CHAPTER FIVE

Wanted—One Greek City

Archaeology

Coins suggest a world of mints and markets, a land where the kings and queens who were displayed on their money must have lived in palaces and cities, where the armies paid by this cash built and guarded fortresses, where the deities honored on these metal disks were worshipped in temples, and where the merchants who relied on this currency maintained warehouses, workshops, and homes. The exponential rise in the number of Bactrian coins recovered from Central Asia had long created the expectation of these related finds, as well as the tools, tombs, inscriptions, and other objects of an ancient society. After all, coins have purpose; they are not manufactured in a vacuum. What had happened to all these things? How could the soil of Central Asia yield so much ancient money and yet no monuments? Scholars desperately wanted to know.

Throughout the decades of the Great Game, enterprising souls had sought not just coins as they risked their lives exploring the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan. Ancient writers had described Bactria as the land of a thousand cities, filling modern minds with dreams of great discoveries.¹ What explorers found, however, did not much impress the scholarly world. In 1902, W. W. Tarn complained that “neither Bactria nor India has yet furnished a single Greek inscription.”² He supposed that Eucratides' capital city, if ever located, would be the place “where Greek architectural remains might be expected, if the Bactrians ever produced such architecture.”³ This frustration came on the heels of a hundred years of digging by European explorers. Unfortunately, much of that excavating had been done by collectors seeking fame and fortune by all available means, no matter how undisciplined and destructive. Archaeology, after all, did not fully mature as a science until the twentieth century. In Afghanistan, this slow maturation was further hindered by cycles of political instability, religious intolerance, and local indifference, making it virtually impossible for scholars to establish anything like Bactriology, on the model of, say, Assyriology or Egyptology. Men like William Matthew Flinders Petrie, destined to become the Father of Egyptology, dreamed of exploring Bactria but never did.⁴

In the nineteenth century, every ancient ruin and monument in Afghanistan seemed fair game for the treasure hunter. Charles Masson, Dr. Honigberger, and the European officers serving Ranjit Singh (Court, Ventura, Allard) could not resist shoveling into the grand reliquary mounds (stupas) that dotted the landscape between Kabul and Manikyala.⁵ The relics deposited inside these Buddhist monuments often included coins and other valuables. Men like Masson, “the stupa ripper,” thrived on the search for these collectible artifacts.⁶ His forays into the countryside around Kabul had another object besides stripping ancient monuments: Masson ached to find an entire lost city. He longed in particular to discover the site of Alexandria sub Caucaso (Alexandria “below the Caucasus”), a city founded by Alexander the Great somewhere at the foot of the Hindu Kush Mountains.⁷ In 1833, he claimed success at Begram (Bagram), as noted above in chapter 2. Located some 37 miles (60 km) north of Kabul near the confluence of the Panjshir and Ghorband rivers, this large urban site featured walled enclosures and other signs of extensive settlement. There Masson and his local agents gathered not only coins but also pottery, engraved seals, arrowheads, rings, amulets, and other “trinkets.”⁸ The datable coins from this site spanned a long era of occupation, from the late fourth century B.C.E. to the early thirteenth C.E. Specimens of Eucratides and Menander proved especially common.

The early work carried out at Begram by Charles Masson was important but inevitably piecemeal and poorly documented by modern standards; academic archaeology did not arrive in Afghanistan until almost a century later.⁹ During his reign (1919–29), Amanullah Khan harbored hopes of modernizing his nation while also freeing it from the old giants of the Great Game, Russia and Britain. Archaeology became one tool of this political agenda.¹⁰ Amanullah turned to the French, whose good standing in the Islamic Middle East and record of archaeological success there made a promising match. Thus, in 1922 a formal Franco-Afghan agreement created the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA), which gave French archaeologists nearly exclusive rights to excavate within the country.¹¹ First directed by Alfred Foucher (1865–1952), a specialist on Buddhist iconography and its connections to Greek art, the DAFA inaugurated a new and certainly more disciplined era in Afghan archaeology. Reflecting Foucher's interests, the origins and evolution of Gandharan (Graeco-Buddhist) art dominated the research agenda for many years.¹² Foucher believed that somewhere in the sands of Afghanistan lay the missing link of Greek colonial cities whose artists first gave the transcendent Buddha the trendy face of Apollo. The French vowed to find those cities.

One of the DAFA's earliest projects took up the chase where Masson had left off—at Begram. Initial surveys in 1924–25 led to targeted excavations between 1936 and 1946.¹³ These endeavors brought forth numerous finds, topped by the discovery of the so-called Begram treasure in 1937 and 1939. This famous deposit contained Graeco-Roman glassware and statuary, Chinese lacquers, and Indian ivories.¹⁴ These eclectic luxury items were uncovered by Joseph and Ria Hackin in two sealed storerooms that formed either part of an ancient palace or a prosperous merchant's warehouse—scholars continue to champion both views.¹⁵ These extraordinary objects naturally fueled the ongoing debate surrounding the production and trade of ancient art in the region. The dating of the treasure remains contentious, but the settlement itself almost certainly existed during the period of Greek rule in Bactria.¹⁶

Another part of that lost world existed north of the Hindu Kush at Balkh, a walled ruin celebrated in Islamic tradition as the mother of all cities, oldest in the world. Called both Bactra and Zariaspa in classical sources, this site was the capital of ancient Bactria, famed for thwarting the two-year siege of Euthydemus by Antiochus the Great (208–206 B.C.E.).¹⁷ Few modern explorers doubted that somewhere under its rubble lay perhaps the grandest of the fabled thousand cities of Bactria. As noted in chapter 2, above, Burnes, Gerard, Honigberger, and others had poked around amid the debris of Balkh; Moorcroft was buried there. Foucher himself gathered large numbers of ancient Greek coins from the locals, driving up the prices in the process.¹⁸ The coins from Balkh included the issues of Euthydemus I and II, Eucratides, Demetrius, and Heliocles.¹⁹ For Foucher, a city of this importance constituted an obvious priority for the DAFA, and he worried that a clause in the Franco-Afghan agreement might give the British, Germans, or Russians access to the site if the French did not immediately claim it.²⁰ Foucher's decision proved to be the most frustrating of his archaeological career. In 1924 and 1925, Foucher's team dug deep into Balkh with disappointing results; they found no grand Hellenistic monuments, statues, mosaics, or inscriptions.²¹ In spite of all expectations, the metropolis of Balkh showed no signs of being the missing link between Greek and Gandharan art. Poor Foucher despaired that Graeco-Bactrian art had never been more than a cruel mirage in Afghanistan's desolate landscape.²² As a later director of the DAFA would put it, “Bactra became the tomb of the hopes of Foucher.”²³

Immediately following World War II, the charismatic British archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler was keen on visiting Balkh as part of a cooperative exchange between the archaeological services of India and Afghanistan.²⁴ Wheeler, director general of archaeology in India, confessed the irresistible tug of these ruins: “Probably no site in Asia surpasses Balkh in its appeal to the historical imagination.”²⁵ Wheeler felt obliged to criticize the methods employed there by the French. He chastised Foucher's “superbly Gallic” predisposition to dig the one part of the site that “a less charmingly sentimental investigator would unhesitatingly have shunned.”²⁶ Sir Mortimer clearly believed that the British had set a higher standard excavating in India than the French could yet manage in Afghanistan.²⁷ For years afterward, Wheeler nurtured the hope of digging the site himself, but he could never convince the Afghan government to permit a joint British, Indian, and French expedition to excavate at Balkh.²⁸ An archaeological version of the Great Game patently played out along nationalistic lines deep into the twentieth century.

It had been the British numismatist Sir Alexander Cunningham who founded the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) back in 1870, more than a half-century ahead of the French in Afghanistan.²⁹ Important results rewarded the ASI's excavation of Taxila (now in Pakistan) by Sir John Marshall, who devoted over twenty years to this site (1913–34).³⁰ Trained in classics at Cambridge, Marshall approached his task “filled with enthusiasm for anything Greek,” and he looked upon Taxila as “a bit of Greece itself” far afield in the Punjab.³¹ He admitted that his expectations grew from Taxila's reputation in the classical sources, where the city is mentioned from the time of Alexander onward. Marshall's work showed multiple phases in the development of the site. Bhir mound represented the period of occupation from the Achaemenid Persians to the Mauryan Empire. Under Ashoka, this Taxila grew into a notable center of Buddhist culture. In the second century B.C.E., the Greeks invaded from Bactria and expanded the city on a grid plan associated with the nearby district of Sirkap.³² Still, the scattered traces of Hellenism at Taxila disappointed the diggers, who could scarcely explain the presence of Greek-styled coins on the one hand and yet the absence of Greek inscriptions on the other.³³ As for art, Mortimer Wheeler later proposed that the Gandharan style might be more Romano-Buddhist than Graeco-Buddhist, its inspiration deriving from trade with Rome rather than from the somewhat disappointing evidence for Greek settlements in the region.³⁴

The birth of the modern state of Pakistan, in 1947, eventually led to a renewed focus on the art and artifacts of early Buddhism in Gandhara and its environs. Sir Mortimer Wheeler himself excavated the large site of Charsadda (ancient Pushkalavati to the Indians, Peucelaotis to the Greeks), which seemed to have expanded from the Bala Hisar (“Upper Citadel”) to nearby Shaikhan Dheri along the same lines as Taxila.³⁵ On this site, Wheeler could see only an incomprehensible “tumult of heaps and hollows marking the spots where the local villagers have dug up ancient brick walls” to be hauled away as phosphatic fertilizer.³⁶ So in 1958, on his first day of work there, Wheeler brought in the Pakistan Air Force to take aerial photographs, which “suddenly and vividly” revealed the telltale grid pattern of the Hellenistic city hidden in the Shaikhan mound.³⁷ Seen from the air, the trenched-out walls of the ancient city made a passable map of its houses and streets, and at least one stupa. The same farmers who had grubbed up the walls had also uncovered several important coin hoards and stray finds.³⁸

Map 2. Ancient India.

 

An Italian archaeological mission (Instituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente) sponsored the large-scale excavation of Butkara I, in Swat, directed by Domenico Faccenna from 1956 to 1962. Faccenna's six volumes on this endeavor qualify Butkara I (the so-called Sacred Precinct) as “the best excavation ever made and published of a Gandharan Buddhist site.”³⁹ The Great Stupa at Butkara underwent five building phases from the third century B.C.E. to the tenth C.E., with the chronology based largely on numismatic finds.

Meanwhile, Article 11 of the Franco-Afghan archaeological convention (which had so troubled Foucher) provided other nations a few opportunities to work in Afghanistan. American teams began working at selected sites, such as Balkh, in the 1950s. Italian and Japanese missions opened in 1954. A joint Soviet-Afghan archaeological survey of Turkestan commenced in 1969; a German team explored Seistan in the early 1970s, and the British Institute of Afghan Studies started excavating at Kandahar in 1974.⁴⁰ Along the Amu Darya (ancient Oxus) Valley, in northern Afghanistan, only Soviet archaeologists were generally permitted to work, in order to ease border tensions. At Dilberdjin Tepe, a fortified-town site about 25 miles (40 km) northwest of Balkh, the Soviet-Afghan mission revealed a temple of the Dioscuri, so called because it contained murals depicting the twin Greek deities Castor and Pollux. Since Eucratides featured these same gods on his silver and gold coinage, the excavators naturally suggested that this king may have built the shrine.⁴¹

But where and when might the archaeological breadcrumbs of Bactria lead excavators to find an actual Greek city such as the king's own Eucratidia, with its houses, government buildings, fortifications, artwork, and inscriptions? In 1960, it was lamented that “apart from the coins, all the material remains of this realm might easily be displayed in a couple of shelves of an exhibition case.”⁴² All that changed the next year. In 1961, while on a royal hunt along the northern borders of his nation, King Muhammad Zahir Shah of Afghanistan recognized Greek architectural remains at Ai Khanoum (“Lady Moon” in Uzbek), a site that may once have been Eucratidia itself.⁴³ Jules Barthoux, a French geologist, had recommended to Foucher that the DAFA excavate at Ai Khanoum in 1927, but Foucher focused instead on Balkh and thus narrowly missed the find of his dreams.⁴⁴ In November 1961, the king informed Daniel Schlumberger and the DAFA that he had seen a Corinthian capital and another carved stone at the confluence of the Amu Darya and the Kokcha River. An inspection of the site startled the experts.⁴⁵ Just inches beneath the soil, the outlines of an entire city bulged in plain sight: ramparts, gateway, streets, courtyards, theater, and other buildings of various sizes. Remarkably, the Hellenistic site had never been reoccupied, so that no Kushan or later city rested upon its ruins.

Under the skilled direction of Paul Bernard, who succeeded Schlumberger as head of the DAFA, full-scale excavations commenced in 1965 and continued until 1978. During that time, the trenches at Ai Khanoum became the training ground for the next generation of DAFA archaeologists, including F. Grenet, H.-P. Francfort, C. Rapin, and O. Guillaume. In view of earlier agreements regarding this fragile Afghan-Soviet frontier, several Russian archaeologists (including G. Koshelenko, R. Munchaev, I. Kruglikova, and B. Litvinsky) labored alongside the French during the first years of excavation. In sixteen campaigns spaced over thirteen years, the main features of the ancient city came to light, dispelling Foucher's mirage to give scholars at last an intimate look inside the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. Bernard and his team assiduously published annual reports in academic journals, and an interim assessment appeared as the first volume of Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum in 1973.⁴⁶ Seven subsequent volumes of Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum have been completed thus far, each devoted to a major feature of the site: propylaea (vol. II), temple (vol. III), stray coins (vol. IV), ramparts (vol. V), gymnasium (vol. VI), small objects (vol. VII), and treasury (vol. VIII).⁴⁷ Yet to come are volumes on the palace, theater, domestic architecture, religious and funerary monuments, arsenal, and the all-important ceramics.⁴⁸ Some materials have been separately published in scholarly journals, such as the ornate stone fountain fronting the Amu Darya (Oxus River) and the coin hoards found in and around the city.⁴⁹ Without question, Ai Khanoum is the most thoroughly excavated and published Hellenistic site in Central Asia.⁵⁰

Map 3. Ai Khanoum.

 

Given his classical training in Greek archaeology, Paul Bernard brought to this task a somewhat traditional emphasis upon art, architecture, inscriptions, and an eventful narrative of the site. Like many French archaeologists, he first worked at Thasos, in the Aegean Sea, before moving on to other assignments, in his case ever eastward until he joined the DAFA and its excavations of the Kushan temple site at Surkh Kotal.⁵¹ As this dig neared completion, Ai Khanoum became his next—and defining—mission. Bernard's early focus at Ai Khanoum was the sprawling peristyle courtyard and associated structures in the so-called administrative quarter of the lower city.⁵² After all, it had been a Corinthian capital from this edifice that first led archaeologists to explore Ai Khanoum.⁵³ From the outset, the excavators stressed the Greekness of what they found:⁵⁴

The over-all impression that these [initial] two campaigns of digging give us is that Ai Khanoum was first of all a Greek city whose colonists strove to maintain the integrity of the civilization they had brought with them. The official language was Greek, as were Greek the gods and in all probability the institutions.

Subsequent seasons did little to change that assessment as the work expanded to include other parts of the city, although Bernard did acknowledge the shadowy backdrop of a non-Greek population whose influence could be seen in some of the architecture and minor arts.⁵⁵ For example, the posh residential sector has private houses built in non-Greek style but strewn with very Greek housewares.⁵⁶ The main temple of the city appears in form and function to combine an array of Greek and non-Greek elements.⁵⁷ Stressing Hellenization, however, the archaeologist Claude Rapin insists that “no Indian or Buddhist cults were practiced at Ai Khanoum, although Indian religious symbols appear on Indo-Greek coins and on a coral pendant.”⁵⁸

To understand Ai Khanoum in its broader geographic and human context, Jean-Claude Gardin began in 1974 a series of regional archaeological surveys.⁵⁹ His team focused on the ceramics and ancient irrigation canals scattered across eastern Bactria, hoping thus to balance the evidence for urban (Greek?) and rural (native?) populations. Methodologically, this endeavor appended to the classical archaeology practiced at Ai Khanoum some of the approaches favored by the so-called New Archaeologies that arose in the 1960s.⁶⁰ Among other things, the work guided by Gardin showed that Ai Khanoum should not be categorized solely, or perhaps even principally, as a military foundation. The ancient city itself consisted of a steep natural acropolis nearly 200 feet (60 m) high that sloped down on its northern flank to a large rectangular plateau (the lower city) that stretched over a mile (1,800 m) along the banks of the Oxus, 66 feet (20 m) high. A massive rampart and ditch enclosed the northeast side of the lower city, and the Kokcha River sealed off the southwest. A wall edged the entire triangle formed by the acropolis and lower city, averaging over one mile (1,600 m) per side.

This well-chosen site clearly exploited every advantage provided by man and nature to secure itself against possible attack. These defenses, plus the strategic location of the city on the Bactrian frontier and the presence of a huge arsenal inside the walls, suggest that Ai Khanoum served, at least in part, a military function. But Gardin demonstrated that important economic factors may also have influenced the development of the city. The surrounding plain showed signs of extensive irrigation, with the potential to support a dense agrarian population. Indeed, the area had clearly been developed as a farming zone long before the arrival of the Greeks. This site also lies near sources of great mineral wealth within the Badakhshan Mountains, where mines yield copper, iron, lead, silver, rubies, and lapis lazuli. At Shortughai on the plain of Ai Khanoum, archaeologists discovered a metalworking colony of the Harrapan civilization dating back to the Bronze Age of India.⁶¹ At Khuna Qal'a, sometimes called “Ai Khanoum II,” just 1.25 miles (2 km) north of the main city, a circular fortification may have served in Achaemenid times as the original town in the plain. During the Hellenistic period, this site may have become an outpost guarding the northern approaches to the Greek city, or it may simply have become a suburb or local estate. Commanding the confluence of two rivers in a rich agricultural and mining zone, Ai Khanoum and its environs clearly possessed commercial as well as military importance.

Although several inscriptions were recovered by the DAFA at Ai Khanoum (for which see the following chapter), none provides the ancient name of the city. The site has been variously identified as Alexandria Oxiana, Diodoteia (or Diodotopolis), Dionysopolis, Ostobara, and Eucratidia.⁶² The close association of the city with Eucratides arises from the fact, based on coin finds, that this king was the last Graeco-Bactrian to rule there, and at that time the city was undergoing a major renovation. This building activity is most evident in the expansion of the palace complex on a grand scale, including additions to the treasury.⁶³ Indeed, the enlarged treasury contained numerous items from India, which archaeologists have linked to Eucratides' plunder of Taxila and other cities.⁶⁴ The huge palace suggests that this was at times a royal residence and not merely a frontier outpost. The presence, too, of a large theater (with special loges), a gymnasium, and numerous so-called mansions gives the strong impression of a veritable capital, in which other prominent officials lived in close proximity to their king. There exists also some compelling evidence that a mint functioned at Ai Khanoum. Ten bronze flans (blanks ready for striking) were excavated in the city.⁶⁵ Reinforcing this view is the very recent discovery of an actual coin die (see plate 6; cf. plate 7) used to strike tetradrachms for King Demetrius. This invaluable artifact is reportedly among a group of objects removed clandestinely from the site. If this provenance is reliable, the die may suggest a royal precious-metal mint at Ai Khanoum; it would accordingly place Demetrius's sovereignty there (and not just in India, as once imagined); and it may link a particular monogram to a specific mint, whether that mark represented the city or a magistrate operating in that city. (See chap. 8, below.)

The coinage recovered archaeologically from Ai Khanoum includes (besides the unstruck flans) a total of 212 identifiably Greek or Indian stray finds.⁶⁶ In addition, two large hoards were excavated.⁶⁷ One, found within the city in 1970, contained 683 coins minted in India and later looted from the palace when Ai Khanoum fell. The other, discovered in 1973 within the kitchen of a house outside the walls of Ai Khanoum, comprised 63 Greek and Bactrian tetradrachms. A third hoard, found by a farmer in the winter of 1973–74 and subsequently dispersed, contained about 141 Greek and Bactrian coins.⁶⁸ A few other hoards have been reported but not published in any detail, such as a deposit of some 1,500 Bactrian coins found at or near Ai Khanoum in 1994.⁶⁹ In every case, the latest specimens have belonged to Eucratides and not his successors, which is why the fall of Ai Khanoum has been so closely tied to this king.

What happened to Ai Khanoum remains something of a mystery. The archaeological evidence indicates a sudden abandonment of the site at or near the end of Eucratides' reign. If Bernard's interpretation of a Greek memorandum from the treasury is correct, then the latest datable administrative activity in the king's palace occurred in the twenty-fourth year of his rule (ca. 146 B.C.E.).⁷⁰ A surprising number of valuables were left in that treasury when the Greek inhabitants of Ai Khanoum hastily departed.⁷¹ Rooms 104 and 109 warehoused semiprecious stones, artworks, and jars of coins, while magazines 120 and 126 held costly liquids. As soon as the Greeks departed, a fire swept through parts of the palace, and the treasury was quickly rifled. For a while, locals lived and worked in the storerooms, scavenging the treasures, until they too fled—perhaps in the face of an invasion (a second one?). The city suffered a major destruction as buildings were razed, colonnades hacked down, and its stone and bricks removed. As a result of these activities, items from the treasury were scattered about the dead city, apparently lost, abandoned, or hidden by whoever came after the Greeks.

The assumption is that the Sakas, nomadic invaders pressing down from the northeast, sacked the city soon after the Greeks had fled from their approach.⁷² Evidence of a battle at Ai Khanoum is conspicuously absent. In a city whose massive walls consumed an estimated ten million bricks, having been refortified three times, the inhabitants apparently suffered a crisis of confidence yet to be adequately explained.⁷³ Local peoples then took possession of the site as so-called squatters, salvaging what remained as they took up residence indiscriminately in the wreckage of the public and private buildings. A second nomadic incursion followed, this time led by the Yuezhi tribes whose descendants established the Kushan empire.⁷⁴

This next phase of Afghanistan's ancient history can be witnessed in the 1978–79 excavations conducted by Victor Sarianidi and Zemaryalai Tarzi at Tillya Tepe (“Golden Hill”), near Shiberghan, west of Balkh. There, in a rain-soaked earthen mound surrounded by cotton fields, a series of impressive Kushan graves came to light.⁷⁵ Over twenty thousand pieces of gold had been interred with the five women and one man buried in the necropolis; this hoard became famous as the Bactrian treasure featured in museum shows, popular literature, and documentaries of various kinds.⁷⁶ The eclectic assemblages of grave goods included items from India, China, Parthia, and Rome, as well as from local workshops. A few items bore Greek inscriptions, and images of several Greek deities graced the jewelry. One pectoral (worn by the man) featured a cameo of a helmeted king reminiscent of Eucratides.

Unfortunately, archaeological work at Tillya Tepe—and throughout Afghanistan—suddenly ended in 1979, just ahead of the disastrous Soviet intervention and subsequent civil war. These calamities not only drove out the excavators but also invited a relentless pillage of sites and museums from Tillya Tepe and Ai Khanoum to Balkh and Kandahar. For the next twenty years, the scientific search for the lost civilization of Bactria was nearly impossible. In September 1982, the Afghan government shut down the DAFA. During the next decades, the French and others shifted their explorations to safer areas north and west of Afghanistan, ironically in regions such as Bukhara that had been so treacherous during the Great Game.⁷⁷ For many years, Russian archaeologists had been working on sites north of the Amu Darya (Oxus River) such as Khojend-Leninabad (ancient Alexandria Eschate) and Samarkand-Afrasiab (ancient Maracanda), where Vasily Bartold (“the Gibbon of Turkestan”) explored before the Russian Revolution.⁷⁸ Subsequently, the interests of a distinctive, centralized Soviet archaeology diverged from those of the West, whose “bourgeois” practitioners were criticized for extolling the imperialist invasions of ancient peoples into Central Asia. Archaeologically speaking, Alexander and the Greeks were out, whereas the indigenous peoples were in. Well-financed Soviet missions shifted their priorities from “naked thingology” (“goloye veshchevedeniye”) to modes of production and questions of ethnogenesis. The material culture of Bactria, especially under the Kushans, was seen as a local product rather than as an importation of Graeco-Roman civilization.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 seriously curtailed the funding of state-sponsored archaeology, yet the independence of the Central Asian republics created new opportunities for joint expeditions. At Afrasiab, for example, a Franco-Soviet mission transitioned into a Franco-Uzbek mission between the first and second seasons of excavation.⁷⁹ The French-Uzbek archaeological mission also excavated at Koktepe (19 miles [30 km] north of Samarkand), Termez (on the right bank of the Amu Darya), and the so-called Iron Gates (near Derbent); other missions, such as the International Pluridisciplinary Archaeological Expedition in Bactria, continue to explore throughout the Surkhan Darya and surrounding regions.⁸⁰ An Uzbek expedition directed by Edvard Rtveladze discovered a Hellenistic outpost at Kampyr Tepe that once guarded the Oxus crossing west of Termez.⁸¹ Although part of the site has eroded into the river, finds included numerous Greek inscriptions (see chap. 6, below) and coins. Further excavations by Russian archaeologists uncovered evidence of body armor from the time of Eucratides, resembling that found at Ai Khanoum.⁸² At Takht-i Sangin (“Throne of Stone”), Russian archaeologists of the South Tadjikistan Archaeological Expedition (1976–91) found an extraordinary cache of weaponry among other items associated with a temple dedicated to the Oxus River.⁸³ This ancient museum of military equipment includes bone-plated composite bows, several varieties of arrowheads, spearheads, swords, daggers, scabbards, armor plate, helmets, and shields. No greater collection of Greek armament has been found anywhere in the ancient world.

Meanwhile, the International Merv Project took up the earlier work of the South Turkmenistan Archaeological Multidisciplinary Expedition in the Merv Oasis.⁸⁴ These excavations clarified the historical development of the Achaemenid site at Erk Qal'a and its larger Hellenistic successor called Gyaur Qal'a, as well as the Parthian and Sassanian fortifications of Gobekli-tepe. The coin finds, though limited, resemble in distribution those uncovered at Ai Khanoum and Takht-i Sangin, and may indicate that Eucratides was the last Graeco-Bactrian king to control these areas.⁸⁵

These extensive archaeological operations have considerably improved our knowledge of settlement patterns and land use in Hellenistic Sogdia and Margiana, and of the movements of nomadic peoples during and after the reign of Eucratides.⁸⁶ The resulting archaeological picture is one of a network of fortifications monitoring the northern approaches to Bactria through Sogdia, indicating the ancient perception that this was a dangerous frontier.⁸⁷ In fact, the archaeological data from Afrasiab signal that Greek military occupation of the area was interrupted for a time before the reign of Eucratides.⁸⁸ Numismatic evidence may support this conclusion.⁸⁹ Excavations at Kurganzol Fortress in the Surkhan Darya region of Uzbekistan show that this Greek stronghold was lost late in the third century B.C.E. and not recovered.⁹⁰

In 2002, following the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that drove the Taliban from power, the DAFA reestablished itself in the country. By then, of course, archaeology had taken the form of a rescue mission in the aftermath of a radical regime that had brazenly pulverized the magnificent Buddhas of Bamian and systematically looted many museums.⁹¹ Over 70 percent of the material in the National Museum at Kabul had disappeared, representing a nation's cultural patrimony callously sold abroad or hammered into dust.⁹² Many stolen coins were brashly auctioned away on eBay as the ePlunder of rapacious thieves. A few Afghan curators with nerves of steel managed to hide the other 30 percent, so that now these salvaged artifacts can again be studied and appreciated.⁹³ To some extent, the ravaging of Afghanistan shows the redeeming value of the now defunct and villainized system of archaeological partage, whereby finds used to be divided between the host country and foreign missions. The impressive—and safe—collections of the Musée Guimet in Paris testify to this value.

Beyond the Afghan museums, other antiquities became victims. In a lawless land plagued by want, the arduous work that had documented some 2,800 archaeological sites in Afghanistan unfortunately served the robbers as a road map to buried treasure. Known archaeological sites such as Begram, Tillya Tepe, Surkh Kotal, Ai Khanoum, and Balkh were attacked in a criminal frenzy of despoliation.⁹⁴ Some of this damage was done by impoverished locals, but in many cases well-equipped syndicates brought in bulldozers and heavy trucks. The profits from this activity rivaled the billions made from the Afghan drug trade, and some of the same unsavory characters engaged in both. Too much of this activity still continues unabated: Afghanistan today has become like the Egypt of a century ago, when the great archaeological pioneer Flinders Petrie described the Nile Valley as “a house on fire, so rapid was the destruction going on.”⁹⁵

During the Afghan civil war, clandestine diggers at Balkh located what had so long eluded Foucher, Schlumberger, and others—the remains of Hellenistic Bactra. In 1947, Schlumberger had recovered the first slim sign of an actual Greek presence at Balkh—a broken potsherd bearing the relief of a young king of Bactria.⁹⁶ The ceramic was found at the Bala Hisar (“Upper Citadel”), but the French also tentatively explored a nearby mound called Tepe Zargaran (“Jeweler's Hill”), only about half a mile (1 km) southeast of the main excavations. Schlumberger noted the promising nature of this site, but it was left for looters in the 1990s to unearth there the same sort of Greek architectural features as found at Ai Khanoum.⁹⁷ Coins and silver wine vessels have also been unearthed. Thankfully, a fresh mission is now under way to excavate what remains of the Hellenistic city at Tepe Zargaran, and another is exploring the nearby Achaemenid site at Chesm-e Shafa, where local villagers had long been looting the citadel.⁹⁸ Sadly, no such effort attends the unfortunate site of Ai Khanoum. Paul Bernard had once written:⁹⁹

The Greek city of Ai Khanoum is right at the surface of the soil, never having been covered by later settlements. Under the thin shroud of earth, we hoped to find the dead body intact. What we discovered was a brutally mutilated corpse.

His reference is to the damage done to the city by nomadic invaders at the end of Eucratides' reign. Unfortunately, that “corpse” was savagely desecrated again in modern times by scavengers unsated until they had picked the bones clean. The ground at Ai Khanoum has been churned so thoroughly by pillagers that the ancient city revealed by the DAFA is now hardly recognizable.¹⁰⁰ Wondering what had happened to the Greek columns and capitals that once graced the city, archaeologists finally found them reused to build a teahouse in nearby Khwaja Bahuaddin, the village where Commander Ahmad Shah Massoud was assassinated by the Taliban on the eve of 9/11. Thus, the trigger for the terrorist attacks far away in America was pulled among stolen ruins from Ai Khanoum.

Some sense of what Bernard's interrupted excavations had left for the looters to find can be gleaned from watching the antiquities market closely.¹⁰¹ Glassware, coins, ivories, statuettes, signet rings, and beautifully decorated silver and gilt bowls hint at these spoils. Some of the looted bowls bear images of Tyche, Dionysus, satyrs, dolphins, and Eros; one has a sculpted attachment recognizable as a royal portrait bust, perhaps of Eucratides. All these objects have been openly linked to the ruin field that once was Ai Khanoum, blatantly plundered under the direction of the local commander, Mamoor Hassan. An infamous looter named Mahbuhbullah boasted to a reporter in 2001 that he had wrested three hundred pounds (136 kg) of jewelry and coins from Ai Khanoum and decorated his home with fine Greek architecture.¹⁰² Similarly, other stunning artifacts have come from ransacked archaeological sites around Herat, Kandahar, Bajaur, and Taxila.

The current state of Central Asian archaeology remains as friable and politically charged as ever. An independent Afghan archaeological service with well-trained and securely funded local excavators is some years away and likely to be hampered in its development by lingering security issues in some vital regions. Particularly troubling is the dearth of technical skills in restoration and conservation, which leaves monuments of all periods waiting for urgent intervention before it is too late.¹⁰³ Meanwhile, international help is hard to mobilize. Many Russian archaeologists struggle to find adequate institutional support in the post-USSR world, and its fine cadre of experienced specialists is aging. The DAFA is vitally active again, but as an arm of the French foreign ministry its own political functions cannot be overlooked. A few American and British universities are sponsoring work in Afghanistan by a handful of dedicated students and faculty, but without coordinated and sustained funding. Efforts to explore the region remotely using satellite imagery show promise, but work on the ground is also necessary.¹⁰⁴ Given the many problems faced at the moment by the Afghan people, their security forces, and their government, costly scientific archaeology exists on the fringe and largely as a piecemeal endeavor by interested individuals. Even at that, no one can be sure how long this somewhat shattered window of opportunity may remain open.

Meanwhile, the hard-won fruits of Afghan archaeology continue to serve political agendas in and outside Afghanistan. It hardly seems a coincidence that the spectacular exhibition of Afghan archaeological artifacts entitled “Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul,” has toured France, Italy, the Netherlands, the United States, Canada, Germany, and Great Britain—all of them NATO members of the International Security Assistance Force operating in Afghanistan, including the top six contributors of troops. The items selected for this goodwill tour all derive from four pre-Islamic sites and cater primarily to the Western cultural traditions of the peacekeeping forces. This trend manifests itself in countless tiny ways. Take, for instance, the “Respect Afghan Heritage” playing cards issued to troops by the well-intentioned Legacy Resource Management Program of the U.S. Department of Defense. The deck is literally stacked: it includes only three cards featuring Islamic remains, as compared with numerous cards devoted to the pre-Islamic antiquities of Ai Khanoum, Begram, Tillya Tepe, Takht-i Sangin, Rabatak, Bamian, Balkh, Tepe Zargaran, and other sites. Four of the cards actually picture sites in the United States!

The undisguised aim of many archaeologists working in Afghanistan and its environs has long been to find Greek remains, and it is only natural to celebrate their success after so many years of struggle.¹⁰⁵ This compelling archaeological narrative reflects a very real prime directive: Discover the kingdom that created the kings. The coins suggested not only the existence of those kings and their subjects, but also their ethnicity—hence, the presumption of Hellenic culture waiting to be unearthed. Finally identifying traces of that long-sought Greekness may, however, tend to exaggerate its importance. That is always the danger in finding what you are looking for in the archaeological record. Some features of Ai Khanoum appear quintessentially Greek, such as the theater and gymnasium; other structures bear the hallmarks of unmistakable Mesopotamian influence, such as the palace and main temple. Even so, archaeologists and historians routinely describe the site as Greek and refer to its inhabitants as Greeks. Is that a balanced assessment, or simply shorthand for “mission accomplished”? In many ways, what people build about themselves (theaters or palaces) can be less informative than what they say about themselves. Since language—and what it is used to express—plays a vital role in cultural identity, special attention must be paid to the written as well as unwritten evidence recovered from the ground.¹⁰⁶