The Ancients - Begram: Crossroads of the Ancient World

Episode Date: July 8, 2021

Bagram, also known as Begram, has been in the news a lot recently. Over the past couple of days, the last US and NATO troops have withdrawn from Bagram air base, which they have occupied for some 20 years. But this area of Central Asia, situated south of the Hindu Kush mountain range, also has some remarkable ancient history. In the area around Bagram lie the remains of ancient Begram (Kapisi). The city witnessed several waves of ancient superpowers. The Persians came here, as did Alexander the Great and his successors. But it was during the age of the Kushan Empire (1st – 4th centuries AD) that it appears the rich, ancient city of Begram enjoyed its golden age. In this fascinating podcast, University of Freiburg’s Lauren Morris brilliantly guides us through Begram’s ancient history and why this site is so extraordinary. Lauren also tells the remarkable story behind the excavations at Begram during the 1930s and how it could be a big hit Netflix show in its own right.Part 2 will be out soon and will be centred on the Begram’s most remarkable archaeological discovery: the Begram Hoard.

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, where you might have noticed in the news over the past couple of days, how the last US and NATO forces have now left Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, having been there for some 20 years.

Coincidentally, a couple of months back, I was fortunate enough to interview Lauren Morris from the University of Freiburg, all about the ancient history of Bagram, also known as Begrim. Now, Lauren and I were talking for well over an hour, so we're going to divide this podcast into two. The main focus of this whole podcast was on an incredible set of objects discovered in the mid-20th century called the Begram Hoard. And this hoard has objects, some of which come from ancient China, from eastern ancient China, lack of where's from that area of the ancient world. We have objects from the Indian subcontinent. We have objects from around Begram.

And we also have some objects from the Roman Mediterranean. It's an incredible ancient hoard with objects that stretch the whole length of the Eurasian continent. Now in this first part we're going to be really delving into the ancient history of Begrum and that area of ancient Central Asia. We're going to be talking about the Persians, we're going to be looking at Alexander the Great, we're going to be looking at the Greco-Bactrians and the importance of Begrum or the Kushan Empire. So without further ado, here's Lauren. Lauren, it is great to have you on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me.

No problem at all, because we're talking about an extraordinary hoard, an extraordinary discovery, filled with objects from, can we say, across the length of the Eurasian continent. That's exactly right. Yeah, almost all of it, really. Well, we're going to have to deep into this. So first of all, the Begram hoard begs the most important question, first of all. Lauren, where is Begram? Ha ha. So I'll start by saying that if someone hasn't heard of the ancient site of Begram, the name's going to ring a bell because of course it's the name of the main US airbase in Afghanistan. Thankfully that airbase is about five kilometers away from the ancient city, so this is good. And

both our ancient city and the airbase are located around 50 kilometers north of Kabul as the crow flies. So this region is actually now split between two modern provinces called Parwan and Kapisa. But this area generally is often called Somali, which just means northern, so north of Kabul. And the ancient city of Begram's in the middle of a highland basin here, and it's about 1,500 meters above sea level. And it's on the south side of the Hindu Kush mountain range. And so Begram's old citadel is located on this natural rock overlooking the junction of these two rivers flowing from the Hindu Kush, so the Gorband and Panjshir rivers. And the citadel was connected with fortification walls to a lower city to the south. So this is like a rectangular enclosure

on the edge of a slightly elevated plain called the Dashti Begram, the plain of Begram. And this gives way to the old city suburbs and hinterland. And so in antiquity, this area was part of a bigger region called Kapisa or Kapisha. And its capital, which must have been the site of Begram throughout history, was known as Capici or Capici. And probably for a brief period too, it was known as Alexandria, but I think we'll talk about that later. But I just want to emphasize something here about the landscape before we move on. This area is absolutely stunning and it's like really, really beautiful. That's not just my opinion you know and we have plains of green irrigated fields and we have canals lined by trees this is interspersed with these picturesque mud brick houses it's surrounded by rippling foothills of pasture and then it just

ascends into these majestic snow-capped mountains and it's not just nice to look at so because of its high elevation the climate in this region in summer it's not just nice to look at. So because of its high elevation, the climate in this region in summer is not too hot. And the region is really rich in terms of its agricultural produce. So it's been a traditional breadbasket of Kabul when Kabul's been the capital. And there's also a strong pastoral component to the local economy. So sheep and goats in particular are herded in the adjacent mountain pastures. And the region also provides access to a range of mineral resources. So the most famous of this is the Galena deposits in the Panjshir valley, which are basically produced silver. But also finally from the city of Begram, you can also control access through important passes in the Hindu Kush, which connected these two major

cultural regions, which Begram lay between. And so these are the ancient regions of Bactria and Gandhara. And so Bactria basically included parts of northern Afghanistan and parts of southern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. And its major historical capital was Balkh, the mother of cities, which the Greeks knew as Bactria. And then on the other side, we have Gandhara. And this is essentially modern northern Pakistan with its core in the Peshawar plain, with the city Pushkalavati, then later Purushpura, that's modern Peshawar city, and then going a bit further southeast, you get the famous city of Taxila. And so what I'd like to emphasize here is that Begram lays at the nexus of these wider cultural Indian and Iranian worlds. And we see this position reflected in the material culture of the region. world. And we see this position reflected in the material culture of the region. And moreover,

Begram and Kapisa were connected to wider overland trade networks and maritime ones too by extension. And so, you know, if you wanted to basically travel from India to Bactria and wider Central Asia in antiquity, you'd most likely want to pass through Begram. You could pick up fresh supplies, you could visit the city's market, and you can maybe be forced to pay some customs duties on goods you were transiting for trade. It sounds like an absolutely astonishing site, and I think we can all agree that this area of antiquity, these regions that you've mentioned from Bactria to Gangadara, it is one of the most awesome, one of the most incredible regions of the whole of ancient history. And you mentioned Alexandria. Yes, that name seems to pop up everywhere. So no doubt we'll be going back to that very soon. But first of all, the period that we're talking about mainly for the Begrim Horde,

I know there's some debate around it, but in the centuries before that, this whole area, this important, this strategic area in the Hindu Kush, Lauren, we've seen various civilizations really having an important presence in this area. That's absolutely right. Many parties throughout the centuries have been attracted to Kapisa's resources and have incorporated this region into their larger polities. And the result, of course, was this immensely dynamic and I think really exciting political and cultural history.

But I want to preface this discussion by saying that we have to piece this history together through this complex body of sources, because people in this region in antiquity didn't write their own histories. And so we do have some local documentary texts and inscriptions, mostly from neighboring Bactria and Gandhara. But instead, we have to pull the history together through a range of literary sources, you know, written by outsiders that have been passed down to us through history. So what survives? And these include sources in Greek and Latin, in Chinese and Indian languages.

But most importantly, our ideas about the history of Kapisa and its neighbors is kind of built on the study of coins, numismatics. coins, numismatics. And so to understand the history of Begram, the coins collected from the site and its hinterland are crucial for this question because they provide proxy evidence for who ruled there. And so a substantial body of that data, they're the coins that were collected by Charles Masson in the 1830s. And those have been the subject of this really incredible long-term research project at the British Museum, led by Elizabeth Arrington, and it's culminating in a forthcoming book with a chapter on Begram's monetary history by Joe Cribb. Well, there you go. You see the power, the power of coins, the power of numismatic study right there. So Lauren, we see this rich array of civilizations that have had a presence in this area of the ancient world. And this takes us

all the way back to the Persians. Yeah. So Begram really emerges into our known history through its incorporation into the Achaemenid Persian Empire. This happened in around the 530s BC under Cyrus the Great. And of course, much is still really obscure about this period at Begram. But essentially, it's possible that the citadel had been known as Kapisi and it was the location of a fortified acumen administrative centre and thus the seat of this minor satrapy of the Paraphimesis region, which was then perhaps subordinate to the neighbouring major satrapy of Gandhara next door. Although, of course, we lack archaeological evidence to really support this right now. And following on from the Persians, who comes next? Oh, our old friend, Alexander the Great.

Oh, there he is. Yep. Yep. Can't get rid of him. No. So he passed through Begram twice. And so the first time was during the winter of late 330 BC. And so he arrived with his army among the Parapermisidae.

So this is a bigger region within which Begram lies. And he's going on the way to Bactria in pursuit of the Achaemenid satrap Bessus. And they had a really bad time. I think this is well known. They didn't enjoy it. It was probably an error, in fact, to try and do this in winter. Nonetheless, the Greco-Macedonian army wintered in this region. And then Alexander, according to a number of sources, founded an Alexandria here. And so he then settled or resettled a bunch of local inhabitants and soldiers at this city before crossing the Hindu Kush. And this was Alexandria of the so-called Caucasus. And so-called, of course, because the Macedonians believed that the Hindu Kush was an extension of the real Caucasus mountain range, which we know now it's not exactly connected.

So Alexander crosses the Hindu Kush in 329. He takes care of Bessus and then he comes back again past Begram or Alexandria in 327 BC on his way to India. Apparently he kicked out his latest governor who'd been bad at administrating the city and later Alexander's father-in-law Oxiates, he governed the city too. Again, we're typically lacking clear material evidence for all of this on the ground, but this is still earlier than the main strata excavated at the site of Begram. But I should say that the location of Alexandria with the site of Begram, it is not 100% confirmed. We'd like a nice inscription, but archaeologists working on the region have long

considered it to be the most plausible option, just as Charles Masson, its European rediscoverer, observed in the 1830s. And this is because Begram was the only main settlement of the region. So it's likely that Alexander, you know, simply refounded the pre-existing Achaemenid fort, and he injected some colonists and a governor, rather than building some grand new city anew. And so we wouldn't expect, you know, to find so much, in fact, to find so much, in fact, archaeologically. So then the settlement of Begram, probably formerly Carpathia, briefly becomes known as Alexandria. Well, there you go. We're edging closer and closer to the main period of our chat today, Lauren. But now we're getting into the coolest period in history,

the Hellenistic period. That's my opinion anyway. So in the Hellenistic period, we see quite a few different cultures, civilizations in this part of the world. That's exactly right. And so a lot of what follows a Begram in this period isn't totally clear. So King Seleucus, of course, founded the Seleucid Empire and he turned east to recapture Bactria. But prior to this, on the other side, we have Chandragupta Maurya, who'd founded the Numorian Empire in Gangetic India, and the two kings came to confront each other at the Indus. And this, of course, concluded with a treaty in 303 BC, in which Seleucus ceded territories bordering the Indus to Chandragupta. So it's thought that Kapisa was one of those territories, but as ever, it's not totally clear. So a few Sleukid and Morian coins have been found around Begrim and its hinterland. And it at least indicates

that life probably went on regardless of who really ruled on the ground. And then following on from that, we have the emergence of this next kingdom, the Greco-Bactrians. Yes, here we are entering an increasingly obscure part of history and one that is especially informed by the study of coins. And I think it's worth diving into it a little bit because it's a lot of fun and this part of history is not really well known. So around the mid-third century BC, this Lucid satrap of Bactria, a certain Diodotus, he wrested power and seceded from the Lucid Empire, establishing this independent Hellenistic

kingdom that's conventionally known as the Greco-Bactrian kingdom. But, you know, Bactria was a land of legendary agricultural wealth and really a major prize. So it's not surprising that about 20 years later, a Euthydemus overthrows Diodotus' dynasty. And then that dynasty then enters into conflict with the Seleucids. And Euthydemus ends up being besieged at the capital of Bactria in the late 3rd century BC. And so the other royal capital of Bactria, I should say, was located in the east, so a famous city known today as Aichanum. So eventually after the two-year siege at Bactria, a peace agreement was settled and Euthydemus keeps the region. And it's not long before the Greek kings of Bactria,

they turn their sights to the south and the riches of India more broadly. So shortly after, the Greco-Bactrian king Demetrius appears to have captured regions south of the Hindu Kush, including Kapisa, Arakozia, and the kings who ruled and minted coins in these regions are usually called the Indo-Greeks today. So between these two blocks, north and south, it's possible that some kinds of alliances were set up at this early stage, not totally clear. And regardless, a new king and usurper in Bactria, Eucretides, emerged in around 170 BC. He crosses the Hindu Kush and he captures part of northwest India. But here, of course, he encroached onto the territory of the Indo-Greek king Menando, who probably ruled in the Punjab. And so Menando might have

undertaken campaigns deep into north and northwestern India as he was pushed by Eucretides, but he also turned back as well later to recapture the territories he'd lost to the Greco-Bactrian king. And so now we're rolling up to around the mid-second century BC, and Eucretides returns home from India to Bactria, and his kingdom comes crashing down. So we have this great summary in Justin that Eucretides was actually killed by his own son, who drove his chariot through his father's blood and ordered his body to be cast out unburied. Like, this is brutal stuff. And so this and a combination of internal infighting, we have local dissent probably, and of course external military pressure.

So on the one side we have the Arsacid dynasty emerging in Parthia, and we have also these incoming mobile pastoralist groups who helped to contribute to the collapse of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom in around 145 BC. And so this is when the eastern royal capital of Iqunum was abandoned. And then we start to hear more about these parts of confederacies of nomads or mobile pastoralists entering into the region. So we have the Saka or Sai, as they were known in Chinese standard histories, who probably came from the north of Central Asia, and a group known as the Yuezhe

in Chinese sources, who were the imperial predecessors of the later Kushan Empire, and I guess we'll talk about them later. But to stay in the Hellenistic period for just a moment, shortly after this in the realm of the Indo-Greek kingdoms, the great conqueror Menander dies in about 130 BC, probably violently, we can assume, And Greek rule in Kapisa to broader Gandara was fragmented into these increasingly smaller kingdoms. And so the last Greek king to rule Kapisa and the city of Begram was Hermias, who we know from his coins. And he was in power from around until about 70 BC. And so in the meantime, in neighboring Gandara, we see the installation of new rulers, apparently more Sarkas, also conventionally known as Indo-Scythians.

And finally, we have the last Hellenistic king in the eastern Punjab, a fellow called Stratto III, who fizzles out in about AD 10 with Greek rule finally fully supplanted by Indo-Scythian and Indo-Parthian kings. So farewell Stratto III and farewell this last Hellenistic king in Begram. And I'm guessing these are such difficult questions because I imagine that the source material is really not there apart from the archaeology and the coinage. Do you have any idea what then immediately follows, particularly in the Begram region, follows these Hellenistic kings? Yeah, I mean, it's a really hard question to answer, Yeah, I mean, it's a really hard question to answer, but life seems to have gone on. So the answer to this question of who ruled this area lies in who we think might have been responsible for this extensive series of imitation coins of the last Hindu Greek King Hermias. And there's been a lot of great scholarship on this question and multiple answers are possible. So one answer is that it was the Uesha who just came over the Hindu Kushavit earlier than we thought. Or another answer might

be that they were otherwise unknown Indo-Scythian rulers. And I personally have wondered if it wasn't just a local governor, perhaps a member of an aristocratic family. And maybe one day we'll have clearer answers. I certainly hope so. But what I can say is that, again, with the archaeology we see from this period of Bagram, life seems to have just continued on. Life seems to have just continued on as it always does. And exactly, perhaps it was just a local noble and we've seen that so many times in history, including maybe with Euthydamus. So if we then do move on, you mentioned them just now, the cushions. I mean, who are the Kushans and how do they come to power in this part of the ancient world?

Huge questions, and I will give you some tentative answers. So, the Kushan Empire is kind of now regarded as one of these great lost world empires, and they're really obscure to us, but it existed from around the 1st to 4th centuries AD, and at its height, this empire seems to have stretched from southern Uzbekistan in the north, so Bactria, to northern India, but its extent is still pretty unclear. And since their rediscovery in modern scholarship, which has been pretty recent, there's been so much work trying to disentangle the story of how this empire unfolds. And so according to the current reconstructions and scholarship, which necessarily have to follow information provided by Chinese standard histories, the processes were something like

the following. So this group of mobile pastures called the Yuezhe, I mentioned earlier, they turned up in Bactria in the latter half of the second century BC. Apparently their original pasture lands were somewhere around Gansu in today's China? That's debated. Anyway, pressure exerted by the expanding Xiongnu Empire in particular helped to drive their migrations towards the west, and at least part of this group ultimately lands it in Bactria. And so at some point during their time in Bactria, rule among this confederacy was split between five yabgu, or allied princes as the term means, and these ruled different

valleys of the tributaries of the Oxus. And so one of these allied princes ruled over a clan called the Kushans, and later in around the mid-first century AD, the leader of that clan, Kajula Kadfises, he seizes power from the rest of the clans, kills their rulers, a classic move, and makes himself king. And so then he establishes the Kushan Empire and its ruling dynasty. And so shortly after, Kujula and his army, they cross the Hindu Kush, capture Gandhara as well as Kapisa, so maybe around 60 AD, yeah, AD 60. And then his successors undertake these further military campaigns deeper into India. They certainly establish rule in Mathura at least. So there's

an area that is near sort of modern Agra, right? And the most famous king of this dynasty was, of course, Kanishka, who ruled from around 127 to 151. And he tells us in the Rabatak inscription, which was only discovered in like 1993, that he even conquered the great old cities of the Gangetic Valley as far as Free Chamfer in the east. So this is enormously, enormously far from Bactria. But all things must end. And in around the year 230, Vasudeva,

the last main Kushan king, he loses the heartland of Bactria to the Sassanians. Bad move, Vasudeva. And he sets up a client kingdom there. And the Sassanians set up a client kingdom there called the Kushan-Sassanian dynasty. And so then this period of imperial contraction follows. And finally, the grand Kushan empire is just in Gandhara and finally disintegrates in around the mid-4th century AD. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast,

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Join us on the front line of military history. Vasudeva, what were you thinking? But in regards to Begram in particular, because it does seem during this incredible period, Lauren, which you've given a great overview there, Begram, it does seem to, what we can tell, become very, very important. Exactly. And of course, we're lacking a lot of details still,

but I can say it was important in three main ways. And so the first we're lacking a lot of details still, but I can say it was important in three main ways. And so the first main way is a simple one. It was rich, and there was a lot of local wealth that must have been based on agriculture, especially. And we see this wealth through proxy evidence, like the establishment of Buddhist monasteries in the first century AD, just in the vicinity of the site. So these monasteries would have depended on the inhabitants of the city and its hinterlands to support them. And so Begram, from an imperial perspective, it was probably the location of the Kushan Empire's main copper mint

and so it produced coins which were used throughout the empire and we see them turning up in Khurasmia, turning up in Gangetic India, which is very exciting and most famously it might have been the location of this summer capital of the king and his court and at least this is widely believed if very hard to verify with any concreteness so the idea comes from the 7th century a.d actually when a chinese buddhist pilgrim visited kapisa and he told a story that he heard there about King Kanishka, you know, our famous king, setting up residences for Chinese political hostages according to the appropriate season.

So accordingly they stayed in Kapisa in the summer, Gandhara in autumn and spring, and India in the winter. And, you know, on the one hand, I do think it's actually pretty plausible that this cult was peripatetic, even though these ideas are often infused with beliefs about nomadism, which are a little bit dangerous, perhaps. But nonetheless, I think it's possible that Begram was visited in the summer by the Kushan kings and their inner circle. And of course, that being said, the city of Begram certainly wasn't their main capital and for day-to-day matters it was probably just ruled by a local governor. And so if Begram seems to have been this incredibly important site for the Kushan royalty if it was a summer capital or whatever I

mean Lauren talk to me through this one particular archaeological excavation that has been done at the site in the 20th century because this seems particularly astonishing the whole story behind it first of all this story behind it is stunning and then we'll get on to the actual finds themselves but tell me through the story of these three figures these three main figures who do excavations at the site absolutely so i'll just like build this up a little bit with a bit of backstory so i mentioned earlier the fellow char Charles Masson rediscovered the site of Begram to European eyes in the 1830s. Apparently he collected about 60,000 coins at the site's hinterland. So people recognized fairly quickly that there was a lot of potential here. And so then almost a century later, we have the establishment of the Delegation Archéologie Française in Afghanistan, so the French archaeological delegation in Afghanistan.

I'll just call them DAFA for short. So in 1922, DAFA was established by Alfred Fouché, who was a renowned specialist in the border side of Gandhara. And he set out pretty quickly to figure out where they should excavate first. And he landed quickly at Begram because he realized that this must be the capital of Kapisa described by Xuanzang. And there was a lot of potential here. And so he actually gave some names to part of the site, which ended up sticking whether or not they're entirely accurate, which I'll refer to like as we talk. So the first is the citadel I mentioned, which the locals called

Burj Abdullah. And he named this the old City. And the fortified square enclosure, which comes up to the top of the plain of Begram, so part of the city's lower town, Fouché called this the New Royal City. So we use these terms by force of convention. So finally, in 1936, the Daffer gets permission to really start excavations proper at Begram. And this was when the Daffer was under Joseph Akin's directorship. And so Joseph Akin and his collaborator and wife, Marie, or Ria Akin, they both actually originated in Luxembourg before they settled in France. And Joseph Akin had these really wide scholarly interests,

but he studied things like philology, Tibetan Buddhist art, and he became a curator at the Musée Guimet in Paris, which is a major collection of Oriental art. And then Ria Akin had studied archaeology at the École de l'Ouvre and was, among other things, an incredibly skilled photographer. So just as the backstory. Right. So in 1936, the Dafas starts their excavations. Akin, he delegates two of his colleagues, the architects Jean-Claude and Jacques Meunier,

to start work there. And Jean-Claude is a person who'll come up again later because he was really Aachen's main collaborator at Begram. So they started off with the lower city, so Fouché's new royal city, so-called, and they started to uncover this old central main street of the area, and it was lined with houses and possibly shops. So they called it the bazaar.

And then in the next season, a year later, Joseph and Ria Akin, they took a more active role. And they decided to open an area around 200 meters east of the first trenches. And they called this Site 2 or Site R for Ria because Ria directed the work there. And so they came across these more monumental remains than before more orthogonal and this is a large rectangular edifice built on this stone masonry in its lower part and this upper part with mud bricks and they go okay and they follow the rooms along until they come to a corridor terminating in a doorway that had been blocked with mud bricks and they're like

oh this doesn't look right so they looked on the other side of that corridor and realized there is a big room around eight by six meters which we'll call room 10 and so they go okay i'm gonna look and we're gonna excavate that from the northwestern angle and so they start digging and what they found there was legendary right so an afghan workman discovered the first fragments of glass and then what unfolded over the next month were just hundreds of finds so we have these ornate unusual glass vessels we've got alabaster vessels we've got worked ostrich eggs bronze basins figural balsamaria, and a lot of carved ivory and bone elements, which are found in isolation or association with wooden furniture frames that had since decayed.

And a lot of those had been originally footstools, it turns out. So they go, wow, this is big. And they immediately start publishing as quickly as possible. And in fact, the report for 1937's excavations were published only two years later, which is really impressive because I don't think many of us can manage to publish anything so quickly these days. But anyway, so in the same year, 1938, Mounioué in the background

is looking at other parts of Begram, this little fort that's above, Site 2 structure. He's looking at an extramural fortress, but not too much work done that year. And then they start again in 1939, back at where the money is, Site 2, again under Rehaken's direction. And they look at a room that was just north of the treasure room, Room 10, which was nine by six meters. And they also excavated some other rooms in this area they're not really well documented but that's another problem right so as in room 10 the entrance of room 13 at this northeast corner had also been walled in with mud bricks and the objects

found here were of the same character as the first room but just wild. So they have glassware again, ivory and bone furniture elements, but this time they're basically chairs, thrones, right? And we have copper alloy vessels. We've got porphyry and rock crystal vessels and a range of these bronze small elements, utensils, figurines, cast elements from pieces of furniture. And we've got these plaster casts, these reliefs with our iconography on them. And we've got lacquerware vessels and boxes from China. And so again, really, really stunning stuff. But in the meantime, World War II is kind of exploding in Europe.

And so the excavators at Begram, the Atkins and Karl are very, very aware of this. And Atkin in 1939 was very interested to go and join the fight in France but you know various authorities intervened to place him on special assignment in Kabul quite unhappily as an intelligence officer okay fine and so they continue excavations at Bagram in 1940 they look more around site 2. They uncover another room, which wasn't sealed, called Room T, and it's got similar items to the Horde objects. Again, more bronzes, but, you know, not like really vessels so much as decorative elements

which have been taken from furniture, lampstands, things like that. And they wrap things up there. And three days later, they basically declare their allegiance to Free France in a telegraph sent through the British legation in Kabul. And so, you know, the new Vichy regime in the background was trying to install Akin as a local intelligence officer at the French legation. Akin definitely did not want to do that. And it was a bad move, Vichy government. And he resigned his directorship of Daffa. And then Joseph Aachen, Ria Aachen and Jean-Claude, they left for London immediately. Right. And so again, it's mind

blowing. In this period, they still found time to publish, you know, short notices about their work at Begram in 1939 in multiple languages. And, you know, part of Aachen's documents were left at the British legation and things started to be a little bit dispersed. And so, good. After liaising with General Charles de Gaulle in Carlton Gardens in London, Joseph and Ria Aachen, they depart Liverpool in 1941 in February on a mission to make contact with free French communities around the world. And four days later, the ship they were traveling on was torpedoed west of the Faroe Islands in the early hours of the morning by a U-boat and so the Atkins perished and Jean-Claude was absolutely devastated when he heard the news and he took his own life. So this is a really heartbreaking

tragic story. These people did really amazing things in difficult conditions and they published very quickly. And nonetheless, you know, the finds they produced were so monumental that of course, there's going to be some complexity with working with the documentation they left behind. And so the finds from room 13, the second major hoard room and the rest of the excavations in 1940 were published much later in 1954 by various collaborators from around the world including the Musée Guimet and the Warburg Institute in London and so that was in 1954 and you know they did their real best to pull bits of documentation together and it's a again a marvelous publication with great photography

but it also doesn't tell us very much about the archaeological context of the finds. And I should say here too that, again, these excavations were not really modern in a sense that we would expect from archaeological excavations today, but they were kind of idiosyncratic and they followed their own logic. So it is possible to look at this material and then other documents that have since recovered that are now kept in archives in the Musée Guimet and pull together a better picture of the story. I mean, but the fact of the matter is, it's the problems with this documentation, which have caused a lot of later debate about what this find is and what it tells us about the world and even bigger questions like its date you know and so I think we'll come back to that later we will definitely I mean that is an absolutely incredible story and it's lovely to hear how their legacy does still live on with their archaeological

discoveries and all that with Haken and Cullen and all that when I was listening to that you do think what I did think immediately of there was a Netflix show The Dig which was very popular over in the UK so it kind of feels like I mean The Dig that was a really interesting archaeological story this seems like that story on steroids like times 10 so these are these incredible pre-war time slash wartime archaeological stories and you had your finger waving just there do you want to come in on that point? I completely agree with you that was my first reaction watching the dig i thought yeah i want this but let's do it in cabell and afghanistan in 1939 you know let's do this well there you go i'm sure the heads of netflix are listening to the ancients podcast so they'll

be able to listen into this point with i'm sure a lot of excitement but lauren let's go back to the begram hoard and that incredible amount of objects which you highlighted just then and i know it's a big question and you did mention it just then the difficulties surrounding that because one of the main controversies is the whole dating of these objects absolutely and so i should say that there is a bigger question about the archaeology of the site so just briefly after the Arkan excavations, Roman Gershman undertook two years of campaigns at Begram, and he was a well-known specialist in the archaeology of ancient Persia.

And he was the only person to really start thinking about the stratigraphy of the site and how it all works together. And so he looked at what the Arkans have excavated and thought, okay, how do I fit this into what I figured out? And so he established that there were three main archaeological phases of Begram. So there's Begram I, which dates roughly to the Indo-Greek slash, you know, transitional unknown power period, and then comes through to the middle Kushan period. Then we have Begram II, which is from around, you know, the mid-second century to mid-third century. And this is a bit of a problem. And then we have Begram III, which is a rather later phase of occupation after a pause, right? And that's been subject to a lot of debate

too, but this was probably around the sixth or seventh century. So there's quite a break in occupation. And so Gershman said, okay, I've looked at what Aachen has done. And he wasn't given Aachen's documents, by the way, he had to sort of figure out based on what had been published so far, which was not much. And he said, okay, so this building, I think it dates to Begram 2. And I think Begram 2, this phase ended in the mid third century. And a lot of people didn't like that because it seemed too late. And a lot of people didn't like that because it seemed too late. Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era, or yoga era,

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This presents real difficulties, so a lot of scholars have tried to sidestep these contextual problems by instead dating the hoard objects on the basis of comparative material excavated elsewhere. Unfortunately, this is a really difficult and sometimes subjective method, particularly as many of the hoard objects are unique in the surviving global archaeological record, and accordingly scholarship hasn't reached a clear consensus on this problem. So rather in about 70 years of scholarship, we've had two main positions on the date of the finds. So there is basically an early position and a late position. So essentially proponents of the late position think it's possible that while some of the hoard objects were produced from perhaps the turn of the

millennium, some were probably produced later too, perhaps even in the third or fourth centuries AD. So the hoard objects then would cover a few centuries. Proponents of the early position on dating, which has become more popular in recent years, have held that the hoard objects were probably produced mostly in the first to perhaps early second centuries AD. Now, sometimes coins have played a role in this debate too, because some coins were found in the hoard rooms, and these are useful because they're easier to date than unique objects. And most people who looked at the coins, too, thought that the latest coin in association with a hoard object, so around the same depth, was one of Kanishka, right? Our famous Kushan king of the mid-second century AD.

And accordingly, then, it would provide a terminus post quem, meaning that the hoard must have been concealed after that coin was minted. meaning that the hoard must have been concealed after that coin was minted. But the problem here is that only some coins were identified in the excavation reports, and they hadn't been cleaned and studied by specialists, and so then it was possible that among the identified coins, there could have been some coins dating to after Kanishka. And in fact, that was exactly the case. So some of the coins that were found in room 10,

at the same depth of the hoard objects, been kept in the Musee Guimet and they were published among other coins from Begram by the numismatist Osman Boparachi in 2001. And among this group were three examples of what we often call late Kushan coins, meaning that they were imitation types drawing on designs inaugurated by our late Kushan kings, so after Vasudeva. Now, our knowledge of the typology and use of these coins is still in development, but what's important is that they're late. And the ones at Begram couldn't have been minted before around after the year AD 260. And yet nobody seemed to realize the significance of this. And so I published an article on them in 2017. And regardless, it's now clear that the hoard was deposited and concealed at least after the mid-third century AD, quite possibly even later.

And so this just underlines the late dating of the hoard objects and the fact that the objects were produced from around the first century BC to perhaps even the third century AD and that then they were acquired over a long period of time which I think is really exciting. And just before we completely wrap up it feels like we do need to mention that in Afghanistan at the moment there are two institutions in particular that are active and that they are doing a lot of work on this area of antiquity and more? Yes I would like to draw the students attention to the Archaeology Institute of Afghanistan and the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul who are very much active at the moment and they provide regular updates about their work on their Facebook pages so I would really encourage you to follow them and see what they're up to. work on their Facebook pages. So I would really encourage you to follow them and see what they're up to. And with yourself, Lauren, there is a book also soon on the way too. Yes, yes, it's in

development. I'm currently revising my PhD dissertation on the Beggar and Hoard in its context to come out as a book. And I'm hoping this will happen in the next year or so. Well, keep in touch and let me know how that all develops. Lauren, in the meantime, it's been great having you on the show to chat. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me.