MAP 13.1 Major empires of the third century BCE
THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES the dynamics of cross-cultural communication, primarily among the kingdoms and empires of Western and South Asia after Alexander the Great (Map 13.1). This period witnessed the rise, conflict, coexistence and fall of a succession of cross-continental empires, including that of the Seleucids (312–64 BCE)1 and Mauryas (321–185), as well as powerful regional powers with larger ambitions such as the Ptolemies of Egypt, the Diodotids and Euthymids of Bactria (ca. 250–ca. 145), Śuṅgas (185–73), and a variety of Indo-Greek kingdoms (ca. 185 BCE–ca. 10 CE). Several new Iranian-speaking élites, including the Parni, Saka, and Yuezhi, descended from the Central Asian steppes and eventually formed the Arsacid, Indo-Scythian, and Kuṣāṇa empires, respectively. These Macedonian, Indian, and Iranian powers engendered an intensive period of diplomatic interaction and cultural exchange. While this chapter focuses first on peer–polity diplomatic communication, it also explores the relationship between direct, intentional communicative acts and the wider contexts of cross-cultural interaction in which they took place and to which they often contributed.2
MAP 13.1 Major empires of the third century BCE
The ancient world boasted a long history of diplomatic exchange among the kingdoms and empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Anatolia, and the Iranian plateau.3 Archives of diplomatic correspondence from the king of Mitanni and the Egyptian court at Amarna testify to these exchanges with direct evidentiary detail unmatched in many later Western Asian exchanges, even up to the Early Modern period.4 Despite this long history of diplomacy in the eastern Mediterranean, and Western and South Asia, it is important to note that political upheavals and invasions ruptured these relations and traditions, with subsequent states continually being forced to improvise, reinvent, and reestablish diplomatic institutions and practices in response to prevailing geopolitical circumstances. The Persian empire subsumed what was left of the ancient Western Asian exchanges and the states that sponsored them. Between ca. 550 and 330, the Persian empire formed the center of gravity of Western Asia and the Mediterranean, with a number of smaller polities, such as mainland Greek city-states or the kingdoms of Northern India, constellated around it, at times cooperating with it and, at others, resisting it.5
Alexander’s invasion and destruction of the Persian empire transformed ancient geopolitical dynamics yet again. A number of powers emerged from the fragmentation of his short-lived empire. Among these, the Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Mauryas initially established themselves as the most powerful in the eastern Mediterranean, Western Asia, and South Asia, respectively. They coexisted and conflicted with one another in various states of cooperative parity and fierce competition. The initial desire of Alexander’s Successors to compete for the entirety of his empire forged a new idiom of Macedonian charismatic kingship, which became both a currency of power and a medium of competition in the Mediterranean and Western Asia.6 At the same time, Alexander’s Successors and their heirs engaged the local traditions of the regions they conquered, such as Egyptian or Babylonian kingship, which did not hold currency beyond those regions. The Mauryas were conversant with the traditions of the Greeks and Persians. As the Greeks became more and more involved in South Asia, the idioms of South Asian kingship and religion rose in importance.
Amidst their ceaseless wars, the Successors and later Hellenistic kings developed an elaborate and careful system of diplomacy. It involved exchanges of envoys between the courts of the major kingdoms, which treated each other as equals even as they competed for dominion over the entire oikoumene. As the kings cemented alliances through marriages with their opponents’ daughters, they attempted to outflank one another in establishing networks of patronage and protection for states of lesser importance. They competed for the loyalty and respect of the old Greek world by bestowing endowments on cities as well as by doing personal favors and giving gifts to local élites as means to influence events. In some respects, Hellenistic diplomatic practices reflected Achaemenid precedents, especially in the co-optation of local élites through the institution of guest-friendship.7 However, the careful web of relations forged among the Macedonian élite through marriage alliances was a relatively distinctive feature of the Hellenistic age; so, too, was the central dynamic of equally matched states forced to come to terms and compete with each other through diplomacy as well as military force.
Hellenistic diplomacy was not a closed system. At the same time as the Ptolemies and Seleucids treated with what was left of the semi-independent Greek city-states in the Mediterranean, they both exchanged envoys with the Mauryan court.8 Western literary sources record the names of a handful of such envoys. One of the most celebrated was Megasthenes, the envoy from the court of the satrap Sibyrtios to Poros and Chandragupta Maurya. He probably served as envoy to Chandragupta again in the time of Seleucus I, and was an important source of information on the subcontinent for the Greco-Roman world.9 We know considerably less about Deimachos of Plataea, the envoy of Antiochus I, and about Dionysios, envoy of Ptolemy II: both were sent to Bindusāra, son of Chandragupta. However, it is clear that such cross-continental exchanges among the Ptolemies, Seleucids, and Mauryas persisted well into the next generation of these dynasties.10
The fragmentation of the Seleucid and Mauryan empires heralded a new diplomatic dynamic in Western and South Asia. As these empires fell apart, several smaller states competed for power, while new regional hegemons, Rome, the Arsacids, and the Kuṣāṇas, rose in the Mediterranean and Western and South Asia, respectively. The Roman Republic adapted Hellenistic traditions as it entered the Eastern Mediterranean in the second century, as did the Arsacids as they gained power on the Iranian plateau.11 The practices of the previous century provided precedents and raw material, although the new power dynamics required new solutions as well. Despite initial hostilities, Roman and Arsacid relations eventually reached an equilibrium, which lasted until renewed hostilities during Trajan’s reign in the early second century CE and the eventual decline of the Arsacid empire in the early third century CE.12 Although they did not reach the intimacy of Roman–Sasanian relations later, these diplomatic exchanges were regularized enough that deviations from normal practice could communicate clear changes in policy. Even as the Arsacids and Rome dismantled the remnants of the Seleucid kingdom, and invasions of Iranian peoples destabilized Bactria, diplomatic exchanges continued to take place within South Asia between the various successor states. The Indo-Greek kingdoms of southern Bactria and northwest India were no longer “foreign” states, and in a sense, South Asian culture integrated Greek kingship and culture just as much as India transformed the Indo-Greeks.
While intensive court-to-court exchanges facilitated communications among sovereigns, movements of merchants, missionaries, craftsmen, and soldiers provided other channels for communication and exchange through the Mediterranean and Western and South Asia. The intensification of entrepôt sea trade between the Mediterranean and India and the eventual opening of direct trade to India were achievements that laid the groundwork for Sasanian and Islamic-period Indian Ocean sea trade.13 The sea trade here, which first peaked in the early Roman Empire, had its start in the Hellenistic era. Alexander and the Hellenistic kings sponsored several expeditions to explore the sea-ways, though Arab middlemen served as the main conduit for trade with major entrepôts in the Arabian islands, such as at Socotra and Aden. Eventually a direct sea route was opened up linking the Red Sea with Sind and Gujarat. To facilitate such trade, the Ptolemies appointed a special officer who oversaw the Red Sea and Indian Ocean (epi tes Erythras kai Indikes thalasses).14
These early links established a foundation for expansion along the west coast of India, and led to the growth of the west coast of the Deccan plateau as a particularly important site of exchange.15 After the fall of the Seleucid and Maurya empires, traffic along the land routes to India and eventually to Central Asia and China resumed. The Indo-Greeks, Parthians, and Kuṣāṇas all attempted to control the Kabul and Peshawar valleys, which contained the main points of access to the eastern bank of the Indus and northern India.16 Guidebooks for these trade routes, such as the Periplus Maris Erythraei and Mansiones Parthicae, preserved and communicated the practical experience of merchants who traveled portions of these routes and collected the experiences of their compatriots.17 Moreover, information gleaned from envoys, soldiers, and other travelers contributed to a growing body of scientific literature as well as enriching the Hellenistic Asian literary imagination.18
Augmenting our fragmentary textual accounts, inscriptions attest to the circulation of people, ideas, and objects along these sea and land routes. For example, the acrostic inscription of Sophytos in Alexandria-Arachosia—a Greek city founded by Alexander in the eastern Iranian plateau, later absorbed into the Mauryan empire—provides evidence of an individual with a non-Greek name who writes in Greek and in a Greek epigraphic idiom.19 The inscription celebrates his success in long-distance trade and in rebuilding his family’s fortunes. In Egypt, the rock-cut temple of the nineteenth-dynasty pharaoh Seti I at Kanais was located on the eastern desert route between the Nile and the Red Sea, some 55 kilometers east of Edfu. Here, the nearby rock face became a favorite site for merchants and travelers to leave graffiti commemorating their dedications. Among its many inscriptions showing evidence of movement of people and objects between India and Egypt, this rock face carries one in the name of a certain Apollo, who offers “Indian myrrh,” “having returned safely.”20 There is another Greek inscription cut by an individual identifying himself as “Indian” (Indos), named Sophon (reconstructed possibly as Sanskrit “Subhānu”). Regardless of whether he was an Indian who moved to Egypt and learned Greek, or an Indo-Greek who did the same, or a Greek from the Mediterranean who lived for a while in India, such inscriptions suggest that individuals who could operate in multiple cultural idioms flourished on these trade routes.21 Some inscriptions in Indian languages dating from the early Roman Empire found at the port of Leukos Limen (Quseir el Qadim) further attest to the movement of individuals and goods from India to the Red Sea.22 Although such inscriptions do not always specify what was communicated or moved, they are nonetheless important because they preserve evidence of individuals responsible for conveying knowledge and objects from east to west.
In the period after Alexander, both Indian and Hellenistic thought produced learned treatises on different aspects of statecraft and kingship. These texts stemmed from the tradition of academic Greek philosophy in the Hellenistic world and the scholastic Sanskrit tradition in South Asia. In both, these were reactive attempts to describe and make coherent the world in which the authors lived. Especially in the Greek world, their authors were motivated by an attempt to impose some measure of control over the absolute power of the new phenomenon of nearly omnipotent kings who ruled vast territories and could marshal huge armies.23 Like works by Plato and Aristotle before them, these treatises are largely concerned with ideals rather than real-world governing. While the Hellenistic ones do not deal directly with diplomacy, their more practical Sanskrit counterparts do. Reflecting, at least in part, the process of building the Mauryan empire, the Arthaśāstra of Kauṭilīya approaches diplomacy as an extension of war.24 Its ultimate goal, if not to facilitate direct conquest and expansion of the king’s territory, was to expand his influence by any means necessary. This characterization of statecraft accurately describes Seleucid and Ptolemaic policies as much as it does those of the Mauryas.
The Arthaśāstra and a number of other classical Sanskrit works describe theories of statesmanship that took into account, not only the relations between a state and its friends and enemies, but also a wider rājamaṇḍala extending far beyond them.25 Often translated as “circle of kings” or even “confederation,” the rājamaṇḍala is perhaps more accurately understood as “geopolitical spheres” or “political landscape.” An interlocking web of diplomatic relationships based on calculations of potential advantage relative to a state’s inferior or superior status animated the entire system. The Arthaśāstra prescribes actions for the king’s proximate enemies, their allies, their enemies, the enemies of their enemies, the enemies of their allies, the allies of their allies, friends and allies to the rear, and their friends and allies, as well as distant, neutral kings (more powerful than the king or his close enemies) who could offer protection or arbitration—a role that Rome eventually played in the Hellenistic Mediterranean.26 Describing essentially two hostile groups, the rājamaṇḍala prescribes actions to establish hegemony over one of these groups so that it can neutralize the other. In the Hellenistic Mediterranean and Western Asia, just as in South Asia, these groupings formed and re-formed with remarkable alacrity and lack of concern for previous loyalty or familial bonds. Although the rājamaṇḍala reflects the concerns of a medium-sized kingdom, its ultimate goal was to establish and maintain the sovereign as imperial master over all.
Diplomatic practices and solutions take their place alongside active military operations among the Arthaśāstra’s six types of foreign policy measures (ṣāḍguṇya): making a treaty (saṃdhi), engaging in open hostilities (vigraha), strategic inaction (āsana), active campaigning (yāna), seeking shelter with another king or in a fortress (saṃśraya), and making a treaty with one king and engaging in hostilities with another (dvaidhībhāva).27 This text, and several other classical Sanskrit texts touching on statecraft, recommend four means (upāya) of overcoming opposition to enacting these policies: conciliatory negotiation (sāman), giving gifts or bribes (dāna), sowing dissention (bheda), and violent force (daṇḍa).28 In South and Western Asia after Alexander, diplomacy was at once a method of communication and a means to further policy.
Diplomatic communications were conducted almost exclusively through envoys. Face-to-face meetings among these kings rarely occurred, and when they did, they occurred almost always in the course of a military campaign. Such meetings took place in the aftermath of a battle or after a show of force, such as Polybius’ report of Antiochus III’s meeting with Sophagasenos (Subhāgasena), one of the petty kings who emerged after the dissolution of the Mauryan empire.29 Anticipating the system that evolved later between Rome and Sasanian Iran, the Arthaśāstra describes three classes of envoy (dūta): the plenipotentiary (nisṛṣṭārtha), the envoy with a restricted set of negotiating powers (parimitārtha), and a simple messenger (śāsanahara).30 These empires all developed bureaucracies to manage the reception and accommodation of foreigners in their capitals, be they envoys or merchants.31 The social standing of the individual would correspond to the importance of the mission with which he was entrusted and the relative stature of the state to which he was sent. The Arthaśāstra and Hellenistic historical sources indicate that the most important missions were entrusted to members of the upper echelon of the court. For example, Megasthenes, Seleucid envoy to Poros and Chandragupta, was a friend and companion of Sibyrtios, the long-serving and powerful satrap of Arachosia. Ambassadors were expected to have an understanding of the culture and, preferably, also the language of the court to which they were sent. Not surprisingly, in the time of Aśoka, Indo-Greek (yona) members of the Buddhist community were selected to conduct missions to the western Greek lands.32 At the other end of the spectrum, sovereigns relied on a vast array of spies and secret agents from lower echelons of society to do much of the dirty work that fell into the category of bheda, including measures equivalent to those that the modern Soviet KGB termed “active”: sowing dissention, bribery, sabotage, psychological warfare, and assassination.
It was a matter of equal importance for the Seleucid kings to come to terms with their powerful Indian neighbor just as much as with their Macedonian rivals in the Mediterranean. The Ptolemies’ interest in India was more complex, because they hoped to establish an alliance and trade relations with the empire at their main competitor’s eastern flank. Kauṭilya would have recognized and encouraged this course of action as a logical approach to the dynamics of the mid–third century rājamaṇḍala. Indeed, once Aśoka finished conquering his subcontinental empire, he pursued a very similar policy. In his thirteenth rock edict, Aśoka states that he sent envoys to several western kings, including Antiochus II Theos, Ptolemy II Philadelphus, Antigonus II Gonatas, Magas of Cyrene, and a king named Alexander, probably Alexander of Epirus (272–255).33 Aśoka sent envoys, not only to the Seleucid court directly to the west, but also to the kingdoms directly flanking the Seleucids and those flanking the flanking kingdoms.
Diplomatic communications involved a complex spectrum of expressive elements. In addition to more explicit means of communication, such as letters and speeches from one sovereign to the other, an intricate and nuanced idiom of ritual, symbolism, and spectacle animated diplomatic exchanges and appealed to the senses and emotions of the envoy. In this regard, elements like food, exotic animals, gardens, women, and urban spaces were vital elements in the wider communicative process. While not necessarily independent statements in and of themselves, such elements contributed mightily to the web of communicative processes that wove together the kingdoms and empires of Hellenistic Asia.
Inspired by Persian example, under the Macedonian and Mauryan kings, royal cities, palaces, and surrounding royal districts gained great importance as symbols of authority and venues for powerful ritual and visual displays.34 Seleucid palaces integrated Babylonian and Persian building types and institutions but adapted them according to the requirements of local building techniques and urban design (Figures 13.1 and 13.2). The archaeological evidence for Seleucid and Seleucid-inspired palaces indicates that they drew heavily from Western Asian traditions, creatively incorporating Macedonian elements such as a central peristyle court with areas reserved for men (andron). Even so, these features were just as often as not adapted to new functions.35
FIGURE 13.1 The Achaemenid palace of Persepolis, Iran (ca. 518–331 BCE) with: 1. Gate of All Lands; 2. Audience Hall (apadāna); 3. Palace of Darius I (tacara); 4. Palace of Xerxes I (hadiš); 5. Palace of 100 Columns.
(Courtesy of author)
FIGURE 13.2 The palace at Ai Khanum, Afghanistan (ca. third century—mid-second century BCE). The early phase of the palace: A. Corinthian peristyle forecourt; B. hypostyle entranceway in the manner of the tacara or hadiš leading to a great room. The later Greco-Bactrian phase of the palace to the west of the great room (including the housing blocks to the west and treasury to the north): C. Doric peristyle court; D. Persian-style treasury; E. open-air enclosure, possibly used as a paradeisos garden or game park.
(Courtesy of author)
Mauryan palaces, too, were culturally plural, and they integrated aspects of Persian architecture into South Asian traditions. According to Megasthenes, the Mauryan palace at Pāṭaliputra was superior to those of Susa and Ecbatana, although it should be acknowledged that, by the middle of the Seleucid era, the latter pair were beginning to fall into disrepair as Seleuceia-Tigris and the Syrian Tetrapolis eclipsed them.36 Evoking the Achaemenid Audience Hall (the so-called apadāna) in a way that no known Seleucid palace attempts, Pāṭaliputra reveals evidence of several monumental structures, including remnants of the city’s wooden palisades, and a grand hypostyle pavilion of eighty columns of polished sandstone, which supported an elaborate wooden superstructure (Figure 13.3).37 Much like their treatment of Gandharan visual culture, colonial and post-colonial political narratives inflecting twentieth-century scholarship unconsciously emphasized or deliberately denied the hypostyle hall’s “foreign” Persian “origins.” However, these flawed interpretive frames completely ignore the processes behind its appearance. What we are witnessing here is an active process of selective appropriation and adaptation to local traditions in the service of Mauryan imperialism, not a simple question of technology transfer. While Megasthenes was impressed by the palace’s exterior fortifications and moats, he was especially struck by the beauty of its gardens and animal parks (Greek paradeisos), which gathered specimens from all over the empire and the world. Both in content and in symbolism, these gardens evoked Achaemenid and Seleucid paradeisoi.38
FIGURE 13.3 The excavated remains of the hypostyle palace of Pāṭaliputra, India, royal residence of the Mauryan dynasty (ca. 321–185 BCE).
(Courtesy of author)
Impressive as the royal cities and their palaces were in and of themselves, the Seleucid, Ptolemaic, and Mauryan courts also all staged elaborate spectacles for the benefit of both their internal audience and a variety of visiting foreign envoys.39 These lavish spectacles animated the urban and architectural environments and presented a vision of an ideal world from their court’s perspective. They presented a display of luxurious abundance that was “an expression of power that itself was instrumental in creating power.”40 By these means, such spectacles enveloped the envoy in alternating waves of sublimated expressions of violence, dominance, and power, and luxury, refinement, and prosperity.
Even as the Seleucid and Ptolemaic processions portrayed India with heavy Dionysian and Alexandrian connotations, its prominence was not confined to the realm of imperial imaginaries but was also reflected in its continued importance within Hellenistic geopolitical reality.41 These massive parades and celebrations became one of the preeminent displays of power in the Hellenistic world, and an idiom that the Romans understood and eventually used themselves in the case of L. Aemilius Paullus in 167.42 Strabo preserves Megasthenes’ description of a royal procession that he witnessed in Pāṭaliputra. Like the Ptolemaic and Seleucid festivals, the Mauryan court organized processions to coincide with the visit of envoys and designed them to impress this foreign audience as much as their internal populace.
And in the processions at the time of festivals many elephants are paraded, all adorned with gold and silver, as also many four-horse chariots and ox-teams; and then follows the army, all in military uniform; and then golden vessels consisting of large basins and bowls a fathom in breadth; and tables, high chairs, drinking-cups, and bath-tubs, all of which are made of Indian copper and most of them are set with precious stones—emeralds, beryls, and Indian anthraces; and also variegated garments spangled with gold, and tame bisons, leopards, and lions, and numbers of variegated and sweet-voiced birds. And Cleitarchus speaks of four-wheeled carriages on which large-leaved trees are carried, and of different kinds of tamed birds that cling to these trees[…].43
Similarly, the Ptolemaia festival staged in Alexandria by Ptolemy II and the procession organized by Antiochus IV at Daphne (in response to that of Paullus) presented equivalent displays of natural abundance, material wealth, cultural refinement, and military strength, all with the intention of celebrating the dynasty.44 These processions brought together animals, plants, and people from across Asia and, in the case of the Ptolemies, Africa.45 They included Ethiopian tribute bearers, Indian captives, and, in the Seleucid procession, 300 sacred envoys (theoroi) inserted into the parade itself.46
The more frequently the courts exchanged envoys, the more refined and close these nonverbal or textual modes of cross-cultural communication could become. The supreme example is the increasingly intricate, regular, and intimate system of diplomatic communication that developed between Rome and Sasanian Iran.47 Even in the more infrequent exchanges between the Hellenistic world and South Asia, the indigenous institutions of diplomacy and royal architectural, urban, and ceremonial traditions were poised to impress a new envoy.
Gifts were an expected part of every exchange of envoys, and gift exchange could serve as a ritualized and symbolically powerful mode of communicating and receiving messages from court to court. Such gift-giving traditions arose initially from local practices and were harmonized through repeated encounters. This economy of gifts could involve simple expressions of wealth; however, exchanges of learning, culture, and technology were equally important.48 Chandragupta gave a powerful aphrodisiac to Seleucus I as a gift; a telling choice, since we also hear that the treaty between the two sovereigns involved some sort of marriage agreement, and possibly an exchange of women in addition to the exchange of territory for elephants.49 In his rock edicts, Aśoka states that he made medical treatment available in the Seleucid empire and gave gifts of medicinal plants. For their part, the Seleucids showed a marked interest in medicine, and physicians could gain honor and influence in their court.50 According to Pliny, the Seleucids cultivated Indian medicinal plants, though if any originated from Chandragupta, they probably presented them as bounty of the earth yielded to the Seleucid king rather than as the cultural largess of a foreign emperor.51
While it is difficult to find examples of actual art objects given as gifts, it is even more challenging to recover how these were interpreted in their context. For example, we do not know the means by which the Indian ivories discovered in the treasury of Ai Khanum came into the possession of the Greco-Bactrian kings.52 Were they a gift received within the context of diplomatic interaction? If that was the case, they could be seen as artifacts of a communicative event between two states. Were they acquired on the market and appreciated simply as a foreign luxury item? Did they lie “inert” in a treasury, or were they incorporated into the Euthydemids’ courtly displays?
Displays of erudition and exchanges of philosophical and medical learning became a noteworthy component of Hellenistic diplomacy. Megasthenes reports on the diseases of elephants and their cures, learning that appears to be drawn entirely from a contemporary Indian manual on elephant care.53 Deimachos of Plateia, the other recorded envoy of Seleucus I, has quite logically been identified with the homonymous author of several treatises, including one entitled On Piety. In the next generation, Bindusāra requested from Antiochus I Greek wine, dried figs, and a Sophist, choices that in ancient and modern retellings have been interpreted as an expression of oriental despotism or (more correctly) the delineation of new political boundaries.54 While they certainly reflect the new Hellenistic world order, these intellectual exchanges were themselves an important instrument of diplomatic communication and competition. Antiochus I duly supplied the wine and figs, but was not able to provide the Sophist, a failure evidently exploited by Ptolemy II when he ensured that someone with intellectual credentials served as his envoy to Bindusāra.55 Against this background, Aśoka’s Buddhist envoys to the Macedonian kings come into focus, not just as isolated proselytizers, but rather as an extension of, and response to, an earlier cross-cultural conversation. Beyond these recorded official embassies, a great deal of philosophical, medical, scientific, and technological expertise moved between the Mediterranean and South Asia.56
Aśoka’s inscriptions provide an intriguing example of how the Mauryan court engaged the culturally-Greek communities within that empire as well as the Hellenistic courts to the west. The Mauryan empire subsumed the eastern portion of the Iranian plateau after Seleucus I ceded territories to Chandragupta Maurya in return for a treaty and war elephants.57 The later Mauryan emperor Aśoka (r. 269–232) created a series of inscriptions carved onto monumental columns or into the living rock across his empire in pursuit of his policy of propagating Buddhism as an imperial religion.58 Although most of these edicts were composed in Prakrit and inscribed in either the Brāhmī or Kharoṣṭhī scripts, a number of rock-cut inscriptions in regions that bordered the Greco-Bactrian kingdom incorporated Seleucid and Achaemenid traditions. In Alexandria-Arachosia (Kandahar), a Greek city founded by Alexander, Aśoka sponsored edicts in Greek (Kandahar II), Greek and Aramaic (Kandahar I; Figure 13.4), or Aramaic and Maghadi Prakrit transliterated with Aramaic script (Kandahar III).59 The regions around Jalalabad to the north and Taxila to the southeast hosted a number of minor inscriptions in Aramaic that mention Aśoka or use his reign for dating.60
FIGURE 13.4 Rock edict of Aśoka, discovered in 1958. This is an almost completely bilingual inscription in Greek (14 lines) and, below, Aramaic (8 lines): Kandahar Edict I (258 BCE). 55 × 50 centimeters. A latex rubber cast (“squeeze”) of the inscription is shown here rather than the block itself, which is now lost and probably destroyed.
(H. Falk [2006)] 243, Figure 2)
Although we do not always know the precise impact or reception of these inscriptions, it is clear that, in formulating this massive display of imperial power, Aśoka responded to a variety of precedents and cultural traditions and integrated them. His rock-cut inscriptions selectively integrated Greek, Persian, and Indian linguistic and epigraphic idioms, establishing a mixed precedent which the Kuṣāṇa sovereigns later adapted.61 Previous modern interpretations—confounded by colonial and post-colonial political narratives—attempted to champion “native” or “foreign” influences, and thus reduced the significance of these elements to a problem of origins. However, there can be no doubt that the Mauryas and Aśoka simultaneously drew from local South Asian traditions, while strategically integrating Persian palatial architectural ideas and their adaptation by the Seleucids and the Greek Far East.62
Like the deliberate juxtaposition of Persian and Greek elements in Seleucid palaces, the Mauryan pillars and Aśoka’s inscriptions deliberately adapt several Greek intellectual and epigraphic traditions to communicate their rather original message. At Alexandria-of-the-Caucasus (modern Begram in Afghanistan), Aśoka’s inscriptions were in composed in koiné Greek and imperial Aramaic—that is, the Aramaic used in the Achaemenid and Seleucid chancelleries, which still incorporated certain Old Persian words. The very act of carving a monumental rock inscription was an imperial act in Western Asia. While the earlier Achaemenid monumental inscriptions did not use the same scripts, the parallels with them could not have gone unnoticed by the patron or by educated viewers. More proximately, in these northwestern inscriptions, Aśoka commandeered Seleucid and Greco-Bactrian royal epigraphic practices that had spread the king’s word discursively and visually throughout these regions previously.63
The impact of their form and medium aside, the language of Aśoka’s inscriptions, and of the Greek ones especially, reveals a careful process of translation, ensuring that the religious and imperial concepts were communicated, not only accurately and clearly, but also in a culturally prestigious idiom. The koiné Greek provided a straightforward yet culturally nuanced translation.64 Thus Aśoka’s inscriptions communicated Buddhist concepts using terms drawn from the Greek philosophical vocabulary. For example, eusebeia was selected to translate the Prakrit word dhamma so as to capture its Buddhist connotation (Sanskrit dharma—“law, path of righteousness”). In addition, the translator deliberately and deftly exploited Greek cultural nuances, including allusions to the Delphic maxims, which were known throughout Hellenistic Asia and even inscribed in Ai Khanum.65
The decline of the Mauryan empire and the rise of the much weaker Śuṅga kingdom allowed Greco-Bactrian kings to push into northern India.66 King Menander (ca. 165–130), a patron of Buddhism, established a powerful empire that momentarily stretched from the Kabul River basin to the Gangetic plain (Figure 13.5).67 Menander, whose remains were divided among his cities and buried in stupas as befitting a Buddhist holy man, portrays himself iconographically as a Greek warrior king, while his Greek and Prakrit epithet “savior” alludes to his role as an enlightened Buddhist prince.68
FIGURE 13.5 Silver tetradrachm of king Menander I (ca. 165–130 BCE). On the obverse, his diademed bust wearing a crested helmet; on the reverse, “Thundering Athena.” Greek and Prakrit Kharoṣṭhī legends: “Of the savior king Menander.” Panjhir mint (Bactria).
(Courtesy of American Numismatic Society, inv. no. 1995.51.124)
Menander’s empire did not survive him, and eventually it fragmented into numerous Indo-Greek and Indian states.69 A later inscription attests to diplomatic exchanges taking place between the court of one of these Indo-Greek kings, Antialcidas (115–95), and that of the Śuṅga king Bhāgabadra (Figure 13.6). Found near Besnegar in western India, it provides a view into the close and culturally integrated relationships between Indo-Greek and Śuṅga kings. A certain Heliodoros, son of Dion, was sent to the Śuṅga king Bhāgabadra by king Antialcidas. Heliodoros was the patron of an inscribed Garuda pillar set up before a temple where he appears to name himself as a bhāgavata (devotee of Kṛṣṇa) (Figure 13.7).70 His conversion to a South Asian religion was far from unique. Buddhism gained, not just royal adherents such as King Menander, but also converts among the wider population of Indo-Greeks. We even hear of Greek monks from Alexandria-of-the-Caucasus making a pilgrimage to Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka for the foundation of the Great Stupa.71
FIGURE 13.6 Silver tetradrachm of king Antialcidas (115–95 BCE). On the obverse, he wears a diadem; on the reverse, an enthroned Zeus holds a Nike with elephant below. Legends in Greek on the obverse, and in Prakrit (vernacular Middle Indic) in Kharoṣṭhī script on the reverse: “Of the victorious king Antialcidas.”
(Courtesy of CoinArchives Pro; MIG 2 p. 148, Type 274)
FIGURE 13.7 The Garuda pillar of Heliodoros, envoy of King Antialcidas, Besnegar, India.
(Courtesy of Asitjain/Wikimedia Commons)
Heliodoros’ pillar provides an intriguing example of the complexity of the processes of cross-cultural communication. Its Greek patron created it within the context of interstate diplomacy. To an outside viewer—say, from mainland Greece—it might appear to be culturally hybrid, barbarized, or foreign. However, this cultural complexity would not have appeared aberrant to the inhabitants of North India. While classical Sanskrit epic or prophetic literature, such as the Mahābhārata or Yugapurāṇa, portrays yavanas (Indo-Greeks) and kambojas (Iranians) as unassimilated alien intruders, the numismatic and archaeological evidence illustrates the deep and permanent changes that these peoples wrought in South Asia, and shows how integral they were to the fabric of contemporary Indian culture. As a physical monument, Heliodoros’ pillar continued to communicate and signify more widely beyond the original moment of its creation and intent. In effect, it alludes to a chain of communicative acts: Heliodoros set it up to ingratiate himself with the god and with the host court. Note, however, a subtle but important point: after the pillar came into existence, the king, Bhāgabadra, evidently allowed it and its inscription to continue to exist. At that stage, the pillar in effect moved to a secondary communicative status that departed from the original patron’s intention, but depended on it. The pillar showed the greatness of the king, with whom foreign envoys sought to curry favor; it also commemorated good relations between the king and the yavana king. Alternatively, it could have even signified the submission of the yavana to Vaiṣṇavism.
Buddhist philosophy appears to have impacted Greek philosophical schools. At the same time, the Greeks left a noticeable imprint on the philosophy, religion, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, and visual culture of North India.72 While Babylonian astronomy might have reached India in the Achaemenid period, it is more likely to have done so during the Hellenistic period, given the intensive processes of exchange at that time. Similarly, the Yavanajātaka—an astrological treatise composed in late Hellenistic Alexandria, translated into Sanskrit, and adapted several times—preserves mention of a royal origin and its introduction into India by a Greek (yavana) king.73
Modern discourse on the development of both Greek philosophy and Gandharan art was at one time confounded by contemporary colonial and post-colonial political narratives: the former portrayed the Greeks as culture heroes; the latter denied any lasting influence, representing the Indo-Greeks as short-lived, unassimilated barbarian communities. Today, however, it is clear that later western Hellenistic philosophy owed a great debt to its encounters with Buddhist philosophy. Similarly, the phenomena of Gandharan Buddhism and “Greco-Buddhist” art were regional expressions of a Buddhism that developed from the early patronage of Indo-Greek élites and a cultural environment where Buddhism and Indo-Greek culture had mutually transformed each other.74 The visual culture of Gandhara had a long and important impact on South and Central Asia. Flourishing under the Kuṣāṇas, Gandharan art became a prestigious medium of communication that contributed to Buddhism’s expansion into Central Asia and beyond. The extraordinary intellectual foment in Western and South Asia after Alexander did not arise from a unidirectional flow of knowledge, nor did it result from a single “exchange,” but rather from multiple sustained conversations among a variety of overlapping philosophical, scientific, political, and artistic communities.
As another medium of mass communication, coins illustrate the broader dynamics of the region’s cross-cultural interaction and communication.75 The coins of the Hellenistic kings, with their vivid, naturalistic forms and powerful, new iconographies, introduced a novel technology of power and propaganda into Western and South Asia.76 The succeeding Parthian, Indo-Scythian, and Kuṣāṇa kings adeptly appropriated what was originally a Greek tradition, in some cases patronizing the same artists and die-cutters. Not only were Greco-Macedonian divine and royal iconographies displayed, but the Greek coinage tradition, once claimed by non-Greek peoples, also became a medium to express power and cultural affiliations. These coins communicated messages and conditioned, even educated, the viewer to recognize and associate certain images with power. Thus, despite its Mediterranean origin, the figure of a winged Victory, or of a god such as Zeus or Athena, became integrated into the visual and political cultures of Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian South Asia as well as of the Iranian world under both the Seleucids and Arsacids (Figures 13.8 and 13.9). The “bilingual” coins of the Greco-Bactrian, Indo-Greek, and later Indo-Scythian kings—with their Greek and Prakrit legends, and in certain cases Greek and Indian iconographies—were a prestigious medium of communication that presented Greek and South Asian cultures as unified under the sovereign. In addition to the coins’ specific messages of power, divine sanction, dynasty, or victory, their bilingual nature was a message in and of itself. The coins could be unifying symbols locally, but for the most ambitious kings, they also served as imperial statements that characterized the power of the sovereign in linguistic and iconographic idioms understood from the Atlantic to the Pamirs and throughout the Gangetic plain.
FIGURE 13.8 Silver tetradrachm of Indo-Scythian (Saka) King Azes I (late first century BCE). On the obverse, the mounted and diademed king in lamellar Central Asian armor holding a whip. On the reverse, Athena with armor and motif that could refer to the Buddhist triratna or tamga. Greek and Prakrit Kharoṣṭhī legends: “Of the Great King, Azes.” Taxila Mint (Punjab).
(Courtesy of American Numismatic Society, inv. no. 1944.100.60049)
FIGURE 13.9 Silver tetradrachm of King Phraates IV (37–2 BCE). On the obverse, his diademed bust; on the reverse, Tyche presenting a diadem to the enthroned king. At their coronation all Arsacid kings took the name Arsaces. Greek legend: “Of King Arsaces, the benefactor, the just, the (god) manifest, the philhellene.” Mint: Seleucia-on-the-Tigris.
(Courtesy of CoinArchives Pro. David Sellwood Collection of Parthian Coins, no. 331. For the type, see BMC Parthia pp. 99–105)
This chapter has surveyed a wide spectrum of communicative processes and practices that developed in Hellenistic Asia. Deliberate communicative acts, especially diplomatic communications, could catalyze a wide range of cultural encounters in their wake by facilitating the movement of art and architecture, as well as ritual, technological, and intellectual material, through multiple overlapping communities and logistical networks. Transported to new contexts, they could affect cultures in new and quite unexpected ways. While such exchanges often engendered wider processes of cross-cultural exchange that were not necessarily involved with communications, still, at the core of every communicative event lay a common idiom, be it linguistic, visual, or ritual. It could be, quite simply, the Greek or Prakrit languages, or in more complex expressions, the visual or spatial idioms of Greek royal or divine iconography, or Hellenistic palatial or garden design. In some instances, these idioms were appropriated and remodeled from a previous, long-established tradition of exchange, such as Persian diplomacy. However, new cross-cultural idioms could arise spontaneously from repurposed indigenous traditions. If sustained, the cumulative effect of multiple exchanges over many years could refine and hone them, remodeling the practices of all those involved in the process. Indeed, the process and practices of cross-cultural communication developed by the kings of Hellenistic Asia eventually transformed their own kingdoms’ worldviews and cultural traditions. They provided the matrix and precedents for the subsequent interchanges across the Mediterranean and Western and South Asia that grew under the Romans, Arsacids, Kuṣāṇas, and Sasanians.
1. Dates are BCE unless otherwise stated.
2. On the wider problems of studying cross-cultural interaction, see Canepa (2010b).
3. Explored in detail by Podany (2010); see also Aruz et al. (2008).
4. Podany (2010), 186–216.
6. For a nuanced treatment of Hellenistic court culture, see Strootman (2014).
7. Strootman (2014), 145–160; Wiesehöfer (1980).
8. Kosmin (2014), 31–58.
9. Eratosthenes FGrHist 715, with Roller (2010), 138. Karttunen (1997), 69–76; reinforced by further arguments in Kosmin (2014), 261–271, pace Bosworth (1996).
10. Eratosthenes FGrHist 716; Plin. HN 6.58. Karttunen (1997), 69, 92–93, 264.
11. Ma (2012); Canepa (2015a), 86.
13. Sidebotham (2011), 32–54.
14. Karttunen (1997), 331.
17. Casson (1989); FGrHist 781, with Schoff (1914).
18. Surveyed in detail by Karttunen (1997), 95–252. On the development of the ethnographic tradition, see Primo (2009), 20–24, 53–85; Kosmin (2014), 37–53.
19. P. Bernard et al. (2004); Mairs (2008); (2014), 102–145.
20. A. Bernard (1972), no. 72; Mairs (2010).
21. Salomon (1991), 735; Mairs (2013).
24. Kauṭilīya, Arthaśāstra, 7.13.42–44; Kangle (1960), 2: 322–323; Mishra (1993), 221–229.
25. This term appears in the fifth-century Tālaguṇḍa pillar inscription with the more restricted, local meaning of “district” or “unit of administration”: Mishra (1993), 140, 252.
26. Arthaśāstra, 6.2.13–22. Kangle (1960), 3: 248. For Rome’s role, see Chapter 15 below.
27. Kauṭilīya, Arthaśāstra, 7.1.6–12. Kangle (1960), 3: 251–255.
28. Kauṭilīya, Arthaśāstra, 7.1.6–12. Kangle (1960), 3: 255.
29. Polyb. 11.39. The name can also be reconstructed as Saubhāgyasena. Karttunen (1997), 271.
30. Kauṭilīya, Arthaśāstra, 1.16.2–4; Canepa (2009), 127–130.
32. Mahāvaṃsa 12; Karttunen (1997), 267.
33. Karttunen (1997), 266. Edict Kandahar II translates part of this edict into Greek: see further below.
34. Nielsen (1999), 112–129.
35. P. Bernard (1976); Held (2002); Kopasacheili (2011).
36. Aelian, NA 13.18; Boucharlat (2006).
37. Waddell (1903); Altekar and Mishra (1959); Sinha and Narain (1970); Mukherjee (2009).
38. Lincoln (2012), 1–19; Tuplin (1996).
39. Strootman (2014), 247–277.
40. Strootman (2014), 255; Kosmin (2014), 160–164.
41. Buccino (2013), 63–83; Strootman (2014), 251–253, 257–259.
42. Polyb. 30.25.1.
43. Strabo, Geography 15.1.69, trans. H. L. Jones.
44. Ptolemy II: Kallixeinos = Ath. 5.196d–203b. Antiochus IV: Polyb. 30.25–26.4; Ath. 5.194c–195d; Diod. Sic. 31.16. Walbank (1996); Bunge (1976); Virgilio (2003), 125.
45. Ath. 5.197–203.
46. See further Chapter 10 above.
47. Canepa (2009), 122–187.
48. Phylarchus, fr. 35b = Ath. 1.32.
49. App. Syr. 11.9.55 (kedos); Strabo 14.1.10; 15.2.9 (epigamia); Plut. Alex. 62.4.
50. Primo (2009), 45–49.
51. Plin. HN 16.135.
52. Rapin (1996). On the wider cultural, linguistic, and archaeological context, see Mairs (2014), 57–101; Martinez-Sève (2015).
53. The Hastyāyurveda of Palakapya.
54. Strabo 2.1.9; Ath. 14.652f–653a; Potter (2003), 421–422; Kosmin (2014), 35.
55. Plin. HN 6.58.
56. For Clearchus and the Ai Khanum Delphic maxims, see Robert (1968), (1973). Calanus, follower of Alexander, Arr. Anab. 7.3. For Zarmanochegas, envoy to Augustus, Strabo 15.1.4; 15.1.73; Cass. Dio 54.9.8–10. Other sources: Karttunen (1997), 55–64.
57. Kosmin (2014), 32–33; cf. Wheatley (2014).
59. Ibid. 242–246. On Kandahar I, see further Parker (2012).
60. Falk (2006), 247–253.
62. Stone (2002); Irwin (1973), (1983); Wheeler (1968), 127–145; Marshall and Foucher (1939), 1: 89–90; Smith (1911).
63. For example, the edict of 193 at sites spread across the Seleucid empire: at Eriza/Dodurga in Phrygia (discovered in 1884), Nehavand in Iran (ancient Laodiceia-Media, discovered in 1947), and a fortress in the region of Kermanshah, Iran (discovered in 1967); see Virgilio (2003), 239–241. On the South Asian context, note Rougemont (2012); Beckwith (2015), 226–250.
64. Halkias (2013), 82–90; Beckwith (2015), 125–135.
65. For a critique of earlier hypotheses, Karttunen (1997), 268–270; Yailenko (1990).
66. Coloru (2009), 197–230.
68. Plut. Mor. 821 D–E.
69. Coloru (2009), 244–262.
70. Lüders (1912), no. 669. Mairs (2014), 102–145.
71. Mahāvaṃsa 29.
72. For the multidirectional flows of knowledge, see Halkias (2013); Beckwith (2015).
73. Pingree (1973); (1978); Karttunen (1997), 316–320.
74. Halkias (2013), 103–108.
75. Compare Chapter 16 below. For the literature on Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins, see now Glenn (2016).
76. Cribb (2007); Errington and Curtis (2007), 50–59.