Southern Bactria and northern India before Islam: a review of archaeological reports.

• Author: Fussman, Gerard

Despite a huge and ever-increasing bibliography, the history of northern India from the death of Asoka to the first inroads of the Moslem armies is still imperfectly known. About its social history we can only state that new peoples kept coming from Iran and Central Asia and were, in the course of time, integrated into an Indian social organization about which we have very little incontrovertible data.(1) Its economic history is summed up by lists of commodities, some indications about currencies and monetary policies, and imprecise records of its trade with China and the Roman Empire. Thanks to recently discovered inscriptions and sculptures, the complex relationship between Buddhism and early Hinduism now appears in a new light, but this new data comes from widely separated Places (mainly Gandhara and Mathura) and its interpretation may be disputed.(2) The political history of northern India still consists of bare lists of names, with an often unsure relative chronology and a still more unsure absolute chronology. These chronological uncertainties cannot but have a bearing on the history of early Indian Art which, despite some advances,(3) has not yet been established on a sure footing.

The extant Indian, Western, and Chinese literatures have been so carefully sifted that new important revelations are not to be expected. New inscriptions and coins are published almost every year, but they are more often than not stray finds whose whereabouts are imperfectly known.(4) Thus, the only hope for the historian of early India lies in regular excavations. Indeed, as early as 1903, (Sir) John Marshall planned to start excavations in Taxila, partly because its location and history reminded him of ancient Greece, but mostly because he wanted to recover all kinds of data "on the political and religious history of the northwest ... and its material culture during lengthy periods between 500 B.C. and A.D. 500."(5) The trend was followed by (Sir) Mortimer Wheeler, who came to India in February 1944 with a plan of systematic excavations for recovering India's past.(6) But he had to leave India (now Pakistan) without being able to implement his plan fully. The Archaeological Survey of India and the Department of Archaeology of Pakistan did not follow in his steps. But his ideas were taken up by three archaeological missions whose heads had impressive academic backgrounds: the Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Afghanistan (DAFA), whose postwar director, Daniel Schlumberger, had the same taste for history as its founder, Alfred Foucher;(7) the Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (IsMEO), whose chairman, Giuseppe Tucci, in 1955, earmarked places in the Swat valley of Pakistan for excavations with the specific purpose of unraveling the history of Buddhism in northwestern India and discovering the sequence of the Hellenized Buddhist art of Gandhara;(8) and the Archaeological Mission of the Museum of Indian Art (Berlin) which began to dig at Sonkh, near Mathura, in 1966 under the leadership of Herbert Hartel, then director of the museum, a pupil and heir of Professors Luders and Waldschmidt, to "collect material information on the early history of the once-flourishing State of Mathura, one of the most important cultural centres of ancient India."(9)

This was how, during the sixties, three large excavations were conducted in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Republic of India which should have helped to solve, but did not, the vexed questions of the origins of early Buddhist art, the creation of the anthropomorphic representation of Buddha, and the subsequent developments of early Indian art: Ai Khanum in northern Afghanistan (1964-1978), started by D. Schlumberger but almost entirely led by P. Bernard, which was to have given important clues to the Hellenization of northwestern India; Butkara I in Swat, "chosen by Prof. Tucci after careful study of historical sources continually checked by inspection of the ground,"(10) entirely dug out by Domenico Faccenna (1956-1962), where it was hoped that careful stratigraphical excavations could help to establish on a sure footing the chronology of Gandharan art; and Sonkh, excavated by Prof. Hartel in eight seasons (1966-1974), which should have been the counterpart of Butkara I in the Gangetic valley. These were large-scale excavations, backed by local authorities, conducted with great care by first-class scholars with relatively important budgets and a good staff of technicians and young promising scholars. We now know that they did not solve the difficult problem of the sources and chronologies of the Gandharan and Mathuran Buddhist arts. Despite the wealth of well-recorded finds, the new advances came mainly from stray finds,(11) and the best overviews are still Schlumberger 1960 and Lohuizen de Leeuw 1949. There is no reason to blame this failure on the excavators. Luck simply was not with them. They cannot be held responsible for not having dug out inscriptions giving a genealogy of Bactrian kings or ascribing a fine sculpture to the reign of a Saka sovereign. Although the problems of early Buddhist art were not solved during these excavations, we know for sure that Ai Khanum will remain for many years to come the standard site for Greek Bactria, that Butkara is the best recorded Buddhist site in northwestern India and that Sonkh will in the coming years be the great reference site for Uttar Pradesh. These excavations are not failures. On the contrary, they are text-book instances of the importance of well-planned and well-conducted excavations for our knowledge of the past of Central Asia and India.

This is not the place to review the important data they brought to light. They have been known for years through many interim reports(12) and exhibitions; the academic world has no doubts whatever about their importance. Now, when the final reports have been published, or are being published, it would be interesting to compare the strategies of excavation and publication adopted by the leaders of these huge projects. Although I owe a great debt to Gardin 1979 and agree with most of his conclusions, this will not be a study in theoretical archaeology. I have no taste nor skill for theory. This will be an empirical study, made by a historian who often needs to look into these reports and who is also faced with the necessity of conducting such projects - even if they are on a much smaller scale - and publishing them in due time.

In its restricted sense, Ai Khanum is a Hellenistic walled city located in northeastern Afghanistan, close to the border of current Tajikistan, at the meeting point of the Oxus (Amudarya) and Kokca rivers. It consists of two parts, a natural acropolis, 60 m high, mainly used for defensive purposes, and a lower town which was the inhabited part of the city (1,800 x 1,500 m in all). Part of the acropolis and more than one-third of the lower town were excavated. The main buildings there are a huge palace or administrative quarters, a large temple, a mausoleum and a heroon, a gymnasium, a theater and an arsenal. Great houses, with built-in courtyards or gardens, were located south of the palace (in the southwestern part of the city) and outside the city, nearby its northern wall. There were few such houses: it seems that there were many empty spaces inside the walled town, which was founded and built on virgin soil either c. 329 or 305 B.C. and ceased to exist as a town c. 146 B.C. There is no doubt that Ai Khanum was one of the main urban centres of Greek Bactria.

North and east of the city lies a small plain, 27 km long, less than 9 km wide, 220 [km.sup.2] in all, which French scholars call "Ia plaine d'Ai Khanum."(13) A survey, begun on J.-Cl. Gardin's initiative in 1974, with P. Bernard's agreement, ten years after the first dig in Ai Khanum city, demonstrated that this plain had been irrigated since the bronze age and could even boast a mature Harappan settlement (Gardin 1978, 130; Francfort 1989, 57-58). There were important settlements until the time of the Mongol invasions. The existence of the Greek city of Ai Khanum is thus only one important and, in any case, the most spectacular episode in the long history of the plain. It should have been studied accordingly, but this did not happen, as can be clearly seen from the scheme of publications adopted, a scheme quite inconvenient both for readers and librarians. Apart from the many interim reports, the results of the digs in Ai Khartum city have been published in the lavish series Memoires de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Afghanistan, under the responsibility of P. Bernard; the results of the surveys and excavations in the Ai Khanum plain were first published, under the direction of J.-Cl. Gardin, in cheaply printed series of the Centre National de Ia Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) or Editions Recherche sur les Civilisations, now in a series called Memoires de la Mission Archeologique Francaise en Asie Centrale. There is almost no relationship between the two sets of publications. The puzzled reader may wonder why one and the same French project is published in two separate series. I often do.

It is easier though to discern the scientific differences between the two series. The studies published in Memoires de la Delegation Archeologique Francaise en Afghanistan, as well as the interim reports by P. Bernard, are almost entirely devoted to studies of the Hellenistic architecture and the decorative art of the Greek city. The keywords of P. Bernard's papers, as listed by himself (Guillaume 1983, xi), are: Hellenistic, Greek, city, urbanism. History in the modern sense of the term almost never appears.(14) The scope of the J.-Cl. Gardin's series is much wider - Central Asia. There are often no chronological limitations (Gentelle 1978); the emphasis is mainly on non-Greek periods and never on art.

Now there is no epistemological conflict between classical archaeology, with its...