Bactria has long been regarded as a marginal cultural backwater, and seldom receives more than a passing mention in books on the Hellenistic world It is frequently treated as an exception, as something out of the ordinary and non-representative As such, the site of Ai Khanoum and related Bactrian monuments have been detached from their regional and chronological contexts Bactria was, in fact, a fully fledged part of the developments that took place in the Hellenistic world during the formative period of the third century BC Hellenistic Bactria played its own part in the highly interactive network of city-states, king-doms, and empires covering large parts of the Mediterranean, Near East and Egypt This
study, therefore, takes an approach that explicitly focuses on the wider context, and seeks to understand what happened in Bactria by drawing parallels throughout western and central Eurasia
The Hellenistic world was highly interconnected Idiosyncratic elements of Ai Kha-noum’s material culture, such as the juxtaposition of apparently jarring artistic styles, can only be properly understood as part of an overarching, ‘global’ framework Hellenistic (material) culture was one large repertoire of optional styles and iconographies: a Hellenis-tic koine One was able to choose (and combine) different elements from the repertoire and flexibly use them in different contexts on different occasions As such, certain traditions devel-oped: certain styles and iconographies became associated with certain functions of contexts and the meanings they expressed There is no straightforward correlation between artis-tic style and cultural or ethnic identity The ‘Mesopotamian’ style of the main temple at Ai Khanoum, for example, is connected more to religious function than to any Mesopo-tamian cultural identity and the position of a statue of apparently ‘Greek’ artistic style within it presents no insurmountable cultural contradiction
The Octopus Goddess of Ai Khanoum
The passages above are a product of selective quotation, and in their recombination are not necessarily representative of the views of the authors whom I, respectfully, plagia-rise The technique of bricolage may not make for elegant prose, but I hope my points have come across Looking at Ai Khanoum through the lens of Nemrud Daǧ, at two different moments in its scholarly history, produces different emphases Our Comma-gene I-Ai Khanoum is a strategic, well-connected region mentioned in the Greek and Roman historians Its style and culture are a tripartite hybrid of Greek, (Achaemenid) Persian and local Central Asian It is unfair to view it from a purely Classical angle and dismiss it as ‘Oriental’ and ‘barbaric’ The temple is located within a network of pil-grimage routes and its place in the (urban) landscape is highly significant The material culture of the site is hybrid, and its gods syncretic Greek artistic and architectural ter-minology is used with abandon Viewed within this framework, we can see the statue fragment as a syncretised god – our old friend, Zeus-Oromasdes – housed within a temple sanctuary and city whose image and identity is a fusion, produced by mysteri-ous, unexamined social processes
Commagene II-Ai Khanoum is sightly different It too has been stereotyped as mar-ginal and exotic, and must be rehabilitated as part of the Hellenistic world Its appar-ently clashing artistic styles are rather elements of a single Hellenistic koine, a shared cultural repertoire, in which the Greek is not necessarily dominant In this light, the statue fragment is not something that should be considered in isolation: it is an
el-ement in a common repertoire of styles and practices, deliberately and strategically employed 23
Readers may or may not be surprised at the extent to which I was able to compose perfectly plausible (fake) interpretations of Ai Khanoum using direct quotations from works on Nemrud Daǧ The rhetorical and conceptual similarities between authentic discussions of the two sites and the artificial hybrids above are the product of a number of factors First, direct scholarly influence Writings on Ai Khanoum in the 1960s and 1970s were directly influenced by writings on Nemrud Daǧ in the 1950s Writings on both sites in the mid-2010s have been in dialogue with one another, and with these ear-lier works Second, a common intellectual formation and scholarly milieu Scholars of both Nemrud Daǧ and Ai Khanoum have tended to come to these sites from previous work on the Graeco-Roman world, and more specifically the Graeco-Roman Middle East (Theresa Goell worked at Jerash; Paul Bernard had been a member of the French schools at Athens and Beirut; the previous specialisms of more recent scholars of the two sites include Egypt and Susa) We therefore find a tendency to look for commonali-ties, and to turn to a stylistic language familiar from other regions Third, actual structur-al compatibility I have left this factor to last because I remain agnostic about the vstructur-alidity of direct comparison between the cultural factors at play in Commagene and those in Bactria Certainly, the political force of the deliberate visual syncretism at Nemrud Daǧ is, so far as we can tell, lacking at Ai Khanoum At Nemrud Daǧ there is a publicly assert-ed ideology of hybridity (or whatever term we choose to employ); at Ai Khanoum there is not 24 Nemrud Daǧ provides good material to think with for scholars of Ai Khanoum, but not, I would argue, to reason with At both sites, actors are deploying selective el-ements of a common Hellenistic cultural koine, but to very different intent and effect
Does this mean that we can dismiss the Zeus-Oromasdes of the temple at Ai Kha-noum? Without the influence of Commagene, would we instead be free to interpret the stone foot fragment as the remains of an octopus goddess? That would be to take this short excursion into the ridiculous a little too far The scholarly reconstruction of this fragment into a whole with a specific name and identity – a Zeus-Oromasdes – has certainly been determined by Nemrud Daǧ But while the identity of the god in Ber-nard’s original proposition came in part from Commagene, its form – a seated Zeus – came from Graeco-Bactrian coinage and from the constraints of the temple building itself Bernard’s suggestion remains what it has always been: a plausible reconstruction, but not a certainty Examination of this one artefact and its interpretative history has shown, I hope, just how strong an influence Nemrud Daǧ has always had on the schol-arship on Ai Khanoum, and why we should employ comparanda flexibly and self-criti-cally
23 This is not dissimilar to what I have proposed in Mairs 2014: a ‘Hellenistic Bactrian koine’
24 Argued at Mairs 2014, 185–187
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Rachel Mairs
Professor of Classics and Middle Eastern Studies University of Reading
r mairs@reading ac uk