The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia
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The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520959545 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 11/24/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
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The Hellenistic Far East
Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia
By Rachel Mairs
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2014 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95954-5
CHAPTER 1
Administering Bactria
From Achaemenid Satrapy to Graeco-Bactrian State
And from that amazing panhellenic expedition,
crowned with victory, everywhere acclaimed,
famed throughout the world, illustrious
as no other has been illustrious,
without any rival: we emerged,
a new world that was Greek, and great.
We: the Alexandrians, the Antiochenes,
the Seleucians, and the numerous
other Greeks of Egypt and Syria,
and in Media, and in Persia, and all the others.
With their far-flung realms,
with the nuanced policy of judicious integration.
And the Common Greek Language
which we've taken as far as Bactria, as far as the Indians.
—C. P. CAVAFY, "IN 200 B.C." (1931; TRANS. AFTER MENDELSOHN 2012, 171–72)
BACTRIA AND ITS RESOURCES
Part of Bactria lies beside Aria toward the north, but most of it lies above and to the east of Aria. It is large and all-productive except for oil. Because of the excellence of the land, the Greeks who rebelled there grew so powerful that they conquered both Ariana and India as well, according to Apollodorus of Artemita. And so they subdued more peoples than Alexander—especially Menander if indeed he crossed the Hypanis River toward the east and advanced as far as the Imaus, for some were subdued by Menander himself, and some by Demetrios the son of Euthydemos, the king of Bactria. They took over not only Patalene but also the rest of the coast, which is called the Kingdom of Saraostos and Sigerdia. In sum, Apollodorus says that Bactria is the jewel of all Ariana; moreover, the Greeks of Bactria extended their empire as far as the Seres and Phryni.
... that most prosperous Bactrian empire of the thousand cities ...
The campaigns of Alexander the Great brought the Greek language and Greek rule to large territories of Central Asia and northwestern India. Cavafy's narrator in "In 200 B.C." uses Bactria and India to indicate the very ends of the earth, the farthest extent of the Hellenistic oikoumene, the inhabited—for which read "Hellenized and civilized"—world. But Bactria has undergone something of a scholarly rehabilitation from the reputation it once held as the "Siberia of the Hellenistic world." Part of this rehabilitation is due to our better understanding of the political and economic ties that bound it to the world of the Near East. Although geographically distant from the centers of the various Near Eastern empires that asserted control over it (the Achaemenid Persian empire, and later the empire of Alexander the Great and his Seleucid successors), Bactria was neither economically nor politically peripheral. It possessed considerable natural resources and occupied a strategic position between the world of Iran and Mesopotamia and the world of the Eurasian steppe. The resources that made Bactria attractive to the Persians and then to the Greeks also meant that it could be used as a power base, whether as a springboard for a satrap's imperial ambitions or for the secession of an independent regional state.
In addition to its agricultural potential with irrigation, Bactria and its southern neighbor Arachosia were sources of manpower. Because of their geographical position, these territories also served as conduits for military forces and war elephants from northwestern India, which might serve under the command of the satraps of Bactria and Arachosia. The region continued to be a source of elephants for the rulers of the Seleucid empire as and when they were able to assert some authority there. In 305 B.C.E., Seleukos I received five hundred elephants under the provisions of a treaty with the Indian emperor Chandragupta Maurya but lost control of Arachosia under this same accord. A Babylonian astronomical diary records the satrap of Bactria supplying war elephants to the Seleucid king in 274/3 B.C.E. In the last decade of the third century B.C.E., Antiochos III conducted an extensive eastern campaign in which he, in the end, made little in the way of territorial acquisitions but did acquire elephants—one hundred and fifty in total—from both the Graeco-Bactrian king Euthydemos and the Indian king Sophagasenos, who ruled in the Kabul Valley.
The Badakshan Mountains of eastern Bactria were the location of probably the only exploited source of lapis lazuli in the ancient world, as well as deposits of other minerals and precious stones. There does not appear to have been any archaeological investigation of the Badakshan mines to date, but their products appeared as far away as Egypt, as early as the Predynastic period. At Shortughai, an outpost of the Indus civilization was established in around 2200 B.C.E., evidently to control access to the Badakshan mineral resources. As well as serving as a center for management of this resource, Shortughai was also notable for the working of lapis. The treasury at the Hellenistic city of Ai Khanoum contained some 75 kilograms of unworked blocks of lapis at the time of its abandonment. The "lapis factor" is therefore an important constant in the economic history of eastern Bactria.
A combination of archaeological and written sources (both literary and documentary) make Bactria an excellent case study for looking at how an empire might manage such a resource-rich region, incomplete though our knowledge of administrative systems must necessarily remain. Crucially, in order to be exploited effectively Bactria's resources required concerted effort and the mobilization of substantial labor forces. The land had agricultural potential but required irrigation. Lapis had to be mined from deposits high in the Badakshan Mountains. Soldiers had to be recruited or conscripted, and elephants had to be acquired and transported. Although there are only a few excavated sites of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic periods, the extensive field-survey project conducted in eastern Bactria in the 1970s provided data on settlement patterns and land use over a period of several millennia. More recently, a small number of administrative documents written on prepared skin have emerged without secure provenance onto the antiquities market. Three are in Greek and date to the late third or early second century B.C.E. A further group, deriving apparently from a single archaeological context, are in Aramaic and cover the period of the end of Achaemenid rule in the region and the conquests of Alexander the Great.
The sections that follow will discuss what these sources can tell us about the organized exploitation of agricultural and other resources in Bactria by locally based apparatchiks working in the ultimate service of external imperial powers. The presence and efficacy of such administrative structures is manifested in our sources both directly and indirectly—indirectly by the very existence of irrigation systems and mining operations that required concerted collective effort, such as might be made possible by a strong local administrative apparatus; and directly by the information contained in the documentary texts on revenue collection, payments to officials, and the central management of tasks such as building fortifications. On a more human level, among the Aramaic documents we have preserved the correspondence between a local governor and his superior, full of terse instructions, reprimands, and lengthy reiterations of previous orders. Resources could be redistributed locally or channeled to the imperial center, but they could also be mobilized quickly and efficiently in emergency situations, such as the need to supply the army column of the satrap-turned-king Bessos, in his flight from the army of Alexander the Great. My focus, in this chapter, is on the longue durée of Bactria's administrative history and on its external relations. Chapter 2 will give a smaller-scale, more detailed case study of the city of Ai Khanoum for which the discussion of the eastern Bactria survey in this chapter provides the necessary context. In chapter 4, the focus will again broaden to consider the relationship, economic and political, between Bactria and its other neighbors, the peoples of the steppe and pastoral and nomadic groups in the immediate hinterland of the settled river valleys of Bactria-Sogdiana. Like Bactria's links to the Near East, these connections are crucial to understanding the region's internal affairs.
The field-survey data, as already noted, gives a valuable perspective on the longue durée in Bactria. The surviving documentary evidence in Aramaic, on the other hand, happens to cover an especially interesting microperiod in the administrative history of Bactria, the transition from Achaemenid to Graeco-Macedonian control. This provides an intimate perspective on a phenomenon widely attested throughout the Hellenistic world, the retention of the existing Achaemenid bureaucracy as a foundation for the administrative structures of the new Hellenistic states. Alexander the Great, it has frequently been argued, was the "last of the Achaemenids"; the Seleucid empire, too, "in its origin and its constituent elements, was a branch grafted directly onto Achaemenid stock." The Seleucid empire provides more copious evidence for exploring such questions of administrative continuity. Even allowing for the different types of evidence available for the two periods (primarily the Persepolis fortification tablets for the Achaemenid administration and Greek documents for the Seleucid), there is, as may be anticipated, much similarity between the two systems. The evidence from Bactria may be more limited, but my conclusions are essentially the same.
One of my major themes in the following discussion will therefore be not the development and imposition of mechanisms of imperial control but the retention of personnel and institutions, and the efficacy of such a policy in enabling the incoming regime both to efficiently manage and control resources and (potentially) to limit political resistance. Maintaining the existing bureaucracy, and keeping on the staff to run it, is not "lazy imperialism"—however calculating the laissez-faire attitude of its practitioners may or may not have been—but a sound political and economic strategy. Crucially for the present study, however, such administrative continuity may mean that control and exploitation of a territory by an external imperial power is less visible in the archaeological and documentary records than may be supposed.
Although I will introduce material—in particular from the archaeological field survey of eastern Bactria—from periods from the Bronze Age through to the Kushan empire, my focus will be on the periods of Persian control in the region, under the Achaemenid dynasty, and of Greek control, under both the external authority of Alexander the Great and his Seleucid successors, and the local control of subsequent independent Graeco-Bactrian dynasts. This corresponds to the latter part of the eastern Bactrian Iron Age, from around 800 B.C.E. through to the conquest of the region by Alexander the Great in 330–329 B.C.E., and the Hellenistic period, which in Bactria effectively ends with the northern nomadic invasions of the mid-second century B.C.E. The new data from the documentary texts now allows us to revisit and reengage with long-standing debates about the nature of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic imperial presence in Bactria. On one side of this debate have traditionally been the archaeologists (and in particular Jean-Claude Gardin), who emphasize the lack of any break in the archaeological record corresponding to an Achaemenid or Hellenistic takeover. On the other side stands the historical approach of Pierre Briant, who draws on historical textual evidence for substantial Achaemenid state intervention in the socioeconomic affairs of Bactria, and for the management of resources and resource-gathering systems such as irrigation. Resolving this debate is not a matter of simple compromise: archaeological and historical sources each obscure some aspect of the "true picture" of Achaemenid Bactria. This historical sources, for example, make no mention of the region's impressive irrigation works. The new documentary texts now also make it clear that the picture of continuity in material culture obscures the very real and effective mechanisms of Achaemenid imperial control.
From around the middle of the sixth century B.C.E., with Cyrus the Great's expeditions in Central Asia, Bactria begins to feature in our historical sources, which are mostly Greek and of whom Herodotos is the most prominent. This Greek historical lens is a problem in approaching the history of the Achaemenid empire as a whole, even though it has recently come to be balanced by an increased attention to contemporary sources—especially epigraphic and documentary—in other languages. A larger number of Greek and Latin historical works cover the period of the campaigns of Alexander the Great in the 330s and 320s B.C.E. and contain accounts of his military activities in Central Asia and the peoples and terrain he encountered there. The preserved sources draw on contemporary accounts but are later in date. For the period of Seleucid and Graeco-Bactrian rule in Central Asia, we possess far fewer historical sources, and the region's political history in this period must be reconstructed primarily on the basis of numismatic evidence.
For the purposes of the present discussion, I would like to extract a few themes or pieces of pertinent information from these historical sources, which may be compared and contrasted with the archaeological and documentary evidence, or which raise questions that we may turn to this data to answer. The first theme concerns the origin of officials in the Achaemenid satrapal administration. The higher echelons, such as the positions of satrap or local governor, tended to be occupied by a "dominant ethno-class" of Persians, with locals of the various satrapies in lower ranks. There does not appear to have been any attempt on the part of the Persians to spread or impose their religion or language beyond the ethnically Persian provincial elite. What this means in archaeological terms is that we should not automatically expect to see any appreciable presence or influence of Persian material culture in the provinces, whatever the degree of Persian political control. This, of course, is the view from the center: if Persian culture was not actively imposed, aspects of it may still have been adopted and adapted by local populations on their own initiative and on their own terms. The archaeological evidence from eastern Bactria indicates that, in this particular region, any such engagement with Persian culture on the part of local populations was limited.
The second point that I would like to draw out from the historical sources is the degree of authority exercised by local "big men," who might operate within wider imperial power structures but also independently. The agency of local governors or warlords can be seen most clearly in the fierce resistance encountered by Alexander and his army in Central Asia. Many such individuals mounted military opposition or retreated to a fortified hilltop, or both, and had to be rooted out one by one, at considerable costs in terms of manpower, provisions, and lost time. In Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander these men are usually referred to as huparchoi (hyparchs), a Greek term (one may translate approximately as "subrulers") that does little to clarify their precise status but does, perhaps, indicate rather well the extent to which their effective power, in practical, local terms, was out of proportion to their technically subordinate position within Achaemenid power structures. Hyparchs could have been agents for the implementation of imperial policy on a local scale in all sorts of areas, including irrigation schemes or the mustering of troops. As Alexander found, detached from such external obligations, they could also draw on local loyalties and resources to act as independent agents. Yet his policy, where possible, tended toward the incorporation of such powerful local figures: they were to be made to work for him.
At the level of the satrapal government, Bactria itself was also a possible personal power base within the Achaemenid empire or the world of the Hellenistic successor states. The most dramatic example of this use as a power base is the case of Bessos, the satrap of Bactria under Darius III, who after Alexander's defeat of the Persians at the battle of Gaugamela in 331 B.C.E. declared himself king, as Artaxerxes V, took Darius captive, and beat a retreat toward Bactria as a base from which to build his power. In the mid-third century B.C.E., with the independence of the Graeco-Bactrian state, under the Diodotids, from the Seleucid empire, Bactria again showed itself to be a formidable power base, from which a local ruler might challenge the authority of an overarching imperial power. The Aramaic documentary texts offer two particular insights into the potential of Bactria as a regional power base. They document the provisioning of Bessos's supply train and how the resources of Bactria were marshaled in his support. And they present us with the new figures of Akhvamazda, the probable satrap, and his governor Bagavant. Akhvamazda's ownership of personal lands and his administration of these along with affairs of state show the close relationships between local landowners with their own constituencies and the Achaemenid authorities.
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
A Note on Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Administering Bactria: From Achaemenid Satrapy to Graeco-Bactrian State
2. Ai Khanoum
3. Self-Representation in the Inscriptions of Sophytos (Arachosia) and Heliodoros (India)
4. Waiting for the Barbarians: The Fall of Greek Bactria
Conclusion
Appendix: Greek Documents
Bibliography
Index