The Ancients - Ancient Globalisation? Life and Death at Ai Khanum

Episode Date: November 11, 2021

For decades the discovery of Ai Khanum, ‘the City of Lady Moon’, in Eastern Afghanistan has fascinated archaeologists and historians alike: from its ‘Greek’ theatre and gymnasium to the literary fragments preserved in the palatial complex to the everyday houses of the site. But there is also much more to this Greco-Bactrian metropolis, which reached its height in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.In this second part of Tristan’s chat with Dr Milinda Hoo, Milinda talks us through the religious and burial structures that have been uncovered at Ai Khanum. We also look at the diverse construction methods used in the building of Ai Khanum and why we should not label this settlement a Greek city in Afghanistan. Milinda is an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg and an associate member of the BaSaR work group.Part 1: https://play.acast.com/s/the-ancients/ai-khanoum-agreekcityinafghanistan--acast035f0852

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 in today's podcast, well, we are continuing our chat with Dr. Melinda Hu about the stunning ancient city of Ihanoum in eastern Afghanistan. This city, which at its height was this royal centre of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom in the third and second centuries BC. Now in this part of our chat, Melinda, who is an assistant professor at the University of Freiburg, she teaches ancient history at that university, we talk about religion at the city, We talk about burial. We talk about the tombs. And we also talk about globalisation in the ancient world and how we can approach the city of Ihanoum with a globalisation lens, particularly to answer the question as to whether we can label Ihanoum

a Greek city in Afghanistan. So without further ado, here's Melinda. Melinda, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. You are very welcome indeed. I'm super, super, super excited. If we therefore move on to this other key monumental set of structures discovered at IHNUM, and these are the religious structures. Melinda, what religious structures do we have from IHNUM? Yeah, so whereas IHNUM has been cited a lot and highlighted and praised a lot for its weird presence of theater and gymnasium,

it's actually the religious structure that I find most exciting. And this is also where you find, I think, the most diversity. So Aichernoom had two temples. There was one temple outside the city walls. So when you approach the city from outside, from the plain of Aichunum, then you would cross this outside temple. This temple has not been extensively excavated because most attention of the excavators went to the main sanctuary in the middle of the city. And this may have been part of the so-called palatial district. This was the main sanctuary with the temple, the so-called temple with indented niches.

Yeah, this temple has become very famous for its variety of cultural influences. But what is especially striking is that both of these temples and also a third religious structure, this open air podium on the Acropolis. These three structures are all distinctly non-Greek in their architecture. So they have nothing in common with the architecture that we find from Greek temples in the Mediterranean. They also have been built or constructed from local mud brick, and they had more in common with Mesopotamian and Iranian temples, actually. So these temples, they were oriented to the rising sun. They all had flat roofs, and they were built on a very high-stepped podium. These temples were also very massively closed off. So whereas in the Greek Mediterranean

or in the Mediterranean world, you have a lot of open temples with columns around it, which you can enter from all sides. But here at Aichnum, the temples can only be entered from one side. And it was really closed off with really, really thick walls. And these thick walls, they were whitewashed from the outside. And also on the outside, they had these so-called indented niches. So they were kind of niches that were dug into the walls. And this is also where, of course, the name of the temple comes from, the temple with indented niches. And of course, it should be emphasized that this final form of the temple, the temple with indented niches, is the latest form. But throughout time, this temple had been rebuilt and reconstructed. And of course, this makes sense in the ancient practice of imperial investment of the kings.

The kings very often, they had to legitimize their rule in terms of investing in local buildings and investing in the local deities. And this can be seen in that same line that they had to invest and reconstruct these buildings throughout time so this is also what you see in this temple that it received reconstructions reparations over time and also some adaptations in its layout that's really interesting so how the building evolves over the time over Ihanim's lifespan and Melinda no is an absolutely okay answer to answer this question which I'm going to ask now because it is there might not be the archaeology there to really

give a clear definitive answer but do we have any idea what deity might have been worshipped there no there we go well I mean like of course there are some ideas and this actually plays into a huge debate on what kind of deity was honored here. So there are from the cultic objects and the objects that were found inside the temple and around the sanctuary. There have been quite a lot of hypotheses that there might have been a Greek god honored here. And this was very much based on this very famous fragment of a foot, a marble fragment. As I said, marble stone was, of course, not available, very much available in the region, so this was quite special. They found a marble fragment of a foot, and the foot wears a sandal, and the sandal has a thunderbolt on it. And this fragment of the foot was very much Greek in form and style. And therefore they kind of hypothesized,

the excavators hypothesized, but also later scholars agreed and disagreed, of course, there's a huge discussion about this, that this god may have been Zeus because of the thunderbolt. So even though the architecture of the temple is distinctly non-Greek, scholars have theorized the possibility that the Greek inside the temple may have actually been a Greek god, maybe in some kind of hybrid mixed form, mixed with a local god, Mithras, for instance, or Oxus. Maybe there was a female god. So these were all kind of different hypotheses that were made, but especially this sandaled foot is a very strong trigger for interpretations to go to the more Greek side of history. But it's not that simple, is it? It's not that simple. No, absolutely not.

There are quite a wide variety of cultic objects or cult practices actually found. There were mud brick altars found. There were also limestone pedestals for burning offerings. They have found pieces of ivory furniture. They have found small circular vessels that were locally produced, the so-called pixides. They have also been found in other sites in Bektria, such as at the Oxus Temple and at Tobolok in Tajikistan. They also found fragments of quite large clay sculptures and also plaster casts in the forechamber.

They found a very famous silver plate with a depiction of the Anatolian goddess Kubile. And this, of course, also led to the hypothesis that Kubile, or maybe a female goddess, may have been honored here as well. They also found a small ivory figurine of a fertility goddess, quite in a different style. Definitely not a Greek style, but the excavators labeled it as Asiatic, with a more strict style, so not as naturalistic as Greek sculptures. And also at the backside of the temple, there was a roll of libation vessels, so to pour libations into the ground. So this kind of indicates or suggests that there was just not one practice or not one form of worship and probably also not one deity that was worshipped

here. Also in the latest phase of the temple's layout, you see indeed that there are three rooms actually. So there's a bigger vestibule and then there's a main cellar with two smaller side chapels. And of course, this main temple was set in a larger sanctuary. And now more recent work has been done on this larger sanctuary by Loria Martina Seve. And she recently published that there was also quite a lot of activity in the wider sanctuary so there were

at least two other chapels where people could worship and there were also some smaller rooms where food was stored for instance or where food was prepared to give offerings to the gods very very interesting indeed now i can tell why you find that building so fascinating melinda and i'm gonna go on to the last last building type we're gonna really talk about before we move on at ihanum which are the tombs at ihanum melinda what do we know buildings? Yeah, so there is a famous so-called mausoleum. It has received the label of a heroon, which is a building for the founder of the city. And there were actually two mausoleums within the city wall, so within the city centre actually, within the palatial district. One of them was a stone vault mausoleum. This one

didn't receive that much excavation, that much attention also in the publications, but most attention has gone to the so-called mausoleum of Kinyas. Together with the temples, the mausoleum was part of the earliest phases of the city. So as I said, the city was really built up in certain stages, and the first stage was really defined by the sanctuaries, including the mausoleum. And so the mausoleum, the building itself dates back to roughly the early third, maybe the mid third century BC. And in its earliest phase, this building was very mixed in its layout as the excavators have identified quite a Greek ground plan. But then again, it was also on a stepped podium, what we also see in Mesopotamian temples. And it was also oriented towards the sun in the same way that we also see this at the main temple of Aichenoum.

way that we also see this at the main temple of Aichenoum. The extraordinary thing is that some decades later, perhaps in the mid-third century BC, we find an inscription. And this is one of the very few inscriptions, one of the few Greek inscriptions at Aichenoum. And this particular inscription has received quite a lot of attention in the scholarship, and particularly because of this very distinct link to the Greek world. So this inscription consists of two parts. One part was a paragraph of the so-called Delphic maxims, and these were life lessons that were set up in the Temple of Apollo in Delphi. And next to this small paragraph, there was another inscription. And this inscription says that a man named Clearchus set up these Delphic maxims, these wise sayings. He set them up from the holy Pythos. So this is

Delphi. He set them up here in the sanctuary of Kineos, blazing from afar. So this is also how we know that this mausoleum or this structure was dedicated to Kineos. And Kineos, this name was probably Macedonian or Thessalian. And this person was probably a very prominent citizen of Ikenum and has also been interpreted as the mythological founder of the city. Ah, mythological founder indeed. Quite a little tangent by me, just a little trivial fact here. It's quite interesting, Melinda, that if he is possibly a Thessalian or a Thessalian, because I believe Alexander the Great, he disbands like the smallest portion of his Thessalian cavalry when he's in ancient Afghanistan, Bactria. So I find that link really interesting. It's probably no link at all,

but I'm just going to put that random facts out there for people to digest at their leisure. Just a very small detail, and this is perhaps quite important, though a little bit small. This inscription that gained so much attention as really being one of the markers alongside the theatre and the gymnasium, one of the more alongside the theater and the gymnasium. One of the more distinct markers of Greekness or Greek identity, a small detail is that the stone of the inscription was actually reused later on as a pedestal and the inscription was actually turned towards the wall. So in later times, it really seems that this inscription and perhaps even the whole connection with Delphi was not deemed as relevant anymore.

Ah, that is so interesting. Let's keep on that for a second, because we interviewed not too long ago, Melinda, your good friend Lauren Morris, all about Begram and how she was saying that we sometimes see these Hellenistic, these Greek objects at Begram much later on. But the original meaning of these objects seems to have disappeared, almost evaporated, not have been as important for the local people. So could it be that we see a similarity with I Hanum where the people later on, they see this object, but they don't value it the same way as it might have been previously. Absolutely, absolutely. I think it's very important to contextualize Iconum in this larger range of history. And we really have to keep in mind that the Iconum existed for roughly 150 years. And so we talk about maybe five, six or seven generations even, if we take an average generation of maybe 20 or 30 years. And you can really question how much indeed of later generations still retains the original meaning, if there was ever an original meaning. So this really plays into the question of what is Greek and what kind of people lived here.

Were they actually Greeks? If they were descendants of Greek settlers, did they actually feel as Greek? Did they feel Greek in the same way as if you would feel Greek in the Mediterranean? So these are all kinds of questions that you have to keep in mind when you interpret these kind of mixed material culture with a strong Greek component. What did Tudor men like their women to look like? They should have broad shoulders, fleshy arms, fleshy legs and broad hips. What did 17th century Londoners think of coffee? A syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes. And what did executioners wear? A lot of these guys, they were clothes horses because it's a big public spectacle. All the eyes are on you. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb and in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything

from monasteries to the Medici, sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. absolutely melinda let's really delve into that now because i know you've done a lot of work around this subject if we look at the older arguments first of all melinda what had people initially concluded about the ethnic makeup of ihanum from the material culture from the archaeology and architecture at the site even though though Aikhenom is very much defined by its cultural diversity, so to speak, so you have indeed a lot of classically Greek buildings or buildings that are really recognised as strongly Greek,

such as the theatre and the gymnasium. Of course, Aikhenom is very much defined by a lot of Oriental, so to speak, Eastern architects as well. oriental, so to speak, Eastern architects as well. And despite this diversity, mainly scholars have focused on the Greek part of the Greek features and therefore also the Greek character of the city and interpreting it in terms of maintenance and a preservation of Greek identity. So really this plays into the whole idea of Hellenism in the East. There's a quite significant debate, the so-called Hellenization debate. What does it mean when cultures come into contact with each other, especially in the aftermath of Alexander the Great's conquest in the East?

And what are the cultural dynamics that lay behind this? conquest in the East and what are the cultural dynamics that lay behind this. And for Ayhenoum, the excavators upon its discovery and upon this continuous excavation, they really brought the city to the public as an outpost of Hellenism in the East. And this is one of the initial interpretations of Paul Bernard. He changed his opinion, of course, in later times to a more nuanced, but I can really imagine the excitement, actually, to find Greek characteristics in the urban landscape of Aichennum so far away from the Greek Mediterranean. And so I think the distance really instigated the emphasis on the Greek elements of the city. And so throughout time, actually, of course,

there have been a lot of paradigm shifts in terms of interpretations of the city. And the interpretations of the city can really be seen in the longer historiography or longer history of writing about the impact of Hellenism in the East. And Hellenism is here defined as the spread of Greek culture in the East. And there have been long debates about how this actually took place,

what it actually implied. And for Aikhenoum, a very strong interpretation that kind of had a very long afterlife was that this city would have been an outpost of Hellenism. It would have been a nucleus of Greek culture, of Greek civilization, where Greek settlers, they had to somehow survive. And they were in this kind of ethnic survival mode. And they really had to keep to their traditions. And the local patrons that were there, they had to Hellenize in order to get by. So in this very classic interpretation, Hellenism is really seen as an ethnic marker of identity. And so the Greek aspects of the city have been kind of aligned to this idea of an expression of Greek ethnicity by the inhabitants.

But Melinda, why is this approach flawed? This approach is flawed, of course, because it really collapses a lot of different aspects of the city. And so, first of all, it collapses who rules the region. So we see this definitely in the political context of the Graco-Bactrian kings and the Sucre kings before them, who minted coins with Greek inscriptions and with Greek iconography, etc. And so we see the Graco-Bactrian kings, at least, we see these as Greek kings. And because it kind of overlaps in time, we kind of collapse political history with the cultural history of Aichinul.

political history with the cultural history of Aichinou. And so I think the question that should be brought to the front is the question who actually lived in Aichinou, who peopled these settlements in general. So we have indeed from Plutarch, who wrote, of course, his moral biography of Alexander the Great. We hear from Plutarch that Alexander the Great came here and that he brought civilization to the savages of Bactria. And although we know that this is kind of a moralizing biography, it did leave some kind of distinct imprint on how people have viewed and how people have interpreted these Greek aspects of the city. And so I think this interpretation is very much flawed because there is this compartmentalization of culture. And so the presence of a Greek theater and the presence of a Greek gymnasium would necessarily mean that there were ethnic Greek settlers. And yes, there was definitely an undue focus to the Greek community at Aichenoom,

even though there were many other elements of the city that were distinctly non-Greek, such as the temples, of course. Scholars have mainly focused their attention on the Greek community at Aichenoom and thereby kind of disregarding all these other cultural elements of the city that kind of are indicators that there is a lot more cultural diversity and perhaps also ethnic diversity than we expect. A second problem is that we tend to look at material culture in ethnic and national categories. So if we talk about Greek features or Greek objects or Greek buildings, we kind of align this to an idea of Greekness as Greek

people having one Greek culture and kind of adhering to this monolithic Greek idea of one Greek identity. And I think this is very much flawed, not only because of course, we didn't have nations, we didn't have nation states, and ethnicity, of course, also worked differently in ancient times because we didn't have nation states. And because culture moves much more dynamically and fluently and cultural influence, I think, moves much more independently from political structures, even though, of course, they are related and they are interconnected but

i think taking over certain cultural elements for different social purposes is definitely a possibility here so just because you have greek style elements in the buildings to do with administration let's say the palatial area doesn't mean that the people themselves in that palatial area were Greek. Absolutely. So you can adhere to a Greek lifestyle, perhaps, or what we would call a Greek lifestyle without necessarily being Greek. So I think Greekness or what we call Hellenism or taking over of Greek cultural elements, may not necessarily be related to Greek ethnicity. There we go. And I guess it's the same as well. If you're looking at, let's say, the house structure,

the structure of the houses, these clear Mesopotamian, Iranian, or Bactrian elements, once again, it's not a reflection of the ethnicity. It's just the sort of design which was preferred in this area of the world at that time. Absolutely, yes. So even though these houses were recognised as distinctly non-Greek, of course the people living there might well have been Greek or might well have been identified as Greek. But also the other way around, people who go to the theatre or who participate in activities in the gymnasium may not necessarily be Greek, but they participate in a social activity for which indeed Greek architecture is preferred. Now, I'm going to ask a big, big question now. I know you've done a lot of work about it, but

it's about this whole word globalisation, Melinda, in Central Asia and the definition of globalization in antiquity and how this can relate to what you've just talked about there about this cultural mixing of elements. Yes, that's a very big question, the definition of globalization. And I think I want to answer this question in two ways. I think I want to answer this question in two ways. And the first way is to really look at the historiography in the sense of scholars always talk about the past in terms of frameworks of their own time. So we see in the early 20th century that the colonial paradigm, the colonial way of interpreting history was very much prevalent. colonial way of interpreting history was very much prevalent. Then this kind of changes throughout time after the period of decolonization from the 1950s onward. There's this emergence of a

post-colonial paradigm, which kind of sets off against these very colonial interpretations of history. That being said, I also want to position myself as very much a scholar of this time. We, of course, live in a time that is defined by what we call globalization. And so increasingly, scholarship has looked at theoretical models, sociological models that look at globalization in a modern world. But these theoretical models, they can be very useful to look at the past as well. And so there's a distinction between two things, globalization as an object of research, and secondly, globalization as a method of research. And I think the promise of globalization lies in the latter. So I'm not, it really depends on how you define globalization,

whether this actually took place in ancient times. There are a lot of studies at the moment that indeed claim that there was ancient globalization, kind of try to search for parameters to prove that globalization was there in ancient times. But I think the merit of globalization is really as a method. And people have been using globalization or globalization theory as a lens to look at surges of increasing connectivity in the past. And so if we take a more loose definition that kind of detaches globalization purely as a

modern phenomenon, and if we use the more loose definition of globalization as social processes through which very distant localities become increasingly interconnected and also interdependent, then this kind of gives us a lens to look at broader processes that were going on in Eurasia and the Hellenistic period as well. And so I'm not saying that, okay, there was ancient globalization in the same way that we have as modern globalization, but I do think that the globalization approach allows us to take into account the wider context of increasing mobility and increasing connectivity across the Eurasian landmass. And this happens by efforts of empires that interact with different

regions of the empires. You see, for instance, in the Hellenistic period, the emergence of the use of the same coin systems, production of coins, use of the same language. You see a shared artistic style, you see shared artistic techniques, there is a shared visual language and architectural language. So there are different ways that people can share across distance in certain ways of doing. And is it within this framework, this globalisation framework, that then you can approach these various cultural elements at sites like at Kaikhanoum and at other sites in Bactria through this fresh lens?

Yes, absolutely. I think previous interpretations have focused too much on Greek ethnicity or Greek identity as such. And really we tend to think of Greek and Bactrian or Greek and local identities in a kind of fixed way, which are then reflected in objects and buildings that would then have a singular meaning. With this globalization lens and with the wider context of connectivity and mobility, you also take into account the connectivity and mobility of ideas and of techniques without necessarily identifying wherever it may come from.

And so I think that it is very important to keep in mind, and this is also what the globalization framework helps us with, is that this cultural mixture that we see at Aikhenom, it was not necessarily imposed, but it was also lived by people. And within the city, there were several ways to connect among each other. And instead of to focus on what kind of ethnic identity people had or how they expressed their identity and how they kept to Greek traditions, I think it's more productive to focus on clusters of social relations or rather clusters of social life within the city that people moved in. So I mean, to wrap it all up, you've explained it all

brilliantly there, Melinda, but if we should not therefore label Ihanoum as this Greek polis, as let's say a Hellenistic outpost, how do you think we should view the settlement? Yes, I think we should view the settlement firstly as a royal city. But it was not only a royal city only connected to the political culture, it was also a royal city that people lived in. And so instead of seeing this really as an outpost of Hellenism, I think we should really see this city as one where diverse peoples lived, and where the people could connect and interact with each other in diverse ways. And that these practices that we see performed in the city were not only imperial,

and also they were also not local, but they were more translocal in the city were not only imperial and also they were also not local but they were more translocal in the sense that they had wider connections to certain ways of doing across space across the space of your asia i'm just imagining now delegates going to that city from maybe like their han china or the indian subcontinent or further west or further north and being absolutely blown away from it this one and I guess another of these great crossroads of antiquity a really really astonishing sight Melinda the chat we've had over the last hour or so has been absolutely awesome it's been really a long time coming it's great to have had you on the podcast to talk all about this

and it all just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on today. No problem. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not, just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.