Archaeology Odyssey

I myself have notified authorities that Bactrian silver coins from the famous Kunduz Hoard, found near the Oxus River and stored in the National Museum, are being sold on the Web, specifically on eBay. Unfortunately, nothing has been done to stop the rapid disappearance of Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic heritage.

Nancy H. Dupree, Status of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage (Peshawar, Pakistan: Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan’s Cultural Heritage, 1998).

The nomadic Yueh-Chi tribes eventually settled into cities of their own and created the mighty Kushana Empire astride the Silk Road linking Rome and China. They borrowed the Greek script to write their language, and their graves are filled with Greek-inspired art. See Victor Sarianidi, The Golden Hoard of Bactria (New York: H.N. Abrams, 1985).

Contemporary edicts promulgating the “competing” Buddhist ideology were set up east and south of Bactria by the Indian King Asoka; see Holt, Thundering Zeus, pp. 175–176.

The voluminous publications on this site are generally in French (for example, the ongoing Fouilles d’Ai Khanoum), but a good illustrated English summary may be found in Paul Bernard, “An Ancient Greek City in Central Asia,” Scientific American 246.1 (1982), pp. 148–159.

Alfred Foucher, La vieille route de l’Inde de Bactre à Taxila, vol. 1 (Paris: Les Éditions d’art et d’histoire, 1942), pp. 73–144.

For full details on what follows, see Frank Holt, Thundering Zeus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1999).

Peter Green, Alexander to Actium (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1990), p. xxi.

For instance, David Oldach et al., “A Mysterious Death,” The New England Journal of Medicine 238.24 (1998), pp. 1764–1769.

Alexander’s insecurities are discussed most notably by Ernst Badian in “Alexander the Great and the Loneliness of Power,” in Studies in Greek and Roman History (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964).