The Ancients - Ancient Afghanistan: The Land of a Thousand Cities

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

Situated north of the Hindu Kush and south of the Oxus (Amu Darya) River, the history of the ancient region of Bactria is rich and diverse. From the Oxus Civilisation that flourished in the Bronze Age to the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great, the Greco-Bactrians and the Kushans.In this podcast Tristan chats to David Adams, Australian photo journalist and documentary film maker, who has been fortunate enough to explore many of the archaeological sites of Bactria. From the 'City of Lady Moon' to the whereabouts of Bactra, 'Mother of All Cities', join David and Tristan as they discuss some of the most extraordinary ancient sites in the world.Arcadia Expeditions: https://www.arcadiaexpeditions.com/

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today's podcast, well, I'm super excited to tell you all about it because we are talking about a land that in antiquity was described as a land of a thousand cities.

The ancient region of Batria, now largely situated in modern day Afghanistan, but also surrounding areas such as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. And this land has got some incredible ancient history, whether you're looking at the Bronze Age Oksa civilization or the Persians, Alexander the Great, the Greco-Batrian kingdom, or even the

Kushans later on. It's absolutely astonishing. And in today's podcast, we are talking to someone who has visited some of the most stunning ancient sites in Afghanistan, a photojournalist who travels to the edges of the world. Absolutely now this man's name is david adams australian he's done many many documentaries historical documentaries and in this podcast i have a chat with david about the general ancient history of afghanistan from the bronze age down to the greco-bactrian period the hellenistic period, and then we really delve into David's experience there and visiting some of these incredible ancient sites, including a site which I personally believe is one of the most incredible in the whole of the world, the ancient Hellenistic city of Lady Moon,

the city of I Hanum. So without further ado, here's David. David, it's great to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much. No, I've really been looking forward to this. Absolutely, me too, because we're talking about Afghanistan in antiquity, Alexander the Great before Alexander the Great. Incredible topic. But first of all, a bit of background about yourself, David, because you've been to many, many incredible places across the world, lost world, shall we say. countries, you know, have you been to after we sort of established the nature of countries and things? And I said, well, look, it's somewhere around 110. And as you can imagine, with an eight-year-old, that conversation then digressed to strange and wonderful areas. And he wasn't particularly impressed, I must say, because, you know, what does that mean? But somewhere around that. And a lot of that has been with camera crews doing predominantly history stories. And then

earlier on, it was a photojournalist. And one of these places, of course, that you visited is Afghanistan and the countries around Afghanistan. And Afghanistan in ancient history, if we go to the background, so way before Alexander, because ancient Afghanistan, which I always called it Bactria, it was home to a highly developed civilization for centuries before Alexander or the Persians. developed civilisation for centuries before Alexander or the Persians? Yes, look, this is probably, you know, when we came up with this idea, and to digress slightly to explain this, is that the survey of India, and I think about 1831, they actually mapped the border between what was the Russian Empire. And somebody walked along and mapped that border. That border today is the

Oxus River, or for much of it, which is the Amu Darya today, but it's the Oxus River of antiquity. And when I realized that therefore no one since 1831 had traveled that route, because there's no reports to say that they had, we had something extraordinary. We had a river and a series of civilizations that no one really had sort of accounted for. And the research then turned up these extraordinary civilizations. And we as Westerners, we had that education, which was that the European position was predominant and based on the Roman, that the European position was predominant and based on the Roman, based on the Greek idea that that was the leading civilization and everything else really didn't quite compare.

And the idea that way over in Afghanistan that you could find the remains of a civilization that in fact did compare and probably surpassed the Greeks and the Romans. So basically people went digging when they went to Afghanistan in the early days in the late 1800s. And then in the 1920s, they were looking for Greek levels, they were looking for Alexander, they were looking for the remains of the story that they believed in the story that they were telling, which was that the Greeks would have arrived at some point and brought culture and civilization to this land of barbarians.

But in fact, it was entirely the reverse, that what they discovered, they got down to those Greek levels and then, of course, there were many, many more levels underneath that. And what we've discovered now is that, in fact, a lot of the influences of the Greeks and, you know, the deities that they formed have commonality and even have been adapted from some of the deities from particularly northern Afghanistan and early Zoroastrian Persian civilizations. age, if you know, for everybody to take a reference point. So we're 1500 BC and earlier, and we're talking about a very, very different world, a very united world, a world through trade, smaller populations. But this was a real crossroads. And Afghanistan is the navel of the

world. Everybody, every conqueror, almost, if you look at the development of civilization, body, every conqueror, almost, if you look at the development of civilisation, has passed through Afghanistan and Central Asia to take over somewhere else. We'll take that, Delphi. So that is really interesting. And in regards to these civilisations that date all the way back to the Bronze Age and why they were so incredible, topographically, this area of the world in antiquity, David, particularly around the Oxus River, it looked very different to how it looks today. Well, look, it's one of the great questions, you know, when people talk about global warming, and I say global warming, not climate change, because so many people, I think, make the mistake

of calling the oscillations climate change, which, you know, we know we've gone through ice ages and warmings for all of our history. So we're not experiencing climate change. That's normal. What we're experiencing is global warming. And in this case, when you look back at the records, it is a different world. In the Bronze Age, particularly, you know, those seas, the Black Sea, Caspian, Aral Seas are much larger bodies of water. When you look at the evidence of the sort of high pastures and irrigation that they found in quite high points of the Pamirs, they indicate a much sort of wetter environment anyway. But the fertility of these river systems that flow into the Amu Dari Oxus

that come from present-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, you know, these valleys, I think, have been incredibly rich right through sort of human occupational history. While we have amazing civilizations from the Bronze Age, you can go back 5,000 BC and have farming settlements in a lot of these areas, which today are deserts. A lot of the most fascinating sites are marooned in sand seas when, of course, they would have been fertile places

with branches or arms of the greater river systems feeding their crops, and they would have been very rich places to live, and now they're not. David, it's so interesting because I know I do, and you think of the classical Mediterranean, you're thinking of a really fertile river that helped create this incredible civilisation around it. I normally think of the classical Mediterranean, if you're thinking of a really fertile river that helped create this incredible civilization around it,

I normally think of the River Nile, this huge river, of course, ancient Egypt and Egyptian civilization emerging around the River Nile. And it sounds like the Oxus River, it sounds as if it's the Nile equivalent, as it were, further east, because similarly, it's this huge river that's central central to the development of this civilisation from the Bronze Age onwards. Yes, and the same with the Indus in India and, you know, the Yellow River, the Brahmaputra, you know, depending on where you like. These river systems are the centre of civilisation. And what's rather curious today is that rivers in our modern world tend to be the borders of nations. You know, we find them as rather convenient lines on a map. And when you're, you know, an imperial surveyor in the

1830s, the border between Imperial Russia and the future possessions of the British Empire is conveniently a river. It's much better than an arbitrary line across a mountain. But in history, they were the centre of civilisation. A lot of these rivers, you know, particularly the Oxus, it is fast flowing. A lot of its flow is orientated to the melting of the snows. And so I would encourage everybody to think of a river that is relatively aggressive and violent. So these civilisations don't necessarily sit

on the riverbank of the Oxus. It's the tributaries, it's the floodplains, it's the areas into that, and an extraordinary amount of irrigation, of incredible technology, Bronze Age technology. I mean, I've walked through canals that are, with no exaggeration, 15 metres to 20 metres deep that were created in the Bronze Age,

bringing the rivers away, abrogating the flow and putting it out onto vast areas which would have supported these large civilizations. And is it fair to say that the fertility surrounding particularly these tributaries of the Oxus, are they also quite closely linked to those other towering geographic areas in this part of the world, those two mountain ranges, the Hindu Kush and the Pamirs? Yeah, look, very much. You know, the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush are the natural barriers, even though the civilizations of the Oxus back at the time of the Harappan civilization in India, they were connected, you know, that we find Harappan towns and villages in Afghanistan,

so that the trade routes across the Pamir and across the Hindu Kush were very much part of the economic flow of trade. They were slightly imperiled because obviously, you know, away from lower lying areas and the towns and communities, it was more dangerous. But if you look at those spreads of trade emanating from the Bronze Age and then going all the way through, you know, we think of the Silk Road. And when I was growing up and I was at school and someone talked about the Silk Road, well, first of all, I thought it was a road made of silk, you know, a little bit like the Olympic Road. But, you know, as you then take on that this was a trade route. But in fact, it's never been one road. It is a spider's web of connectivity.

What they realize now is the Silk Road was the land route, and there was an equal amount of maritime routes that connected China to India to Southeast Asia. And so they think of these things as sort of great trading circles now. they think of these things as sort of great trading circles now. So the Silk Road really is a term for a trade system, which began in the Bronze Age and perhaps even earlier. Absolutely, David. And ancient Afghanistan, its central position on this trade system, the Silk Road, I'm guessing that helps pave the way, as you say, for the emergence of cities and also these far-reaching connections to the east, to the west, to the southeast? Absolutely. What has great resonance today, you know,

if you tell someone the story of Tutankhamen's mask, and, you know, it's an extraordinary gold funeral mask that I think everybody's probably seen at some point in their life in books or on video, and some people lucky enough to see it but the part that sits on the top of the chest or the breast is lapis lazuli and that mine which i've been to is in the hindu kush and it has been mine for probably seven eight thousand years and when you go into that mine this is the locals doing that. So take that with the import, but also perhaps the inaccuracy that you would expect. But they led us down 50 yards into mine number one, and they said, we think this is where Tutankhamen's masked lapis was taken from. Now,

you know, somewhere within that mountain, one of those tunnels is the place where it came from. It doesn't come from anywhere else in the respect they've tracked the makeup of what's on the mask to that mine. So, you know, that says to you a number of things. It's sort of one, mind-boggling, but also inspirational, is that the connectivity at the time of Tutankhamen was that you as a king or a pharaoh in this case was commissioning a mask and I want the rare stone from Afghanistan. And that could be brought to you, whether it was for merchants that were in Cairo and on the Nile. But that trade item got there with no problem. So when you think about the Bronze Age and you think about what we think, we still think of Afghanistan as this incredibly remote place.

But then it was part of that known world, part of the trade system that you could effectively order. It might take you 18 months or 12 months. You've got to calculate the speed of a camel caravan. But people knew that that was something that was connecting Egypt to Afghanistan. And arguably the gold that came from the same rivers from the Oxus probably made its way to the West as well. I mean, that is absolutely incredible. That's hundreds and hundreds of years before the rise of the Persian Empire, like second millennium BC, as you say, really emphasises this global connected nature of ancient Afghanistan in the Bronze Age

and we were talking slightly there about cities and let's then focus on the cities now because quite a few seem to have emerged at this time and one in particular I know you've done quite a bit of work around that you've visited or or tried to find is the mother of all cities Bactra because from what we hear in the sources this was an absolutely incredible city. Yes I mean Bactra? Because from what we hear in the sources, this was an absolutely incredible city. Yes. I mean, Bactra really, for any young historian or archaeologist, it's probably the crucible. It's remote. It's Afghanistan. If you read James A. Mitch's Caravans when you were 14, it was the place that you wanted to go and explore. I think the discovery of Alexander's tomb perhaps might be more exciting. The discovery of Troy was certainly up there, but certainly Bactra stands as one of the great sort of

archaeological historic mysteries. What we know at the moment, and for really the last 100 years, I suppose, is that the site very close to Mazar-Sharif is and has always thought to have been Bactra. But the problem with it, it doesn't match any of the Greek reports. And it's sort of a mixed bag, depending on who you're reading.

Some people are very scathing of Alexander's biographers and think that there's huge inaccuracies and it was all particularly biased. And others think by re-examination and comparing is that, you know, they weren't. And I think we basically say that there is a lot more respect now for their narrative. And where they, in respect to Bactra, they place it at the foot of the Pamirs. The site in Mazar is, you know, about 25 kilometers out in the desert. Well, it's actually on the Bacta River Delta, an irrigated delta, but it's a massive site, a massive circular city site

with a very large arg or castle central point. But it really doesn't seem to go much further back as far as archaeological discoveries than the sort of Arab period. as far as archaeological discoveries than the sort of Arab period. And while there are Archimede walls and some Alexandria period sites in the area, the citadel certainly hasn't given a great bounty of archaeological evidence to suggest that this was ancient Bactria. So what they talk about is that ancient Bactria sat at the foot of the Pamirs and the Bactria River ran through it. And none of that really fits that site. So when we

first went there in about 2007, the French, who, you know, their history and the archaeology of Afghanistan, you know, is extraordinary. And they really are the leaders there and have been always. know, is extraordinary. And they really are the leaders there and have been always. They had been excavating a site which is about 40 kilometers south of Mazar. And it's on the ancient road to Bamiyan. And what is extraordinary about the site is that it has a mountain, which has got many, many levels of archaeology and then an enormous plan. And the Bactria River flows right through the middle of it. So I think that while they certainly haven't declared that that's ancient Bactria, I do personally believe that they will announce that one day.

The problem is they can't get back there and do the archaeology that they need. So I think we've found it, or they found it. We spent quite a lot of time there photographing and speculating, because I'm not an archaeologist, of course, but it does have a number of really interesting facets about it that fit the story. I mean, no, absolutely. And if they do, if they do declare this as being the actual Bactria in due course, make no mistake, this will be one of the big archaeological discoveries, hopefully, of the 21st century, in my opinion. Because David,

as we see when the Persians arrive in this part of the world with the Persian Empire, Bactria is incredibly important for the Persians and the whole region of Bactria too. It is. I mean, principally, it's the seat of the air, if you like. So a lot of the governance of Bactria was given to the prodigal son. And that sort of seems to come back to the prominence of Bactria within the Persian Empire, particularly within Zoroastrian belief. And Zoroastrianism changes quite a lot as we move through time and the Persian Empire and afterwards. But certainly Bactra is representative. It's a little bit like the Prince of Wales. The Prince of Wales is sent to go off and Wales is his seat effectively,

and he's encouraged to be kindred to those people, that sort of thing. So Bactria was that. So it was a really important geopolitical place and undoubtedly a magnificent city. At the time of Alexander's arrival, and again, the records are a little unclear, but even if you look at his invasion pathway, this site of the proposed Bactria, I think it fits a lot better than the one near Mazar. Now you mentioned Alexander there, so we will go on to him in a second. But just quickly, keeping on the Persians, a slight tangent here, David, because in the sources we sometimes hear,

particularly when the Bactrians are mentioned in regards to the Persian Empire, we hear about the Bactrian cavalry, whether it's like the Bast of Plataea in Greece or the Bast of Galgamella between Alexander and Darius. It seems that that area of the world, it was renowned for its rearing of war horses of horses around the banks of the Oxus and further afield. And is that something that we see in Afghanistan to this day? Does this really feel like there was a strong horse culture in this part of the world? Yes. I mean, when you imagine, and even if you look at the map, and certainly if you travel there, what the Oxus represents is a band of civilization. And then when you move north through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,

into Kazakhstan, you're meeting the plains and the realm of the Scythian horsemen. And so it's really the interface between civilization and the horse culture. And so horses have been the interface between civilization and the horse culture. And so horses have been the main prize of empire. They've been the mechanism of war. They've been, when you go to burial sites, for instance, in Turkmenistan, you've got the horses buried near where the king's burial sites, you know, they've been predominant. Today, things like bushkazi, which is the great horse game, the battle game, which

in times gone by, they would have used the bodies or parts of the bodies of the defeated as the buz, which is what they try and wrestle from each other. But today they use a slaughtered calf or sheep and you get 500 horsemen. Effectively, there's a circle drawn and someone says, go. And they basically gallop towards that circle. Someone's got to pick up the carcass. And then they ride out some 200 or 300 yards around a pole and come back. And you've got to drop the carcass back in the circle. And 499 other men have got to try to stop you doing it.

and 499 other men have got to try to stop you doing it. And so the horses there, you see these quite extraordinary horses that have vast necks, huge shoulders. The Altecchi horse, which is the precursor to the Arab, if you like, or at least when the Arab armies came through, they bred the Arab horses with the Altecchis and we ended up with the Arabs that we know today. But there obviously are more ancient breeds there, much, much sturdier war horses that the Bactrian cavalry, I think, would have used. And one of the things you see in a game of bushkazi is that they

rear the big horses up and then they lower them or effectively charge the horse into the melee and it breaks out the melee. And I think you would have seen this sort of thing in battle where they would have gone into a melee, but everybody with their swords or whatever. And these big battle horses would have effectively broken up that melee. And, you know, it's extraordinary to see that in Bushkazi, which is they play in almost all of those countries. They play a circuit in the autumn and winter months. And there are many places you can see that played in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to a lesser degree.

Certainly in Afghanistan, almost every village will play it. Yeah, absolutely. That's absolutely striking. You say it's actually seeing a Bishkazi match as well. It sounds like quite a sight to actually see rather than hear about too. Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603? Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies? And do you want to know about chin-chucking and thigh sex? Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, is a deep dive into what I like to think of as the long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything

from Aztecs to witches, Velazquez to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from Thanks for watching. And David, then you mentioned Alexander approaching Afghanistan earlier and his route into Afghanistan. What do we know about Alexander, his approach to Afghanistan and why he comes to that part of the world? Well, look, it's a wonderful long story that we won't sort of delve into now. But, you know, essentially, Alexander, after a number of generations of Greek stroke Macedonian conflict, Alexander, through his father, Philip, really gets the upper hand. And while the generations before Darius III, Cyrus and Darius I were all conquering, and we know those remarkable tales of the Persians attacking Greece. So this was sort of the return match, that Alexander leads, you know, this enormously

diverse army, Macedonian base, but with, depending on the allegiances of the Greek city-states, he had mercenaries from most of them. And then as he traveled and conquered, he would pick up whole regiments from Turkey or from Syria or from wherever he was passing. So he basically is there to go and deliver a crushing blow to the then Persian emperor, which is Darius III. And, you know, he leads everything before him and is very successful. And it's a rather pitiful end to Darius who runs from the deciding battle.

Alexander sacks Persepolis and then Darius flees and is killed by his own men. And Alexander is impassioned by Darius. You know, he feels that, you know, there's an aspect perhaps of seeing things in Darius that he didn't find in his father. You know, it's a really quite complicated and interesting story. And Alexander is this very interesting character in this respect. But he then, because Darius's death is at the hand of Bessus, and Bessus is a Bactrian. And so it's really a vendetta, but the vendetta is a complicated one

because Alexander's success and his character means that, you know, there's a feeling within the Macedonians in his support and their triumph so they can take the world. And so the chase is definitely to bring down Darius's murderer. And that certainly is his intent, it would seem. But the route he takes doesn't really follow because he crosses Iran, heads down south, goes into what is Sistan, which is sort of near going down towards Balochistan and, you know, even the coast.

He's supported, obviously, by this vast train. You know, we're talking tens of thousands with both the armies, cavalries, and then the baggage train. And he then swings up around sort of where Kandahar is, and then goes up today, which is the Gandhara, which is around where Kabul is. And then he crosses the Pamir and he finally makes his assault on the Bactrians. And I still don't understand why he didn't just sort of cross from Marshad straight over into Turkmenistan and get to Bactria that way. So, you know, there were lots of other imperatives, obviously, over and above getting Darius's slayer. So there's fantastic books about

it. And it's a real adventure story about Alexander in that time in history. I mean, it is absolutely, David. I'm sure we share a similar passion for it, because actually also when Alexander, he does eventually reach Afghanistan. I mean, this is a torrid time for him when he's there, isn't it? It's like some of the hardest fighting of his campaigns. And his tale is a cautionary one for future invasions into Afghanistan too. Well, it is. And you'd think that the various empires and governments that have tried to invade Afghanistan would have taken this as a cautionary tale. But obviously they don't. But I'm sure he never intended to be mired in Afghanistan for more than two years. And testament to the present day Uzbeks and Turkmens and Afghans that they gave him a

merry chase. And, you know, really his technique of fighting had to be reinvented and challenged endlessly and reinvented. And I guess the end of that story, which is, again, fascinating, is that he chooses a political outcome. I mean, the marriage of Roxanne, her association is probably as a symbolic person of the river goddess, and their marriage was very much sort of steeped

in Zoroastrian cultural observance. And by marrying Roxanne, he kind of ends up with the empire, as far as the Macedonians were concerned, and thinking that, you know, therefore dad, or at least the brothers and the cousins and everybody would hand it over if they married this beautiful woman and her connections to the deities. But that didn't happen either. And soon after his departure,

the poor Greek mercenaries that were left in these tens of fortresses as he went on to India, they didn't survive. Effectively, the Turkomans and particularly the Uzbeks were far too strong, too overwhelming, superior in hill fighting and guerrilla warfare. And so we look at Alexander's passing as this kind of, it's like the trails of a great purple cape. Takes a long time to actually pass, but when it's gone, it's gone. And it's really his generals that come back and reestablish control. But after his death, it falls back immediately to the local control, which you would expect. What's startling and our lack of historic sense is that, you know, he was there for two years. We've just been there for 20. The British went there four times. The

Russians were there for 10 years. Nobody ever comes out of Afghanistan, Central Asia with success. It's too hard. They are rather like us. You know, if someone came to your house and wanted to move you on, well, I could see every Englishman and certainly every Australian, in my case, taking to the hills and you dig in and that would be that. And England's proven that time and time again. Thankfully, we haven't had to. But you put yourself in the position of an Afghan across these millennia of invasion. Of course, you're never going to defeat them. If we go back to cities now then, David, and we've already established sort of the fact from the fiction of how this passed the ancient world, there are lots of flourishing cities long before Alexander arrives. But we have these tantalising snippets, as it were, that Alexander, he also establishes some cities there too, but we don't really know much about

where they are. Well, Ayhanoum is a really good example. Even though it's built after Alexander's passing, it's got a whole lot of riddles about it, primarily why was it located where it was. And there is a much older, ruined, probably Bronze Age, and then certainly it was an Archimedean fortress. But when we now, there's a lot of really interesting research being done on Zarathustra, the prophet of the Zoroastrian religion. And it does seem that the accounts marry to Ihanum being his birthplace. And he's located, as far as trying to place him in history, is a bit hard, but somewhere between 800 BC and 1500 BC. So perhaps Bronze Age, but perhaps Homeric kind of time.

But if you consider then that this place was the holy ground of the great prophet of the religion that was dominating this whole region and came to be the state religion of Persia, that the reason why Ihanum, which is created some years after Alexander by his generals, and why they didn't locate it at Bactria, why the Greeks didn't centre their administration or their occupation in Bactria, really the evidence now suggests that they were building on a holy site and that Ihanum would take over,

rather like Rome being taken then as the Christian capital, which was the Roman capital. But, you know, that's a hearts and minds thing. If you're going to take over a civilization, you go to their holiest place and you effectively take that over. And within the Greek or Greco-Bactrian city of Ihanum, there was at its center a Zoroastrian temple. And so what we look at now as this Alexandrian-created city, even though it was created after him, was really servicing both the Greeks, Macedonians, and the whole sort of multicultural milieu of those occupying armies

and the locals. And it sustained itself for 150 years until it too was invaded and taken over. And I think that that's probably a relatively good example of what happened with the cities that, you know, Alexander was supposed to have been responsible for 16 or so cities within his conquest. And I think some of them sort of, we don't know where they are, you know, in southern Iran, for instance, there's about three or four different quite large tells that could be one of his cities, Alexandria and Qamidia.

And that's something for anybody who's travelling in Iran, you can go down and speculate for yourself. You might be the finder of Alexandria and Qamidia. But as far as the ones in Central Asia and Afghanistan, I think we can generally say that they were pre-existing centres that at the time of occupation, he and his armies would have taken over. They probably re-fortified them. Bactria would have been a great city in itself. The levels that the French have investigated,

and they haven't been able to do a lot of work, but they've identified a big fire event at that time of Alexander's arrival. And so whether ancient Bactria was destroyed by Alexander, which is certainly possible, and therefore Ihanum being created as the new Greco-Bactrian capital because it was a holy site is a really interesting and plausible explanation for that. The other city sites certainly have really interesting archaeology, monumental archaeology of Persian, Achaemenid Persian and pre-Persian timing.

So as we said at the outset, the idea that somehow the Greeks brought civilisation and culture and the ability to bring monumental architecture is ridiculous. These places are much older. And I think that really we're looking at an occupying army that comes in. Alexander's transformation here is really interesting. You know, he confounds and confuses his followers and army because he begins to wear the robes of the Persians or the Bactrians. He takes on some of their habits. He marries Roxanne and he seems to step away from the Greek pantheon. But what's really amazing is he was finding identification within the Zoroastrian

deities, the river goddesses that behave like Helena. They behaved like what he was familiar with. And so it's a fascinating area because it's almost as though Alexander, this great representation of Western dominance, military dominance and culture, comes back and finds his fountainhead. And, you know, I think there will always be debate about the effects of Alexander and his decisions around that period. And certainly having traveled those lands, that spiritualism affects you. And I think it must have affected him. And, you know, we're talking of Afghanistan as an Islamic realm. But still, that fantastic feeling of this ancient Zoroastrian yin and yang

balance of things is predominant. You know, Afghans are moderates, despite what you're told and we read. Afghans are moderates. They pretty much just want to be peaceful. Well, I'm glad you mentioned there, first of all, Ihanum, and then, of course, your own travels around this part of the world. Because, David, you had this rare, I'm incredibly jealous, this rare privilege of being able to visit the site of Ihanum. I mean, tell me what that was like. It must have been incredible. Well, look, it's a problematic site because it sits on the Tajik border and the Amu Darya flows right through it, right past it. And it has been because there is another river that comes and joins it at the site.

has been because there is another river that comes and joins it at the site. So Ihanum is almost a promontory with two quite large rivers, particularly the Amidari or Oxus, and it's a wonderfully defensive site. The city itself has enormous ramparts. There's an ancient sort of citadel at the centre of it. So when you're driving up to it, you're faced with a mountain that, while it's not man-made, it's certainly over probably a couple of thousand years has been improved and re-improved. But the whole place is pockmarked with the tank emplacements and trenches of a number of different chapters of the recent wars. So certainly Russian-Mujahideen war, but then also it was a

center with the civil war and then the Northern Alliance, and then again with the Taliban and the Western occupation as well. So this place is riddled with bombs and bullets and everything as well. And unfortunately, the great city site, which is down really only about 15 metres above the river, which was in 1960 an untouched archaeological site with really impressive remains, has been, as much of Afghanistan has, been looted. And so it's pockmarked. So you think they look like shell craters, but in actual fact, they're holes dug by locals looking for treasure,

which most of it goes over the Pamirs to India and is sold to unscrupulous dealers. But it is an extraordinary sight. I mean, when we arrived there, Taliban were very present in the area. And so it was sort of a touch and go all the time. And we were staying in and around the military posts there, the border control posts. And, you know, I met the most extraordinary commander who invited us to dinner and we sat there smoking cigars, which I'd provided. Don't tell me why I took cigars to Afghanistan, but for some reason we had some. And he sent the ferry, of which only you can't cross it.

It's sort of a localized thing. He sent the ferry across to Tajikistan for a case of vodka. And the vodka came back on the ferry. And we had a fantastic evening talking about the ancient history through our translator, of course. He was an Uzbek Afghan, and he wasn't a general, but he was a major equivalent, I think. But he knew more about the archaeology of Ayhanoum than really anybody I'd met other than an academic. And he basically gave us license to go out, gave us more letters,

because what happens in Afghanistan when you're traveling is the Ministry of the Interior gives you a number of letters to the principal governors or police stations. So you leave Kabul with a great wodge, in our case, about 30 letters on that first expedition. And you arrive in a place and you hand over your letter and everybody sort of has tea and chats a bit. And then because you're now given permission and you're part of the surety, the hospitality system, everything opens up to you and you're given lodging. The police station gives you the barracks and you travel through the country like that.

And that's sort of time immemorial. I mean, if you had those trade licenses, if you had those permission letters, you know, we never traveled with guns. It was just myself and Greg Nelson, my cameraman and our guide and a driver. And that was it because we followed the system of surety, which enabled us to simply slot into their hospitality system. And I don't believe we were ever really in danger. In fact, the only time I think we were in danger when we were staying at a German-run hotel in Kunduz, and a couple of guys, Westerners, I won't say which country, arrived dressed as Afghans, but fully armed and took the room next to us and we had a dinner and then our guide and our driver arranged for a house about a kilometer away and we moved because the most dangerous thing for us was to be associated with them i mean yeah that is super interesting

to hear like your experience of actually being there and seeing these sites and the people involved it's incredible about the command i have to see if i can get him on the podcast in due course david i mean that was an incredible talk through your experience of visiting Ihanoum and what remains of the site. I mean, are there any other particular ancient sites that you remember visiting in that part of the world that you think really deserves like a special mention

to really talk about in this podcast? Because I'm guessing there must have been many. Well, look, probably there are two that I would mention. One is Gonur, which is in Turkmenistan. And at the outset, we were talking about the climate changes within this recognizable period from the Bronze Age. And this site sits, you know, the very famous city in western Turkmenistan called Merv, which is, you know, a really ancient site and goes back to those sort of times as well. And it's a massive layer upon layer fortified series of cities, and it covers a marvelously large area.

But if you travel by four-wheel drive on a very bumpy road, about three hours out into the desert, and if you can imagine for everybody listening, this is a delta, a desert delta. So it's a little bit like the Okavango in Botswana, where the delta is empty into desert. So you get a little bit like the Okavango in Botswana, where the delta is empty into desert. So you get lots of water at the beginning and very fertile. And then as the water ceases to flow and it's irrigated, it sort of ends. And right at the end of this sort of delta

that ends in the desert is Goner. And there's a number of city sites and they're around 2100 BC. and they're around 2100 BC. And a Russian-Greek archaeologist excavated them in the 80s called Sarianidi. And basically he took in bulldozers in a very sort of ad hoc effect, but he managed to basically remove the desert and reveal the city. And if you Google now and you Google Gonur

and you have a look at the aerial shots, it's like Paisley, the way that the fortresses and the town centre and everything connects. It's the most beautiful thing. And with our expedition company, we actually, you know, you can go out and camp next to that city. But when we went out there and filmed there, to be sitting and, you know, you would go into these rooms and there were vessels,

and at the bottom was still the residue of what they were drinking when they abandoned that city. You go into the tombs and that's why I was mentioning the horses. You know, there's full horses laid out in funerary chambers. You can go in and there is the whole horse sitting next to a body and that sort of thing. So the immediacy, the touchstone of ancient history, the touchstone and the empathy that you feel for these people and what changed their circumstance to have the city basically abandoned and then to be unearthed 4,000 years later. So a gonorrhea is extraordinary.

And probably the other end of the whole series of expeditions that we did was in the high Pamir. And we went to try and which is still a bit of a riddle for anybody who wants to look into it is the real source of the Amu Dara, the Oxus River. But where the road ends and you have to pack everything onto donkeys. And we did an expedition for a month going up into what is the Wakhan Corridor. And there is a fortress on the top of the hill at a place called Sahad. And it's a fortress that defended a Chinese invasion. And in about 700, an incredible Chinese commander led his two armies across what is the back of the Himalayas and the

Pamirs to attack the Tibetans. And they fought this extraordinary battle in the middle of nowhere. And when you climb up to this fortress and you ride up, you have to cross the Oxus on donkeys and horseback. And then you ride up to the top of this fortress and you survey this extraordinary mountain scene and you look back through time and the geopolitical situation and what empowered a Chinese army. And, you know, China was a lot smaller then. They didn't have all of the territory in Western China. What were they doing there?

And what were the Tibetans? You know, it's this forgotten chapter. But there were, from recollection, there was sort of 15,000 to 20,000 troops in this battle in the middle of northern Afghanistan, in the middle of the Pamirs. And nobody knows about that. So it's an extraordinary land. And every corner of the road, every bend of the road is another citadel, another kafir kala, which is from Afghan or Islamic unbelievers castle. The archaeology on the ground there is extraordinary and it's worth preserving.

There is this famous quote from ancient history of Bactria being the land of a thousand cities. And David, with you having been there, having traveled there, having seen the geography, the topography, the archaeology, do you think this could be true? It is true. I've mapped the Bactrian Delta on Google Earth, you know, and put your flag markers in. And I have somewhere about 650 archaeological sites. And that's just me as a crazy guy who likes looking, you know, at Google Earth and trying to find stuff. So that's just in the Bactrian Delta. Now, I would say that there's probably 30 great sort of city fortress sites within that. A lot of them are smaller sites. If you then project that up the whole river system, going through Kunduz and all the different sites, and then up to the rivers that

flow into it, the amount of sites, if you, Greater Bactria, which was effectively the watershed of the Oxus, kind of, I don't think any archaeologist today would argue that there are a thousand towns or villages within that archaeological complex. You know, it's extraordinary. It's extraordinary. Absolutely. And I've got just a couple of other names on my list just before we wrap up dave and this is going slightly further north but it seems to follow in this whole strand keeping alongside the banks of the oxus river the amu daria but getting closer to the aral sea and these are i believe it's in uzbekistan and i know

that as we talk about your arcadia expeditions in the moment i I saw it there as well. The first site, one called Kazali Yaskan. What is it? But it has got some extraordinary archaeology there. Well, yes, it does. And for anybody who's travelled up and is a bit of an archaeological nut, what's really interesting is that obviously the Amu Dari or the ox has changed its course because cities like that, and when you, for instance, go to somewhere like Kiva or Nukas, these places down near the Aral Sea, wonderful experiences. There are a series of cities there that you can visit on day trips, go and have picnics in these extraordinary sites. And the desert has consumed some others sort of by channels and things like that. But that horizon is about 800 BC.

And there's not a lot of evidence of anything prior to that. And then only then across the Karakum Desert, you then have Gonur and these 2000 BC sites. So it evidences that the end of the Amudari, as it flowed into this great swampy, what is today desert, but was an enlarged aral connected seasonally perhaps with the Caspian, but certainly was a swampland. And then at some point, the Amu Darya goes north. You know, it breaks through a dune field or whatever it does, and then goes to a different point. And these civilizations along the northern branch,

which is where it flows today, all spring up. So the vagaries and machinations of the Amu Darya, it defines and almost enables civilization. You have to follow the river. You build on that river. When the river moves, like in the case of Gona, even though it dies out long before 800 BC, it obviously evidences the great climactic changes,

but also simply the way that the hydrology of that river works. And you can see when you look at that whole stretch of the river, there are giant sort of swings of oxbows where the river once flowed. And it all sits on a thing called the Turon Plate, which is this great mantle of Earth's crust. It's a bit like a billiard table. It tilts two degrees one way, and all the billiard balls fall down the other end.

And that's what happens to these ancient seas, Caspian and Aral, and probably the way that the Oxus, where it flows, is a little bit of an earthquake. And there's, I think, from 800 AD to now, there's 1,800 earthquakes over and above six on the Richter scale. So it's a really heavy earthquake zone. This sort of tabletop affects the way that the seas and the rivers all work. And, you know, if we're trying to understand global warming and the oscillations of climate change, you can't begin at 1850.

You've got to go back to anecdotal, historic evidence to show that this world has been radical for a very long time. It doesn't mitigate the problems that we have with industrialization and fossil fuels. But if we're going to understand it let's go back in history and see these extraordinary changes to civilizations which are incredibly evident absolutely absolutely ancient history the coolest type of history david this chat this podcast has been absolutely eye-opening showing the incredible ancient history of this part of the world and just

before we finish up you're an explorer at your heart. Talk me through your new project. Talk me through Arcadia Expeditions, because you're hoping, among many other projects, one day to come back to this part of the world. Well, Arcadia, the idea is that travelling and documentary can be the one thing. And so we take very small groups of people, 10, 12, 16 people maybe, and we effectively tell a story. We find a world expert on a story and that storyteller, we call them, takes you. And it's like being on a documentary, but there's no camera crew. And so you get that extraordinary access of, for instance, in the Sudan, where you go into archaeological sites, you meet the most

incredible people. The idea, I guess, is based on the idea of a dinner table and a movable feast. Wherever we go, whether it's Botswana, India, Cuba, every time we're telling the story and we're bringing extraordinary people to the table. And then the next day, they'll take you to show you their part of the story. So it's a different way to travel. It's not a lecture tour. It's all done, to be honest, with gin and tonics and sitting by the fire. But when we bring these extraordinary people to come sit with you, you understand their history and their passion for it. And everybody is a representation of somebody in the past. for it. And everybody is a representation of somebody in the past. Everybody's passion latches on to somebody's ancient beginnings, ancient grandfather. And they get fascinated with it. If you meet a Turkman, he will tell you that he's related to Tamerlane. He will tell you

how that army operated. He will show you all the books he's read. He will then take you out and show you his horses. Now, that is what travel should be. We can all go and lie on a beach, but what I think we're creating is something where you get to immerse yourself, you know, that word's used a lot, but immerse yourself and meet people and understand these stories. So have a look at our site, Arcadia Expeditions, and give us a call if you'd like to come travel with us too. Absolutely. Well, David, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast. Thanks so much. I've really enjoyed it. Thank you.