The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia.

• Author: Kosmin, Paul
• Position: Book review

The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia. By RACHEL MAIRS. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, 2014. Pp. xvi + 231, illus. $85.

The Hellenistic Far East--Sogdiana, Bactria, Arachosia, Gandhara, and parts of India--retains a capacity to thrill: part Silk Road. Prester John fantasy, part Great Game derring-do, which it would be a pity to scrub away entirely. But the expansion of our evidentiary base in recent decades from almost nonexistent to paper-thin--the partial excavation of Ai Khanoum and Takht-i Sangin, the East Bactria Survey, the appearance of some Achaemenid and Hellenistic administrative documents, to name the highlights--now permits analysis in the modes employed with some success for the more traditionally central regions of the Hellenistic world. In this excellent, subtle book Rachel Mairs, one of the leading English-language scholars of Central Asia and northern India in the centuries after Alexander's conquests, effectively demonstrates the region's integration into the Hellenistic oikoumene and, even more, its particular contribution to scholarly understandings of cultural interaction, ethnic identity, and the nature and depth of the changes wrought by the Graeco-Macedonian conquest.

The book is organized into four thematic chapters, preceded by a scene-setting introduction (pp. 1-26) and followed by a conclusion (pp. 177-88) that extracts major themes and an appendix (pp. 189-93) that provides text and translation of the Greek documents discussed in the book. (A couple of the recently discovered Aramaic satrapal documents are reproduced in translation in chapter 1, the Prakrit Besnagar inscription in transliteration and translation in chapter 3.)

The first chapter, 'Administering Bactria: From Achaemenid Satrapy to Graeco-Bactrian State" (pp. 27-56), explores the nature of imperial administration in the region. Mairs shapes her argument around three textual dossiers--the late Achaemenid and early Hellenistic Aramaic documents, probably from the satrapal archive at Bactra; Greek receipt ostraca from Ai' Khanoum's treasury; and a couple of Greek parchments from the late third- and second-century Graeco-Bactrian kingdom--that together demonstrate a bureaucratic organization resembling that of other Achaemenid satrapies or Hellenistic kingdoms. Mairs' analysis is concerned to demonstrate a fundamental continuity across the successive imperial regimes in both the...