulated rather differently in coherence with distinct philosophical stances and expectations, even within the same regions. We will now have a closer look at the cruxes and issues rising from comparative analyses. 8.2 Hellenism and ethnicity baggage In an evasive yet self-evident way, Hellenism is often connected to Greek ethnicity – thus carrying what I call ‘ethnicity baggage’. This has been the case for Ai Khanum, Seleukeia, and Babylon, where dominant interpretations of Hellenism are inextricably bound with explanations of Greek ethnicity. The actors of Hellenism are self-evidently assumed to have been Greek settlers or their descendants, who felt the need to emphasize Greek traditions, albeit imagined, to preserve and distinguish themselves as Greek in the context of their Eastern surroundings. In scholarly literature, Ai Khanum and Seleukeia have been characterized as new urban foundations specifically designed for Greeks (or imagined Greeks) while the urban context at Babylon was clearly understood as neither new nor built for Greeks. Accordingly, Hellenism at Ai Khanum and Seleukeia was connected to a dominant ethno-cultural group whose members enjoyed civic privileges that non-Greeks did not have (access to). Inversely, the Greeks at Babylon were assumed to have been a minority, even if they acquired a higher elite status in the Hellenistic period. Colonial ideas of an ethnic segregation between Greeks and non-Greeks have been present in all three interpretive scenarios. While scholarly explanations of the culture at Ai Khanum, Seleukeia (the city), and Babylon have largely been focused on explaining Greek ethnicity and its maintenance by Greek beings, settlers who migrated from the Aegean, the main interpreters of Nisa, Takht-i Sangin, and Seleukeia (the small arts) have been more eager to connect Hellenism to social practices of doing Greek, without restricting such agency to do so to Greek settlers. In fact, scholarly assessments of Nisa, Takht-i Sangin, and to some extent, Seleukeia, place the issue whether non-Greeks could share in Greek culture at the centre of interpretation, rather than a side note. In these cases, the issue in question is solved positively with the emphasis that ‘outsiders’ (Iranians and Mesopotamians) indeed could partake in Greek culture, even non-elite individuals, as evidenced from small arts and votive objects.12 However, general views consider the artisans who produced the Nisa art objects to have been ethnic Greeks, which illustrates how scholars often find difficulties to separate cultural Greekness from the ethnicity baggage that the word ‘Greek’ carries with it.

12

See also Martinez-Sève 2016, 104–105 for a similar interpretation for Ai Khanum.

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It seems that the first and most clear paradox of Hellenism that arises here lies in the coexisting assumptions that Hellenism was confined to Greek beings – ethnic Greek insiders – on the one hand, and that Hellenism entailed Greek doings by outsiders, who were able to share in Greek culture in a social way. In other words: Hellenism is paradoxically envisioned to be both strictly ethnic, as well as distinctly non-ethnic at the same time. As Chapter 2 has shown, this methodological (and often convenient) confusion is inherently related to the etymological core of the terms Hellenism, Hellenization, and Hellenistic, which all involve something Hellenic; something Greek. What this ‘something’ in scholarly usage amounts to, is often ethnic in nature. For many scholars, Hellenism has now come to refer to cultural Greek as recognized in the material culture, yet not uncommonly accompanied by an implicit (or sometimes even explicit) reference to Greek ethnicity – to ‘real Greeks’, envisioned to have been organized as an elitist enclave of Greekness. This implicit reference is illustrated in Chapter 4 which drew attention to an interpretation of Hellenism as a ‘systemic cultural combination’ (as phrased by Martinez-Sève), complemented by an interpretation of non-Greek structures that allowed ‘ethnic neutralization’ or ‘ethnic rationalization’ by Greek settlers (as phrased by Mairs) to maintain their Greek ethnicity. This inadvertently reasserts an ethno-cultural dichotomy of Greeks and non-Greeks, implying that Greek cultural elements were inherently ethnically laden with Greekness, whereas non-Greek elements were automatically (and antagonistically) not. The inconsistent and convoluted use of Hellenism as cultural Greek and ethnic Greek arises from the confusion about what ‘Hellenistic’ and ‘Greek’ precisely mean. These words are often interchangeably used to refer to cultural Greek, ethnic Greek, Greek civilization, and the full range of cultural processes in Asia after Alexander the Great in roughly the first three centuries BCE. Sometimes they imply all meanings at once. At other times, particularly in the usage of the term ‘Hellenistic’, an extent of non-Greek influence and the involvement of non-Greek people is granted but often not explicitly; predominant associations of the term ‘Hellenistic’ remain ‘Greek but a little distorted’.13 The lack of articulation of exact meaning leaves much open to philosophical interpretation, conveniently so. As a result, Hellenistic in the temporal sense is often (though not always) closely intertwined with Hellenistic in a cultural and ethnic sense, particularly in archaeological reports. The conventional differentiation between Hellenistic layers and Parthian layers is illustrative for such a convolution between periodization and culture label. In similar vein, the word ‘Greek’ for matters in the Hellenistic period, is often used to signify both Greek in a primordialist sense, referring to Attic Greek culture from the Classical period, as well as ‘Greek plus something else’.14 This unsurprisingly amounts to immense ambiguity. Is ‘Greek’ a matter of being or becoming? Could non-Greeks 13 14

As in an evocatively titled paper by Hauser 2001. Mairs 2006, 24.

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become Greek and where would the threshold be for them to have been considered as such? Does Hellenism, then, entail non-Greek actors attempting to be or appear Greek? Or would it entail being Greek as a condition to Greekness, and if so, to how much more Greekness? Would being Greek always require ethnic awareness? If not, how could this be distinguished etically from identifying as merely culturally Greek? And how relevant would such a distinction have been emically, from an insider’s perspective? To what extent would markers of ethnic or cultural identity have been internalized individually or externalized collectively? Many of these questions remain elusive when categorizing material culture along the lines of modern aesthetics and typological expectations of things Greek or non-Greek, based on the idea of Hellenism as a systemic cultural combination that would make one ‘Greek’. If ‘Greek’ would refer to ethnicity, it still remains inconclusive what precisely this would have amounted to in past communities, especially in light of common practices of intermarriage and people with migrant or mobile histories.15 Ethnic indicia may have been developed differently across regions and across generations, as well as having mere transient significance, raising the question to what extent cultural objects that are archaeologically categorized as Greek could actually constitute past Greek ethnicity. Is it then correct to assume that the same Greek cultural practices continued to be connected to ethnic Greekness across time and space, and thus remained consistently separate from ‘non-Greek’ local traditions? It is more likely that people did not adhere to a single primordial ethnicity but that individuals, depending on their migrant histories, developed multiple aspects in their identity that could amount to some ethnic belonging in some situations, though not decisively nor uniformly. Keeping in mind that Greeks and Macedonians were not homogeneous groups and certainly not the only migratory peoples in antiquity, ethnic identities were probably not compartmentalized along the same lines that modern scholars imagine them to have been, based on modern (often national) conceptions of ethnicity.16 Theorization of ethnicity in the social sciences have clarified that ethnic identity is not a checklist of shared cultural traits, but a situational claim to a distinct identity role that may utilize cultural traits to construct boundaries.17 However, this does not exclude ascriptions to other identity roles (even other ethnicities), nor does it claim these other roles to be less important for a person’s identification. Moreover, boundaries of cultural difference and similarity may be constructed (made relevant) in different ways across identity roles. Karl Strobel is instructive here:

15 16 17

For instance, those initiated by Alexander the Great at Susa; see further discussion in Burstein 2012. See Chapter 3, fn. 145. The bibliography on ancient Greek ethnicity is vast; instructive here are the classical works of Hall 1997; 2002; 2003; see also Malkin 2001; Derks and Roymans 2009; Vlassopoulos 2015. Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Brubaker 2002; 2006.

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Boundaries of culture and ethnic identity do not coincide. Just as ethnic identity can be preserved in spite of cultural changes and dominating cultural influences, cultural contents can vary without any critical consequence for the maintenance of the ethnic group and its defining boundaries. Continuity of ethnic identity is not to be equated with a continuity of culture or even material culture.18

If messages about identity are conveyed through material remains, it is therefore important to keep in mind that their symbolism is all but straightforward. Rather, expressions of identity are likely to be open for multiple interpretations which were not only entangled in the past, but also between antiquity and modernity.19 People, things, and their identities are likely to change and vary in meaning as they move through different social situations, with different standards and criteria that influence the significance of objects in any particular social and historical context. Despite increasing awareness amongst recent scholarship, it seems difficult to unburden the notion of Hellenism from the baggage of ethnicity. 8.3 The question of religion The second paradox of Hellenism pertains to the contradictory interpretation that Hellenism did not necessitate Greek religion or Greek gods, while on the other hand, Hellenism was most expressed through the use of Greek religious practices and the presence of Greek gods in the visual arts. A comparison of the case studies under review, reveals the striking commonality that none of the sites included (what was categorized as) a Greek temple, yet all sites have been culturally portrayed within a conceptual framework of Hellenism. Apparently, religious architecture does not play an important role in the scholarly mind as marker for Hellenism – in either the cultural or the ethnic sense. This is best illustrated by the prevailing interpretations of Hellenism at Ai Khanum and Babylon, where the notable absence of Greek temples is explained and rationalized by stating that Greeks were well able to ethnically neutralize (non-Greek) religion and religious architecture, and that they could worship Greek gods in syncretistic form, Greek gods in the guise of local deities, such as Apollo in the appearance of Nabu.20 This point entails a compelling paradox. If one reverses the situation, the same religious fluidity is usually not ascribed to, nor expected from non-Greeks. Interpretations that 18 19 20

Strobel 2009, 121. Jones 1997, 135–144; Meskell 2002; Sherratt 2009. Recently, Michael Shenkar 2017, 383 emphasized that the assumption of an interpretatio iranica – the actual Iranian meaning behind Greek appearance – is based on a strict separation between Greeks and non-Greeks, who both only worshipped ‘their own gods’ (deities stemming from Iranian c. q. Avestan traditions or Olympian gods) and followed their own traditions, if necessary in foreign cultural guise. Such a distinction is, however, purely artificial.

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highlight Greeks in Babylon worshipping in Mesopotamian temples are rare; rather, the focus tends to lie more on the city’s theatre and palaistra. The fact that Babylon’s urban landscape was dominated by existing ancient Babylonian temples is readily translated to represent the continuity of Mesopotamian local traditions. The long pre-Hellenistic history of Babylon plays a major role in such interpretations, yet the contrast with the supposed insignificance of Greek religious forms for sacred architecture and gods is striking. After all, Greeks too were homines religiosi and to state that they would have been less religious or less interested in sacred form than other ancient peoples, seems profoundly counterfactual. Moreover, the idea that Hellenism did not require Greek religious traditions is conspicuously inconsistent with other cases where Hellenism was not immediately or profoundly recognized in urban structures. In the case of Takht-i Sangin, it were Greek cult practices and particularly the votive altar dedicated by Atrosokes (the bronze figure of Marsyas atop the altar and the Greek inscription on its side), through which the Oxus Temple gained its connection to Hellenism. In fact, the Greek aspect of the temple was interpreted to be most distinctive and visible in practices that scholars described in religious terms, rather than in ethnic ones: the limestone basin for purification rites (the perirrhanterion), the anthropomorphic clay sculptures, the three Greek inscriptions, and the votive depositions. In cases where ethnic understandings did appear in interpretations of Hellenism at the Oxus Temple, the main interpreters referred to the presence of Iranian names (and thus Iranian actors) in the epigraphical record. Similarly, Hellenism at Nisa has been described and identified primarily in connection with the iconography of Greek gods on the ivory rhytons and the monumental statues. Because the Soviet archaeologists interpreted both the Oxus Temple and the sacred-ceremonial complex at Nisa in close association with local Iranians, rather than with Greeks, Hellenism at these sites became distinctly characterized as religious syncretism. The term syncretism conveniently accommodates the paradoxical role of religion in Hellenism, drawing attention to the ‘coming together of influences’ rather than ethnic identification. 8.4 The paradox of Philhellenism The third paradox of Hellenism is related to Hellenism’s ethnicity baggage as explained above, and is inherent to the term Philhellenism – an explanatory notion drawn from the ancient epithet with which Arsakid kings presented themselves on coin legends, from Mithradates I onwards. In the wider context of Iranian and Central Asian architecture at Nisa, coupled with an almost complete lack of Greek language and names in the numerous economic ostraca unearthed, the Nisa rhytons and marble and clay sculptures have been interpreted to reflect Hellenism as a cultural choice by the Arsakid kings, rather than an expression of Greek ethnicity by Greeks. It is here where the paradox of Philhellenism emerges: the term is contradictory because it is both

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connected yet inherently detached from Hellenism, dividing its users while simultaneously uniting them under the header of Hellenism. The term’s main signifier is determined by the prefix ‘phil’; this particular kind of Hellenism implies the love or admiration for Greek culture by non-Greek actors – more specifically, the Arsakid kings. ‘Phil’ distinctly frames such kind of Hellenism as one performed by outsiders rather than insiders, yet at the same time, it is precisely that designation of ‘phil’ which made these outsiders associated with Greeks.21 For the Soviet excavators of Nisa, Masson and Pugachenkova, it was the very Greekness of the ivory rhytons they perceived, that embodied the central characteristic of Arsakid Philhellenism: the creative originality to emulate (‘real’) Hellenism. An apparent apologetic tone underlies such interpretive explanations of Philhellenism which often emphasize the ingenuity of the Parthians to (re)create Hellenism; their ability to do so would mitigate the ‘foreignness’ of the Parthians and so alleviate them from their long-held status as barbarian Others in both ancient and modern historiography.22 Conversely, for Invernizzi and Pappalardo, Nisa’s recent Italian excavators, it was the particular Arsakid religious and ideological agenda, which gave Philhellenism its meaning. Accordingly, Philhellenism would equal the use of Greek visual language as communicative vessel to express Arsakid ideology, rather than to express their Greekness. For both the Soviet and Italian archaeologists, there was no question about the agency; the very term Philhellenism already linguistically indicated that Hellenism at Nisa signified a cultural choice by non-Greek actors, rather than naturally ingrained ethnic behaviours. Invernizzi was involved in the archaeological excavations at both Nisa and Seleukeia on the Tigris. His views on Hellenism are therefore most remarkable. As head archaeologist in the Seleukeia project of the CRAST, focused on tracing Greek culture in the East, Invernizzi distinctly altered his heuristic foundations of Hellenism in his assessment of Nisa, allowing generous conceptual space for local, non-Greek agency on the part of the Arsakid kings. His views on Greek-styled material culture take on distinctly different forms upon assessment of the two sites, influenced by the wealth of ancient literary sources mentioning the Greek population at Seleukeia and the contrasting lack of written evidence concerning Greeks in Parthian Nisa. While Invernizzi described Greek culture at Nisa as extraneous Philhellenism, a stylistic medium employed by non-Greek actors, Greek culture at Seleukeia is interpreted in direct connection with 21 22

Paradoxically, the word Philhellenism as used first by Herodotos, referred to Greeks rather than non-Greeks, who were committed “to the cause of Greek culture or noted for their hatred of the barbarians” (Ferrary 2006 after Hdt. 2.178). For Philhellenism in Roman contexts, see Ferrary 1988. This may be meaningfully contextualized by another paradoxical relation, that of Russophone Soviet scholarship with Classical antiquity and Orientalism. On the one hand, such emphasis may have formed a reactionary interpretation against the view held by many West-European scholars – influenced by biased testimonies from Graeco-Roman authors – that the Parthians and their art were barbaric, derivative, and unoriginal. On the other hand, the prominence of Greek artistic elements of the rhytons in their interpretation of Nisa, would affirm a Central Asian (central Eurasian) share in the illustrious heritage of Greekness. See further discussion in Chapter 9, section 9.2.

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those ethnic Greek settlers who cultivated it.23 Interestingly so, his conceptualization of Philhellenism connects Hellenism with artistic taste but not with the manufacture itself: according to Invernizzi, the ivory rhytons at Nisa were commissioned by the Arsakid kings but actually crafted by ethnic Greek artisans. Inversely, Invernizzi’s understanding of Hellenism at Seleukeia, assumes that it is not only produced by ethnic Greeks, but also for purposes of Greekness – to express and perform Greek identity. The result is a distinct paradox. On the one hand, Hellenism (as Philhellenism) is considered to be evidently indirect, involving extraneous actors as commissioners of Greek culture for various purposes, although they were not the actual producers (‘made by but not for Greeks’). By contrast, Hellenism (as Greekness) is also considered to be evidently direct, acted out by ethnic Greeks (‘made by and for Greeks’). Although more recent interpretations of Pappalardo and Langin-Hooper permit more nuanced layers of meaning, rather than solely an ethnic one, prevailing historical narrative caters to a notion of Hellenism at Nisa that is considerably more dynamic and complex – focused on adoption, appropriation, and recontextualization – than Hellenism at Seleukeia.24 Comparisons of interpretations of Hellenism at Nisa and at Ai Khanum also raise similar discrepancies. Both sites are identified as royal cities which demonstrate considerable royal investment in monumental architecture and with visual Greek elements in the unearthed art works. In both cases, local mud brick dominated the material of the buildings while regional ground plans were used for their construction. Nevertheless, it is well within the mainstream to consider Greek forms in Ai Khanum’s material culture as ‘real Hellenism’, associated with ethnic Greek settlers, for whom and by whom the Greek institutions were assumed to have been built. By contrast, normative interpretations of the cultural mixture at Nisa are concerned with reinterpreted meanings of Greek visual culture, associated with a more dynamic and functional notion of (Phil) Hellenism to express Arsakid ideology. Of course the political history of Nisa and Ai Khanum – the former an Arsakid site, the latter a city under Graeco-Baktrian rule – play a distinct role in how their material culture is framed. Yet, the extent to which political history is projected onto mixed material culture and the ethnic identities of peoples in Central Asia, is striking. Had the ivory rhytons at Nisa been discovered at Ai Khanum instead, we can imagine them to be readily interpreted as brilliant examples of ‘real Hellenism’, by and for ethnic Greeks.

23

24

While Invernizzi argues (in both cases) that the artisans who actually manufactured Greek-looking objects, must have been Greeks – either working independently or on royal commission – his colleague Pappalardo also includes the possibility that the small objects may have been produced by local craftsmen. But cf. recently, Langin-Hooper 2020, 203–248; Messina 2021.

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8.5 Cultural reductions in cultural hybridity The fourth paradox of Hellenism concerns its conceptualization as cultural hybridity. The idea of cultural hybridity would challenge and overcome monocultural categories of ‘Greek’ and ‘Oriental’ (or ‘Eastern’) to assess mixed material culture with a notable Greek look. At the same time, historical conclusions drawn from cultural hybridity that project the components of material cultural hybridity upon the identities of its users, distinctly reproduce the dichotomy between Greek and non-Greek (and inadvertently, West and East) by assuming the precondition of homogeneous cultural production – unhybridized purities – prior to the cultural mixture. As a result, visual style remains equated to distinct peoples while material culture continues to be aesthetically compartmentalized along an ethno-cultural divide.25 Such a tendency is particularly prominent in interpretations of small objects, as in the cases of Takht-i Sangin and Seleukeia on the Tigris. Common descriptions of the small altar dedicated by Atrosokes traditionally dissect its ‘influences’ into a Greek component (the shape of the altar, the Greek inscription on the front side and the Marsyas statue on top) in juxtaposition to an eastern Iranian component (the name of the dedicator and the name of the deity) which together would represent the multicultural hybrid society that produced such an object. As envisioned by Litvinskiy, this hybrid society would consist of eastern Iranians and ethnic Greeks who brought their discrete ‘influence’ with them. The equation of hybrid objects with a hybrid i. e. multicultural society thus disentangles hybridity back to its (presumed) essential elements, reverting monocultural essences behind apparent mixture. In reality, the Atrosokes altar was probably not made and dedicated to the temple by multiple people with distinct identities, who desired to imprint the votive offering with their ‘ethnic influence’. The object is better studied as a product of social and cultural practices rather than one of ethnic influences. We can discern the same inadvertent reproduction of monocultural categories, highlighting essentialist presumptions, in the case of the small objects at Seleukeia on the Tigris. The clay seals and terracotta figurines have received conventional assessment according to distinct typologies that culturally categorize the objects into Greek, respectively Hellenistic, or Mesopotamian types. Despite the common acknowledgement that the styles in which the figurines were produced were, indeed, culturally diverse, scholarly usage of the term cultural hybridity often still tends to give prominence to Greek cultural elements, considering the political context of the city’s foundation. Though analyzing the figurines not as aggregates but according to their individual features, Van Ingen and Menegazzi have both retained traditional categories of Greek types juxtaposed to Mesopotamian types in their analysis. According to Menegazzi, the figurines would reflect “the strength and vitality of the Greek element and, at the

25

See further instructive discussion on style in Versluys 2017a, 185–248.

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same time, the persistence of the local Mesopotamian tradition”.26 Methodologically, however, the implication of such categorizations, even on the level of individual features, is that innovative aspects can only be attributed to external (i. e. Greek) factors while local forms remained and represented the same. The underlying thought is that Babylonian culture (meaningfully termed ‘traditional’ Mesopotamian or ‘millenary’ Near Eastern) would be static and persistent, while anything recognized as Greek (meaningfully termed ‘Greek-inspired’) would signify creative and inventive influence from the West. Menegazzi’s problematization of the differential Greek sources of inspiration (referring to a heterogeneous repertoire of Greek visual culture) and the lack of a similar discussion for the Mesopotamian features, further illustrate the power and persistence of Hellenocentric methodologies. Perhaps a better approach is provided by Langin-Hooper, whose social network analysis of the figurines consciously challenged interpretive bias of commonly used scholarly typologies. Her analysis underlined that not only ethnic Greeks but also local coroplasts were able to use, produce, and reproduce visual Greek features in their figurines. However important these conclusions are, it should be noted that they are similarly based on the same cultural categories of Greek and Babylonian. Explaining her methodology in 2007, Langin-Hooper stated that she: … remained aware of the fact that some of those features originated exclusively in either the Greek or Babylonian figurine tradition prior to the Hellenistic period. Thus, in presenting the figurines in their respective typologies, I have chosen to comment on the cultural origins (both certain or likely) of particular figurine features. This was done as a way to illustrate the degree of either ‘Greekness’ or ‘Babylonianess’ or both in the terracotta figurines, but not to determine a sole cultural origin of a figurine based on an individual feature.27

It thus seems that the cultural divide between Greek and Babylonian remains imperative to the analysis. Although Langin-Hooper has since adjusted her methodology, consciously moving away from underlying ethnic implications of Greekness and Babylonianess, her statement does reflect the common need to identify the cultural origins of recognizable features as stemming from Greece or otherwise further East. This need emerges from a philosophical stance that asserts the existence of authentic and culturally exclusive (rather than invented) traditions prior to the Hellenistic period, despite that cultural contact, communication, political and commercial relations between Greece and Babylonia as well as with other regions stretched much farther in the past.28 The risk is therefore eminent to reify identities by connecting them to coherent groups with predefined agency, prior to their hybridization. 26 27 28

Menegazzi 2012, 157. Langin-Hooper 2007, 149. See e. g. Rollinger 2006. For the concept of invented traditions, see Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983. For discussion about its use in archaeology, see Boschung et al. 2015.

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8.6 The trouble with localism The fifth paradox of Hellenism relates to its association with change and its often-dichotomous relationship with localism in the scholarly mind. From the interpretive juxtapositions ‘Hellenism versus localism’ and ‘change versus continuity’ a distinct paradox emerges: Hellenism is connected to non-local change while Hellenism itself is simultaneously considered as a continuity of a distinctly local (Aegean) Greekness. In the cases of Ai Khanum and Seleukeia on the Tigris (on a city-wide level), Greek ethnic identity has formed a dominant paradigm for theorizing and evaluating Hellenism. This paradigm of Greek ethnicity expresses itself in typical characterizations of the cities as ‘outposts of Hellenism’ in the East – outposts in a sea of Eastern Otherness and interpreted as continuous in traditions of Greekness originating from the Greek motherland. This is different in the cases of Takht-i Sangin, Nisa, and Babylon, where interpretive efforts to make meaning of Hellenism loosened the ethnicity baggage to focus more on a framework of creative localism, locality, and regional identity.29 Where a non-Greek temple in Ai Khanum would be couched in a context of Greek accommodation of Eastern elements – signifying a place where ethnic Greeks could worship their gods – an anticipated non-Greek temple in Babylon or Takht-i Sangin would be treated as an unchallenged, taken-for-granted indicium of non-Greek local inhabitants forming the main constituents of the building. This appearance of localism as neutral and self-explanatory is engendered in the tendency to envelop and treat localism as a commonsensical notion rather than an object of research to be questioned and analysed. However, how localism is understood and advocated for often stands in a distinct relation with ideational boundaries of Hellenism. The dichotomous relation between Hellenism and localism emerged in the assessment of all five case studies in this study, but became most evident in the comparison between Babylon and Ai Khanum. The different scholarly perceptions of Hellenism at these two cities appear to be based on a constructed notion of difference between an ingroup and an outgroup, between Greeks and Babylonians. These groupings of Greeks and Babylonians are envisioned as oppositional and ontologically distinct cultural communities, predicated upon modern cultural ideologies of collectivity.30 Such ideologies that construct apparent groupings of ‘cultural people’, organized in meaningful communities with a shared identity, follow the logic of Otherness – of ‘Us’ versus ‘Them’. While both cities showed similar Greek characteristics, Babylon has largely been framed in terms of Mesopotamian (or Babylonian) continuity of ancient

29

30

This difference is not necessarily due to the background of the excavators in question. The initial excavations at Takht-i Sangin and Nisa were carried out by Soviet archaeological teams, while the first expeditions at Babylon were directed by foreign archaeologists – German architects who were focused on the city’s architectural and political heyday in Neo-Babylonian times. See anthropological discussion on such ideologies in Amit and Rapport 2002.

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local life, with Hellenism as either superficial veneer or limited to an urban island of Greek life on the Homera mound. Interpretations of Hellenism at Babylon stand in stark contrast with the common approach to and portrayal of Hellenism at Ai Khanum, which has largely been aligned to Greek ethnicity (whether real or imagined), assumed to be rhetorically evident in the city’s gymnasium, theatre, Greek art objects, and Greek inscriptions. Those same features were present in Hellenistic Babylon yet at Ai Khanum they have been interpreted and conceptualized as a continuation or reinvention of Greek ethnicity. Analysing the scholarly literature, it appears that the impact of these ‘Greek’ characteristics on the modern viewer deeply depends on the perspective taken in the discourse of Otherness: does Hellenism represent the identity of the preferential ingroup, or does it belong to the outgroup? Research on Ai Khanum has not only been built on the shoulders of, but has also been framed and directed towards certain interpretations by great archaeologists such as Daniel Schlumberger and Paul Bernard for whom the material evidence for a ‘Greek Baktria’ weighed high on the research agenda. DAFA’s first aim in the 1920s was to find the famed capital Baktra, whose anticipated Hellenism would explain the missing link between the Classical art of the Mediterranean and the Apollonian face of Buddha in early Gandharan art. When Ai Khanum was discovered in the 1960s, the presence of a theatre, gymnasium, and mausoleum therefore seem to have been interpreted and framed as representing Greekness. In doing so, in his presentations of the city, Bernard mitigated the important fact that the theatre and the gymnasium, recognized as the pillars of Greekness, appeared in the urban landscape only after a century of the city’s existence, in the third building phase in the second quarter of the second century BCE. Subsequent scholarship traditionally highlighted those cultural elements which could be connected to a Greek identity of Ai Khanum’s settlers – the preferential ingroup. Scholarly approaches to Hellenism at Babylon have been distinctly different. As described in Chapter 7, research on Babylon has been led and framed mainly by Assyriologists who aimed to reconstruct the celebrated city of Nebuchadnezzar II in the Neo-Babylonian period. Because of the city’s ancient-old and illustrious history, Babylon’s Hellenistic phase – perceived as the beginning of progressive decline – was of minor interest and has therefore been less systematically researched. Scholarly descriptions and characterizations of Hellenistic Babylon have therefore mostly highlighted those cultural elements that represent the survival of pre-existent local Babylonian traditions. Scholarship of Ai Khanum and Babylon thus seem to have been dominated by a tendency to focus on what was considered as the golden age and the high culture linked to that epoch. Modern (disciplinary) association or disassociation with such glory days had a distinct impact on whether historical narrative was steered towards continuity or change, directed towards the preferential in-group. For Assyriologists interpreting Babylon from a philological perspective, this high culture was represented by ancient Babylonian (scribal) culture under Nebuchadnezzar II, when the thriving city reached

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its apex. Accordingly, Hellenism – manifested in the city’s Greek cultural features centuries later in the Hellenistic period – became associated with Babylon’s period of decline, influenced by the decrease of texts in cuneiform writing. In this case, continuity (of local culture) was preferred over change (in the form of Greek culture), and interpretation was directed towards the preferential in-group of non-Greek Babylonians, associated with the city’s heyday. Babylon was considered primarily as an Oriental city, for Babylonians. The people who buried their dead in and underneath the dwelling houses are rarely connected with Greeks; the antiquity of this practice would indicate that these were certainly Babylonians, even though some of their burial forms and earthenware grave goods were recognized and labelled as Greek in style.31 Conversely, the target high culture for Classical archaeologists who excavated and interpreted Ai Khanum, was embodied by Greek culture – associated with the city’s monumental structures of the theatre, gymnasium, and mausoleum, and the preferential in-group of ethnic Greek settlers longing for home. The framing of high culture and the preferential in-group coupled with it, has interpretive implications for the way in which localism is perceived and formulated in relation to change. Research traditions of both Ai Khanum and Babylon tend to frame and valuate change as either positive or negative, depending on how Hellenism is appraised and embedded in the perceived hierarchy of cultures. Where scholarly views have predominantly marked Greek culture as a high culture in Baktria – a civilizing culture from the West, associated with Ai Khanum’s moment of grandeur – the same Greek cultural features at Babylon have been assessed not only as subsidiary, but as part of those deteriorating influences that furthered the decline of the local ancient-old high civilization. In both cases, Hellenism is closely linked to change and is consistently viewed as something external – connected to, or contrasted against a greater high culture. This high culture, in turn, is distinctly envisioned as continuous: Aegean Greek for Classical archaeologists and historians or Neo-Babylonian for Assyriologists. Localism and Hellenism – continuity and change Shaped by the relative positions taken by scholars in the ‘Us’–‘Them’ dichotomy of Otherness, Hellenism is not only culturally juxtaposed to localism, but also spatially and temporally. While continuity of Mesopotamian culture, ancient in its locality, is emphasized at Babylon, cultural change through the new settlement of Greeks is highlighted in the case of Ai Khanum. However, it is from such antithetical positioning of localism and change along the axis of identity, that ‘the trouble with localism’ emerges.32 Through prioritizing localism in the form of ancient-old traditions at Babylon and 31 32

Reuther 1926, 251. The phrase ‘the trouble with localism’ is a reference to the influential book The Trouble with Community by the anthropologists Vered Amit and Nigel Rapport 2002, in which they reflect on, and

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non-localism in the form of Hellenism at Ai Khanum, that what is considered as local becomes rigidly and determinedly isolated from that what is considered as non-local. This results in an idea of localism as ontologically anchored in a distinct place, yet displaced from dynamic time, through which the local becomes fixed and frozen.33 In the scholarly mind, Hellenism can never be part of Babylon’s Mesopotamian localism, while Baktrian localism always remains distinct from Hellenism at Ai Khanum; the two spheres remain strictly separated. However, such an inward and stagnant notion of localism critically places it outside history, restricting and ignoring internal changes and larger contexts and dimensions of local cultural developments. Localism is not an authentic and bounded territorial entity. As stated by Anthony Giddens, “what structures the locale is not simply that which is present on the scene; the ‘visible form’ of the locale conceals the distanciated relations which determine its nature.”34 Along the same lines, Arjun Appadurai defined localism rather as “a structure of feeling, a property of social life, and an ideology of situated community”, produced socially and discursively in larger contexts.35 The performance and structuration of localism is therefore largely formed through, and in relation to the supralocal: As these local subjects engage in the social activities of production, representation, and reproduction (as in the work of culture), they contribute, generally unwittingly, to the creation of contexts that might exceed the existing material and conceptual boundaries of the neighbourhood. Affinal aspirations extend marriage networks to new villages; fishing expeditions yield refinements of what are understood to be navigable and fish-rich waters; hunting expeditions extend the sense of the forest as a responsive ecological frame; social conflicts force new strategies of exit and recolonization; trading activities yield new commodity-worlds and thus new partnerships with as-yet-unencountered regional groupings; warfare yields new diplomatic alliances with previously hostile neighbours. And all of these possibilities contribute to subtle shifts in language, worldview, ritual practice, and collective self-understanding. (…) As local subjects carry on the continuing task of reproducing their neighbourhood, the contingencies of history, environment, and imagination contain the potential for new contexts (material, social, and imaginative) to be produced. In this way, through the vagaries of social action by local subjects, neighborhood as context produces the contexts of neighborhoods. Over time, this dialectic changes the conditions of the production of locality as such.36

33 34 35 36

interrogate the concept of community in the face of globalization. Fabian 2014, 11–21. Fabian refers to this as the cultural ‘naturalization of time’. Giddens 1990, 19. Appadurai 1996, 189, 178–199 Appadurai 1996, 185.

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Appadurai’s explanation of an unfolding dialectic between local subjects and their wider environments – or in other words, between localism and its wider contexts – highlights that local consciousness and local identity, however bounded and integral in appearance, are never static and geographically restricted but rather operate in dynamic, networked, and discursively formed ways, linked to continuous (re)production processes of change – both from within and without. The local, therefore, is never exclusively local, but rather translocal. Babylonian culture was not a contained aggregate but was, like Hellenism, shaped through and embodied in networked cultural engagements with several and various ‘Others’, making it inherently translocal. In a similar way, what we recognize as Hellenism was not exclusively foreign, but was itself formed and structured through localism, which results in the ambiguous and sometimes contradictory forms and ideas associated with Hellenism. However, thinking in terms of ethnic-communal frames and cultural sovereignty, invoking thick collective identities where the ‘Us’– ‘Them’ boundaries may have been fluid, still persists in research traditions. Review How notions of Hellenism have been formed in the scholarly mind, shaping historical narrative, can thus be dismantled into various reasonings, centred upon those aspects in the material culture that benefited from scholarly priority. Their comparison unfolds a series of theoretical paradoxes that emerge around the following themes: (1) Hellenism’s baggage of ethnicity, (2) Hellenism’s double relation to religion and syncretism, (3) Hellenism’s ambiguous form as Philhellenism, (4) Hellenism’s cultural reduction in the notion of cultural hybridity, and (5) Hellenism’s troublesome relation with localism. The association of Hellenism with Greek ethnicity is often conceptualized within a framework of Greek settler identity maintenance in foreign territory, to distance and oppose themselves to Oriental locals situated within that territory, who at the same time could also hellenize themselves to become part of the Greek community. The articulations of Hellenism as syncretism and hybridity advocate both cultural fluidity and religious or cultural fusion, yet do so while presupposing categorical distinction between local and non-local traditions. Furthermore, Hellenism’s rendering as Philhellenism grants full and active agency to royal Oriental locals adopting non-local imagery for political and aesthetic purposes yet never for ethnic ones – which both connects and distances its actors from any ‘authentic Hellenism’. Most important of all, is the strict conceptual division of, and close interaction between localism and non-localism which forms the crux of the problem of Hellenism as a model to interpret cultural inbetweenness.

9 Towards a translocal approach The constitutive tropes of Hellenism – Greek ethnicity, syncretism, Philhellenism, and hybridity – and the paradoxes that emerge from their coexistence in scholarly discourse, thus cross and converge in the juxtaposition and spatialization of localism and Hellenism, informed by an ethno-cultural ontology of things Greek and things non-Greek. This chapter continues from this methodological conundrum in Hellenism’s foundations and explores how to move beyond dichotomous interpretations of localism and non-localism. Chapter 2 traced the historiography of Hellenism as interpretive model to the present day, asserting that current trends now increasingly adopt globalization approaches and global perspectives. This chapter explores such perspectives, examining in what way concepts from globalization research can be useful to better approach the cultural inbetweenness that we associate with and interpret, paradoxically, as Hellenism. I argue here that translocalism is the promise of globalization. In order to lay out this argument, this section commences with a theoretical exploration of globalization concepts, followed by an evocative outlook in the form of a methodological exercise to illustrate the potential of a translocal approach to Hellenism and inbetweenness. 9.1 Globalization in theory 9.1.1 Classics and globalization Globalization is upon us: we are riding waves of globalization and so is the field of Classics. But what precisely does this cultivate? As we have seen in Chapter 2, over the past decades historians and archaeologists studying the Graeco-Roman world have increasingly integrated the term globalization in their works. Following scholarship on the Roman world, the Hellenistic world too is now frequently described as a revolutionary experimental world characterized by “a kind of process of general globalization”, visible in the fields of power politics, economics, science, literature, and above all, arts and culture.1 Current scholars have rephrased and recontextualized the Hellenistic period

1

Invernizzi 2012, 98. See further Chapter 2, section 2.3.2.

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as an age of cultural globalization during which the Greek oikoumene expanded through global connectivity – often spelled with inverted commas. While the Hellenistic era was indeed a watershed moment in terms of a significant deepening of transregional connectivities and interactions, globalization and related lexical constructions – globalism, global connections, global processes, global-local interactions – are often casually evoked without adequate theoretical reflection on what precisely globalization encompasses and implies.2 In fact, the growing prominence of globalization vocabulary within studies of Graeco-Roman antiquity is accompanied by an increasing distance from adequate theoretical discussion of, and methodological engagement with the vast swathes of globalization literature.3 This is particularly peculiar considering the heavily theorized field of the social sciences, from where the globalization lexicon entered the disciplines of ancient history and archaeology. Typical spellings of globalization and the global with inverted commas indeed indicate a sense of theoretical discomfort coupled with an awareness of potential pitfalls, yet their increasing ubiquity seems to excuse scholars from the necessity to explain what precisely it means or implies. In other words, globalization and the global are considered to be self-evident. Roman historian Frits Naerebout recognized this problem more than a decade ago as he highlighted the prevailing lack of theoretical clarification in the usage of globalization by ancient historians, refuting the concept as uncritical and unproductive.4 His criticism resonated, hitting the underlying sore spot and the source of theoretical discomfort: sociocultural processes in the Graeco-Roman world did not operate on a truly planetary scale because there was no ‘real’ time-space compression in antiquity in the same way that factually modern discoveries have instigated, such as telecommunication, airplane travel, internet, and social media. The ancient world was to be considered as inherently different from our modern network society – sensu Manuel Castells.5 Similar sceptical voices about globalization were shared across the wider 2 3

4 5

For discussion, see Pitts and Versluys 2015a, 19–20; Hoo 2020; 2021. And vice versa, too: Jennings 2011, 1–18 and Pitts and Versluys 2015a, 12–13 rightly point out that seminal globalization scholars rarely include historical or archaeological studies in their theorization, despite the recognition that globalization may have its roots in premodern, ancient, or even prehistorical times. Publications of recent years demonstrate that this is starting to change, see e. g. Nederveen Pieterse 2021, esp. 61–88. Naerebout 2006–2007, 150, 163 in reaction to Hingley 2005. Castells 1996. Jennings 2011, 3–8 identified this as ‘the Great Wall’ between modernity and antiquity. Globalization research often defines globalization as the expansion and diffusion of modernity, which is assumed to have commenced with the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the industrialization from 1800 onwards (e. g. Harvey 1989; Giddens 1990; Harvey 1990; Robertson 1992; 1995; Castells 1996; Tomlinson 1999). However, critical voices (Hopkins 2002; Hobson 2006; Nederveen Pieterse 2012) argued that such a limited periodization makes globalization a theory exclusive to Western modern history, one that indulges in a Eurocentric view of modernity in which globalization equals Westernization (from the West to the Rest), while the past remains stagnant and segmented from modernity. Such criticism on the Eurocentric bias of modernity and history is intricately connected with postcolonial literature, see e. g. Said 2003 [1978]; Hobson 2006; Amin 2011 [1989].

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humanities and social sciences which feared that globalization would become just another word for interdependence – an empty wordplay replacing grand narratives such as imperialism, colonialism, and Westernization, with new ones.6 Such criticism is not unfounded. Evocative usage of globalization by ancient historians, indeed, suggests that globalization is considered to be an appealing metaphor for the dissemination and universalization of Western i. e. Greek or Roman cultural features, objects, names, practices, and iconographies across vast geographical space, forming a more acceptable explanation of continuity and change in preference to the disavowed concepts of Hellenization and Romanization.7 Nevertheless, there is a steady trend of positive readings of globalization for antiquity which critically integrate the theoretical toolbox of globalization research. Recent studies have forcefully and convincingly argued that the concepts and vocabulary of globalization literature offer great potential to bring debates on Hellenization and Romanization forward.8 This book aligns itself with such recent studies without necessarily claiming that theories of globalization will provide definite or all answers to historical questions concerning the Hellenistic period. In 2014, Pitts and Versluys indeed anticipated that “concepts like imperialism, Romanisation and creolisation are as contextual (and suggestive and misleading) as globalisation will inevitably turn out to be. But applying them has brought our understanding of the Roman world much further – as globalisation potentially promises to do.”9 This chapter now explores which terms and concepts from globalization research, then, have the potential to productively break down the paradoxes of Hellenism and advance the Hellenization debate towards a translocal approach, beyond the interpretive dichotomy between localism and non-localism. 9.1.2 Defining globalization Before elaborating on relevant concepts, it is first necessary to define what globalization is. Globalization can mean many things to many people. As the defining characteristic of modern-day society, the term has functioned as both a descriptive and an analytical framework within which major questions and issues about being in the world are raised, reframed, and debated. Contrary to what the singular form of the phrase ‘globalization theory’ suggests, there is no obvious ‘general process of globalization’, much less a unitary theory of globalization. Featuring across a number of disciplines, including world 6 7 8 9

Rosenberg 2005, 66; Naerebout 2006, 153; Ball 2015, 251. See e. g. usage of the term globalization in Thonemann 2015, 8. Further discussion of common usages and misunderstandings of globalization is provided in Hoo 2020, 555–557. The literature engaging with globalization is growing by year, but see esp. Witcher 2000; Pitts 2008; Hodos 2010; Versluys 2010; Colburn 2013; Gardner 2013; Strootman 2013; Vlassopoulos 2013; Versluys 2014; Pitts and Versluys 2015a; Hodos 2017a; Boivin and Frachetti 2018; Blömer et al. 2021. Pitts and Versluys 2015a, 21.

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history, modern and premodern history, ancient history, archaeology, anthropology, climatology, business and economics, and the social sciences, globalization is a broad umbrella term that is used to both represent and conceptualize a wide range of various and different phenomena: from international trade, global market integration, corporate growth, and global outsourcing, to consumer capitalism, transcontinental travel, cultural appreciation and appropriation; and from global justice, international terrorism, and multilevel governance, to international environmental protection in the face of global warming. Consequently, different definitions of globalization circulate the vast and ever-growing multidisciplinary body of popular, journalistic, and intellectual writings. Nederveen-Pieterse briefly summarizes its ambiguous ontology: Globalization is an objective, empirical process of increasing economic and political connectivity, a subjective process unfolding in consciousness as the collective awareness of growing global interconnectedness, and a host of specific globalizing projects that seek to shape global conditions. It’s not always clear which globalization is being talked about.10

Disagreement abounds not only on the nature, but also on the timing and scale of globalization. These aspects are closely related to the contentious understandings of globalization as a process or as a condition, which has important consequences for globalization’s relevance for antiquity. Much confusion stems from the root word of the term: global. Globalization can easily suggest that the globe – a planetary scale – should be the subject matter and unity of analysis. Within globalization research, it is not uncommon to find respective references to globalization as a condition i. e. status of globality that encompasses an interconnected world as a whole. Globalization, accordingly, gains an important temporal aspect as it assumes globality as its precondition: an existing situation of worldwide relations necessary for processes of globalization to proceed and unfold. Proponents of such views are scholars who perceive globalization as one of the ‘consequences of modernity’ – as phrased by Anthony Giddens – and assume that global interconnectedness and interdependence are primarily or even fundamentally modern phenomena that resulted from the industrial, capitalist, and information revolutions of the 19th and 20th century.11 Other scholars consider globality rather as a post-condition of globalization, as the end-state or the ultimate outcome of globalization, manifesting itself in new constellations such as planetarity.12 The prob10

11

12

Nederveen Pieterse 2009 [2003], 16–17 (emphasis in original), and Tables 1.4–1.6. For good assessments that grasp major trends within globalization debates, see Held and McGrew 2000; Steger 2005; Robinson 2007; Nederveen Pieterse 2009, 7–23; Osterhammel 2011; Nederveen Pieterse 2021, 29–33. E. g. Harvey 1989; Giddens 1990; Harvey 1990; Robertson 1992; 1995; Castells 1996; Tomlinson 1999; Scholte 2005, 41–61. In addition, some scholars approach globalization more specifically as a distinctly Western project of modernity, associating with it a reinvigoration of Western imperialism (e. g. Albrow 1996). Steger 2005, 13.

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lem with globalization as a precondition for globality or a post-condition of globality, however, is that it conflates causes with consequences and thus the journey with the destination.13 Underlining the profound conceptual obscurity, Manfred Steger elucidates this as a convoluted circular reasoning of globalization (as condition or process) leading to more globalization (the process or the condition).14 Proponents of a historical approach to globalization, this author included, emphasize that it is more productive to distinguish globality from globalization. Globalization should be defined as a process or rather a set of uneven social processes of expanding, increasing, and intensifying connectivities between distant localities and people, of which one of the directions may lead to a condition of worldwide integrated interconnectedness on a planetary scale.15 Such processes therefore do not necessitate the complete integration of the whole wide world but pertain to significant surges in transregional connectedness and interactions and attendant social consequences.16 Defining globalization as such has important implications for the periodization of globalization as well as the usefulness of globalization concepts for the analysis of ancient phenomena. As the sense and surge of increasing connectivity are more relevant than the geographical i. e. planetary extent, globalization processes may have been present in various times of history, including antiquity.17 In preference to the idea of a teleological progress towards globality, the definition of globalization as a set of uneven processes of expending, increasing, and intensifying connectivities not only integrates the historicity of interconnectedness but also allows room for disjunctive multidirectional paths that globalization may take simultaneously. 9.1.3 Complex connectivity Understanding globalization as a set of processes rather than a condition shifts the emphasis on the increasing and expanding aspects of large-scale connectivities between distant localities. In alignment with contemporaneous globalization thinkers, John Tomlinson was the first who explicitly defined globalization as complex connectivity.18 In order for connectivity to be complex, he argued that it requires a rapid development and intensification of a range of interactions through movement-flows of people, goods, knowledge, and ideas (both material and immaterial) over long distances, often driven by accelerations in economic and technological innovations.19 The flows that move, 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

See elaborate discussion in Rosenberg 2005, 12–15. Steger 2005, 13. Definition after Held et al. 2000, 54; Pitts and Versluys 2015a, 11; Hodos 2017b, 4. Jennings 2011, 21–28. Jennings 2011, 13–18, 19–34; 2017 therefore argues for globalizations in the plural. Tomlinson 1999, 1–12. Tomlinson 1999, 1; Held et al. 2000, 55.

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migrate, and circulate across networks can consist of persons, consumables, fashion, religion, music, money, labour, resources, democracy, deadly diseases and terrorism – a variety of local things that along the way may lose any or some of the significance they held in other or previous geographical or temporal contexts. Emerging from these developments are dense, entangled, and interdependent networks of activities, practices, behaviours, and interactions, which essentially entail a lateral stretching of social relations across local, regional, and transregional scales that in turn can effect significant fluctuations in the range, rules, and forms of human contact on any of these scales.20 As a result, processes of complex connectivity can galvanize cultural products that become part of what Ulf Hannerz calls world culture: “cultures without a clear anchorage in any one territory (…), sub-cultures, as it were, within the wider whole; cultures which are in important ways better understood in the context of their cultural surroundings than in isolation.”21 Acknowledging the complexities that connectivity entails is useful for cultural analyses in historical studies on periods of increased connectivity, as it requires an important shift in focus, from space to scale – from contained Area Studies and regional histories to their enmeshment and embedding in wider world history. According to Carl Knappett, “it allows a move away from civilizational histories that emphasises boundaries and boundedness, no doubt under the influence of our modern nation-states. With the focus instead on the cultural entanglements created by constant mobility and connectivity, we create much more dynamic and emergent histories.”22 Situating localities in wider historical processes of entanglement, the concept of complex connectivity allows ancient historians not only to broaden but also to diversify the scale, range, and units of historical inquiry, moving across traditional borders of methodological nationalism.23 9.1.4 Time-space compression and deterritorialization Complex connectivity is entangled with shifting perceptions of social space and social time, with significant implications for traditional notions of localism – and therefore instructive for a translocal approach. Anthony Giddens theorized that accelerating connectivity paradoxically leads to time-space disconnectivity or time-space distanciation which brings us to the psychological dimension of globalization: how increasing connectivities subjectively unfold in people’s consciousness.24 The upsurge in largescale interconnectedness greatly impacts the psychological and conceptual experience

20 21 22 23 24

Giddens 1990, 64–65; Held et al. 2000, 54–55. Hannerz 1990, 237. Knappett 2017, 29; see also Hopkins 2002, 1–2, 11; Pitts and Versluys 2015, 7. Hoo 2020, 562–563; 2021. Giddens 1990, esp. 14–21.

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of time and space. Through the stretching of social relations, the primacy of cultural, social, and geographical distances and barriers becomes less immediate or important, resulting in the awareness of being part of a rapidly widening world that becomes progressively smaller in mind. As explained by Giddens, within this cognitive shift, time and space become disconnected and abstracted as separate dimensions along which people relativize, structure, and position their actions, strategies, and experiences.25 It is not difficult to discern the profound impact that the internet, cell phones, smart phones, satellite television, wireless banking, airline travel, social media, or – stretching farther back in time – coinage, horse carriages, and postal relay systems across imperial roads have had on the mentality of people, their experience of and movement in local life, and the rules and trends for (re)creating and maintaining social relationships. The necessary adjustments to the coronavirus across the globe of the past years is most illustrative in that respect. Essentially, therefore, time-space distanciation entails a change in ‘the structure of feeling’, integrating adjusted notions of time and space.26 Shifts in the perception of time and space do not necessarily mean that people have to migrate, move, or travel in order to experience complex connectivity. Aptly phrased Zygman Bauman, “we are all on the move, even if physically, bodily, we stay put.”27 Although not everyone is a ‘mover’, interdependencies still reach into the lives of ‘stayers’, in the way they structure, coordinate, and internalize social relations.28 The psychological experience of such temporal and spatial relativism has further been elaborated by David Harvey, who coined the term time-space compression, revolutionizing Karl Marx’s concept of the annihilation of space with time.29 Time-space compression entails the decreasing importance of geographical distance through which the divide between the local and the distant is no longer absolute but becomes increasingly relative to a host of factors, such as (access to) technology, which can dissolve obstacles of distance. The local experience of distant things in increasingly compressed (reduced) amounts of time galvanizes the psychological impression of a shrinking world and the appearance of ‘global proximity’, because far-away events can have important consequences for things happening at home, and vice versa.30 Alongside the coronavirus pandemic, a striking example is the USA mortgage crisis of 2007: an initially national crisis which triggered a gulf of banking crises and sovereign debt crises throughout the world in what became known as the Great Recession in the 2010s. The societal effects of this global economic 25 26 27 28 29 30

Giddens 1990, 16–17. Harvey 1990, 426. Bauman 1998, 2, 77. Giddens 1990, 64; Tomlinson 1999, 2; Appadurai 2000, 6; Held and McGrew 2000, 54–55. For a relevant discussion for ancient history, see Woolf 2016. Harvey 1989, 240–259; 1990, 426–428. Marx 1973 [1939] 464 explains the annihilation of space with time as “the reduction to a minimum of time spent in motion from one place to another.” See further Bauman 1998, 2–3, 13–17; 2000, 8–11. For global proximity, see Tomlinson 1999, 3–10.

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crisis were and still are felt dramatically in grounded, local lives of people in the form of severe job loss, higher food prices, increasing poverty and social insecurity, greater risk management, international migration growth, politico-cultural backlashes and so on.31 The experience of a shrinking world through global proximity is also shaped through material confrontations with the simultaneous presence and absence of the distant and the local, generating a sense of an inwards collapse of different scales (global, regional, and local) into the same locale: The whole world’s cuisine is now assembled in one place in almost exactly the same way that the world’s geographical complexity is nightly reduced to a series of images on a static television screen. (…) The general implication is that through the experience of everything from food, to culinary habits, music, television, entertainment, and cinema, it is now possible to experience the world’s geography vicariously, as a simulacrum. The interweaving of simulacra in daily life brings together different worlds (of commodities) in the same space and time. But it does so in such a way as to conceal almost perfectly any trace of origin, of the labour process that produced them, or of the social relations implicated in their production.32

Time-space compression, or the intersection of the near and the distant, not only echoes through the ways in which people embed and coordinate cultural experiences in their daily lives but also involves an increasing concealment of geographical, temporal, and social origins and relations. Complex connectivity therefore not only connects but also detaches things and meanings from local settings. Foundational globalization theorists Arjun Appadurai, Giddens, and Tomlinson have conceptualized this as disembeddedness or deterritorialization: the detaching, abstraction, or ‘lifting out’ of people, objects, ideas, and social relations from their previous spatio-historical context, to be restructured, recontextualized, and re-embedded into other, new, or old local settings.33 This has important implications for the production and the extent of reproduction of meaning and significance. Deterritorialization is accompanied by the increasing potential of ideas and objects to become ‘commoditized’ (i. e. to flexibly move into a phase wherein they may lose their original meaning and become like commodities with social exchange value), for instance through trade and transfer in commercial networks but also via more indirect and incidental movements, such as ideas, associations, and impressions that ‘move’ via coins, stories, and various social interactions and encounters at cities, courts, markets, and sanctuaries, through which ideas and objects can transcend cultural (and other) boundaries and acquire new contexts.34 In such situations 31 32 33 34

Tilly 2011; Ötker-Robe and Podpiera 2013. Harvey 1989, 300. Harvey’s perspective echoes Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism. Appadurai 1986; 1990; Giddens 1990, 21–29; Appadurai 1996; Tomlinson 1999, 106–149; 2003, 273–275. See further formulations of deterritorialization in Deleuze and Guatarri 1972; 1980; DeLanda 2006. Appadurai 1986, 13– 16. See now Von Reden 2022a.

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of deterritorialization and recontextualization, objects and ideas can lose some or all meaning they had in previous contexts or settings, to be negotiated anew in different or similar contexts. The ways in which deterritorialized objects and ideas are recontextualized anew deeply interacts with the shared subjectivity of the actors involved – their shared frames of reference. In a monumental article of 1986, Appadurai explained that ‘commoditized’ objects (i. e. objects ‘lifted out’ from previous contexts) can again be de-commoditized and meaningfully recontextualized in a cultural framework, if they are perceived to fit the standards and criteria of value within a particular social and historical context.35 As things in motion, the potential or affordance of deterritorialized objects to be recontextualized can be affected by their earlier movements through previous situations and contexts, which may affect their standing, associations, and thus particular recontextualization in various ways.36 The dislocation of space from immediate place through deterritorialization and the reordering of meaning happens “in the light of continual inputs of knowledge affecting the actions of individuals and groups”, whereby previous cultural contexts or significations of people, objects, and ideas may (but does not need to) affect their new meanings.37 At the same time, with complex connectivity, people’s frames of reference for restructuring and recontextualizing of objects and ideas in their local lives also increasingly expand through those very flows of knowledge, information, objects, and ideas. Deterritorialization is inherent to the complex dynamics of globalization processes, entailing not only significant disembeddedness of things, people, ideas, and relations, but also a profound proliferation of choices and forms that allow meaningful re-embeddedness and recontextualization. 9.1.5 Glocalization and the local Since globalizing networks are shaped and mediated by various power differentials, such as institutions, organizations, legal frameworks, households, and individuals that operate on multiple scales as well as across multiple social dimensions – economic, political, cultural, religious spheres – globalization is not only characterized by various flows but also by various ebbs of connectivities and interactions.38 This means that there is a dis35 36 37

38

Appadurai 1986, 16–20, 41–58. A classic example of this is the accumulative dynamic of the Melanesian Kula exchange system of shells; see Malinowski 1922. Giddens 1990, 17. The cultural and cognitive accumulation of meanings and contexts of things and people has been termed by scholars as a cultural biography. The discussion on cultural biographies and the biographical approach has been dealt, amongst others, by Appadurai 1986; Kopytoff 1986; Hoskins 1998; Gosden and Marshall 1999; Hoskins 2006; Joy 2009; Hahn and Weiss 2013. For recent applications in ancient history, see Versluys 2015; Van Eck et al. 2015. Wallerstein 1979; Wolf 1982; Harvey 1989; Chase-Dunn 1999. See further discussion in Hoo 2022, 17–22 and practical applications in the Afro-Eurasian world region in Von Reden 2022a.

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tinct unevenness in the velocity, intensity, extent, and impact of global connectivities on localities.39 Asymmetrical mediation of connectivities variously affect patterns of behaviour in the reconfiguration of local social life, which make differential local experiences of complex connectivity a key aspect of globalization. The profound unevenness in the velocity, intensity, extent, and impact of connectivities, profoundly challenges the classic myth about globalization: cultural homogenization or the inevitable trend towards the assimilation of the world into a single global cultural unity.40 The idea that globalization would birth a homogeneous metaculture is based on postmodernist interpretations that envision the obliteration of differences between local cultures and identities and the destruction of cultural diversity. According to such views, globalization ultimately results in the widespread diffusion and the universal assimilation of the same cultural forms and norms and the attendant loss of unique identities – a vision captured in terms such as George Ritzer’s McDonaldization, and easily projected onto understandings of Hellenization as an acculturative process of diffusion of Greek culture from Greece to the East.41 While cultural flows across wide distances certainly galvanize a degree of sameness or one-placeness in terms of shared practices, values, and objects – one only has to think of English as academia’s (currently dominant) lingua franca – it should be kept in mind that people continue to live local lives. Identities are constituted and played out in situated actions within localities, which means that common or easy access and knowledge to practices, values, and objects that are shared across distances do not necessitate or involve an identical replication of the matter at hand.42 Though structurally shaped by complex connectivity, meaning-making always remains culturally informed: all practices and actions, even the most basic and instrumental ones, take place in grounded contexts of local cultural signification.43 The myth of cultural homogenization is closely intertwined with how scholars intuitively use and think of ‘culture’, as something tied to essentialist notions of identity and locality as fixed and treasured properties – and as such, as ‘victims of globalization’.44 However, conceptualizations of localism as pure, ingrained, and spatially contained, not only construe local actors as unassertive and merely reactionary to global change, but also overlook the outward and social basis of their behaviour. The ways in which people experience their social environment and navigate their behaviour through social relations is rarely shaped by dynamics confined to local scale only. Much of what is considered as local, both from an emic and etic perspective, is constructed, invented, and 39 40 41 42 43 44

Nederveen Pieterse 2009 [2003] 32–34. Ferguson 1992, esp. 79–82. Ohmae 1995, 38–39, for instance, infers that economic globalization leads to “a genuine cross-border civilization”: a melting pot of consumer culture. Ritzer 1993. Nederveen Pieterse 2009 [2003], 51 explains that at the core of the cultural homogenization stance is diffusionism, or the spread of culture from one single centre. Friedman 1990; 2002. Tomlinson 1999, 24. Tomlinson 2003, 269–271; 2006, 151–152.

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imagined on a translocal basis; the ‘local’ only makes sense in relation to the supralocal and vice versa.45 Roland Robertson was the first in globalization literature to use the term glocalization for the entanglement of globalization and localization processes.46 Rather than viewing identity and localism as autonomous cultural counteracts that resist opposite forces of globalization, Robertson rightly pointed out that “it makes no good sense to define the global as if it excludes the local (…), [as if] the global lies beyond all localities”, since both are mutually constitutive and interpenetrative.47 More specifically, he explained that the globalization of local culture (‘universalization of the particular’) and the localization of global culture (‘particularization of the universal’) not only happen in a continuum but also define and determine one another, forming the principles of difference for either one to be constructed.48 These considerations have important implications for thinking about localism (local culture and identities), further elucidated by John Tomlinson. He similarly argued that local actors are not merely reactionary to supralocal processes, but that globalization is weaved in the texture of locality. Rather than an external force or structure isolated from local actors, globalization and local culture are inherent dimensions of one another: “globalization affects people’s sense of identity, the experience of place and of the self in relation to place, [and] impacts on the shared understandings, values, desires, myths, hopes and fears that have developed around locally situated life.”49 Vice versa, “as connectivity reaches into localities, it transforms local lived experience but it also confronts people with a world in which their fates undeniably are bound together in a single global frame.”50 The concept of time-space compression illuminates, indeed, that cultural actions undertaken in distinct localities, such as the decision to buy and consume quinoa and avocados, can become globally and locally consequential in various ways, for instance, giving rise to a trendy culture that promotes a nutritious life style shared across affluent countries, while increasing inequality and poverty in the regions of production. The spatial stretch of social relations beyond territorial locality thus implies an expansion of local and translocal ways of being in the world, generating shared idioms (common grounds) to facilitate large-scale interactions, and horizontally widening the array of local modes and strategies of belonging and identification.51 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

Instructive for the invention of locality (similar to ‘tradition’), is Hobsbawm 1983; instructive for the imagination of locality (similar to ‘communities’) is Anderson 1983. Robertson 1992, 173–174; 1995, 28. The notion of glocalization featured earlier in business literature since the 1980s, first captured in the Japanese term dochakuka which roughly translates to global localization. Robertson 1995, 35. Hannerz 1990, 249–250; Robertson 1992, 97–115; 1995, 29–32. Tomlinson 1999, 20. Tomlinson 1999, 12 (emphasis in original); see also Tomlinson 2006, 152. This is what he understands as globalization’s cultural dimension, an intrinsic aspect to the process of complex connectivity. Friedman 1990; Tomlinson 1999, esp. 9; Tomlinson 2003. For ‘being in the world’, further see the key texts of Heidegger 1962 [1927]; Bourdieu 1977; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992.

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As such, complex connectivity facilitates the proliferation of situations, possibilities, means, and meanings to culturally express oneself in a variety of social contexts and geographical scales. 9.1.6 Translocalism Considerations of complex connectivity, deterritorialization, and glocalization urge and allow to radically rethink traditional notions of localism. They significantly challenge ideas of cultural containment and identity boundedness, shifting the focus from cultural ‘roots’ to cultural ‘routes’.52 However, critics have raised their voices against ‘globalocentrism’ and the emphasis on the deterritorialization of culture in light of ever-increasing movements, mobilities, and migrations, at the expense of place. Addressing this loss of place in conceptualizations of globalization, Arturo Escobar rightly argued that culture still ‘sits in places’: The fact remains that place continues to be important in the lives of many people, perhaps most, if we understand by place the experience of a particular location with some measure of groundedness (however, unstable), sense of boundaries (however, permeable), and connection to everyday life, even if its identity is constructed, traversed by power, and never fixed. There is an ‘implacement’ that counts for more than we want to acknowledge (…).53

The continued significance of place should not be seen as a methodical return to territorialized cultures or localities. Any idea of absolute territorialization is misleading and reproduces associations of the local as the sedentarist, antiquated, and reactionary Other of the dynamic and mobile global (or supralocal).54 Yet the conceptual ‘trouble with localism’ that emerges from juxtaposing local place juxtaposing local place with global space, betrays a distinct theoretical commitment to the spatial bounds of the local: That place-consciousness does not of necessity require spatial boundedness or the exclusion of the extralocal, temporal stasis, or social homogeneity are important reminders that these putative characteristics of place consciousness were more a fabrication of modernist prejudice than a description of the realities of premodern (and modern) local societies.

What we call local culture is and has never been entirely moored and bounded, but neither has it been exclusively mobile and fleeting. Rather, localism as inherently and structurally translocal, even without complex connectivity. In light of these considerations, it makes more sense to talk about translocalism. 52 53 54

For ‘roots’ to ‘routes’, see Clifford 1992, 108–110; 1997. Escobar 2001, 141. See further Eriksen 1992; Morley and Robinson 1995, esp. 138–130; Olwig and Hastrup 1997; Casey 1998; Dirlik 1999; Escobar 2001; Friedman 2002. Dirlik 1999, 154. For the local as globalism’s Other, see also Smith 2001, 27.

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Translocalism entered the vocabulary of globalization research through Appadurai’s seminal work Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, in which he explained the production of locality as “temporary negotiations between globally circulating forms.”55 He argued that locality or localism is “primarily relational and contextual rather than scalar or spatial”, and is therefore better approached as “a phenomenological property of social life, a structure of feeling that is produced by particular forms of intentional activity and that yields particular sorts of material effects.”56 Further elaborating on the idea that localism is a socially rather than a geographically produced structure urban theorist Michael Peter Smith explained that translocalism underlines the “emergent social relations under globalizing conditions that are situated in specific places yet operate across geographical distance and are both embedded in and transgress processes of state power.”57 The concept of translocalism thus situates global-local embeddedness on the ground and highlights the cultural negotiation of social relations across a scalar range, rather than prioritizing either geographical proximity or distance (respectively, place or space). Comparable to glocalization, translocalism captures the same sense of situatedness in place while navigating through the connectedness that shapes and structures both the diverse contexts and the material expressions of belonging. However, while intimately related to what the concept of glocalization draws out, translocalism eschews the tendency to emphasize the primacy of the global over the local and to articulate the latter as merely reactionary to the former – a pretheoretical commitment to systemic part/ whole thinking in which the two spheres are linked in a structural-causal container model of local-global interaction.58 Moreover, unlike glocalization, the word translocalism leaves the contentious question open whether and to what extent globalization may have occurred in antiquity, taking as its starting point the inherent mobility, larger-scale connectedness, and the continued importance of situatedness in the construction of local identities, instead of commencing the narrative from the global.59 Complementing the term glocalization, then, translocalism captures the entanglement of scales in the actions, behaviours, expressions, and identifications of various actors, whose social relations stretched across geographical space yet were embedded in a particular place. Communities of practice One way to makes more concrete sense of how translocalism operates on the level of visual culture, is through the notion of communities of practice: a practice-oriented concept that combines well with the theoretical tools offered by the globalization 55 56 57 58 59

Appadurai 2010, 12. Appadurai 1996, 182. Smith 2011, 181; see further Smith 2001, 5. Translocalism as a morpheme comes closest to what Tomlinson explained as globality that weaves itself in the texture of locality. Smith 2001, 23–47; Moore 2004; Carpentier 2007, 5. See further Hoo 2020, 556–557; 2021, 15–17. Oakes and Schein 2006, 1.

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concepts explored above. Communities of practice shares common considerations with object-oriented theories current in archaeology, such as object entanglement, assemblages of practice, and most recently objectscapes, which all emphasize the relationality inherent to objects.60 Similarly engaging with relationality yet oriented to practices, the notion of communities of practice was developed by Jean Lave and Étienne Wenger in their book Situated Learning, followed by Wenger’s more detailed monograph Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity.61 Central to these works is the theorization of how translocal identification, the negotiation of meaning, and community coherence are realized through learned social practice. Learned social practice refers to knowledgeable (yet not necessarily conscious) engagement in forms of co-participation which are embedded in “relations amongst people in activity in, with, and arising from the socially and culturally structured world.”62 Lave and Wenger define a community of practice as “a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tangential and overlapping communities of practice.”63 These communities, as such, are not primordial groups or culture-historical entities but should be seen as socially networked knowledge structures which are informally “formed by people who engage in a process of collective learning in a shared domain of human endeavour.”64 Communities of practice are everywhere. We all belong to a number of them – at work, at school, at home, in our hobbies. Some have a name, some don’t. Some we recognize, some remain largely invisible. We are core members of some and occasional participants in others. Whatever form our participation takes, most of us are familiar with the experience of belonging to a community of practice.65

Communities of practice are contingent upon shared practice and can be large, small, and significantly overlapping. They can be institutionalized (such as university departments) as well as loosely organized or institutionally interstitial (such as artists). For example, archaeologists can form a community of practice, whose membership can overlap with 60 61

62 63 64 65

Esp. Stockhammer 2013; Versluys 20176a; Antczak and Beaudry 2019; Pitts and Versluys 2021. Closely related to communities of practice, is the notion of communities of style (Feldman 2014) – which can be considered as distinct communities of practice. Lave and Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998. Although relatively unknown in ancient history, the impact of Lave and Wenger’s works has been enormous across disciplines. As a social theory of learning, the concept particularly gained wide popularity in the fields of education studies, organization studies, and business management. The concept was gradually noticed in historical studies, mainly in connection to material culture; see e. g. Minar 2001; Minar and Crown 2001; Sassaman and Rudolphi 2001; Feldman 2014. Lave 1991, 67; Lave and Wenger 1991, 51. As such, the theory of communities of practice takes issue with the structure-agency nexus and is caught in the middle of theories of social structure and theories of situated experience (Wenger 1998, 12–13). Lave and Wenger 1991, 97–98. Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner 2015, 1. Wenger et al. 2002, 5.

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a community of practice of university instructors, of parents, of people who paint, of people who climb, or vegetarians. Membership roles in these communities are based on the extent and forms of knowledgeable participation in the practice, and therefore represent modes of belonging which can play active or latent parts in one’s negotiation of identification.66 Knowledgeability of the practice, i. e. the knowledge of how to learn and perform the practice, is socially generated through peer-to-peer interaction (for instance, from more experienced climbers to beginner climbers), in which the peers are defined by their competence as practitioners, not by ethnic or cultural origins. In essence, therefore, a community of practice is formed through ‘a way of doing’, which is facilitated by a repertoire of tools to do so: sources of how-to-knowledge such as objects, styles, techniques.67 All communities of practice can be seen as relational constellations of practice, which do not necessarily require identity consciousness (community awareness) unless activated. Wenger explains that “the notion of community of practice does not primarily refer to a ‘group’ of people per se. Rather it refers to a social process of negotiating competence in a domain over time. That this process ends up structuring social relationships amongst people involved in various ways is a secondary phenomenon.”68 In challenging conventional understandings of local communities as proximate and geographically structured groups with group identities, furnished in an immediate social environment, Lave and Wenger’s concept provides a way to think and talk about the diversity of material culture in our Eurasian localities in Central and West Asia as translocal localisms, highlighting relational identification across various kinds of communities and identity roles based on shared ways of doing, which can transcend physical and proximate space. 9.2 Globalization in practice: outlook We have seen that globalization concepts of complex connectivity, time-space compression, deterritorialization, glocalization, and translocalism deeply challenge and unsettle traditional stances and notions on localism and change. As such, they provide critical theoretical observations and useful heuristic tools to productively approach Hellenism and cultural inbetweenness during the time period in focus. The third to first centuries BCE belonged to a period of increasingly complex connectivity across the Eurasian landmass, during which elements of particular local cultural contexts 66 67

68

Wenger 1998, 143–188. Wenger 1998, 83. Wenger et al. 2002, 27–29 explain that communities of practice are characterized by three basic components: a domain of interest (the domain of knowledge), a community of people (interacting practitioners), and a shared practice (the repertoire of knowledge, ideas, tools, styles, language, and objects that is developed, negotiated, and maintained to effectively deal with the domain). In his earlier work, Wenger 1998, 73 phrased these characteristics as a mutual engagement, a joint enterprise, and a shared repertoire. Farnsworth et al. 2016, 142.

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(such as the Attic weight standard for coins) became deterritorialized and partook in what can be considered as globalizing cultural repertoires. These repertoires entailed various practices, forms, and norms that became dynamically shared or known across distances and which contributed to a degree of sameness or one-placeness, including those that have analytically received the label of ‘Hellenism’. In turn, these deterritorialized elements of particular culture could be recontextualized as cultural means (resources) for the assertion of distinct social identities in local contexts, whether for local or supralocal audiences. The concept of glocalization – or simultaneous processes of globalization of the local and localization of the global – further highlights that (re)constructions of local identities do not happen in isolation or in imaginary third spaces between cultures, but by virtue of their embodiment of, and embeddedness in wider structures, as people navigate and (re)produce distinction across broad scales and spectra of difference.69 The notion of time-space compression underlines the forceful emergence of such embeddedness: social actors (whether movers or stayers) become increasingly confronted with a growing amount of various ‘Others’, as they come directly or indirectly contact with widening arrays of potential identity positions and (material and social) practices and behaviours, weaved into the texture of locality. This results in a proliferation of contexts for signification, cultural expression, and local actions, as the supralocal couches and settles in the reflexive (re)production of localism. More concretely, then, how does a translocal methodology operate and integrate complex connectivity, time-space compression, deterritorialization, and glocalization in the analysis? In the remainder of this chapter, I will revisit the case studies central to this book and explore how cultural inbetweenness would look like from the translocal approach that has been argued for. This methodological exercise in situating translocalism illustrates what such an approach could add to future directions of the field of Hellenistic and wider cultural studies. 9.2.1 A translocal view on Ai Khanum and Hellenism The case of Ai Khanum lends itself particularly well to illustrate a translocal approach.70 Modern juxtapositions between Greek and non-Greek elements and the subsequent conclusions on the identity of the city’s inhabitants often overlook the fact that Ai Khanum’s urban design was not a static given, but one that developed over time. Significantly, the majority of buildings recognized as quintessentially Greek were added considerably late in the city’s ancient biography, during the first half of the second century BCE. Nevertheless, previous interpretations have commonly referred to the 69 70

For the Third Space between cultures, see Rutherford 1990; Bhabha 2004 [1994], and the discussion of hybridity in Chapter 2, section 2.1.5. Hoo 2015; 2018; and recently Mairs 2021b.

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city’s theatre, gymnasium, and above all the Delphic maxims in the mausoleum of Kineas to connect Hellenism at Ai Khanum with an apparent community of Greek diasporic settlers that replicated Greek life at home in the Aegean. While Chapter 3 and 8 showed that interpretations of Ai Khanum mostly pertained to (debates around) Greek ethnicity, the concepts of complex connectivity, deterritorialization, glocalization, and translocalism, urge to think outside the culture-historical box and integrate multiple constructions of identity, belonging, and communities of practice than solely those defined by ethnicity. Consequently, they shift the focus from ethnic to social dynamics behind the cultural inbetweenness of Ai Khanum’s architecture and objects. Instead of connecting Greek elements (labelled as Hellenism) at Ai Khanum with a Greek motherland and the Greek ethnic identity of its inhabitants – whether (re)imagined or not – the attention draws to how elements that we recognize, categorize, and imbue with ethno-cultural significance as ‘Greek’ played a role in the translocal navigation of social actors in different and overlapping structures of being and belonging. The modern semantic and conceptual distinction between Hellenization and Hellenism (as now increasingly commonplace in recent scholarship as explained in Chapter 2) is instructive here. Unlike Hellenization, Hellenism in the sense of as Greek doings can but do not necessarily require Greek beings. In other words, visual, material, and cultural practices that we recognize as Greek are not limited to or necessarily associated with ethnic Greek belonging or even cultural identity, per se. Instead of emphasizing intercultural diffusion that underlies the term Hellenization – the acculturative movement from (Greek) culture and society to another – Versluys has convincingly argued in a number of works that Hellenism was more about “concepts associated with those cultures and applied to a different region and/or time period and thus about the intra-cultural.”71 In the context of complex connectivity, the Eurasian landmass during the third and first centuries BCE may be approached as one ‘world’ of cultural entanglement with cultural processes and dynamics taking place on an intra-cultural level (within the same cultural macrosphere) rather than on an inter-cultural one (between different monolithic cultures). Entangled in various networks (royal, political, economic, cultural, social) across several scales (imperial, regional, local), Eurasian localisms thus emerged from various intra-cultural appropriations and recontextualizations of translocal elements in various material, visual, and cultural repertoires. In light of complex connectivity, those buildings, objects, or visual elements that we recognize as culturally inbetween and signify as Hellenism probably did not represent a fixed and uniform set of ethnic markers, but entailed a flexible set of material and cultural practices that were deterritorialized and meaningfully re-embedded by various actors who, as practitioners, were caught up in communities of practice that were formed across the identity spectrum. Within this spectrum of identity roles, Greek ethnicity may only have been one of the varieties of 71

Versluys 2015, 128, emphasis added. See more elaborately Versluys 2017a, 209–213; Strootman and Versluys 2017.

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social roles that could be evoked and activated in situational interactions. A translocal approach to Hellenism allows conceptual room not only for the possibility of multiple coexisting and overlapping Hellenisms, but also for potential social code-switching between various dynamic cultural ‘-isms’ in flow. Beyond ethnicity: Ai Khanum’s Eurasian localism Historically, all cultures are inherently hybrid because they are continuously formed and constructed in a conjunction of appropriation, negotiation, and transformation throughout time. The concepts from globalization research considered in this chapter urge to take such inherent hybridity seriously in the context of increasing complex connectivity across Eurasia.72 While the main interpreters of Ai Khanum have embedded the presence of Greek architecture and objects in the city in various ethno-historical narratives, focused on Greek settlers and the acculturating effect of the culture they brought with them, a translocal approach compels not only to revise but also to rethink such ethnicity-centred understandings. Though previous views have highlighted distinct Greekness or non-Greekness in aspects of Ai Khanum’s material culture, in the light of intracultural Eurasian connectivity, such associations (even if they did activate distinct identities) probably overlapped with various other emic experiences of collectivity. We have seen in Chapter 3 that evidence about Ai Khanum before the second century BCE is scant and problematic: our current sensationalized image of the city in its entirety stems from the last building phase, prior to which potential decontextualization and localization processes were set in motion since at least a century before, when the earliest foundations were built. Possibilities of various cultural dynamics and developments during that period abound; it is not unthinkable that objects, architecture, and visual elements that we recognize as ‘Greek’ were crafted, produced, or constructed on the basis of selective appropriation of deterritorialized, ‘globalizing’ (i. e. transregionally shared and known) cultural elements that came to be locally reauthenticated in specific social spheres. Indeed, the practice and experience of culture in everyday life is most often ordinary, routinely, and habitually; culture, as stated by Tomlinson, “is not the exclusive property of the privileged, but inclusive of all manner of everyday practices”, and “refers to all these mundane practices that directly contribute to people’s ongoing ‘life narratives’”.73 Methodologically, it is therefore more constructive to approach the cultural inbetweenness of Ai Khanum’s art and architecture in its local, regional, and transregional social contexts, rather than to focus on the geographical provenance, cultural roots, and ethnic groups that distinct buildings, objects, or visual elements supposedly would represent. What were the social scenarios that such forms 72 73

Nederveen Pieterse 1994; 2009 [2003], 65–94 argues for hybridization as the defining feature of globalization. Tomlinson 1999, 19, 20.

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evoked, how were these forms experienced in practice, and what do they tell us about the cultural and visual knowledge people had ingrained in their ‘ongoing life narratives’ in order to do so?74 Considering the specific social scenarios whose material contexts were shaped by seemingly different cultural elements, it can be stated that those visual forms and practices that we typologize as Hellenism were particularly competent to evoke a social environment associated with civic behaviours, negotiations, and possibly civic belonging, as suggested by the grand theatre, the gymnasium, and the intramural mausoleum of Kineas at Ai Khanum. Greek elements also potentiated administrative, literary, and funerary spheres of practice, at least to the extent of the literary fragments in the palace ‘library’, the administrative writings in the palace treasury, and the Kineas inscription of the intramural mausoleum. In similar vein, those cultural elements we recognize as Mesopotamian and Iranian may have been considered particularly competent for religious and dynastic dimensions of social life – characterized by the city’s religious structures and the colossal palatial complex – while Baktrian and wider Iranian elements were deemed most adequate to fashion domestic spheres in the lives of Ai Khanum’s inhabitants. These social spheres should neither be seen as ethnically exclusive nor as absolute categories of social life, but rather as etic constructs of loose analytical groupings of scenarios and contexts for social behaviour and activity, which in practice could overlap: practices at the Kineas mausoleum, for instance, may be considered as both civic and religious. The distinction of social spheres serves an analytical purpose, to draw attention from ethnic categories to focus on domains of social practices. By no means does the distinction suggest that only Greeks would have been able to engage in civic and public life (based on the presence of Greek visual elements in these spheres), nor that Greeks and non-Greeks would have been ethnically segregated according to such social domains. That would problematically imply that ethnic, cultural, and social categories, behaviours, and material practices would invariably align to form singular holistic identities, thus returning to monocultural interpretations in which the gymnasium, theatre, and mausoleum were exclusively visited and experienced by Greeks while the temples were reserved for non-Greeks – both envisioned as distinct monolithic identity groups with predefined agency. It is more probable that the same people practiced their lives and moved in both spheres of Greekness and non-Greekness, if we should attribute ethnic distinction to these categories at all.75 The competence of cultural elements, related to the question why these particular elements had been habitually re-embedded in these social contexts, may have been 74 75

The term ‘social scenarios’ is here adapted after Versluys’ use of ‘cultural scenarios’ to act out multiple identity roles through material culture; see esp. Versluys 2013, 434–436; 2015; 2017a, passim. I follow here Rogers Brubaker 2002, 165–167, who makes the important distinction between categories of analysis and categories of practice. Civic, religious, and domestic spheres are more difficult to distinguish in ancient reality where the lines between them were often blurred and entangled, as in modern times.

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mediated and informed through their previous pathways and contexts. The intensification of transregional trade, communication, and a range of connectivities under the Seleukid kings and the Achaemenids before them transformed the texture of people’s sense of locality and their place in the world, broadening their frames of reference to produce meaning. Recent scholarship demonstrated that the Seleukid empire instigated profound connectedness of localities and civic elites across and beyond their Eurasian empire, brought about by a series of networked translocal practices and forms of court culture, royal ideology, imperial administration, coinage, language, visual idioms, urbanization, and monumentalization.76 These practices and forms, which included civic architecture such as theatres and gymnasia, asserted great network power, affecting the choice and form of cultural, visual, and architectural media used for interactions between various peer polities and actors across the Hellenistic world, as well as for imperial interactions with localities – both benefiting from expressing or performing (elements of) transregionally shared, locally significant civic culture.77 In Ai Khanum, therefore, what scholars have recognized as Hellenism (the theatre, gymnasium, mausoleum, and inscriptions) may alternatively indicate a series of deterritorialized elements which had developed ‘social competence’ – capable to evoke and serve transregionally (and locally) recognized civic behaviour.78 The particular contexts, use, and date (the second century BCE) of most of those structures and elements that we are prone to call Greek, suggests that these cultural elements were associated with power, civic status, and social distinction within the locality as well as translocally across central Eurasia. In similar vein, the architecture that has been labelled as Mesopotamian and Iranian in style, dated to the first or second phases of the city (i. e. older than the theatre and gymnasium) and most visible in Ai Khanum’s religious and dynastic spheres, may have resulted from local recontextualizations of disembedded elements shared across Eurasia to produce meaning in religious and dynastic contexts. Such an interpretation carries historical plausibility: the Achaemenid kings invested immensely in dynastic rather than civic architecture for royal legitimation, while the two centuries of Achaemenid imperial rule over Western Asian, Iranian, and Central Asian lands (c. 530–330 BCE) had instigated processes of long-distance communication, transregional integration, and cultural negotiation accelerated across the vast landmass of central Eurasia.79 That the oldest structures at Ai Khanum, postdating Achaemenid reign by at least forty years, were largely characterized by Mesopotamian and Iranian cultural elements suggest that

76 77 78 79

See esp. Kosmin 2014b; Strootman 2014; Lavan et al. 2016; Canepa 2017b; 2020b; von Reden 2020b. The understanding of Hellenism as a culture of communication is voiced most notably by Strootman 2013; 2014, 7–11, 163–164, 267. For network power, see Grewal 2009; and relevant discussion in Hoo 2022; Von Reden 2022b. Hoo 2015; 2018. Colburn 2013; 2017.

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these had probably been integrated in familiar stylistic repertoires by the third century BCE, further appropriated and adapted by the Seleukid kings.80 From a translocal approach, then, what we recognize as Greek, Mesopotamian, and Iranian would not (necessarily) have referred to ethnic Greek, Mesopotamian (Babylonian), or Iranian (Persian), but more likely social recontextualizations of transregionally shared elements, used to evoke social scenarios, which may or may not have been imbued with ethnic significance.81 Rather than interpretations of cultural inbetweenness as largely local (Hellenism is just localism with a veneer) or interpretations that emphasize the non-local (Hellenism is ethnic Greekness transferred from Greece), a better understanding situates the use and habitual experience of these cultural elements in people’s ongoing life in a translocal frame. The various actors involved in the material culture of Ai Khanum partook in a shared subjectivity, a shared frame of reference, so that the integration and localization of seemingly different elements in the city’s architecture and objects made sense in their social context. But that does not imply that these elements were completely neutral and value-free in the ‘global cultural supermarket’. The chronological context of the Greek, Mesopotamian, and Iranian elements at Ai Khanum suggests that these elements were associatively used and selected from a wide range of deterritorialized globalizing cultural elements, which gained their competence to be meaningfully re-embedded through their evocative translocalism – through the mediation of cultural capital, generated and shaped by the movements they made through a series of previous situations across central Eurasia, under the rule and imperial integration of the Seleukid kings and the Achaemenid kings before them. This translocal recontextualizing process of deterritorialized cultural elements in various social spheres can explain Ai Khanum’s ‘peculiar’ features – features that do not quite fit modern conceptions of purely Greek and Oriental buildings: the box seats midway the koilon of the theatre, the northern orientation of the large houses, the modular plans with long and narrow corridors to regulate space in the gymnasium, the palace, the houses, and the overall construction material of local sun-dried mud brick. These distinctive traits can be considered as those Central Asian elements that made the material culture of Ai Khanum particularly local in a Eurasian context. A striking monumental palatial structure, unearthed at Saksanokhur in south Tadzhikistan and dated to the second century BCE, was built on a comparable ground plan, with the same construction materials and architectural decorations as the palace at Ai Khanum. Here too, a grand courtyard, a columned hall (termed an iwan), and columns with stone Corinthian capitals and torus-shaped bases were notable features of the Saksanokhur complex, while movement, circulation, and access were similarly regulated by long

80 81

Mairs 2013b, 100–103; 2014c; see further Canepa 2015a; cf. 2020b. Strootman and Versluys 2017.

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narrow corridors that both connected and bypassed different units of rooms.82 Comparanda to the city’s domestic architecture, contemporaneous to or somewhat later than Ai Khanum, have been identified at Dilbarjin in north Afghanistan, Dalverzin Tepe in south Uzbekistan, Nisa in south Turkmenistan, Abu Qubur in Iraq, and at Saksanokhur, which contained similar structures with central hall or forecourt and long and narrow circumambulatory corridors.83 Although such typical Central Asian features at Ai Khanum indeed speak for a regional Central Asian or local Baktrian school, it would be wrong to consider these as representations of localism-as-nativism – an inward conception of local behaviour, impervious and unyielding to foreign influences.84 In light of processes of complex connectivity across Eurasia in the first three centuries BCE, through which the supralocal became ingrained in the texture of locality and vice versa, the nature of this Baktrianism can be described as Eurasian localism. The idea of Eurasian localism engenders precisely the translocal nature of many distinctly local productions of culture in the Hellenistic period. Ai Khanum’s distinctive features not only made sense on their local (Baktrian) contexts, but also on regional (Central Asian) and transregional (Eurasian) scales. As numerous studies have shown, the objects, inscriptions, and architectural decorations that are typologized as Greek have been unearthed not merely in Baktria or the Mediterranean but across central Eurasia, resonating transregional ‘ways of doing’. Furthermore, significant analogies to Ai Khanum’s religious structures which re-embedded deterritorialized Iranian and Mesopotamian elements in their plan and architecture, have been identified not only in Central Asia, such as the Hellenistic-period temple at Dilbajin in north Afghanistan and two open-air podiums at Kok-Tepe and Pashmak-Tepe in south-east Uzbekistan dated to the Achaemenid period, but also further west in Syria and Mesopotamia, particularly the temples of Zeus and Artemis at Doura Europos, and the temple of Assur in Babylonia.85 These local (Baktrian), regional (Central Asian) and transregional (Syrian and Mesopotamian) analogies reflect the geographical range of cultural ways of doing with distinct potential for recontextualization. Rather than representations of Hellenization as acculturation or hybridization, what we typologize as Hellenism was more likely to be part of a wider series of deterritorialized cultural elements (objects and architectural ideas and techniques) imbued with potential or competence to produce social meaning with. Related to the idea of a Hellenistic cultural koine – a common lingua franca of architectural and visual traditions in 82 83 84 85

Litvinskiy and Mukhitdinov 1969, 169–176; instructive discussion in Mairs 2014a, 79–82. Two stone capitals were found, which have been analysed as composite in style, though intimately related to the capitals found at Ai Khanum. Francfort 1977, 267–280; Kruglikova 1977, 409; Bernard 1980, 320–330; Lecuyot 2013, 201–205, figs. 78, 79. Mairs 2014a, 79, 99–100 argues for a Graeco-Baktrian school; see also Pugachenkova 1990 for a North-Baktrian school. See Chapter 3, fn. 94, 100.

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the Hellenistic period – translocalism provides a productive approach that moves away from a distinctly Greek framework that preconceives Ai Khanum as a Greek city, and instead adopts as its starting point the complex and timely production of socially regulated preferences, modes, and styles across Eurasia through which culturally competent elements deterritorialized to become re-embedded in context.86 These elements were selected and combined from a repertoire of cultural tools with potentialities to make meaning with, while (access to) knowledge about the possibilities had broadened on a transregional scale in the wake of complex connectivity across Eurasia. I emphasize that re-embedded cultural elements could indeed carry ethnic significance, but they could also serve multiple other social, political, religious, and cultural agendas, depending on what the social situation required and whether they were selected on the basis of that particular potential. Taking such an approach does not erase ethnic Greeks from the narrative, but emphasizes that we have to take a range of other actors and other identities and forms of belonging into account as well. The actions, practices, and attendant material expression of ancient people would have been motivated by often overlapping ethnic, cultural, and personal identities that played out in specific social scenarios and situations. Thus, a translocal approach to Ai Khanum considers the city and its features not according to compartmentalizing typologies, with different cultural elements directly linking to ethno-cultural groups or geographical motherlands, but as functioning and socially lived in its Eurasian locality. The cultural, social, and architectural practices at Ai Khanum indicate that the population engaged with networked practices and diverse ways of doing that circulated on local, regional, and transregional scales, and became re-embedded anew in local contexts, possibly altering the very texture of local cultural experience in the Baktrian city. 9.2.2 A translocal view on Nisa and Hellenism The consideration of a translocal approach to an urban site such as Ai Khanum, has extended implications for how we may view cultural eclecticism in the visual culture of a comparable site of royal importance: Nisa. Although the site is of a somewhat different nature – interpreted to have been a dynastic ceremonial centre rather than an urban settlement – this case study, too, may benefit productively from the semantic-conceptual distinction between Hellenization and Hellenism. As discussed in Chapter 8, Hellenism at Nisa has been inquired, conceptualized, and given meaning in scholarship as Phil-

86

The idea of a Hellenistic koine has increasingly gained firm ground in recent scholarship. For Hellenistic Central Asia, see most notably Canepa 2013, 340–342, Mairs 2013b, 102; 2014a, 79, 98–101; Martinez-Sève 2016, 105–106; Hoo 2018. It should be kept in mind that the notion of a koine, notably a Greek term, is etymologically still grounded in a Greek-centred framework, hence the preference here for translocalism.

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hellenism. In contrast to Hellenization-as-acculturation, the concept of Philhellenism already etymologically conveys the idea that Greek-doings (employing Greek elements for art and architecture) were not restricted to Greek-beings (ethnic Greek settlers from the Aegean). Accordingly, associated with Arsakid rather than Greek kings, the term Philhellenism imparts more dynamism, choice, and complexity by merit of the prefix ‘phil’. This prefix highlights the desire for, and the act of cultural adoption-cum-appropriation by diverse actors, instead of embodying some ethno-cultural essence of Hellas. Thus, Hellenism at Nisa is scholarly perceived to be distinctly non-ethnic, compared to Hellenism at, for instance, Ai Khanum of Seleukeia on the Tigris. Such abundantly common perceptions already create the conceptual space for the possibility that Hellenism was learned and performed as (part of) a translocal cultural concept that came to be recontextualized for social purposes – in this case, purposes of translocal communication to various elites that were connected to royal courts across central Eurasia in the Hellenistic period. I will return to this point later. While Philhellenism allows more cultural dynamism than other understandings of Hellenism, Chapter 8 also showed that the term’s etymological roots and the agentic implications that follow from those are precisely where the problematic dichotomy between localism and non-localism emerges. While Hellenism and Philhellenism are intricately connected in their implication of Greekness, the latter notion notably detaches the actors involved from any genuine, endogenous Greekness while anchoring them in discrete localism. Such asymmetrical views are embedded in a persistent and powerful historiographical framework of partisan understandings of the Parthians by ancient Greek and Roman authors, coupled with modern investments in these portrayals which rendered the Parthians as the new Persians – the new Oriental Other.87 As a result, actors enacting Philhellenism are conceptually required to be ethnically, culturally, and politically Other, segregated from ‘real’ Greeks and Greekness in their mere imitation of, and resemblance to Greek culture. We have seen in Chapter 5 that the idea of Philhellenism as derivative localism persists in scholarship in the much-debated questions whether Arsakid Philhellenism was genuine or pragmatic, and whether Arsakid kings were original or dependant on Greeks and Greek culture to uphold their empire. These considerations not only merge political, ideological, and cultural domains of behaviour, they also advance essentialist compartmentalization of Arsakids and Parthians as inherent and perennial Others.88 That such assumptions turned into logical premises upon which Greek culture at Nisa was analysed and explained, becomes clear in prevalent interpretations about the agency in question. Although the Nisa rhytons and marble and clay sculptures are often praised as fine examples of Arsakid creativity and ingenuity – valuated along modern aesthetic ideals of Greek (Aegean) art of the Classical period – 87 88

Wolski 1983; 1989; Fowler 2005, 129. The scholarly merging of domains of behaviour in modern historiography has been observed by Wiesehöfer 2000; Olbrycht 2017.

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their actual artistry, skill, and craftmanship are ascribed by default to Greek, rather than Parthian or Iranian artisans, who would have produced them upon royal commission.89 Thus, although Hellenism-as-Philhellenism accounts for more cultural flexibility, its connotations still feed into an ideology of alterity that excludes Arsakid kings and local people from any real cultural achievement while perpetuating monolithic ideas about agents of Hellenism and their relation to change. As a result, the circular reasoning follows that 1) only ethnic Greeks would be capable of doing and producing Greek culture, and that 2) Greek culture implies change in terms of civilization: a positive progress that can only be enacted by ethnic Greeks, who represent civilization per se. Beyond Philhellenism: Nisa’s Eurasian localism The paradox of Philhellenism – closely connected to Greekness yet perpetually anchored in discrete localism – emerges from a persistent yet problematic methodology in which ethno-civilizational groups are the units of analysis and thus the categorical lenses through which we assess archaeological remains. Through explicit or implicit assumptions that the boundaries of ethnicity must coincide, in some way or another, with those of culture, Greek culture continues to represent Greeks while non-Greek culture continues to represent non-Greeks. In other words, pots indirectly remain people: the production of Greek culture is still seen to necessitate the involvement of ethnic Greeks, even if commissioned by Arsakid kings. In turn, these kings and their practices are ascribed to Parthian localism, despite that neither the origins of Arsakes or the Aparna, nor the area and operation of Arsakid rule can be called local in the limited, spatialized sense of the word.90 This case draws out prevalent methodological commitment to ethno-cultural groupism: when scholars refer to ‘local influence’ or ‘localism’, they often imply categorical non-Greek things rather than entangled material remains in context. Permeating research methodologies, the essential problem is therefore a conceptual one that lies with the premise of localism as static, autochthonous, and bounded in geographical, ethnic, and cultural uniformity. The rhetoric of Hellenism positions localism as innately alien to Greekness, through which Philhellenism – by virtue of its association with localism – is articulated as inherently different from, and therefore only reactionary to Hellenism that is enacted by ethnic Greeks, regardless of the possibility that similar mechanisms and dynamics may have been at hand. How could a translocal approach help to overcome Philhellenism’s paradox and paradigm of Hellenism-as89 90

As interpreted by e. g. Invernizzi 2011a, 191–193. Arsakid rule stretched far beyond Parthyene. Moreover, combined with the obscure evidence about the origins of Arsaces (as leader of the Aparna), it is difficult to designate the Arsakids as ‘local’, even within Parthyene. In Strabo’s account (11.9.2), Arsakes was a Scythian while the Aparna were a tribe of a nomadic confederation called the Daha. Confusion already existed in antiquity; on the inability of Greek and Latin authors to pinpoint the origins of Arsakes and his people, see Fowler 2005, 130–133.

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exogenous-localism? Context, again, is key here. Locating the site in its Eurasian interconnected context of the second century BCE, the eclectic cultural configuration of Nisa’s art and architecture is best understood as the outcome of a series of translocal (trans-scalar) choices, desires, and demands, which engaged in a timely fashion with a globalizing repertoire of deterritorialized cultural elements available to the Arsakids. Following current consensus that Nisa was the locus of dynastic celebration rather than an urban settlement, we can assume that the transregional importance of the citadel had a major impact on the choice of, and awareness about the specific use of cultural elements in its art and architecture, and the associations with the wider Eurasian world that they evoked. Thus, at Nisa, the use of Greek, Iranian, and Central Asian cultural elements was probably not as routinely and habitually as we may imagine at the city of Ai Khanum. Yet, in Nisa’s case too, rather than focusing on the degree of Hellenization or on the geographical provenance of culture – which is often causally paired to (representations of) ethnic groups – cultural elements and their use should be approached from a social contextual perspective to assess the possibilities of meaning(s) they may have evoked on local, regional, and transregional scales. Accordingly, the social scenarios that the material culture at Nisa evoked were mostly stately in nature and related to activities that celebrated the Arsakid dynasty. Although the extant evidence does not allow similar analytical distinctions of social spheres of activity as at Ai Khanum, nor definite statements about experiences by numerous actors ‘on the ground’, it does permit tentative readings about the practices taking place in the citadel. According to leading interpretations of the Italian excavators, these practices may range from lavish banquets (early phase of the Square House); various audiences with the king or representative court members and attendant reception rituals (Square Hall; Red Building); grand ceremonies held in the open air (two courtyards of the Central Complex and the North-Eastern Building), possibly including acts of homage and loyalty by subjects through gift-giving (the results of which were perhaps later stored in the Square House); and a series of ritual acts of commemorative – and thus, self-stylizing – nature that accompanied a possible ruler cult (Round Hall; Red Building), such as perhaps the consecration of cultic statues (Round Hall), affective cantations, and special offerings (niches in some inner walls of the Red Building). Ceremonial in nature, these activities were embedded in overlapping sacral, dynastic, and political spheres of activity, involving a translocal range of actors who, through their participation and adherence to the rules of engagement, contributed to the creation, celebration, and empowerment of Arsakid royal ideology which resonated throughout the Arsakid empire. Apart from ceremonial activities, Nisa’s south-western section (the South-Western Building and Eastern Building) and northern section (the Square House and adjacent khumkhana) afforded more functional practices related to the storage, preparation, distribution, and administration of produce. These practices ranged from the storage of wine, oil, flour, and other produce in large ceramic storage jars (khums); the particular arrangement of these vessels, buried at varying lengths into the floor or placed on bases

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of clay or brick; the careful accounting and subsequent ‘labelling’ of the khum contents on sherds; the recycling and reuse of storage jars; and distinct sealing practices.91 Recent research by the Turin mission on the glyptic art and function of the clay seals indicate that sealing practices were not uniform across Nisa but distinct in their specific context within the fortress: while those in the north (in the Square House) seemed to have been more functionally diverse, sealing doors and various types of stored objects, those in the south (in the South-Western Building) largely pertained to the sealing of khums.92 Though seals and seal practices are widely attested across West Asia and Central Asia (indicating distributed communities of practice), the particular administrative practices inferred from the sealings in the South-Western Building seemed to have been distinct to the region of Parthia, using semiotic codes to indicate the quality or quantity of the sealed stock in jars, bags, or other means of storage.93 The differential engagement with sealing practice by Nisa’s various functionaries working in the Square House and the South-Western Building not only reflects the diversity of the practice but also the translocal levels of their participation in constellations of the practice, as actors (practitioners) engaged with repertoires of practical knowledge beyond local regimes of competence. The numerous unearthed ostraca further inform about a number of other productive translocal activities that took place in the buildings in the southern section, such as the quality-control of wine or the coordination of collecting and distributing produce to and from various vineyards, estates, and temples, which similarly indicate the trans-scalar orientation and relationality of practices carried out at Nisa.94 The architectural settings as well as the material culture that accommodated the range of activities at Nisa needed to evoke or befit appropriate social spheres: royal grandeur in the case of the central complex and the Square House, and less lavish functionality in the case of the northern khumkhana and the southern sections of the citadel. Alongside ceremonial and administrational practices, therefore, material practices need to be taken into account as well: practices inherent in the architectural planning, decoration, and visual culture of the site. The proportional planimetric arrangement of Nisa’s buildings, with their repetitive quadrangular shapes, measurements, and layouts, their construction of unbaked brick, and the elongated peripheral corridors, engaged with building practices shared across Central Asia and eastern Iran. Similar practices are evident in the palatial, domestic, and religious structures at Ai Khanum and Takht-i Sangin. The architectural decoration of Nisa’s celebratory buildings additionally integrated Greek stylistic elements, such as Ionic fluting and egg-and-dart motifs, alongside techniques 91 92 93 94

Lippolis and Manassero 2015. Lippolis and Manassero 2015, 135. The only comparanda that Lippolis and Manassero (2015, 135–138) identified were the sealings from Shar-i Qumis in Iran (Hekatompylos) and those of the Bronze Age site Ulug Depe in Turkmenistan, both geographically nearby. See useful discussion in Manassero 2010; 2013; 2015. Bader 1996, passim; Lippolis and Manassero 2015, 130; further discussion in Hackl 2010; Taasob 2021.

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of coloured plaster to highlight divisions of mural space (Red Building Building; Square Hall) that have analogies to Iranian palatial architecture such as at Mansur Depe, Susa, and Persepolis.95 These elements  – Central Asian and Iranian traditions for ground planning and Greek and Iranian elements for architectural decorations – should not be seen as culturally representative or culturally distinct, but rather as deterritorialized elements with visual competence to induce fitting atmospheres, selected from a transregional repertoire of architectural practices and executed in a combination that was deemed apt. As for visual culture, detailed analyses by the excavators have shown that Greek artistic forms as well as Iranian cultural elements were part of globalizing repertoires of practical knowledge that enabled craftsmen and artisans – whatever their ethnic identification – to produce Nisa’s court art, as seen in the eclectic ivory rhytons and statues and statuettes from the Round Hall, Square Hall, and Square House. These craftsmen most probably worked on location, as indicated by the fragility of many of these art objects (in terms of their size and material of unbaked clay or ivory) as well as the presence of plaster casts in some rooms of the South-Western Building. While scholarly mention and discussion of Nisa’s cultural character have focused on the ivory rhytons and the marble statues, the scenarios of various activities and material practices that we may imagine in and across the citadel, profoundly challenge the paradoxical paradigm of Philhellenism-as-exogenous-localism as a desirable framework to understand things Greek in the Nisean context. The ceremonial activities that took place at Nisa required a broad translocal range of practitioners, overseers, and audiences on location, formed from royal circles, nobility, elites, interregional ambassadors, but also construction workers and other translocal actors. Accordingly, not only the nature of such activities can be seen as inherently translocal, but also the use of cultural elements in those contexts. Rather than ethno-political signifiers, Greek elements in Nisa’s architectural decoration and its court art seem to have been considered most appropriate to evoke the social atmospheres of the contexts in which they were used: royal feasting, ritual commemoration, sacral performance, and dynastic celebration. The use of Iranian and Central Asian elements in those same contexts, even within the same objects (ivory rhytons; clay statues; architecture), suggest that Greek elements were embedded in an available repertoire of material ways to culturally express power and prestige, dynastic glory, sacrality, or economic functionality in the Arsakid citadel. That the Arsakid kings carefully invested in Nisa to emplace Parthia on the transimperial map of Eurasia, further demonstrates that the Arsakid imperial heartland was not solely centred on Babylonia (as the written sources have us believe), but that especially eastern Iran carried profound dynastic significance through its imperial memory in the Arsakid topography of power, perhaps even of comparable stature as Persis for the Achaemenids and the Sasanians.96 95 96

Lippolis 2014, 225. According to Lippolis 2011b, 222–224, such usage of colour may have marked heightened significance of the space, accommodating a sacred aura. For the transformation of Iranian topographies of power, see Canepa 2013; 2018a, esp. 68–77.

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Thus, rather than merely reflecting political opportunism to rally Greek support or passive receptiveness to Greeks in their newly acquired Mesopotamian part of the empire, the cultural eclecticism at Nisa is better understood as Eurasian localism, within the context of transregional connectivity and as a conscious effort of alignment by the Arsakid kings to proclaim their newly-won social-dynastic position on the wider Eurasian stage. Comparable material practices across Eurasia in the second century BCE, support the idea of a globalizing repertoire of deterritorialized cultural elements which were recognized, if not shared by those the Arsakids considered (and aspired to be) their peers: their Baktrian neighbours in Central Asia, the Ptolemaic and Seleukid kings in Egypt and West Asia, the Roman Republic in the Mediterranean, and Iranian noblemen at home and elsewhere. With a devotion to emplace eastern Iran on the imperial scope, Arsakid kings recognized and acted upon the need to engage with the repertoire of power, language, imagery, and symbolism used by rulers across Eurasia, in order to appeal and align themselves to them and so “claim membership of the (wider) Hellenistic world and the circle of Hellenistic kings.” – though one may replace ‘Hellenistic’ with ‘Eurasian’.97 The perimeters for ‘doing Greek’ in the context of Nisa were, therefore, not defined by ethnic Greeks or by a desire to become Greek, but through translocally constructed dynastic identification, with various audiences on local, regional, and transregional levels in mind. The Hellenism as enacted by Arsakid kings compared with the Hellenism analysed at Ai Khanum, allows to assert productively that cultural expressions of what modern scholars recognize as ‘Greekness’ were more likely to be embedded in social, rather than ethnic relationships and contexts. 9.2.3 A translocal view on Takht-i Sangin and Hellenism A translocal approach is productive to rethink and reinterpret Hellenism at large urban sites such as at Ai Khanum and Nisa. How would a translocal approach to a smaller case study such as a single sanctuary, the Oxus temple at Takht-i Sangin, impact interpretive analysis? Chapters 4 explained how the main interpreters of the site have described and explained the Oxus Temple – both the edifice and the attendant cultural practices – in distinct terms of religious syncretism, related to a multicultural community as the sanctuary’s constituency. Chapter 8 further discussed that the term syncretism has been used as an easy descriptor that either veils or returns to analytical practices of determining which element of an object, building, or practice is Greek (or ‘Greek-influenced’) and which component is not, thus reproducing essentialist and dichotomous categories of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ types.

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Versluys 2017a, 230, see also 229–232. Further instructive discussion in Fowler 2005, 151–155; Dąbrowa 2011b; Messina 2014b, 193; Canepa 2018, 68–77.

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By contrast, a translocal approach commences from the premise that localism is inherently translocal, integrating dynamic, diachronic, and trans-scalar qualities to the conceptualization of the local. The notion of communities of practice provides an instructive way to dismantle Hellenism as East-Western syncretism, by shedding light on translocalism through different coexisting kinds of communities that provide membership roles and modes of belonging which can transcend physical space, stretching across local, regional, and transregional scales. Thinking in communities of practice urges a relational rather than a spatial approach to material culture perceived as culturally inbetween, as well as the people and communities that produced them. Key to this perspective is the resetting of primordialist assumptions of a ‘community’ not as a fixed collective group innately bound by primordial origins, but as a dynamic social collectivity formed by networked practices that are not geographically, ethnically, or culturally constrained. Bringing such ways of doing to the centre of interpretation, the attention shifts from singular and rooted community identities with apparent Eastern or Western ethno-cultural origins (Greeks, Baktrians, Iranians), to a range of diverse and overlapping communities of practice involved in a single building. Converging communities of practice Processes of complex connectivity stretch social relations and proliferate possibilities of identification, material activities – and thus also new kinds of communities based on practice. Communities of practice take various forms and sizes while members (practitioners) are often variously involved in several practice communities at once. Multiple communities of practices can converge on the same location and diachronically operate within the same building or suite of objects. This means that the material, visual, and social properties of a given building constitute a relational constellation of various converging communities of practice whose members and practices variously embodied and embody that building throughout time. More concretely, consideration of the Oxus sanctuary should not only focus on the cultural nature of the building and the relation to its apparent multicultural religious constituency (Greeks, Baktrians, Iranians, Scythians or Saka), but should also include other kinds of relationality that operated here. Various communities of practice (Fig. 9.1) involving the workmanship, craftmanship, and physical production of the material culture at Takht-i Sangin often remain absent from interpretive assessments: the commissioners, architects, and skilled workers that were active in the planning, construction, and maintenance of the sanctuary, as well as the craftsmen and artisans of the numerous votive gifts in the temple, accumulated over time. Many of these likely worked on commission and their level of skilled practice was probably more important than their ethnic or cultural background. Further communities of practice that constituted the material culture of the Oxus sanctuary were those related to the users and consumers of the material: gift-givers who dedicated their votive gifts (both frequent worshippers and traveling passers-by’s), priests and cultic personnel who accepted and

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stored the dedications on behalf of the deity (or deities), and practitioners performing specific cultic rites. Individual practitioners may have acted out multiple roles across the range of such consumer communities: priests and cultic personnel accepting dedications may also have been concerned with the material and immaterial ways in which cultic rites and routines were executed, for instance those related to fire rituals in the side chambers and ash depositions in the central hall, or those related to the recycling of votives in the bronze casting workshop on the courtyard of the temple. At the same time, craftsmen and artisans of votive objects may not have been identical to those offering it. We do not know whether Atrosokes himself inscribed the dedication to the Oxus on the votive altar, whether an educated scribe was responsible for engraving the text, or whether Atrosokes commissioned an artistic vendor to craft the inscribed votive altar altogether.

Fig. 9.1. Scheme of possible overlap of practitioners in converging communities of practice

The loose distinction between 1) practitioners engaged with the physical construction and maintenance of the Oxus Temple as well as those involved in the production and craftsmanship of votive objects, and 2) practitioners engaged with ‘consuming’ and performing the cultic offerings, provides insights on the multiplicity of community relations and modes of social belonging that operated or were embedded in the spaces and material culture of the sanctuary. However, these various ‘producer communities’

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and ‘consumer communities’ should not be considered as static groups of people immovable in their particular way of doing; there could be significant overlap as well as mutual dependencies (Fig. 9.1). Artisans who modelled and crafted the votive objects may also have been the ones actually dedicating those objects (Atrosokes may well have been literate), while those practitioners who devoted gifts to the temple deity (or deities) probably included construction workers, too. Iromois, son of Nemiskou, whose inscription on the rim of the large clay mould in the bronze-casting workshop indicated that he dedicated a cauldron of seven talents to the Oxus, may not only have been the gifting benefactor, but could also have been involved in practices of bronze casting himself. In another possible scenario, artisans (local or foreign) sold their crafted items to local customers or foreign ones traveling to the Oxus Temple, who then dedicated the object as a votive gift, with or without mediation by priests or other cultic personnel. The variety of votive objects in the storage corridors, combined with the fact that a bronze-casting workshop later supplemented the setting of the sanctuary in the second century BCE, further compels to think about the possible hands, eyes, experiences, and interpretations that mediated and intersected in processes of producing, using, and making meaning of material objects over time. Furthermore, the particular ways in which the sanctuary was constructed (with local mud brick and on a square and symmetrical ground plan) most likely involved the repertoires of knowledge and tools of the commissioning party, the person(s) to advise and decide on its architectural and practical design (who may all have been one and the same), the accumulated constituency of the building (its consuming ‘customers’), as well as the actual systematic skill, technical knowledge, and practical ways of doing of the workers who carried out the construction and maintenance of the sanctuary. Excavated remains do not necessarily reflect community salience: membership in a community of practice can be, but is not necessarily conscious or meaningfully activated. Greek-styled objects or objects labelled as ‘culturally hybrid’ do not naturally carry or reflect a Greek or hybrid identity of all the actors involved; other relationality embedded in the object may involve different social roles and degrees of social belonging in multiple communities of practice. The famous phrase “culture is ordinary” is relevant here: some practices are latent and internalized in such a way, that material change can mask continuity and vice versa.98 People engaging in cultic practices at Takht-i Sangin did so as dedicators, as cultic personnel, or as priests, and thus engendered divergent experiences and meanings for one’s identity. Individual dedicators, such as first-time travellers or passers-by, were probably habitual practitioners in the wider general practice of offering votives to a temple, but most likely learning beginners i. e. peripheral practitioners of the cult practices specific to the Oxus temple. As beginners, they probably were more aware about their way of doing in this particular sanctuary. 98

Raymond Williams 1958 emphasized lived, open-ended culture, as experienced in the minds and everyday life of people.

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Other, more learned dedicators, such as those inhabiting the settlement at Takht-i Sangin or the wider vicinity, may be more habitual practitioners and therefore less conscious about their actions. In relation to both learned practitioners who dedicated votives habitually and peripheral practitioners who dedicated gifts in the manner in which they mimicked others, were told to do so, or assumed would be the correct way, priests and cultic personnel at the sanctuary were more learned practitioners in the distinct rites of the Oxus Temple. Thus, the different possible actors whose agency is embedded yet veiled in the material culture can assumed to have been variously skilled in the communities of practices that converged at the sanctuary, which means that the material remains that we assess also carry diverse degrees of identity awareness (and thus identity significance) of the numerous actors involved. Distributed communities of practice Members of a community of practice do not have to be physically proximate or spatially connected to one another, but they can also be geographically distributed. Shared ways of doing – i. e. knowledge of repertoires of tools to perform certain ways of doing – can result in visual or technical similarities across geographical space, as observed in archaeological remains. Juxtaposing the Oxus Temple with the Temple with Indented Niches at Ai Khanum, largely based on Francfort’s 2012 comparative research, may illuminate the Eurasian localisms of both temples in terms of the extent and complexity of potential distributed communities of practices that socially operated at both sites (Table 9.1). Table 9.1. Comparison of the Oxus Temple (OT) and the Temple with Indented Niches (NT) during the Hellenistic period (after Francfort 2012) Aspect Architecture

Similarities Set in a larger sanctuary Mud brick construction Thick walls Ground plan: antechamber, central chamber, side chambers

Ritual objects Small stone pedestals in the shape of column bases Large stone basin Flutes Drainage structures for water control

Differences Indented niches (NT) Chapels for additional worship in the wider sanctuary (NT) Corridors for storage (OT) Fire chambers (OT, later date) Fountain structure (OT, later date) Bronze-casting workshop (OT, later date) Libation vessels turned upside down (NT) Cultic shovels made of schist (NT) Votive pits (OT) Votive storage (OT) Votive recycling (OT) Bronze cauldrons (OT)

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Votive objects Schist vessels with inlaid decorations Ivory figurines Clay anthropomorphic sculptures Female visual representations (e. g. gilded ‘Kybele’ plate)

Cult statue fragments (NT) Objects with themes related to water and horses (OT) Weapons and arms (OT, later date)

The similarities in architectural ‘ways of doing’ of the Oxus Temple and the Niched Temple – their setting in a sanctuary, the use of mud bricks, their thick walls, and their ground plan – indicate that the involved architects and construction workers at Takht-i Sangin formed communities of practice with those at Ai Khanum. At the same time, these actors were also part of a wider constellation of related practices with peer practitioners elsewhere across Eurasia, such as at Dilbarjin in Baktria, Nisa in Parthia, or at Doura Europos in Syria, where religious structures displayed comparable architectural features as at Takht-i Sangin and Ai Khanum. Furthermore, depending on the perceived identity of the deity or deities, the Oxus Temple and the Niched Temple may also have shared a community of practice of worshippers of the same god(s), whose associations formed the cultural competence of material expressions in the form of ivory figurines, schist vessels, anthropomorphic sculptures, and female representations (whoever they signified), as well as the competence of using stone pedestals and water-related objects for cultic purposes, present at both sites. At the same time, the dissimilarities in size and architectural spaces, as well as in the suggested ritual practices – the vessels for libations in the case of the Niched Temple, and the bronze cauldrons for recycling votives in the courtyard of the Oxus Temple – may indicate different communities of consumer practice of dedicators and priests, who engaged in distinct cult practices suitable for the respective temple and deity. At the same time, other scenarios are possible too: the same deity may have been worshipped in different ways at each temple, while other deities may have been shared recipients of specific practices of worship. The spatial stretch of the material differences and similarities in material ‘ways of doing’ across Central Asia and beyond suggest that ‘consumer communities’ and ‘producer communities’ were not spatially constrained, but were formed by transregional structurations of local social life in Eurasia. This does not imply that the specific intersection of such consumer and producer practices necessarily shared the same meaning or significance as well. Shared ways of doing neither replicate shared ways of being nor shared significance of those practices in an identical manner. Practices that are known to have occurred in Greece, such as ritual washing practices at a large stone basin (perirrhanterion) at the entrance of a sanctuary or the recycling and storage of votives (on the principle of ouk ekphora) which scholars have identified as distinctly Greek, may have involved different significance, requirements, and different degrees of ethnic or cultural identity awareness of the practitioners. The consideration of distributed communities of practice and their divergent potentialities illuminates the pitfalls of common meth-

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ods that analyse whether a given feature of an object or practice should be defined as Eastern, Western, or hybrid. Ultimately, these analytical categories imbued with cultural significance by modern scholars were historically entangled and socially intersected by various constellations and communities of practice on the ground. Acknowledging the variety of potential communities of practices that converge on location as well as distribute across geographical space, not only severely undermines those sweeping interpretive labels of Hellenization and cultural hybridity that focus on discrete ethnic or cultural communities, but also provides a more layered narrative that integrates multiple and various actors involved within the sphere of activity of a single temple site. 9.2.4 A translocal view on Babylon, Seleukeia, and Hellenism We have seen that a translocal approach to the Oxus sanctuary at Takht-i Sangin requires envisioning different scenarios than at the urban city of Ai Khanum or the ceremonial centre at Nisa. Finally, then, what could a translocal approach offer to the Mesopotamian sites discussed in this book? Both Babylon and Seleukeia on the Tigris have enjoyed historiographic reputations in modern scholarship as strongholds of respectively Mesopotamian and Greek cultural traditions. This resulted, as analysed in Chapters 6 and 7, in the tendency to translate material evidence associated with Hellenism at Babylon and Seleukeia into particular historical narratives. These are shaped by (the survival of) literary sources and the traditional focus on such sources which align with disciplinary and historiographical interests in disparate in-groups associated with the ‘golden age’ of the city in question. In the case of Seleukeia, the Macedonian period of rule, Greek artefact elements or artefact types, and Greek and Macedonian people have been of greatest interest, not only because of the city’s historical context as a royal name-city of the new Macedonian ruler in Mesopotamia but also from a historiographical point of view, as its material culture has mostly been studied and published by scholars of Classics (including Classical archaeology). Conversely, in the case of Hellenistic Babylon, remains of the Neo-Babylonian period, Mesopotamian artefact types, Babylonian inhabitants, and the survival (continuity) of local traditions despite a rapidly changing world received much scholarly and analytical attention in view of the city’s deep antiquity and its central importance in Ancient Near Eastern Studies (including Assyriology). This juxtaposition is part and parcel of the main problem and attendant paradox of Hellenism: the methodological commitment to a dichotomy between localism and Hellenism. Such commitment became clear in scholarly debates by the main interpreters about whether Seleukeia should be considered as a Greek or a Babylonian city, and whether Hellenism was a superficial veneer or a distinct mark of Babylon’s decline. In line with rapid and productive recent scholarship of the past decade, this section illustrates how a translocal approach provides a way out of the Hellenism-localism dichotomy and a way into understanding situated translocal connect-

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edness, by refocusing on social relations and situations of eclectic cultural behaviour on the ground, rather than on rooted cultural origins and material traces that would represent distinct ethnic groups. Translocalism beyond continuity of traditions While the monumental material cultures from Babylon and Seleukeia have been filtered to suit almost opposite historiographical positions, emphasizing either Greek (Western) or Babylonian (Eastern) cultural identities of the cities and their inhabitants, increasing textual and archaeological evidence has come to light which demonstrate much room and possibility for multiple, diverse, and spatially distributed communities formed around artistic, cultural, and ritual practices that converged in both cities. There are two interrelated levels in which such diversity can be highlighted: the first pertains to the royal ideology of the kings of Babylonia, the second to the small objects used in a more diffuse manner by broader layers of society. The issue of continuity is most persistent in scholarly debates and research agendas on Hellenistic Mesopotamia. Scholarship on Hellenistic Babylon has long been dominated by the paradigm of continuity of local cultural forms and institutions which simultaneously portrayed the Seleukids as weak rulers whose geopolitical focus was on the regions and cities of the Syrian Tetrapolis and who merely adapted to existing local systems in the more eastern peripheries of their kingdom. As outlined in Chapter 2, the global turn of the 1990s saw important interpretive shifts in Hellenistic studies which not only remapped the Seleukid empire as a dynamic, multi-ethnic, and multicultural power network with several core regions, but also fundamentally reassessed the dynamics between Seleukid kings and their subjects. The importance of Babylonia as a significant ideological, cultural, and economic node in the imperial landscape of the Seleukids is now widely and commonly acknowledged, while the notion that the Seleukids were more ‘Eastern’ (i. e. Iranian) than previously thought gains increasing acceptance.99 Scholarship of the recent decade further invested the cognitive work to approach Seleukid rule and ideology as profoundly strategic, engaging, and above all interactive.100 Of relevant interest here is a notable object which has been subject to productive debate on the question to how culturally conservative ‘Babylonian localism’ actually was: the Antiochos Cylinder. Discovered in the (re)foundation layers of the Ezida temple at Borsippa – a major religious centre ritually interconnected to Babylon, its larger sister-settlement 17 km. southwest of it – the cylinder mentions that Antiochos 99

For the Seleukids as Iranian kings, see esp. Strootman 2011a; Canepa 2015b; 2017a; Plischke 2017; Strootman 2017; Canepa 2018; Strootman 2020. 100 For the active and profound restructuring of the imperial landscape by the Seleukids, see esp. Kosmin 2014b; Canepa 2018. Recent lucid overviews that embed the eastern imperial landscape of the Seleukid empire in similar dynamics across Eurasia in the Hellenistic period are provided by Ma 2013; von Reden 2020b.

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I Soter rebuilt Ezida, dedicated to Nabu, alongside brief notices on similar building efforts at Esagila at Babylon, dedicated to Marduk (the father of Nabu).101 The long practice history in Mesopotamia of burying a cylinder as a royal foundation document, combined with the inscription itself – a cuneiform text written in Akkadian language in apparent archaic format and formulae, dedicating three prayers to a Babylonian god – have been considered as evidence for the Babylonian attitude and cultural conformism of the Seleukid kings.102 Such interpretation of the Cylinder would extend to and support the continued historical importance of Esagila, Babylon’s main religious complex and key driver of the region’s economy, and thus underline the undisturbed survival of local Babylonian traditions despite the arrival of foreign rulers in the Hellenistic period. However, upon closer reading of the text, a number of scholars such as Kyle Erickson, Paul Kosmin, and Rolf Strootman have independently argued that the Antiochos Cylinder was not a product of the Seleukids’ passive conformation to local culture but that Antiochos I actively interacted with (and was possibly educated by) Babylonian temple scholars to anchor Seleukid kingship in Babylonian traditions and attract support of local elites.103 Specific elements in the inscription, such as the prominence of Nabu as the son of Marduk and the emphasis on Seleukid royal family relations, were integrated and moulded to make the text intelligible in multiple ways, accommodating both Seleukid rhetoric of power as well as Babylonian ones. Although it is not surprising that Nabu features so prominently in the text, considering the historical context of 101

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Borsippa as the city of Nabu was closely connected to Babylon, the city of Marduk (father of Nabu); this familial relation was also celebrated in the New Year festival at Esagila and the Akitu temple in Babylon. On Esagila, see Chapter 7, section 7.2. The cylinder is dated to 268 BCE. Conventional translation of the text is provided by Kuhrt and Sherwin-White 1991, 76–77; the first half of the inscription is relevant here: “Antiochus, the great king, the mighty/legitimate king, king of the world, king of Babylon, kind of lands, caretaker of Esagila and Ezida, first son of Seleucus, the king, the Macedonian, king of Babylon, am I. When I decided to build Esagila and Ezida, the bricks for Esagila and Ezida I moulded with my pure hands (using) fine quality oil in the land of Hatti and for the laying of the foundation of Esagila and Ezida I brought (them). In the month of Adder, on the twentieth day, year 43, the foundation of Ezida, the true temple, the house of Nabû which is in Borsippa I did lay. (O) Nabû, lofty son, wise one of the gods, the proud one, worthy of praise, most noble son of Marduk, offspring of Erua, the queen, who formed mankind, regard (me) joyfully and, at your lofty command which is unchanging, may the overthrow of the countries of my enemies, the achievement of my battle-wishes against my enemies, permanent victories, just kingship, a happy reign, years of joy, children in satiety, be (your) gift for the kingship of Antiochus and Seleucid, the king, his son, for ever. (…)” The last paragraph is further particularly innovative, integrating reference to the queen mother: “(O) Nabû, first son, when you enter Ezida, the true house, may favour for Antiochus, king of lands, (and) favour for Seleucus, the king, his son, (and) Stratonice, his consort, the queen, be in your mouth.” Kuhrt and Sherwin-White 1991, 78–81; Haubold 2013, 135–141; Kosmin 2013, 210; 2014a, 188–192; Stevens 2014, 77. The inscription integrated strategic intertextual references to Nebuchadnezzar II, which stylized Antiochos as a good and legitimate Babylonian king, modelled after Nebuchadnezzar II (Kosmin 2013, 210; 2014a, 188–92). Erickson 2011; Haubold 2013, 135–42; Kosmin 2013; Strootman 2013; Beaulieu 2014; Kosmin 2014a; Stevens 2014 – notably all published around the same time. See also recent discussion in Erickson 2019, 87–90; Stevens 2019, 220–225; Klinkott and Pfeiffer 2021, 246–261.

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Ezida (a sanctuary dedicated to Nabu), further textual, epigraphical, and numismatic sources strongly favour the theory highlighted in scholarship that the early Seleukids consciously selected and invested in Nabu because this deity could be understood and identified as Apollo – the divine patron and ancestor of the Seleukid dynasty.104 The dynastic identification with Nabu allowed Antiochos as son of Seleukos I to be associated with Nabu-Apollo as son of Marduk-Zeus, thus weaving imperial ideology into Babylonian religion. Importantly so, Kathryn Stevens further pointed out that the scribal god Nabu did not enjoy equal standing in competitive theologies across Babylonia but was particularly tied to the city of Borsippa.105 The syncretism with Nabu was therefore not random but a deliberate Seleukid investment in shaping religious discourse to co-opt a specific Borsippan audience of priests and other local powerbrokers.106 This discourse was, however, not limited to the locality of Borsippa but deeply entangled with matters at Babylon: the choice for Nabu was probably influenced by his prominent role in kingship rituals at the New Year festival at Babylon, while the consequences of the discourse similarly extended beyond Borsippa: Ezida, Esagila, and the Akitu festival were re-established, the stance of Marduk and Nabu in regional theologies reinforced, and the king’s rule in Babylonia legitimized through his patronage of and participation in Babylonian cult.107 Babylonian localism was therefore not culturally static but rather the product of dynamic networked interactions in the face of globalizing processes of increasing connectivity which allowed Nabu to evoke imperial legitimacy in translocal rhetorics of power. That ‘local’ elements were not culturally continuous but well capable of change, to be repurposed and recontextualized across scales, is further illustrated by the religious and palatial architecture at Ai Khanum, where Mesopotamian elements had been appropriated to suit religious and dynastic atmospheres that resonated translocally in Central Asian and Eurasian contexts.108 Scholarship on the Antiochos Cylinder similarly shows that immaterial local Babylonian elements in the discourse of Antiochos-Nabu-Apollo/Seleukos-Marduk-Zeus were not bound to singular meanings either but capable of dynamic change – which was not exclusively capacitated by im104 See esp. Kosmin 2014a, 182–184; but cf. Stevens 2014, 80; additional references in the previous footnote. An interpretatio graeca of Nabu in the form of Hermes would have made more sense than Apollo; Erickson 2011 was the first to elaborate on the connection between Apollo and Nabu in support of Seleukid dynastic ideology, with further recent assessment in Erickson 2019, 62–115. 105 Stevens 2014, 83. 106 Stevens 2014, 83–85; cf. broader historical discussion in Stevens 2019, 222–225. For detailed analysis on the rationale behind the equation of Nabu and Apollo (instead of Hermes), see Beaulieu 2014, 19–26; Erickson 2019, 87–90. 107 Strootman 2013, passim; Ristvet 2015, 206–208. Royal participation in local cult would be a cultural performance of the king as “the city’s most important citizen”, thus tying the king in the civic structure of Babylon (Strootman 2013, 78). Strootman’s wider argument calls attention to the “connectivity of the global and the local as a parallel to the connectivity of the imperial and the civic” (2013, 90). For relevant discussion of the Seleukid kings participating in the Akitu festival, see Erickson 2019, 83–84. 108 Chapter 3, section 3.2 and this chapter, section 9.2.1 above.

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perial will. The composition of the Cylinder served not solely local nor solely imperial theology, but can be considered as inherently translocal in its orientation, emerging from networked interactions and with ramifications on several connected scales: local (Borsippan), regional (Babylonian), and imperial (Seleukid). Rather than the result of active exogenous innovation or passive patronage of endogenous localism, the Cylinder is a most illustrative example of the translocal scope and nature of dynamic change and perceived continuity. Translocalism beyond hybridity Considerations of translocalism afford more nuanced understandings of ‘Mesopotamian traditions’ beyond the frame of stagnant Babylonian continuity. This has extended implications for acculturative understandings of Hellenism in the form of Greek culture, which was similarly not only due to foreign innovation and exogenous change. As at Ai Khanum, the monumental architecture at Seleukeia was constructed from local mud brick while notably the theatre complex in the most prominent quarter of Tell Umar had embedded a small structure identified as a Mesopotamian temple. Rather than within the interpretive frame of acculturative Hellenization, Seleukeia’s Greek appearance by virtue of its architecture is better understood as the convergence of various translocal communities of practice, whose diverse members engaged with repertoires of techniques of mud brick building but also in various performative and ritual practices that related to the social contexts that the buildings accommodated.109 Messina most recently proposed that those quintessentially Greek buildings and institutions at Seleukeia around Tell Umar – the theatre complex, the stoa, and the public archive building – were not as Greek as scholars ascribed them to be, but were rather examples of globalizing architecture that were Greek in appearance yet not (necessarily) Greek in meaning.110 These arose to the occasion through networked interactions and negotiations across spatial scales, with imperial (Seleukid), regional (Babylonian), and most importantly local (Seleukeian) significance, as illustrated by the small Mesopotamian temple and known designations of the megacity as the ‘polis of the Basileis’ and ‘the city of Sharru’ in written sources.111 Though fine details lack to disentangle these scales, those structures at Seleukeia (as at Babylon and Ai Khanum) which had been interpreted as firmly associated with the Greek identity of its settlers primarily functioned in their contextual social atmosphere of Tell Umar and the adjacent Archives Square, whose monumentality engaged with a globalizing architectural repertoire of deterritorialized

109 For the theatre as a space for performative and ritual practices to negotiate political and civic authority, see Ristvet 2014; 2015. 110 Messina 2021, 391–392; the nuancing of the apparent Greekness of Seleukeia is a central argument in several of his previous publications: Messina 2011; 2012b; 2012a; 2017. 111 Messina 2011, 165; 2021, 384. See further Chapter 6, section 6.4.

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elements to evoke civic distinction and imperial recognition across Eurasia in the Hellenistic period. It important here not to equate ‘Greek’ with ‘global’ and ‘non-Greek’ with ‘local’, thus reproducing the essentialist search for foreign sameness of Greek materiality across space, but to approach Greek elements too as inherently translocal in their orientation, with targeted significance beyond the locality while emplaced through the lived experience of people whose sense of belonging included more than only (and necessarily) ethnic identity roles.112 Shifting the focus from the dynastic and monumental to those lived experiences and practices of actors behind material culture, the second level which illustrates the translocal diversity in Hellenistic Babylonia is formed by the object class of the small anthropomorphic figurines. The meticulous work by Menegazzi formed the foundation for very recent studies on the production and consumption of these small-sized and broadly available objects, providing unique glimpses into broader strata of society.113 Both Babylon and Seleukeia were major centres of figurine production in the region and it is particularly in typological assessments of this object class that the idea of hybridity – new mixtures of Babylonian and Greek culture resulting from sustained contacts between foreign settlers and local inhabitants  – gained interpretive appeal. Though considered to reflect a predominantly Hellenistic style and iconography, the figurines at Seleukeia showed elements from both Mesopotamian and Western cultural traditions with previous histories of practice. In scholarly reports, ‘local’ or ‘Mesopotamian’ traditions refer to more stylized, frontal, flat, hieratic or rigid features of the figurines while labels of ‘Western’, ‘Greek’, or ‘Hellenistic’ traditions have been used to designate a naturalistic style, Greek iconography, and the use of the double mould as production technique.114 Accordingly, as discussed in Chapter 6, the figurines have been interpreted as Greek, Babylonian, or hybrid productions, depending on the representativeness of either typology in the overall figurine, which was frequently interpreted to underline oppositional identities of Greeks and Babylonians. However, despite the emphasis on cultural mixture, the notion of hybridity inadvertently reproduces essentialist containers of Greek and Babylonians cultures, as its typological features are often considered as metonymies for ontologically distinct ethnic groups with equally distinct cultural production, prior to the hybridized outcome.115 Moreover, diffusionist and acculturative vocabulary continues to be used to assert exogenous Greek elements (and implicitly ethnic Greek artists) as innovative, inspirational, and instructive to traditional (and implicitly unprogressive) local production, similar to interpretations of Philhellenism as discussed in the section above.

112 113 114 115

Further discussion in Hoo 2020. Foundational remains Menegazzi 2014a. Further references below. E. g. Menegazzi 2016b, 97; 2019, passim; see further Chapter 6, section 6.4. Chapter 2, section 2.2.

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It is important to acknowledge that the craftspeople and consumers of the figurines at Seleukeia and Babylon, as at Ai Khanum and Takht-i Sangin, probably did not make sharp typological distinctions between ‘Greek’ and ‘Babylonian’ when it came to these creative productions that they sold, used, and discarded in daily life, at least not along modern scales of cultural progressivism and conservatism. Instead, the immense quantity of figurines at Seleukeia, combined with the fact that the majority was unearthed in contexts of disposal, suggests that these objects were commodities with social value rather than fundamental representations of ethnicities. Current studies on the corpus of terracotta figurines have productively shown that none of the objects in their holistic combination of features could be assigned to an exclusively Greek or exclusively Babylonian category, but rather variously combined Hellenistic-Mediterranean and pre-Hellenistic Mesopotamian practices.116 Taking serious issue with the cultural linearity of monocultural typologies while highlighting ‘purposeful hybridities’ of the figurines at Seleukeia and Babylon, Langin-Hooper productively draws attention to the wide range of forms, styles, and motives that actors interacting with the figurines could select and engage with.117 Rather than representations of Greekness or Babylonianness, it appears that the particular form, postures, drapery, nudity, and imagery of the figurines allowed personal engagement, identification, experimentation, or interactive play with various social relations and social concerns through these tiny objects. The range of female, male, and intersexed figures, with bare breasts, holding their babies, reclining, riding horses, as well as children, dwarfed figures, grotesque body figures, and theatrical themes suggest possible connections to real community practices and concerns, such as motherhood, banqueting, and equestrianism, as well as also possible performative functions of the objects.118 Like the figurines, the actors themselves (the figurine users) could differ in age, gender, body, and sexuality which formed categorical references and preferences, affecting the diverse ways in which the miniatures provided significance in people’s lives through their interactivity. Langin-Hooper’s analysis emphasizes that the figurines, as miniature representations of diverse deities, body types, and personae, could further function to empower as models, play out fantasies, simulate real social situations, represent worship of deities, or serve ritual performances, all at once or at different stages of their use-life.119 Given that the figurines were unearthed in deposits, their previous social contexts can only be conjectured, though the fact that these depos116 117

118 119

See esp. Menegazzi 2014a; Langin-Hooper 2020. Langin-Hooper 2013a; 2013b; 2015; 2020; see also Menegazzi 2012; Lippolis and Menegazzi 2015; Menegazzi 2016b. Many of the figurines lacked articulated details which allowed their use and function to be shaped according to desires, expectations, and imaginations of the figurine users (Langin-Hooper 2011; 2020, 14–24). Figurines of reclining women may have been particularly connected to funerary contexts, as argued by Menegazzi 2016b, though multiple readings that include associations with banqueting practices may have been possible too (Langin-Hooper 2020, 242–246). Langin-Hooper 2011; 2020, passim.

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its with similar types of figurines were discovered across religious, domestic, and civic contexts hints at the diversity of contextual meanings that figurines could carry. Understanding a nude female figurine as a representation of Aphrodite and as straightforward indication of Greek worship, connected to a person’s Greek ethnicity, thus severely reduces the broader range of possible meanings and desired uses of these small objects. Studies on the figurines show that the selection and combination of forms, styles, motifs, and iconographies were not tied or primarily driven by ethnic concerns, but were affected by very personal choices, practices, and identifications with bodies, identities, sexualities, and other lived social activities that the figurines were moulded into – in a figurative and a literal sense. Culturally, these forms, styles, and motifs were neither entirely foreign or local, but products of translocal negotiation. As members of communities of producer and consumer practices, artisans and figurine users engaged with globalizing elements from a broader repertoire of figurine practices (‘ways of doing’) shared not only within Babylonia but also across wider Eurasia, which were reembedded in local settings with diverse and sometimes very individual purposes. As in the case of the Antiochos Cylinder, the hybridity of figurines demonstrates that what we deem as ‘Greek’ (non-local) or ‘Babylonian’ (local) was not singular, culturally continuous, or even cultural at all, but that such cultural features could be socially negotiated and combined in various translocal ways, appealing to possibly more relevant identity roles such as age, gender, status, and sexuality, beyond discourses of ethnic Otherness.

10 Conclusion Hellenism engenders a powerful series of connotations that entangle with modern expectations and explanations of Greek culture and cultural inbetweenness across central Eurasia, particularly from the third to the first centuries BCE. This book probed and unfolded perceptions of Hellenism, focusing on the prominent sites of Ai Khanum (Afghanistan), Takht-i Sangin (Tadzhikistan), Old Nisa (Turkmenistan), Seleukeia on the Tigris (Iraq), and Babylon (Iraq). We have seen how understandings of cultural inbetweenness and cultural change through the notion of Hellenism are not consistent, but entail diverse ideas about their nature and dynamics. With varying thresholds, Hellenism has served interpretive emphasis on Greek ethnicity in the context of Ai Khanum, religious syncretism at the Oxus Temple, Parthian Philhellenism in the case of Nisa, cultural hybridity at Seleukeia, and superficial or contained Greek culture in the context of Babylon. Chapter 8 revealed remarkable contrasts and surprising similarities between these articulations of Hellenism in a series of interrelated paradoxes of perceptions: (1) Hellenism is strictly ethnic and distinctly non-ethnic; Hellenism is associated with ethnic Greek beings (Ai Khanum, Seleukeia), yet also distinctly entails non-ethnic Greek doings (Takht-i Sangin, Nisa, Babylon). (2) Hellenism does not require Greek religion (Ai Khanum, Babylon), yet it is also distinctly expressed through Greek religion (Takht-i Sangin, Nisa). (3) Hellenism is both connected to, and disconnected from Philhellenism; Philhellenism entails a distinct outsider’s position in relation to original Greek culture, while these outsiders are also considered to be distinctly original through their relation to Greek culture (Nisa). (4) Hellenism is culturally hybrid, yet clearly culturally divisible in Greek and local categories (Seleukeia, Takht-i Sangin). (5) Hellenism represents non-local change (Babylon), as well as a continuity of local Greekness (Ai Khanum, Seleukeia).

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Two important conclusions arise from the comparative exercise. Firstly, scholarly understandings of Hellenism in Western Asia and Central Asia differentially cross and merge, which severely undermines the geographical rubrics of ‘Eastern Hellenism’ and ‘Western Hellenism’. Secondly, Hellenism is not tied to cultural metageography but is rather contingent on a structural philosophical stance on the relationship between Hellenism and localism. Common to the paradoxes of Hellenism, I argued, are the simultaneous division and entanglement between localism and non-localism, intuitively associated with Greeks and non-Greeks as sectarian communities with distinct identities. In paradox (1), ethnic Greeks are juxtaposed to local natives who could self-hellenize; paradox (2) pertains to the rationalization of the absence/presence of Greek religion as evidence for Greeks not needing their own religious structures on the one hand, and Greeks evidently keeping to their religion on the other; paradox (3) concerns the contrast between original i. e. authentic Hellenism by non-local Greeks and original i. e. creative Philhellenism by local Parthians; paradox (4) applies to the contradictory foundations of hybridity, implying that cultures of non-local Greeks and cultures of local natives existed in isolation before mixing; and paradox (5) connects Hellenism with Greeks causing non-local change contrary to local continuity, while presenting these Greeks as essentially unchanged and continuous in their Aegean localism. These paradoxes still haunt current thinking about Hellenism and cultural inbetweenness. To move beyond the local/non-local conundrum, I proposed to approach apparent Hellenism and localism as both inherently translocal. Chapter 9 argued that globalization can provide valuable ways to challenge persistent essentialist methods of tracing continuous similarities of either Hellenism or localism. Integrating complex connectivity, deterritorialization, glocalization, and translocalism in our theoretical and methodological premises not only profoundly unsettles conservative conceptions of culture and locality, but also helps to shift the units of analysis from spatially bound cultures to translocal situations, practices, and contexts. Taking connectivity and global-local embeddedness as point of departure, the translocal views explored in Chapter 9 reveal that the paradox of localism/non-localism is actually just that: an apparent but artificial contradiction in scholarly discourse. The review of Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, Old Nisa, Seleukeia, and Babylon as varieties of Eurasian localisms illuminates multiple social scenarios beyond Hellenization-as-acculturation as well as the range of possibilities to produce meaning and identity significance across global, regional, and local scales at once. Thinking about cultural eclecticism in social and relational terms not only highlights the networked practices behind the material remains that we label as Hellenism or localism, but also situates dynamic change in translocal relations and processes. A more inclusive approach, translocalism has potential to bring current debates in Classics and archaeology on Hellenism, globalization, and cultural transformation in Hellenistic Eurasia forward. Translocalism draws analytical attention to what transregional mobility and connectivity do to people’s experience, without externalizing and privileging global space and scale over locally embedded social practices. Rather than

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an explanation for cultural homogenization or a universal scheme to assimilate mixed material culture in an international macroframe, globalization and translocalism are thus useful as heuristic tools to study, think about, and understand material changes, transformations, and continuations as social reorganizations of increasing diversity in the face of intensifying interactions across global, regional, and local scales. This book made clear that when we rethink dichotomous and ethnicized understandings of ‘Greek’ and ‘local’ culture as one amongst other (perhaps simultaneous) possibilities of lived experience, a host of translocal practices, situations, communities, actors, and means of identifications come to light that merit further historical consideration. Ultimately, inbetweenness should inspire to explore the manifold, diverse, and intersecting stories of Eurasian localisms.

Abbreviations ABC AJA ASOR BCH BCHP BEFEO CRAI CRAST DAFA DAI DOG MDAFA SBAH Strab. YuTAE YuTAKE

Grayson 1975 American Journal of Archaeology American Society of Overseas Research (formerly American School of Oriental Research) Bulletin de correspondance hellénique Finkel et al. forthcoming Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino per il Medio Oriente e l’Asia Délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan Deutsches Archäologisches Institut Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft Mémoires de la délégation archéologique française en Afghanistan State Board of Antiquities and Heritage Strabo, Geography Yuzhno-Tadzhikskaya Arkheologicheskaya Ekspeditsiya Yuzhnaya Turkmenistanskaya Arkheologicheskaya Kompleksnaya Ekspeditsiya

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Index acculturation 43–45, 48–50, 53–54, 56, 60, 62, 68, 70, 149, 170, 238, 245–246, 250, 252, 267–268, 272 Achaemenid – empire/rule/kings 1n2, 32, 53–55, 74–75, 83n39, 127n1, 130, 155n3, 156n4, 177–178, 186, 188, 191, 199, 206, 248–249, 256 – culture/Persian style 60, 82n33, 91, 95, 109, 114, 117, 122, 124, 126, 136, 146, 166, 169, 173, 194 – period/dated layers 73n2, 74–75, 82n33, 96, 109n1, 110n5, 115n26, 146, 169, 178, 181, 185, 187–188, 193, 250 Aeschines – In Ctes. 3.172: 39 Afghanistan 20, 33–34, 69n132, 73, 100, 250, 271 – archaeology in 27–28, 73, 77–79, 208 see also Ai Khanum – heritage of 27, 79, 206 Afrasiab (Samarkand) 26–27 agency/actors 35, 44, 59, 61–62, 64, 125, 170, 175, 212, 214–215, 217, 219–221, 223, 228, 237–239, 241, 242n98, 244–245, 247–249, 251–263, 268–269, 273 agora 81n33, 101–102, 104, 158, 160–163, 167–168, 170, 184–185, 196, 198–200, 213 Ahura-Mazda 98 – Ai Khanum 34– 35, 73–109, 111, 114, 122– 126, 136, 146, 150, 162, 167, 201, 205– 208, 210– 215, 215–218, 221, 224, 225– 227, 244–251, 252, 254, 255, 257, 261, 262, 263, 266, 267, 269, 271– 272

– – – –

chronology 81–83 domestic architecture 94–95 gymnasium 86–87 interpretations of Greek identity 100–108, 211–212, 215–218, 228 – mausolea 88–91 – palatial complex 91–93 – religion 98–100 – religious architecture 95–98 – theatre 84–86 Akitu festival/temple 184, 190, 165n137, 265n137, 266 Alexander the Great 1, 18, 20, 26, 29, 31–32, 34, 40, 41, 43–48, 52, 54, 73, 74–75, 77–78, 81, 102, 105, 151, 155, 171, 178, 182, 184–190, 192, 196, 200, 207, 209, 216–217 Alexandreia – in Central Asia 1, 73 (on the Oxus), 74n3, 75 (Eskhate), 111 (Oxeiane) – in Egypt 156, 176n1 Ammianus Marcellinus – 23.6.2: 127n2 Anahita 99, 124 Antiocheia – in Margiana (Merv) 130 – on the Orontes 156 Antiochos I (Soter) 31n61, 75, 81, 155, 190n75, 191, 264–266, 270 – Cylinder 190, 264–267, 270 see also Borsippa – rule over Upper Satrapies 53, 74–75 Antiochos II (Theos) 190n75

330

Index

Antiochos III (Megas) 74n5, 75n8, 82, 109, 162, 189, 191 – treaty with Euthydemos see Euthydemos Antiochos IV (Epiphanes) 192, 198n115 Antipater (of Sidon/Thessaloniki) – Anth. Pal. 9.58: 176n1 apadana (‘Perserbau’) 185, 187 Apama 75 Apollo 90, 166, 191, 193, 196, 218, 225, 266 Appadurai, Arjun 227–228, 236–237, 241 Appian – Syr. 58: 155n2, 178n9 Aramaic 89, 93, 100, 142, 195–196, 200 architectural decoration – capitals, Doric/Ionic/Corinthian 78, 93, 100, 114, 191, 122, 124, 145, 249 – column bases, torus-shaped (‘Persepolitan’) 99, 100, 112, 114, 122, 136, 137n43, 145, 249 – metopes, Doric 145 – niches 89, 96–98, 104, 139, 165, 187, 254, 261 archives 102, 157–167, 169–172, 189, 213, 267 Aristotle 39, 90n70 – Soph. el. 182a.14: 39n2 Arrian – Anab. 3.16.4–5: 188n57, 186n48, 189n67, 199n57 – Anab. 3.30.5: 75n6 – Anab. 7.12.2: 186n48 Arsakes I 127, 130, 253 Arsakid – culture/style/Parthian art 30, 117, 129–130, 146, 149–154, 161, 172, 212–213, 220–221, 271 – empire/rule/kings 30, 65, 76, 117, 127–133, 135–142, 144–154, 156, 168, 178, 182, 184, 189–191, 194, 206–207, 212–213, 219–221, 252–254, 257 – period/dated layers 19, 131, 132n24, 136, 138n48, 142, 156–157, 159–163, 166, 169, 181, 185–190, 192–196, 216 Artemis 97, 176n1, 193, 250

Aryan race theory 25–26, 60n96 Asia Minor 20, 54, 74n4, 114, 158, 174, 181, 200 ASOR 157, 208 atashgah see Takht-i Sangin, Zoroastrianism Atrosokes 119, 212 Babylon 18, 35, 85, 147, 155–156, 160, 174, 176–201, 205–208, 211, 213–215, 218–219, 224–228, 263–270, 271–272 – chronology 177–178, 185 – civic institutions 192, 194–196, 198–199 – domestic architecture 193–194 – hanging gardens 176–177 – interpretations of local traditions 199–201, 214, 224–226, 228 – palaces 185–187 – palaistra 192–193 – religious structures 187–191 see also Esagila, Etemenanki – temple institutions 189–190, 194–196, 198–199 – theatre 85, 86n49, 191–192 – walls 182 Babylonia 54n75, 69, 97, 128, 155, 205, 250, 256, 268 Babylonian – culture/style 62, 88, 124, 157, 161, 166–172, 223, 228, 247, 270 – New Year Festival see Akitu festival/temple Babylonian Astronomical Diaries – Sachs-Hunger 1988 261C rev. 12‘: 187n51 – Sachs-Hunger 1988 273B rev. 34‘–36‘: 178n9 – Sachs-Hunger 1988 328 rev. 26‘: 187n51 – Sachs-Hunger 1988 330 rev. 4‘–8‘: 189n63 – Sachs-Hunger 1989 168 A rev. 13‘: 195n102 – Sachs-Hunger 1989 187 A rev. 4‘–18‘: 189n63 – Sachs-Hunger 1989 187 A rev. 10‘: 190n71 – Sachs-Hunger 1989 187 A rev. 12: 187n51 – Sachs-Hunger 1989 204C rev. 15‘: 187n51 – Sachs-Hunger 1989 237 obv. 13‘: 187n51 – Sachs-Hunger 1996 77B rev. 16‘: 190n73

Index

– – – – –

Sachs-Hunger 1996 87C rev. 30‘: 192n84 Sachs-Hunger 1996 118A rev. A19‘: 192n84 Sachs-Hunger 1996 124B rev. 17‘: 192n84 Sachs-Hunger 1996 132D2 rev. 15‘: 192n84 Sachs-Hunger 1996 133B rev. 22‘–24‘: 189n63 – Sachs-Hunger 1996 140A rev. 5‘–6‘: 192n84 – Sachs-Hunger 1996 144 rev. 17‘18‘: 189n63 – Sachs-Hunger 1996 198B rev. 13‘: 190n73 Babylonian Chronicles – ABC 8 obv 11: 187n51 – ABC 9 obv. 8: 187n49 – ABC 10 obv. 20: 155n3, 187n51 – ABC 10 rev. 7: 187n51, 187n51 – ABC 10 rev. 40: 155n3 – ABC 11 rev. 7–9: 156n5 – ABC 13B: 190n71 – BCHP 1 obv. 11: 187n51 – BCHP 3 obv. i. 39.20‘, rev. iv. 25‘: 155n3 – BCHP 5 rev. 7‘–9‘: 156n5 – BCHP 12: 190n71 – BCHP 18 rev. B3‘: 195n104 Babylonians 167, 172–173, 175, 213, 224, 226 Badian, Ernst 46–47 Baktra (Balkh) 26, 73n2, 78, 82, 225 Baktria 17, 30–35, 44n31, 45n36, 53, 73–77, 79, 80, 83, 94, 96–98, 102, 104, 107–109, 111, 117, 119, 121, 125, 130, 150, 158, 181, 205–207, 209, 213–214, 251, 262 see also Graeco-Baktrian – land of a thousand cities 73, 44n31 Baktrian – architecture 94, 97, 100–101, 111, 124, 211 see also Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin – mirage 78, 225 see also Foucher – Revolt: 30 Baktrians 88n62, 106–108, 120–124, 150, 211, 258, 262 banqueting/feasting 141–142, 145, 148, 254, 256, 259 barbarians/barbarism 17, 18, 25, 31, 39, 42–45, 50–51, 62, 105, 108, 129, 146, 149, 151, 168,

331

200, 207, 220, 268–269 see also civilizing narrative Barth, Fredrik, 106–107, 211 basileia 160 Battle of Ipsos 34, 155n2 Bel see Marduk Bernard, Paul 78, 88, 102–105, 107, 123, 150–152, 210–211, 225 Bessos 17n2, 74 Bevan, Edwyn, 42–45, 214 Bhabha, Homi K. 58–60, 63, 67, 214 Biblical sources – Acts 6.1: 39n7 – 2 Macc. 4.9–4.13: 68n131 – 2 Macc. 4.13: 39 – Rev. 17.5: 176 bilingualism 89, 109, 123, 189 Boiy, Tom 200–201 Borsippa 190, 264, 265n137, 266–267 – Cylinder see Antiochus Cylinder Briant, Pièrre 53–55 bricolage 61, 62n99 British empire/imperialism 23–27, 31–32, 42–44, 51, 53n68, 58n88, 77, 105 see also colonialism British Museum 26n38, 109n4, 179n12, 190n69, 206 brotherhood of mankind 18, 45 Brubaker, Rogers 106, 247n111 bullae 165 see also sealings Canepa, Matthew 69, 124–125 Cassius Dio – 40.16: 156n10 – 68.30.1: 178n9 Central Asia, centrality of 21–26 civic culture/institutions 65–66, 69, 107, 148, 161–163, 165, 167, 171, 194–196, 198, 213, 215, 247–248, 266n143, 267n145, 268, 270 civilizing narrative 18, 23–25, 29–31, 41–46, 49–40, 49–53, 60, 77, 105, 149, 188, 200,

332

Index

209, 213–214, 226, 253, 268–269 see also barbarians code-switching 68–69, 246 coins 73n1, 74n3, 75n9, 76, 77n15, 78n22, 81n33, 82n34, 85, 89, 93, 97, 99, 105, 116, 120, 136, 138, 146–148, 155, 162n40, 182, 190, 219, 235, 244, 248 colonialism 23, 25, 26, 28n44, 31–33, 42–45, 47–49, 51–59, 61–62, 65, 67–68, 70, 77, 90, 102–103, 105–108, 125, 171, 198, 200, 207, 209, 211, 214–215, 231 communities of practice 241–246, 255, 258–263, 267 connectivity – of regions 53n71, 74, 81, 107, 111, 157–158, 181, 230 – theory/approach 60, 63, 65–67, 230, 232–246, 248, 250–252, 254, 257–258, 263–264, 266–267, 272 see also globalization continuity – between past and present 28, 43 – of Greek culture and traditions 43, 105, 125, 148, 162, 217–218, 225–226, 253, 272 – of local cultures and traditions 51–56, 62, 64, 93, 168–170, 178n9, 181–182, 186–187, 190, 193, 196, 198, 200–201, 213–214, 219, 224–226, 231, 238, 240–241, 260, 263–267, 270–272 see also localism Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum – 2 (1) 77: 141n63 – 2 (1) 95: 118n44, 122n63 – 2 (1) 96: 120n52, 122n63 – 2 (1) 96bis: 121n58, 122n63 – 2 (1) 97a, 97b: 90n67 – 2 (1) 98b: 86n51 – 2 (1) 99–109: 93n80 – 2 (1) 101–102: 93n82 – 2 (1) 117: 82n34 – 2 (1) 117–120: 93n80 – 2 (1) 131: 93n84 – 2 (1) 132: 85n47, 93n84

– 2 (1) 149: 93n80 – 2 (2) 478: 133n28 – 2 (2) 681, 1693: 128n5 – 2 (2) 2663, 2673: 133n25 corridors, peripheral 86–87, 91, 93–94, 100, 112–114, 116–118, 120, 122, 124, 136, 138–139, 145, 186, 249–250, 255, 260–261 see also Ai Khanum, Nisa, Takht-i Sangin CRAST 129, 131, 157, 180, 208, 209, 220 creolization 61 cultic platforms 84, 95–97, 250 cultural biography 237n73 cultural fusion 20, 40–43, 46m38, 56–57, 59, 61n99, 104, 214, 228 see also hybridity cultural scenario see social scenario Curtius Rufus, Quintus – 5.1.29: 197n108 – 5.1.31–35 – 7.5.36–43: 75n6 Cyrus the Great 74, 177, 179n12 DAFA 27, 77–79, 84, 93–94, 102–103, 208–210, 225 see also Bernard, Schlumberger DAI 110, 180, 208, 210 see also Lindström Dalverzin Tepe 209, 250 Darius I 181, 186n48, 187 Darius III 1, 40n12, 74 Delphi, maxims from 89–91, 100, 103, 105, 107, 211, 245 Demetrios II (Nikator) of Syria 147, 156n7, 164 Demetrios of Baktria 31n61, 75, 76n9 deterritorialization 236–237, 240, 243–245, 248–251, 254, 256–257, 272 see also Appadurai Dilbarjin 73n2, 97, 250, 262 Dio Chrysostom – Or. 48.9: 101–102 Diodoros of Sicily 105, 184, 188 – 2.9.9: 178n9 – 2.10: 176 – 17.83.9: 75n6

Index

– 17.112.3: 186n48, 188n57 – 17.115: 192n81 – 18.7: 105 – 34.21: 184n38 Diodotids 75, 76n9, 85, 97 DOG 179, 189, 196, 208 see also Koldewey Doura Europos 35, 97, 129, 150, 250, 262 Droysen, Johann Gustav 40–43, 56, 200, 214 Druzhinina, Angelina 110, 119, 210–212, 214 Eddy, Samuel 48–49, 214 Egypt 28, 40, 44, 48, 50, 68n53, 60n96, 69, 256, 195n106, 257 emic/etic 19–20, 64, 146, 217, 238, 247, 264 elites 25, 30, 48–49, 55, 69–70, 102, 108, 129, 147–148, 170–171, 215, 248, 252, 256, 265 Esagila 190, 193–194, 196, 199, 265–266 essentialism 21, 60, 61n99, 62–63, 222, 238, 252, 257, 268, 272 Etemenanki 179, 184, 185, 188, 191, 193–194, 196 ethnic groups 45, 55–56, 61n99, 62, 64, 126, 172–175, 195, 198–199, 221, 222, 223, 247, 249, 251–254, 257–258, 262–264 ethnicity see identity Eukratideia 73, 74n3 Eukratides 74n3, 75, 76n9, 82, 84, 94, 99, 107 Euphrates river 157, 159, 181–182, 184, 197 Eurasia, imperial visions of 22–27, 77 Eurocentrism 23, 47, 49n54, 54, 129, 149, 169n74, 223, 230n41 Euthydemos 31, 74n4, 75, 76n9 – treaty with Antiochos III 74n5, 82, 109 Ezida see Borsippa Fan Ye – Hou Han shu 88.13: 76n10 figurines 166–167, 172–175, 223, 268–270 fire – chambers/atashgah 115, 123, 259, 261 see also Takht-i Sangin

333

– rituals/sacred role of 114–115, 122–123, 127, 259 – temple 115, 123–124 Foucher, Alfred 27, 77–78 fountain 84–85, 87, 102, 119–120, 261 Francfort, Henri-Paul 123–125, 261 Gandharan art 50, 64, 77–78, 117, 122, 225 gardens 84n42, 91, 139, 176, 177n5, 179n15 Giddens, Anthony 227, 232, 234–236 globalization 34–36, 61n99, 65–71, 175, 229–244, 246, 249, 254, 256–257, 266–268, 270–273 – glocalization 237–241, 243–245, 272 see also translocalism Graeco-Baktrian – culture/art/stylistic category 64, 97m100, 103, 122–123, 125–126, 209, 226, 227, 247, 250 – kingdom/kings/rule 65, 74, 82, 99, 105, 113–114, 119, 151, 206, 221, 225, 257 see also Diodotids, Euthydemos, Eukratides Gorshenina, Svetlana 22–23 Graeco-Buddhist art see Gandharan art Great Game, the 23, 24, 26, 31 Greek – citizens 192, 198, 266n143 see also civic culture – iconography/motifs 50, 136, 141, 145–146, 150–153, 166, 171, 174, 219, 231, 255, 268, 270 – language 39, 50, 89, 93, 106, 118–122, 124–125, 128, 147–148, 200, 211–212 see also inscriptions Green, Peter 55–56, 106 Gullini, Giorgio 157, 209–210 gymnasium 77, 83–88, 91, 94–95, 100–102, 105, 136, 162, 167, 185, 193, 196, 198–199, 211, 213, 225–226, 245, 247–249 Harvey, David 235 Hellenicity 60, 68n129

334

Index

Hellenization 68, 70, 108, 125, 198, 200, 213, 214, 216, 231, 238, 245, 250, 251–252, 254, 263, 267, 272 Hellenocentrism 47, 54, 129, 149, 223 see also Eurocentrism Herakles 86, 95, 100, 190, 193, 196 Hermes 86, 95, 100, 266n140 Herodotos 39, 179, 181–182 – 1.131–132: 96n93 – 1.178–187: 179n15 – 1.179.3: 182n33, 183n35 – 1.181: 176n1 – 1.192: 181n25 – 2.124–136: 176n1 – 2.178: 220n21 – 3.150–159: 186n48 – 3.90.1: 74n4 – 3.93.1, 3.93.3: 74n4 – 8.144.2: 39n5 heroon see mausoleum Hindu Kush 73n1, 76, 91 Hippodamian grid plan 83, 159–160, 167–168, 170, 213 Holt, Frank 105–106, 108, 211 Hou Han shu see Fan Ye hybridity 19, 34–35, 56–65, 67, 70, 101, 103–104, 109, 117, 125, 126, 157, 166–167, 171–175, 205, 211–214, 222–223, 228–229, 244, 246, 250, 260, 263, 267–272 identity – ethnic 35–36, 38, 49, 68–70, 80, 101, 104–107, 205, 211–219, 224–225, 228–229, 245–246, 253, 256, 262, 268–271 – theory 58, 60, 64, 66, 217–218, 226, 228, 238–240, 243–245, 260–262, 268 – urban 101–104, 168–170, 175 imagined communities, traditions 106–107, 211–212, 215, 225, 245 imperial rule and power 23–27, 29–32, 34, 42–49, 52–56, 58, 60, 61n99, 65, 67–69,

74–77, 128, 130, 135, 147–149, 155–156, 167–168, 172, 177–178, 181, 194, 197–198, 206–207, 209, 231, 235, 245, 248–249, 252, 256–257, 264, 266–268 – Graeco-Macedonian 46–49, 53–55, 68–69, 148, 156, 172, 231 inbetweenness 18–21, 24, 28–30, 33–34, 36–38, 59, 61n99, 70, 100, 177, 178, 206, 228–229, 243–246, 258, 271–273 India 21, 24, 26–28, 31–33, 43–45, 47, 49n54, 50, 53n68, 65, 75, 77, 81, 105, 128, 181 indigenous populations 30, 31, 33, 44, 48–50, 53, 56, 59, 62, 64, 67, 105–106, 123, 125, 171, 199–200, 213, 272 see also Babylonians, Baktrians, Parthians Indo-Greeks 31–33, 65, 73n1, 76n9 inscriptions 83, 86, 89–90, 93, 95, 100, 102–103, 107, 111, 118–122, 124–125, 133, 141–142, 145, 161, 164–165, 171, 177n6, 185, 190, 192–193, 195–196, 211–213, 219, 222, 225, 247–248, 250, 259–260, 265 see also Corpus Inscriptionum Iranicarum Invernizzi, Antonio 129, 135, 137, 141, 151–153, 157, 168–171, 200, 210, 212, 214, 220, 221 Iraq – archaeology in 208, 210 – heritage of 180 irrigation 75, 81–82, 130, 158–159, 181 Isidoros of Charax 207 – Parthian Stations 8–12: 130n18 – Parthian Stations 12: 127 iwan 91, 112–113, 114–117, 122–123, 161, 167, 249 Josephus, Flavius – AJ 10.11.1: 176n1 – AJ 13.184–185: 147n85 – AJ 18.372: 155n3, 156n6, 157n11 – AP 1.19: 176n1 Justin – Epit. 36.1.3: 147n85 – Epit. 41.1: 44n31, 73n2, 76n9

Index

– – – – – – –

Epit. 41.4: 127n2, 73n2, 127n2 Epit. 41.6.1: 82n34 Epit. 41.6.4: 75n9 Epit. 41.6.5: 82n34 Epit. 41.6.6: 76n9 Epit. 41–42: 128n10 Epit. 42.1.3: 184n38

Kineas 83, 85, 88–91, 94, 100, 103, 107, 211, 245, 247 Klearchos 83, 89–90, 103, 105, 211 see also Delphi, maxims from Kohna Qala 75 koine 56, 153, 250–251 Kok Tepe 96, 250 Koldewey, Robert 179, 182, 184–185, 197 Kuhrt, Amélie 54–55, 198, 214, Kybele 98–100, 124, 162 Langin-Hooper, Stephanie 174–175, 221, 223, 269 Lave, Jean see Wenger Lindström, Gunvor 110, 113, 116, 124–125, 210, 212 Lippolis, Carlo 129, 135, 151, 180 Litvinskiy, Boris 110, 113–115, 124–126, 210, 212, 214, 222 Livius, Titus – 38.17.10: 156n10 localism 35, 180, 196–201, 205, 211, 213, 224–229, 231, 234, 238–241, 243–246, 249–254, 256–258, 261, 263–264, 266–267, 272–273 see also continuity of local cultures and traditions Lucian of Samosata – Syr. D. 23: 151–152 Ma, John 48, 65 Mairs, Rachel 48, 79, 87, 93, 106–107, 211, 216 Marduk 184, 188–191, 193, 196, 200, 265–166

335

Martinez-Sève, Laurianne 79, 83, 104, 107–108, 210, 215–216 Masson, Mikhail 129, 149–150, 209, 220 Mauryan empire 32, 65 mausoleum 83–85, 88–90, 94–95, 100, 102–103, 107, 138, 145, 158, 160n24, 211, 225–226, 245, 247–248 memory, cultural, dynastic 68, 138, 168, 256 Menander (Milinda) 76n9 Menegazzi, Roberta 173–174, 222–223, 268 Mesopotamia see Babylonia Messina, Vito 259, 170, 214, 267 methodological nationalism/essentialism 66, 234, 253, 263 métissage 61 middle ground 59n91 mission civilisatrice see civilizing narrative Mithra 98 Mithradates I 82n34, 127–128, 130, 135, 138–139, 144, 146n84, 147, 156, 219 Momigliano, Arnaldo 49–51, 53, 214 Nabu 166, 190–191, 193, 196, 218, 265–266 Nana/Nanaia 124, 193 Narain, Awadh Kishore 31–33, 38 nationalism/national conceptions 27, 28n45, 49, 70, 77, 172, 217 native populations see indigenous populations Nebuchadnezzar II 177, 179, 180n18, 182, 184–186, 155n3, 193, 185, 225, 265n138 networks 21, 53n71, 65–67, 157, 181, 223, 230, 248, 264 see also connectivity Ninurta 190, 193–194, 196 Nisa 35, 93, 127–154, 201, 205–215, 219–221, 224, 250–257, 262–263, 271–272 – Central Complex 135–140 – chronology 132–134 – clay sculptures 137–139 – interpretations of Philhellenism 145–151, 212, 219–221, 228 – Northern Sector 140–142

336

Index

– ostraca 142 – rhytons 141–142, 146, 149–154 – ruler cult 138–139 – South-Western Complex 142–144 nomadic pastoralists 24, 76, 82–83, 105–106, 109–110, 121, 127, 129, 146, 253n126 oikoumene 18, 67, 77, 230 Old Nisa see Nisa onomastics 48, 93, 100, 119, 121–125, 124, 142, 145, 193, 195–196, 201, 212–213, 219, 222 Orientalism 18, 24–25, 36, 43, 46, 51–53, 63, 67, 146, 170, 176, 188, 197, 207, 220n22, 252 see also Otherness, racialist discourse, Said Otherness/Othering 30, 47, 51–52, 59, 63, 105–106, 108, 146, 153, 187, 207, 220, 224–226, 228, 240, 244, 252, 270 ouk ekphora 116, 121, 124, 212, 262 Oxus – god 98–99, 109, 118, 119–122, 124–125, 212, 259–260 – river 17, 73–74n3, 81, 93, 106, 110–111, 119, 123 Oxus Temple see Takht-i Sangin Oxus Treasure 26n38, 109–110, 206 paideia 102–103, 148, 192 palaces 83, 84n42, 85–86, 89, 91, 93–94, 100, 104, 108, 135–137, 139n53, 140, 145, 155n3, 165, 167, 180n18, 184–187, 193, 196, 200, 247, 249 palaistra 184–185, 191–193, 196, 199–200, 219 Pappalardo, Eleonore 151–152, 220–221 paradeisos see gardens Parthia – art see Arsakid – culture, style, Parthian art – language (Pahlavi) 142, 145–146 – region 32, 35, 74n4, 127–128, 130, 146–147, 205–207, 213–214, 255–256, 262 Parthians 30–31, 128, 142, 146, 149, 187, 207, 211, 220, 252–253, 272 see also Arsakid Pashmak Tepe 96, 250

Pausanias – 1.16.3: 155n2, 156n5, 178n9 – 4.32.1: 86n52 – 8.33.3: 178n9 – 10.4.1: 101–102 peer polity interaction 65–66, 243, 248, 257 Persia/Persis 17, 21, 26, 60, 62, 130, 158, 181, 256 see also Achaemenid Persian Royal Road 130, 181 Persianism/Iranism 30, 148 see also Achaemenid Persians 96n93, 154, 187, 207, 249, 252 personal names see onomastics Philhellenism 35, 130, 145–154, 205, 211–212, 219–221, 228–229, 252–253, 256, 268, 271–272 see also Arsakid Philo of Byzantium – On the Seven World Wonders, 1.1–4: 176n1 Pichikyan, Igor see Litvinskiy Plinius Secundus, Gaius – HN 6.41, 6.44: 128n10 – HN 6.112: 128n8 – HN 6.122: 155n2–3, 156n5, 158n16, 159n19, 178n9 Plutarch – Mor. De Alex. fort. 328c–329d, 330d: 18n3, 39n5 – Mor. De Alex. fort. 388: 17n2 – Vit. Alex. 43.6: 75n6 – Vit. Alex. 47.4: 17n2 – Vit. Crass. 33.2: 148n91, 162n39 polis 29, 78, 101–104, 123, 157n11, 168–170, 197–199, 211, 213, 267 Polybios 76, 109, 161 – 5.48.12: 162n38 – 5.54.10: 162n40, 195n104 – 10.49: 76n9 – 11.34: 74n5, 76n9, 106n134, 110n5 Pompeius Trogus see Justin postcolonialism 49–56, 58–60, 61n99, 67, 70, 214, 230n41

Index

poststructuralism 58 Pugachenkova, Galina 129, 149–150, 209, 220 pyxides 99, 117 racialist discourse 43, 45n36, 46n38, 57–59, 104 rhytons 17, 128n7, 129, 141, 145–146, 149–154, 209, 212, 219–221, 252, 256 Robert, Louis 102–103, 105, 211 Robertson, Roland 239 Rostovtzeff, Mikhail 129 Roman – culture/Romanization 50, 51n62, 57, 61n99, 66–67, 69, 102, 214, 220n21, 231 – republic/empire/rule 22, 28–29, 40, 50–51, 43, 65, 128, 147–148, 156, 168, 176n2, 187, 257 Roxane 17, 40n12 royal cult 99, 139, 145, 191, 196, 254 Russian empire/imperialism see Eurasia, imperial visions of Said, Edward 24, 51–53, 58, 67 see also Orientalism Saksanokhur 73n2, 249–250 Samarkand see Afrasiab Schlumberger, Daniel 33, 78, 210, 213, 225 sculptures/statues 88, 98–100, 115, 117–118, 122, 124–126, 128–129, 137–139, 141–143, 145–146, 149–153, 189, 211–212, 219, 222, 252, 254, 256, 262 Scythians/Scythian style 109, 117, 122, 126, 253n126, 258 sealings/sewal impressions on clay 143, 157, 161, 163–167, 169, 171, 172, 201, 222, 255 Seleukeia on the Tigris 35, 85, 130, 147, 152, 154, 155–175, 178, 190, 195, 197, 199–201, 205–208, 210–211, 213–215, 220–224, 252, 263–264, 267–269, 271–272 – archives 163–166 – chronology 159–160 – figurines 166, 268–270

337

– interpretations of cultural hybridity 171–175, 222–223, 268–270 – Tell Umar 162–163, 267 Seleukid – empire/kings/rule 30–35, 42, 44–45, 47–48, 53–56, 69, 74, 75, 81, 88–90, 97, 103, 113–114, 119, 124–125, 127–128, 130, 147–151, 155–156, 167, 170–171, 178, 181–182, 184, 187–191, 194, 196, 198, 201, 206, 248, 249, 257, 264–267 – period 159–163, 165–166, 178, 181, 185 Seleukos I (Nikator) 75, 155, 160n24, 168, 178, 182, 190–191, 197, 207, 265–266 Self and Other see Othering Sherwin-White, Susan 54–55, 198, 214 Shortugai 75 Silk Roads 21–22, 26–27, 130–131, 158 Sima Qian – Shiji 123: 76n10 social imaginary 68 social scenario 246–247, 250, 254, 256, 260, 262–263, 272 Sogdia 17, 56, 74n4, 75, 96, 106, 119 space/place 19n6, 21–26 see also inbetweenness statues see sculptures Stevens, Kathryn 266 stoa 158, 160, 167, 170, 213, 267 Stobaios, Ioannes – Ecl. 3.1.163: 90n68 Strabo – 11.9: 128n10 – 11.9.2: 76n9 – 11.9.3: 127n2 – 11.11.1: 76n9 – 11.11.2: 74, 76n9 – 14.2.28, 39 – 15.1.3: 73n1 – 15.3.15: 96n93 – 16.1.5: 155n2, 176n1, 178n9, 181n26. 188n58 – 16.1.9: 157n14 – 16.2.5: 156n6

338

Index

Strootman, Rolf 55, 69–70, 265 Susa 40, 75, 147, 158, 181, 210, 256 syncretism 35, 41, 50, 56, 61, 98, 103, 125–126, 150, 152, 166, 187, 205, 211–212, 214, 218–219, 228–229, 257–258, 266, 271 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius – Annal. 2.1–4, 6.31–37, 6.41–44, 11.8–10, 12.10–14, 12.44, 15.1–31: 128n10 – Annal. 6.42: 155n3, 156n10, 162n39, 168 – Annal. 11.8: 147n85 Tadzhikistan 20, 23, 109–110, 208 Takht-i Sangin 26n38, 35, 73n2, 98n103, 99, 106, 108, 109–126, 146, 201, 205–212, 214–215, 218–219, 222, 224, 255, 257–263, 269, 271–272 – atashgah 114 see also fire – chronology 113–114 – courtyard 119–121 – cult practices 123–125 – iwan 114 – peripheral corridors 116–117 – interpretations of syncretism 125–126, 212, 219 – Atrosokes altar 118–119 see also Oxus Tarn, William Woodthorpe 18, 31–33, 38, 44–46, 53, 214 Tell Umar see Seleukeia on the Tigris temenos 89, 97, 115 Temple with Indented Niches see Ai Khanum theatre 77, 84–86, 100–102, 105, 158–160, 162–163, 167–168, 170, 184–185, 191–196, 198–200, 211, 213, 219, 225–226, 245, 247–249, 267 Third Space 58, 59, 62, 244 see also Bhabha Thukydides – 2.68.5: 39n2 Tigris river 155–157, 159–161 time-space compression 230, 234–237, 239, 243–244 see also Giddens

tintir = Babylon 187 Tomlinson, John 233, 236, 239, 246 Torbulok 99 transculturation 61n99, 62–63 translocalism 33–35, 228, 229–272 Turkmenistan 20, 23, 27, 127, 129–130, 208 typology/stylistic categorization 29–30, 62, 70, 73n1, 98, 100–106, 109, 125, 129, 150, 166–167, 171–174, 217, 222–223, 247, 250–251, 257, 268–269 UNESCO 110, 129, 180, 206 Upper Satrapies see Antiochos I Uruk 163n46, 165, 210 Vakhshu see Oxus van der Spek, Bert 192, 195, 197–199 von Humboldt, Alexander see von Richthofen von Richthofen, Ferdinand 22, 24, 27 Versluys, Miguel John 67–68, 231, 245 Veyne, Paul 50–51, 214 Vitruvius Vaccus, Marcus – De Arch. 5.11: 193n88 Wenger, Étienne 242–243 white man’s burden 25, 46 see also civilizing narrative Wolski, Józef 149 Xerxes 32, 186n48, 188 Yuezhi 76, 113–114, 117, 121 YuTAE 27, 110, 208–210 YuTAKE 27, 129, 131, 138, 149–151, 208–209 Zeus 97–98, 150–151, 190–191, 196, 250, 266 ziggurat 160n25, 163, 179, 184, 188, 196 see also Etemenanki Zoroastrianism 114–115, 123 see also fire

oriens et occidens Studien zu antiken Kulturkontakten und ihrem Nachleben

Herausgegeben von Josef Wiesehöfer in Zusammenarbeit mit Pierre Briant, Geoffrey Greatrex, Amélie Kuhrt und Robert Rollinger.

Franz Steiner Verlag

ISSN 1615–4517

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Robert Rollinger / Brigitte Truschnegg (Hg.) Altertum und Mittelmeerraum: Die antike Welt diesseits und jenseits der Levante Festschrift für Peter W. Haider zum 60. Geburtstag 2006. 878 S. mit 79 Abb. und Frontispiz, geb. ISBN 978-3-515-08738-4 13. Josef Wiesehöfer / Philip Huyse (Hg.) Ērān ud Anērān Studien zu den Beziehungen zwischen dem Sasanidenreich und der Mittelmeerwelt. Beiträge des Internationalen Colloquiums in Eutin vom 8.–9. Juni 2000. Hg. unter Mitarb. von Carsten Binder 2006. 288 S. mit 57 Abb., geb. ISBN 978-3-515-08829-9 14. Nikos Kokkinos (Hg.) The World of the Herods Volume I of the International Conference The World of the Herods and the Nabataeans held at the British Museum, 17–19 April 2001 2007. 327 S., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-08817-6 15. Konstantinos D. Politis (Hg.) The World of the Nabataeans Volume II of the International Conference The World of the Herods and the Nabataeans held at the British Museum, 17–19 April 2001 2007. 392 S., kt. ISBN 978-3-515-08816-9 16. Henning Börm Prokop und die Perser Untersuchungen zu den römischsasanidischen Kontakten in der ausgehenden Spätantike 2007. 382 S., geb. ISBN 978-3-515-09052-0 17. Charlotte Lerouge L’image des Parthes dans le monde gréco-romain

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From Mesopotamia to Central Asia, regions in central Eurasia in the Hellenistic period are often viewed, presented, and imbued with meaning as ‘places in between’ – cultural melting pots, resulting from a fusion of Eastern and Western cultures after Alexander the Great. Milinda Hoo critically explores scholarly understandings of cultural inbetweenness in the regions of Baktria, Parthia, and Babylonia in the third to first centuries BCE, focusing on the diverse ways

ISBN 978-3-515-13315-9

9 783515 133159

in which the model of Hellenism has been used to make historical meaning out of eclectic material culture. The sites of Ai Khanum, Takht-i Sangin, Old Nisa, Seleukeia on the Tigris, and Babylon serve as core case studies to investigate perceptions of Hellenism in places that are considered culturally ‘inbetween’. These form the foundation for a new translocal approach, based on globalization concepts, to better and more critically understand what we consider as Hellenism and localism in the East.

www.steiner-verlag.de Franz Steiner Verlag