In 333 BC, Alexander of Macedon defeated the Achaemenid ruler Darius III at the battle of Issus and changed the history of Asia. On 1 October 331 BC, they met again at Gaugamela on the Tigris in northern Iraq. After a desperate battle, Darius broke and fled, to be murdered by his Bactrian satrap Bessus. Alexander gave Darius a royal funeral and then set off after Bessus, beginning the Greek penetration of Central Asia.
Alexander effectively took over the Achaemenid Empire as a going concern: it had an established administration, road network and currency, and a political structure of huge regional satrapies that reached east into what are today Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan around the western end of the Himalaya, and south of that to the edge of the Indian sub-continent. As he secured this instant empire, Alexander founded and garrisoned cities, Alexandrias all: the sites of some are long known, others plausibly identified, such as Alexandria Eschate at Khojand in the Ferghana Basin and Alexandria in the Caucasus at Begram, north of Kabul. Alexandria Arachosia at Old Kandahar in southern Afghanistan was identified by British excavations in the 1970s, but confident expectations that Alexandria Ariana would be confirmed at Herat were confounded by the recent German project there.
Alexander passed quickly through South Asia: when he got beyond the Indus, his Macedonian troops refused to go farther, and he returned west to die in Babylon in 323 BC. His vast empire was divided between his generals: Ptolemy got Egypt, while the eastern Achaemenid territories went to Seleucus. The Greek culture introduced there proved surprisingly durable, its architecture, ceramics, script and coinage surviving to varying degrees under successor regimes: these are the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek polities scrutinised in Rachel Mairs's ambitious edited volume.
Its 710 pages embrace 31 chapters by 30 authors (Mairs contributes two): a plurality are from British and French institutions, most of the others from universities within the EU; two are from China, one from India, one from the USA; but this understates the diversity of the team's origins—many come from countries outwith this list. Mairs has a firm hand but a light touch: she notes that there are conflicting theoretical perspectives and divergent readings of the data in a field in which “there are few certainties” (p. 2). There is some cross-fertilisation between chapters, though less than one might desire, and “none assume any knowledge of material in other contributions” (p. 3).
That the book “is not designed to be read from start to finish” (p. 3) could be more firmly flagged, as the narrative beginning with the history of scholarship and segueing into the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek regional archaeologies only commences on p. 127. Before that is a section on ‘Interactions’ that looks at regions surrounding the main subject of Hellenistic impact in the diffuse space between the more homogeneous Iranian, Indian, steppe and Chinese cultural zones: the Seleukid Empire and Parthia to the west, South Asia and the Central Asian steppe to south and north, and China in the reign of the Han Emperor Wu (165–87 BC) to the east, whence westward travellers’ narratives give rare documentary testimony.
The regional surveys, by those who have worked there, form the solid core of the book: the Oxus Basin in Afghanistan (Martinez-Sève), Uzbekistan (Stančo), Tajikistan (Lindström) and Sogdiana (Lyonnet); Margiana and Merv in Turkmenistan (Puschnigg); southern Afghanistan (Ball), and Gandhāra and Punjab spanning the present Pakistan-India frontier (Olivieri). One of the most successful is that by Lyonnet, who integrates the pottery and the politics, using the coin evidence as a set of chronological pegs. Later chapters by Wu and Petrie, on the Achaemenid period in Central Asia and the Indus Basin respectively, belong here also.
The short section (three papers) on written sources is followed by five chapters on numismatics. Simon Glenn's ‘History from coins’ is a vital, clear introduction to the sometimes overwhelming detail of the others. It is not clear whether the uniquely massive gold coin of Eucratides I (171–145 BC), described as of 20 Greek staters’ value on p. 477 by Glenn is the same as the “octodrachm” noted by Bordeaux on p. 514. A little more cross-referencing might have been editorially imposed; and something on hoards by Osmund Bopearachchi, pervasively cited but not a contributor, would have been welcome.
Coins complement archaeology beautifully: only eight Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek rulers are attested from non-numismatic sources, but the coins give us 45. There are bilingual issues in Greek and Kharoshthi (and both Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian issues; the linguistic mélange is seen on pottery too—three sherds from Barikot in Swat bear inscriptions in Greek, Aramaic and Brāhmī (fig. 16.18)).
The Greek drachm seems to have been the dollar of its day, surviving as a standard weight, and Roman influence continued the western impact: a coin of Kujula Kadphises (AD 40–90/95), founder of the Kushan Empire, imitated a denarius of Augustus (27 BC–AD 14). Roman imports were rich, as Morris notes for the Begram treasure. There seems to be agreement that much of what has been called ‘Hellenistic’ in culture is in fact the result of continuing contact with the east of the Roman Empire, although the city of Aï Khanoum on the Oxus, a fusion of Greek and local themes, was abandoned prior to that era. Joe Cribb suggests that by linking the Greek, Kushan and Laukika eras “it is possible that the Greek era lasted for fourteen centuries” (p. 666).
In such an ambitious, specialist (and cripplingly priced) book there are bound to be deficiencies: there are virtually no maps in the first 200 pages, and those that follow are often informative only to the initiate. The index is inadequate: the numerous cities called Alexandria are lumped into one entry, as are the important coin hoards. Mairs's introductory outline of the volume (pp. 1–7) could profitably have been longer, or a final synthesising chapter added to draw together the themes of this enticing survey of an under-appreciated region of the ancient world.
