With Alexander in India and Central Asia
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LEXANDER CONQUERED most parts of the Western World, but there I WI A N WITH is a great deal of controversy over his I T invasion of India, the least known of N H his campaigns. In BC 327 Alexander DIA came to India, and tried to cross the A & LEXA Jhelum river for the invasion, but was ALEXANDER CE then confronted by King Porus who NT ruled an area in what is now the Punjab. N IN INDIA & According to Indian history he was RAL ASIA DER stopped by Porus at his entry into the country, but most of the world still believes that Alexander won the battle. Fearing the prospect of facing other large armies and exhausted by years of CENTRAL ASIA campaigning, Alexander’s army mutinied at the Hyphasis River, refusing to march farther east. T is river thus marks the easternmost extent of Alexander’s conquests. moving east & back to w e s t Eleven papers in this volume examine aspects of Alexander’s Indian campaign, the relationship between him and his generals, the potential to use Classical and Indian sources, and evidence E for the infl uence of policies of Alexander in neighbouring areas such as Persia and parts of dited Central Asia. by C CLAUDIA ANTONETTI is Professor of Greek History and Director of the Laboratory for Greek laudia Epigraphy at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She specialises in the study of Greek epigraphy, the history and historiography of north-western Greece, Greek relations with the western Mediterranean and archaic Greek colonisation. A ntonetti PAOLO BIAGI is Professor of Prehistory and Protohistory in the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. His research interests are wide-ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Neolithic with a special interest in lithic technology, prehistoric & and environmental archaeology, and techniques of radiometric dating and he has many years P of experience excavating in northern Italy, Sardinia, Slovakia, England, Romania, Western aolo Macedonia, Limnos, Cyprus, Kuwait, Oman, Sindh and Balochistan (Pakistan). B iagi ISBN 978-1-78570-584-7 Edited by www.oxbowbooks.com Claudia Antonetti & Paolo Biagi With Alexander in India and Central Asia With Alexander in India and Central Asia Moving East and Back to West edited by Claudia Antonetti and Paolo Biagi Oxford & Philadelphia Published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by OXBOW BOOKS The Old Music Hall, 106–108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JE and in the United States by OXBOW BOOKS 1950 Lawrence Road, Havertown, PA 19083 © Oxbow Books and the individual contributors 2017 Paperback Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-584-7 Digital Edition: ISBN 978-1-78570-585-4 (epub) A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher in writing. Printed in Malta by Melita Press For a complete list of Oxbow titles, please contact: UNITED KINGDOM UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Oxbow Books Oxbow Books Telephone (01865) 241249, Fax (01865) 794449 Telephone (800) 791-9354, Fax (610) 853-9146 Email: [email protected] Email: [email protected] www.oxbowbooks.com www.casemateacademic.com/oxbow Oxbow Books is part of the Casemate Group Front cover: The mangrove swamp of Miāni Hor, Las Bela, Balochistan, close to the place where Nearchus landed. Photo by Paolo Biagi. Back cover: The Indus River between Sukkur and Rohri in Upper Sindh, where Alexander crossed it to visit Aror. Photo by Paolo Biagi. Contents Introduction ...........................................................................................................................vii C. Antonetti and P. Biagi Part I: Babylon, the Upper Satrapies and the Iranian Peoples 1. “Kislīmu Day 10, Year 31, Seleucus and Antiochus the Kings”: Greek Elements in Babylonian Sources ..........................................................................2 P. Corò 2. Aspects of Seleucid Iconography and Kingship ..........................................................17 V. Messina 3. Alexandre le Grand en Asie Centrale. Geographie et Strategie de la Conquete des Portes Caspiennes à l’Inde...........................................................37 C. Rapin 4. The Scythians and the Eastern Limits of the Greek Infl uence: The Pazyryk Culture and Its Foreign Artistic Infl uences ........................................122 L. Crescioli 5. Alexandre le Grand et les Russes: Un Regard sur le Conquérant Porté depuis l’Asie Centrale ....................................................................................................152 S. Gorshenina 6. Parthia, Bactria and India: The Iranian Policies of Alexander of Macedonia (330–323)............................................................................................................ 194 M. Olbrycht Part II: From Paropamisus to the Indus Mouth and to the Persian Gulf 7. The Indian Caucasus from Alexander to Eratosthenes ............................................. 212 F. Prontera 8. Megasthenes Thirty Years Later ..................................................................................... 222 A. Zambrini vi Contents 9. Indian Ethnography in Alexandrian Sources: A Missed Opportunity?................ 238 S. Beggiora 10. Uneasy Riders: With Alexander and Nearchus from Pattala to Rhambakia ......255 P. Biagi 11. From the Indus to the Pasitigris: Some Remarks on the Periplus of Nearchus in the Arrian’s Indiké ..............................................................................279 V. Bucciantini Introduction This book is the compendium of papers from the international conference Anabasi: Sulle orme di Alessandro dalla morte di Dario that was held in Venice on 16th–17th October and 17th–18th November, 2014. The conference was organised by one of the editors (C. Antonetti) under the patronage of the Department of Humanities (D.S.U.), the Department of Asian and North African Studies (D.S.A.A.M.) and the School of Cultural Production and Conservation of Cultural Heritage of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. The fi rst part of the conference focused on Babylon, the Upper Satrapies and Central Asia, the second on the Indian Subcontinent and the Persian/Arabian Gulf. Italian, Polish, Russian, Swiss, and Ca’ Foscari scholars took part in the conference, which was attended by many university students. The conference focused on the relationships between the Greek-Macedonians and those civilizations in the Middle East, Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent that Alexander encountered during the last phase of his conquest, according to the most recent results from research in philology, historical geography and archaeology, but also historiography. The scope of the meeting was to verify, beyond the post-colonial view and with a new approach to the ancient sources, the perceived view of peoples and territories, together with any possible syncretism, hybridisation, survival or caesura within the interrelationships in material, artistic, cultural, religious and institutional life. This is not the fi rst time that such a broad topic is discussed (cf. Chapter 16 – “In the steps of Alexander and on the trail of Darius” – of the seminal book by P. Briant (2002) From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire), and it will probably not be the last. The Venice meeting revealed, beyond post-colonialist (Cliff ord 1988; Mellino 2005) and ‘Reception’ studies (Vasunia 2013), the need for a wider and less dichotomous theoretical approach to the interpretation of phenomena such as cultural interaction and transfer (cf. f.i. Stavrianopoulou 2013; Ahuja 2016; McCarty 2016). In our opinion, the ongoing debate of the last two decades on colonisation, identity and cultural relationships – with the occasional exaggeration1 – among historians of antiquity has strangely obliterated the geographic and epistemological “boundaries” of the eastern “outskirts” reached by the Hellenic experience, namely those regions where “Orientalism” originated, according to Edward Said.2 We are still lacking in adequate defi nitions to express the realities at hand, for instance when we consider that the concept of Central Asia, now commonly used, was only introduced around the beginning of the 19th century. It is a typical Eurocentric concept, inspired by theories of environmental determinism and the myth of nationalism (Gorshenina 2014). viii Introduction A special interest in this fi eld of study was reinforced when C. Antonetti took part in the conference organised by L. Gallo and B. Genito on 5th–6th June, 2014, at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”, entitled “Grecità’ di Frontiera. Frontiere geografi che e culturali nell’evidenza storica ed archeologica”. That conference dealt with multicultural contacts between the farthest geographic and cultural areas reached by Hellenism. It was organised within an academic environment rather similar to that of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where classical and oriental studies coexist. This is an ideal prerequisite to try and reverse the national course of this fi eld of study, traditionally confi ned to separate, non-communicating environments and university departments, as opposed to what we can observe in other European and extra-European academies. The eleven papers gathered in this book deal mainly with an “Oriental” or “Orientalised” Hellenism (Filigenzi 2012), rather than with Hellenised countries and peoples and