GREEK CULTURE IN AFGHANISTAN AND INDIA: OLD EVIDENCE AND NEW DISCOVERIES

Abstract

In 1888 Rudyard Kipling published a collection of short-stories entitledThe Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales. Perhaps the most famous of these stories, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, recounted the adventures of two British military veterans, Peachy Carnahan and Daniel Dravot Esq., played by Michael Caine and Sean Connery in John Huston's 1975 film of the same name. Both men have seen India's cities and jungles, jails and palaces, and have decided that she is too small for the likes of they. So, they set out to become kings of Kafiristan, a mountainous, isolated, and unstudied country beyond the Hindu Kush in north-eastern Afghanistan. They confide their plan to their recent acquaintance Rudyard Kipling (Christopher Plummer), then editor of theNorthern Star, who calls them mad. No man, he says, has made it to Kafiristan since Alexander the Great, to which Peachy replies ‘If a Greek can do it, we can do it.’ What they find in north-eastern Afghanistan are the last remnants of Alexander the Great's empire, a local culture and religion part-Greek and part-Kafiri. The story is fiction, but aspects of its historical context are true. Alexander spent most of the years 330–325 campaigning in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, and he left behind Greek kingdoms and culture that flourished throughout the Hellenistic period and even later. Traces of these Greek kingdoms are continually coming to light and the archaeological, artistic, and epigraphic evidence coming out of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India reveals a prosperous and culturally diverse kingdom.