The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia by Rachel Mairs

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 407 The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia. By Rachel Mairs. Oakland: University of California Press. 2014. Pp. xvi, 234. Classicists often label Bactria and northwestern India as the “Greek Far East.” In this thought-provoking book, Mairs proposes the more appropriate “Hellenistic Far East,” challenging the traditional perspectives expressed in the very titles of the two main works referencing the question: William Woodthorpe Tarn’s The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938), and Awadh Kishore Narain’s The Indo-Greeks (Oxford 1957). The former considered these regions as the outpost of Hellenism, while the latter claimed them as parts of Indian history. Arguing that “this material is exotic in a double sense” (3), Mairs proposes a more complex approach, focusing on the interaction between the Greeks and their neighbors after Alexander. In her criticisms she mostly takes aim at the traditional attitude of classicists. However, some late twentieth-century approaches, espousing acculturation, also need revision. Mairs’s methodological observations give a welcome complement to the more traditional, comprehensive monograph by Omar Coloru, Da Alessandro a Menandro: Il regno greco di Battriana (Pisa and Rome 2009). The book is structured as a sort of matryoshka doll. After a methodological “Introduction ” (1–26), two historical chapters provide the opening and the closing (Chapter One, “Administering Bactria: From Achaemenid Satrapy to Graeco-Bactrian State,” 27–56; Chapter Four, “Waiting for the Barbarians: The Fall of Greek Bactria,” 146–176), whereas the central chapters focus on two expanded case studies (Chapter Two, “Ai Khanoum,” 57–101; Chapter Three, “Self-Representation in the Inscriptions of Sōphytos [Arachosia] and Hēliodōros [India],” 102–145). A brief “Conclusion” (177–188) sums up the methodological achievements of the book, followed by an “Appendix” (189–193) with the texts of three inscriptions discussed in Chapters Two and Three, a sizeable “Bibliography” (195-225), and a general “Index” (227–231). There is no source index . Chapter One considers the continuity of Achaemenid institutions in Bactria, an aspect less developed by Coloru, who starts with the actual beginnings of the kingdom. Mairs draws on the archaeological and the epigraphic evidence, extracting “a few themes or pieces of pertinent information” (32). Some preserved administrative documents, still written in Aramaic, seem to show that Alexander’s conquest did not apparently produce an outright break, but no written evidence was found until the third century. The Seleucids may well have retrieved Achaemenid administrative know-how, but is it enough to label the Seleucid satrapy as a period of lengthy transition from the Iranian to the Hellenistic phase? Chapter Two deals with the center of Āy Ka ̄nom (usually known with the spelling Ai Khanoum) in Arachosia, present-day Afghanistan.1 Mairs criticizes an early article of the late Paul Bernard giving emphasis to the “Greekness” of the city, “whose colonists strove to maintain the integrity of the civilization they had brought with them” (91).2 1 Laurianne Sève-Martinez (in her review of the book in TopoiOrOcc 20 [2015] 579–588) suggests that this discussion ignores several relevant archaeological publications. 2 P. Barnard, “Ai Khanoum on the Oxus: A Hellenistic City in Central Asia,” PBA 53 (1967) 71–95; cf. G. Traina, “Notes on Hellenism in the Iranian East (Classico-Oriental Notes, 6-8),” Iran & the Caucasus 9 (2005) 1–14. 408 PHOENIX To support her argument, Mairs proposes a new interpretation of the inscription of Klearchos with the sayings of the wise men from Delphi from the pronaos of the heroon of Kineas.3 Following Narain against Louis Robert, she dismisses the latter’s identification of Klearchos with the philosopher Klearchos of Soloi, a pupil of Aristotle,4 and considers him a local citizen from the Bactrian-born generation. Refined texts such as Klearchos’ inscriptions were meant to enforce Ai Khanoum’s Greek identity in a sort of invention of tradition. Chapter Three compares two apparently opposite cases, dating from the same chronological context (second century b.c.e.): Sōphytos, a poet of Arachosia bearing a local name, who composed an extremely refined Greek acrostic funerary epigram found in Qandaha ̄r (SEG 54: 1568; Rougemont, no. 84), and...