To judge from the arrowheads strewn beneath the city walls, the final struggle was fierce.
But the end, when it came, was swift.
The great palace burned.
The Temple of Zeus was desecrated.
Corpses were heaped in the theater.
And when the invaders moved on, and all but a few of the inhabitants were dead or gone,
the only sound on the long straight streets of the city we call Ai Khanoum was the sigh
of wind from the steppes.
Ai Khanoum, located in what is now northern Afghanistan, was one of the many Greek settlements
scattered across Central Asia by Alexander the Great and his successors.
For two centuries – first as outposts, and then as centers of a rich kingdom – these
cities thrived and grew in settings profoundly different from those of the distant Mediterranean.
And then, cut off from the rest of the classical world by invasion and war, they slowly faded
from view.
This video will explore their fates.
Alexander the Great entered central Asia in the summer of 330 BC, having already won a
series of spectacular battles and conquered half of the Persian Empire.
The King of Kings was dead, and soon – it seemed – the last remaining Persian governors
would surrender.
In the event, it wasn’t quite so easy.
First a powerful noble declared himself the new King of Kings, and had to be dealt with
in a campaign that stretched into the following year.
Then, raids from the steppe forced Alexander to turn and attack a confederation of nomads.
Then, having put the nomads to flight, he plunged into two years of savage guerilla
warfare with the lords of the Persian east.
Only his marriage to Roxane, daughter of the greatest local potentate, brought an end to
the struggle, and allowed Alexander to continue east into India.
The heart of the newly-conquered territory was the region of Bactria, centered in what
are now northern Afghanistan and southern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.
The plains of Bactria, watered by the river Oxus and its tributaries, were irrigated and
fertile, and dotted with prosperous towns.
Seeing the territory’s value, and aware of the need to secure the northeastern frontier
of his sprawling empire, Alexander settled no fewer than 10,000 mercenaries in Bactria,
and founded a series of cities.
Almost all, characteristically, were named Alexandria.
After the civil wars that followed Alexander's death, Bactria was incorporated into the kingdom
of Seleucus, a former commander of Alexander’s bodyguards.
Seleucus and his immediate successors reigned over the eastern part of Alexander’s empire,
a huge block of territory extending from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush.
Although Bactria lay on the eastern edge of their domains, they took pains to defend it,
and encouraged thousands of settlers – both retired soldiers and adventurers from old
Greece – to settle in the region.
Gradually, however, the governors of Bactria became increasingly independent; and from
the mid-third century BC onward, they ruled as independent kings.
The kings of Bactria were aggressive and successful generals, pushing the boundaries of their
kingdom north into the steppes and south to India.
And despite the isolation of their realm, the Bactrian kings continued, like Alexander
and the Seleucids before them, to recruit Greek settlers and found cities.
The wealth of the Bactrian kings was proverbial, and splendidly displayed in the kingdom’s
beautiful gold and silver coins, which circulated throughout central Asia.
There were, it was said, 1,000 cities in the Bactrian kingdom, all of them rich.
Many of these cities had a long pre-Hellenistic history, and had only been re-organized and
re-named by Greek kings.
But some really were new foundations, and one of these – one, in fact, of the most
important cities in all Bactria – has been excavated.
That city is Ai Khanoum, mentioned at the beginning of this video.
We don’t know what the actual Greek name was – Ai Khanoum is Uzbek for “Lady Moon,”
a reference to a local legend.
Whatever it was called, the city was an impressive place, expanded and embellished several times
over its century and a half of existence.
The final expansion took place only a few decades before the city’s destruction, and
seems to have been financed by King Eucratides, who made Ai Khanoum one of his capitals.
The city stood at the confluence of two rivers, at the base of the hill that served as its
citadel.
The streets behind its tall mudbrick walls bounded blocks of low houses, many equipped
with Greek-style bathing rooms.
The main avenue, nearly a mile long, connected the gates with the main public buildings:
a huge gymnasium, a theater with seats for 5,000 spectators, and a palace with a majestic
reception hall.
Ai Khanoum was an emphatically Greek city.
The excavators uncovered a public fountain with dolphin-head spouts, a mausoleum in the
shape of a colonnaded temple, a monumental shrine inscribed with maxims of the Delphic
Oracle, and even the imprint, pressed by chance onto mudbrick, of a Greek philosophical treatise
written by a follower of Aristotle.
The gymnasium – itself a quintessentially Greek institution – was supplied with olive
oil imported thousands of kilometers from the Mediterranean.
There were pebble mosaics in the palace.
And the temple of Zeus featured a colossal seated statue modeled on the famous wonder
of the world at Olympia.
But if Ai Khanoum was a Greek city, it was also a Bactrian city.
Almost all the buildings, even the theater, were built of mudbrick, in keeping with local
custom.
The grand reception hall of the palace was inspired by Near Eastern models.
And despite its Greek occupant, the Temple of Zeus looked like a Persian shrine.
At Ai Khanoum, in fact, ethnic Greeks were almost certainly a minority.
We should imagine a relatively small group, descended from Greek settlers and their local
wives, coexisting with a larger native population that had, to various degrees and for varying
reasons, become familiar with the Greek language and Greek culture.
Ai Khanoum, in short, reflected the potentially precarious nature of the Greek presence in
the East – and it would share, like all the other Greek cities of central Asia, in
the mid-second century collapse of the Bactrian kingdom.
The Bactrian kings were almost constantly at war.
To the west, they faced two rival empires – first the Seleucids, their nominal overlords;
and then, as the Seleucids faded, the rising menace of Parthia.
To the south, they hurled their cavalry against the elephants of the native princes and Greek
warlords of India.
But the greatest menace lay in in the endless grasslands of the north, where the nomads
roamed.
Alexander had known it, and had founded the fortress-city of Alexandria Eschate – Alexandria
the Farthest – to meet the threat.
The kings of Bactria knew it too.
But they were powerless to stop it when it came.
In the middle of the second century BC, the Xiongnu, a nomadic confederation that ranged
along the northern frontier of Han China, decisively defeated the Yuezhi, a rival confederation.
The Yeuzhi migrated westward, driving other tribes before them.
These tribes, led by the Saka, poured with irresistible force into Bactria.
The king met them in battle, and was crushed.
As the broken remains of the royal army fled south toward India, the nomads surrounded
the kingdom’s rich Greek cities.
A few cities – including, apparently, Ai Khanoum – resisted, and were destroyed.
But most seem to have come to terms with the invaders.
A Chinese traveler who passed through Bactria a decade after the invasion found many rich
cities, each governed by a petty chieftain, under the dominion of the Saka.
Not long after, the Saka were defeated by the Yeuzhi, the same tribe that had chased
them into Bactria in the first place.
The Yeuzhi settled in the region; and, sometime in the early first century, one of their chieftains
declared himself king, established his authority over the whole confederation, and founded
the Kushan Empire, a sprawling state that came to include both Bactria and much of northern
India.
It was under the Kushan Empire that the Greek cities of central Asia had their final flowering.
The Greeks had always been a relatively small minority, and many had fled or been killed
during the destruction of the Bactrian Kingdom.
But many more remained.
Their history is unrecorded.
The art of the Kushan Empire, however, bears witness to continued Greek influence.
A dramatic example is the Kushan palace at Khalchayan, in what is now Uzbekistan.
The palace courtyard was decorated with a rich array of Greek-style sculptures, and
the walls featured paintings of Hercules, Athena, and Nike – among other Greek and
Iranian gods – watching over Kushan rulers.
The Khalchayan frescoes and statues are predecessors of the fascinating Buddhist art of Gandhara,
a southern province of the Kushan Empire.
The Kushans patronized Buddhism, as did many of the kingdom’s merchants, who had grown
wealthy on the burgeoning trade of the Silk Road.
It was through the Kushan domains that Buddhism first reached China; and it was under the
influence of the empire’s Greco-Bactrian artists that Buddhist art evolved many of
its conventions.
The Buddhist stupas and monasteries that sprouted across the Kushan Empire often featured figural
sculpture inspired by Greek models.
A famous example is the Bimaran Casket, shown here – a golden reliquary discovered inside
a stupa near Jalalabad, Afghanistan.
Here, the Buddha, the central figure, appears in a pose and setting taken directly from
Greek sculpture.
The figures wear Greek himations, and stand like Hellenistic statues in a classical architectural
frame.
Art historians debate the degree to which the Hellenistic art of the Kushans and Gandhara
derived from that of Bactria.
But it seems clear that the intermingling of the Hellenistic and Indian traditions began
in Bactria, and that Greco-Bactrian artists, working for Kushan patrons, were responsible
for the first human depictions of the Buddha.
The gigantic Buddhas of Bamiyan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, were direct descendants
of the Gandhara tradition, and thus of the art of the Bactrian kingdom.
Perhaps the most spectacular witnesses to the continuing artistic influence of the Bactrian
Greeks are the Tillya Tepe tombs.
These first-century burials, discovered in 1978 in northern Afghanistan, belonged to
a nomad chieftain and his five wives.
More than 20,000 objects were recovered from the burials, including a staggering amount
of gold jewelry.
Much of the jewelry, like these dolphin-riding cupids, was Greco-Bactrian work, similar to
the ornaments worn by the wealthy ladies of Alexandria and Antioch, thousands of kilometers
to the west.
Another impressive sign of the continued Greek presence and influence in Bactria are the
coins of the Kushan Empire.
For more than a century, Kushan coinage was basically Hellenistic.
The legends were in good grammatical Greek, and Greek gods frequently appeared on the
reverses.
Greek, in fact, seems to have been the administrative language of much of the Kushan Empire for
more than a century, and stray inscriptions suggest the existence of substantial Greek-speaking
populations as late as the third century.
Gradually, however, Greek influence declined.
In the mid-second century, the great Kushan emperor Kanishka formally declared that his
court would cease to use the Greek language.
His own coins reflect the change, with Greek legends being replaced by those in Bactrian,
an Iranian language written in a Greek-derived alphabet.
After the collapse of the Kushan Empire in the third century, all trace of the Bactrian
Greeks is lost.
Although there’s no hard evidence, the ultimate fate of the Greeks of central Asia is easy
to surmise.
They had always been a small minority; and after the destruction of the Greek kingdoms
in Bactria and northern India, they lost all political power.
Elements of the Greek population may have enjoyed Kushan patronage.
But without any special status or privileges, or any particular reason to maintain ties
with a homeland none of them had ever seen, the Greeks of central Asia simply faded into
the cultural background.
Some of the cities founded or re-founded by the Greeks still exist.
Alexandria in Arachosia, for example, is now Kandahar, Afghanistan – Kandahar, in fact,
is a corruption of Iskanderiya, or Alexandria.
Herat, Afghanistan was originally Alexandria Ariana.
A few of the Greek cities in Central Asia have been at least surveyed by archaeologists.
At Merv, Turkmenistan, the ancient Antioch in Margiana, the rectangular walls of the
Greek city can still be seen in the midst of a vast sea of mudbrick ruins.
Near Balkh, Afghanistan, the walls of ancient Bactra, capital of the Greek Bactria, still
rise in a dramatic ring over a plain cratered with looter’s pits.
Although Bagram, Afghanistan is best known for its airfield and base, it’s also the
site of the ancient Alexandria in the Caucasus; and it was here, about 90 years ago, that
archaeologists discovered a fabulous hoard of Kushan luxury goods, which included carved
ivory from India and enameled glass from the Roman Empire.
Many of the Greek cities in Central Asia, however, are just names on a map, tentatively
associated with grass-covered hills or isolated ruins.
And even the sites that are known are being progressively destroyed, year after year,
by looting.
Bactra has been torn to pieces over the past twenty years.
And Ai Khanoum, once the best-preserved of all the cities in the Greek east has been
almost completely destroyed by treasure hunters with tractors and bulldozers.
Cities pillaged in this way are truly lost, and lost forever.
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