University of Heidelberg

The Hellenistic Far East: From the Oikoumene to the Community

Rachel Mairs
(Brown)

The material record from the Hellenistic Far East displays great diversity in its influences, with stylistic traits and religious practices with their origins in the Mediterranean world, the Near East, India and Central Asia.  In exploring cultural interaction in the Hellenistic Far East, however, we run the risk of reducing the region to the sum of these influences, without taking full account of the agency of local populations in adopting or discarding certain forms or practices, and in creating their own local cultural koine.  Equally importantly, the assumptions which we might make about the identities (‘hybrid’, conflicted) of these populations, based on our perceptions of their diverse material culture, may bear little resemblance to the identities they actually claimed and defended.
My focus in this paper will be on the local.  A small, but invaluable, corpus of documentary texts in Aramaic (Achaemenid) and in Greek (Hellenistic) from Bactria allows us to access something of how this region was administered.  The most remarkable point to emerge from these documents is the degree to which administrative continuity was maintained.  In the Aramaic documents, which cover the period of Alexander’s conquests, it is ‘business as usual’: documents simply begin to be dated by a regnal year of Alexander.  Naming practices in these texts, and in inscriptions, also show continuity: theophoric personal names from the deified river Oxus are consistently popular.
There is continuity, too, in material culture, although this is more difficult to trace in a very lacunose local archaeological record.  I will nevertheless consider some of the evidence in favour of this, and in particular for the retention of local forms in the architecture of religious and political institutions over the longue durée.
On a still more local scale, I will consider one settlement site, Ai Khanoum, as a community with its own coherent internal dynamics.  As in the Hellenistic Far East as a whole, Ai Khanoum displays a dazzling array of different artistic styles and cultural practices.  The contrasts can be striking: a Greek theatre and gymnasium, a temple in a Near Eastern style.  But these contrasts, I would argue, are most striking to us, modern analysts.  Ai Khanoum functioned as a city, and its diverse inhabitants created, manipulated and lived within this urban landscape. To them, it made some kind of cultural sense.