1

Ai Khanoum and the Achaemenids

Rachel Mairs, University of Reading

Introduction

The site of Ai Khanoum, in eastern Bactria, is best known for its impressive Hellenistic-

period architecture, and has attained a certain degree of academic celebrity as a remote

outpost of Hellenism in Central Asia. The remains of the city excavated by the Dlgation

archologique franaise en Afghanistan from 1964-1978 dated essentially from the very late

fourth century BC the period of Alexanders campaigns in Central Asia, or the time of his

immediate successors to around the 140s BC, when the city was violently destroyed, by

war, whether civil war or outside invasion, and abandoned by its inhabitants. Although no

substantial Achaemenid-period remains have been recovered from the site, I argue that this is

likely simply to be an accident of preservation. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention

to evidence which has long been in the public domain in order to argue the case for such an

Achaemenid occupation of the site. As well as archaeological evidence from the city of Ai

Khanoum itself, material from a regional archaeological field survey conducted in the 1970s

demonstrates the intensity with which the resources of eastern Bactria agricultural, and

mineral (e.g. lapis lazuli) were exploited from the Bronze Age through the periods of

Persian and Greek domination, and beyond. Under the Achaemenids, as in earlier and later

periods, substantial irrigation works were maintained. It is therefore highly unlikely that the

site of the later Hellenistic city of Ai Khanoum, with its strategic location, was not utilised at

this period.

In addition to the evidence from the regional survey, some material from Ai Khanoum itself

suggests that there was an earlier Achaemenid period settlement, which was razed for the
 2

construction of the Hellenistic city. A few architectural elements, in their style and

workmanship, appear to have been reused from this earlier settlement. In addition, the

architectural plan of many of the citys institutions and in particular its temples and palace

find their nearest parallels in forms from other regions of the Persian empire, not from the

Classical world. An Achaemenid Ai Khanoum provides the most compelling explanation

for the existence of these forms, and their retention into the Hellenistic period suggests also a

certain degree of administrative and cultural continuity across the regime change from the

last of the Achaemenids to Alexander the Great.

The City

Ai Khanoum lay on the north-eastern marches of the Achaemenid empire, on the river Oxus,

in Bactria, on the present-day border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan.1 In the late fourth

century BC, Alexander the Great campaigned through the lands of the Achaemenid Persian

empire, and nominally brought regions as distant as Bactria, Sogdiana and India under his

rule.2 Alexanders unified empire, however, did not outlive him, and over the course of the

third century BC, Bactria gained effective independence from the other Hellenistic successor

states, under dynasties of local Greek kings.3 Little is preserved in Greek and Roman

historical works about the Hellenistic kingdoms of Bactria and the east in general, and until

the archaeological projects of the mid to late twentieth centuries, the major sources on the

Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kings and their history were their coins. The capital city

was Bactra, at present-day Balkh, near Mazar-i Sharif, but the archaeology of Hellenistic, or

indeed Achaemenid, Bactra is still poorly known. The best known city in the Graeco-

1
For a complete list of publications on the site, see Mairs 2011, 26-29, updated in Mairs 2013a.
2
Bernard 1982, however, refutes Bosworth 1981s arguments that Alexander campaigned locally in eastern
Bactria in 328 BC, making it unlikely that Ai Khanoum was an Alexander-foundation.
3
See, for example, Holt 1988 and Holt 1999.
 3

Bactrian kingdom, from an archaeological point of view, is Ai Khanoum, in eastern Bactria.

The ancient name of the city is not known for certain, although several identifications have

been proposed.4 Excavations at the city took place between 1964 and 1978, by the

Dlgation archologique franaise en Afghanistan, but were abandoned because of the war

in Afghanistan.

The city itself is on the model of a new colonial foundation, rather than an ancient and

longstanding political and administrative centre such as Bactra. Its period of occupation

appears to have been relatively short, from the time of the initial Greek settlement of Bactria,

in the aftermath of Alexanders campaigns, through to the 140s BC, the time of the

catastrophic destruction of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom, under external pressures, such as

war with Parthia and nomad invasions from the north, and also internal dynastic strife and

civil war.5

The city was vast, occupying a triangular raised upper city with a still higher citadel at its

south-eastern end and a lower city at the junction of the river Oxus with a tributary, the

Kokcha, which contained most of the citys excavated monumental public buildings, as well

as a residential district of large mansions. The dimensions of the city are large the main

street which runs along the foot of the upper city is over a kilometre in length. It was heavily

fortified. Erosion along the river banks has damaged the southern and western fortification

walls since antiquity, but walls to the north, and on the acropolis and citadel, remain.6

Ai Khanoum occupied a strategic position, at the junction of the two rivers, and was well

placed to supervise and control the resources of eastern Bactria. The plain around Ai

Khanoum had been irrigated and farmed since the Bronze Age. Eastern Bactria had

important mineral resources, such as lapis lazuli, and the river Kokcha led directly from Ai

4
On the ancient name of Ai Khanoum, see the arguments presented in Bernard and Francfort 1978, 3-15, Narain
1986, Leriche 2007, 121-124, and Claude Rapin 2003.
5
Posch 1995; Mairs forthcoming-b.
6
On the fortifications, see Leriche 1986.
 4

Khanoum to the mines of the Badakshan mountains. In the city treasury, within the vast

palace complex, there were found written documents to which I shall return below

accounting for the movement of goods and revenue through the treasury. Raw materials and

crafts were also found in the treasury, including a large amount of unworked lapis lazuli. Ai

Khanoum was perfectly situated to control all these resources and routes, and was fortified

and invested in accordingly. As I shall go on to discuss, the Achaemenids had long had an

interest in the area. Given Ai Khanoums strategic position and the natural advantages

which allowed it to be fortified so efficiently it would be surprising if there had not been

not just Achaemenid period occupation of the site, but Achaemenid official interest in it.

Achaemenid Survivals in Hellenistic Bactria

Most of the evidence which I shall put forward for an Achaemenid foundation of some sort at

Ai Khanoum has, as I have already noted, long been in the public domain. My purpose is not

to propose anything radically new, but to draw attention to material and arguments which

merit greater attention. There are good reasons for doing so at the present time. Over the

past twenty years or so, building on the work of Pierre Briant, among others, it has become

widely accepted that the Hellenistic world politically, culturally, religiously,

administratively was built on Achaemenid foundations. 7 In more recent years, new

evidence has made it increasingly clear that what is true for most of the rest of the Hellenistic

world is also true for Bactria. The evidence which has permitted this deduction relates for the

most part to the administration of Achaemenid and Hellenistic Bactria, and it comes from

documentary texts written on perishable materials, a genre of evidence almost entirely

lacking for Bactria until the early 1990s.

7
See, for example, the studies in Briant/Joanns 2006.
 5

From the treasury at Ai Khanoum, there are the ink texts written in Greek on ceramic vessels

which I have already briefly mentioned.8 These document transactions of goods and coinage

and name the officials involved, who have a combination of Greek and Iranian names.9 The

texts are fairly brief: these are not documents of the length and complexity of those we have

preserved on papyrus from contemporary Egypt. In the 1990s and 2000s, a small number of

Greek texts written on preserved skin, acquired on the antiquities market, have offered a little

more insight into the administration and regulation of legal affairs of Hellenistic Bactria.10

But the most remarkable discoveries of recent years have been the corpus of Aramaic

documents, written for the most part on skin, with a few on wooden sticks, now in the Khalili

Collection.11 As well as providing invaluable information on the administration of the

Persian satrapy of Bactra (the documents derive probably from the satrapal archive in Bactra,

and contain rough copies of correspondence sent to a regional governor) they also document

a period of transition from Persian to Greek rule. One document, identical in all ways to its

companions, is dated to a regnal year of Alexander the Great:

Column l, 1: On the 15th of Sivan, year 7 of Alexander

2: the King. Disbursement of barley <from> Vakhshudata, the barley-supplier

3: in Ariavant.

(Naveh/Shaked 2012 C4 [Khalili IA 17], 8 June 324 BC.)

In Bactra, it was very much business as usual - and this is precisely what one ought to expect

of the transition from the last of the Achaemenids to the first Hellenistic monarchs. It was in

8
Their principal publication is in Rapin 1992. They are reproduced with further commentary in Canali De
Rossi 2004 and Rougemont 2012.
9
Grenet 1983.
10
Rea et al. 1994; Bernard/Rapin 1994; Clarysse/Thompson 2007. As with the economic texts, these are also
reproduced in the compendia of Canali de Rossi and Rougemont.
11
A preliminary study was published as Shaked 2004, followed by the full publication Naveh/Shaked 2012.
 6

the newcomers interest to minimise disruption and revolt, and maximise revenue, by

retaining the existing administration and those who ran it.12 The question of how long this

period of transition continued before any administrative reform or major change in personnel

cannot, unfortunately, be addressed in the current state of the evidence. To answer this, and

other questions, material from the capital city of Bactra itself would be invaluable, but such

evidence is not yet available.

It is in the context of these recent discoveries and insights that I would like to consider afresh

the evidence for Achaemenid interest in the site of the later Hellenistic city of Ai Khanoum.

Ai Khanoum is a problematic site in the sense that it cannot be considered as a typical city of

Hellenistic Bactria. It is unusual in being a new foundation or city which received substantial

modifications in the Hellenistic period, sufficient to utterly erase any settlement which may

or may not previously have been there. In the aftermath of the troubles of the 140s BC, the

site was destroyed and abandoned, and received only small-scale and temporary

reoccupation. The history of the city of Ai Khanoum therefore essentially only occupies in

the region of 160 years. Although I shall argue for an Achaemenid presence at the site, I

mean this only in the sense of a fortification or much less substantial settlement than the later

Hellenistic period city.

Achaemenid Ai Khanoum

Most of the excavators of Ai Khanoum, and those who took part in the regional field survey

of eastern Bactria, appear to have been of the view that there was an Achaemenid period

occupation of the site of Ai Khanoum, much smaller in size than the Hellenistic city, which

was essentially destroyed and replaced by the Hellenistic period building programmes and

12
Argued in Mairs forthcoming-a, Chapter 2. On administrative continuity from the Achaemenid to the
Hellenistic period, see also Rapin 1992, 268-269.
 7

renovations, especially in the lower city.13 I have, of course, been reliant on the views of the

excavators as expressed in print, in the preliminary reports on the excavations at Ai

Khanoum, and in the final published volumes of the city excavations and the regional field

survey: this does not necessarily mean that there are not other structures which might be

interpreted as Achaemenid in date, or as the remnants of Achaemenid structures. The fullest

such discussion is that of Pierre Leriche in the fifth volume of the series Fouilles d'A

Khanoum, in whose view the existence of some Achaemenid foundation on the site nest pas

douteuse, even if its nature and scale remain unknown.14 He identifies the remains of an

Achaemenid or very early Greek - occupation in several locations, including the citadel, the

northern ramparts, the wall along the bank of the river Oxus. He cautions, however, that the

degree of continuity in the ceramic record from the end of Achaemenid rule to the beginning

of the Hellenistic period makes it difficult, in places, to definitively assign material and

structures to one period or the other.

I shall start at the large scale, looking at the position of the later site of Ai Khanoum within

Achaemenid period eastern Bactria, proceed to examine the evidence of materials from the

site which may belong to Achaemenid precursors or continuing Achaemenid craft traditions,

and conclude by sketching how I think the old evidence from the site of Ai Khanoum can be

integrated into new arguments about the culture and administration of Achaemenid period

Bactria, and the subsequent Graeco-Bactrian state.

The eastern Bactria field survey (1974-1978) revealed irrigation works and even an outpost

of the Indus civilisation, at Shortughai, dating as far back as the late third millennium BC.15

Whatever may have been happening at the site, the plain around Ai Khanoum was certainly

occupied in the Achaemenid period, irrigated and exploited for its agricultural potential, and

13
Lerner 2003-2004 takes existence of earlier settlement on the site as patent.
14
Leriche 1986, 24; 71-72.
15
Gentelle 1989; Lyonnet 1997; Gardin 1998. On the Harappan settlement at Shortughai, see Francfort 1989.
 8

for its strategic position in eastern Bactria, on the river Oxus.16 There are even architectural

remains upstream, at a different site, the so-called Ville Ronde, a site with two concentric

fortification walls. This was the most convenient crossing point on the river Oxus in the

neighbourhood: there were the steep hillsides immediately across the river from Ai

Khanoum. There were therefore apparently two separate Achaemenid period fortifications, at

Ai Khanoum and at the Ville Ronde, perhaps occupied at different periods, and further work

at both sites if this is possible would be needed to clarify the relationship between them.

At the city itself, we find two categories of evidence which might support the notion of an

Achaemenid precursor: material which pre-dates the construction of the Hellenistic city; and

elements of the architecture and material culture of Hellenistic Ai Khanoum which suggest

local Achaemenid predecessors, sometimes even with connections to models and institutions

from the wider Achaemenid world.

The excavators tentatively identified some stone architectural elements from the lower city,

notably the palace complex, as re-used pieces from Achaemenid period buildings. It should

be noted that good building stone is not readily available in the vicinity of Ai Khanoum,

making it advantageous for builders to reuse old materials, where possible. For the most part,

such identifications have been made on stylistic grounds. Paul Bernard, for example,

suggests that some column bases which are visibly of different workmanship than others

might be compared to Achaemenid types, and are either re-used pieces of this sort, or

represent the brief continuation of a local tradition of craftmanship: We therefore consider it

very probable that these bases attest the existence of Achaemenid-period monuments which

have not yet been located, which were dismantled by the Greeks.17

Certainly, whether or not Achaemenid buildings materials found their way into Greek

buildings, builders and artisans trained in longstanding local ways continued to work and

16
See Bernard 197, Bernard 1975, 196, on the Ville Ronde and Achaemenid settlement of plain.
17
Bernard 1973, 19-21; 120; Pl. 24.
 9

played a part in creating the form of the Hellenistic city of Ai Khanoum.18 There is no major,

catastrophic break in craft production and material culture in eastern Bactria associated with

the Greek takeover in the late fourth century. At Ai Khanoum as in the plain as a whole,

local ceramic traditions continued, alongside the introduction of new forms derived from the

Greek Mediterranean world.19 Along with other cultures and political masters, the Persians

left their stylistic mark, however restricted, on the diverse repertoire of Hellenistic Bactrian

material culture.20

It is in the city walls, however, where the clearest evidence of Achaemenid precursors and

models may be seen, perhaps supporting the notion that the Achaemenid occupation at Ai

Khanoum amounted essentially to a military installation. As I have already noted, in

Leriches publication on the fortifications, he makes it clear that, in his view, the existence of

an Achaemenid fortification at the citadel is not to be doubted, whether or not one in addition

takes the Achaemenid-type column bases identified by Bernard in the palace as further

indicative of an Achaemenid structure there. 21

It appears that the first Greek occupants of the site took over an existing series of smaller-

scale Achaemenid fortifications, including the northern rampart of the lower city, the

building materials of which they reused in their own later, more substantial fortification

walls.22 The dimensions of the bricks used in each phase were different, large bricks of sides

of over 50 cm being associated with Achaemenid constructions, and at the citadel ceramics

were also found associated with proposed Achaemenid period walls which can be dated, from

18
See Guillaume 1985 on local pre-Hellenistic traditions of craftsmanship, from the materials at Ai Khanoum.
19
Gardin in Bernard 1973, 182-185, and Lyonnet 1998, 142, note the persistence of local Achaemenid period
ceramics at Ai Khanoum into the first phase of the Greek city.
20
See, for example, the comparanda treated in Francfort 1984 (worked ivory and ivory figurines, 12-13, 16;
alabastrons, 21; rhytons, 26; images of walking lions in profile on a wooden frieze, 33; thymiateria 33) and the
discussion in Francfort 2013.
21
Leriche 1986, 24.
22
Leriche 1986, 53; 71-72.
 10

the comparative material of the field survey, to the relevant period.23 Both such

Achaemenid bricks and Achaemenid ceramics are, of course, only inexact dating guides,

since there was no major interruption in craft production and techniques associated with the

Greek takeover, and both continued to be produced.

In analysis of the architecture of Ai Khanoum, much has tended to be made of the fact that

the city includes institutions whose form and function belong very much in a Greek cultural

milieu especially the theatre and gymnasium, the latter of which contains a Greek

inscription24 and those which are, for want of a better word, strikingly non-Greek. I

would argue that one of the most constructive approaches to the citys architecture is to try to

think in terms of the precise mechanisms by which buildings of these designs came to be

constructed at this city in eastern Bactria in the third century BC, rather than in more

abstractly art historical terms. I take my examples from two types of buildings at Ai

Khanoum which are often discussed in relation to Near Eastern comparanda, the palace and

the temples.

The palace which is sometimes known as the administrative quarter dominates the lower

city at Ai Khanoum. It includes several vast courtyards, suites of offices and meeting rooms,

two residential units and a treasury where raw goods and revenue were counted, consolidated

and packaged for shipment. Although the treasury yielded a few Greek economic texts as

well as two dramatical and philosophical texts,25 indicating that it may once have contained a

library, we know little about the precise nature of the administration at Ai Khanoum. Was it

the seat of a regional governor, perhaps, or was it ever the residence of a king? Its layout has

provoked a certain amount of comment, and been compared, generally in rather vague terms,

23 Leriche 1986, 71.
24
Veuve 1987.
25
Rougemont 2012, Nos.131-132; Lerner 2003.
 11

to that of Near Eastern and Achaemenid royal and provincial palaces.26 If we actually

compare it to the layout of Achaemenid palaces at sites such as Susa or Persepolis, we find

that such comparisons are indeed true only in general terms. The Ai Khanoum palace shares

certain features, such as large courtyards, an avoidance of linearity, and the incorporation of

various official and residential functions.27 The Ai Khanoum palace also, however, has some

features peculiar to itself, and some which speak of connections with the Greek world. Its

great court is lined with Corinthian columns, the language of administration is Greek, and by

its entrance, we find the cult shrine of a man named Kineas, the citys probable founder, with

a Greek dedicatory inscription stating a connection to Delphi.28 But in terms of its

functionality, the Ai Khanoum palace is designed to do what an Achaemenid provincial

palace was designed to do, and it is not, I think, unreasonable to propose that this Greek

period construction the palace in its final form dates to the early second century BC

replicated or was inspired by a local Achaemenid period example, whose administration the

new Greek rulers of Bactria needed and wanted to perpetuate.29 I am not necessarily arguing

that the Hellenistic palace of Ai Khanoum was built directly over and reproduces an

Achaemenid palace on site. I would like to phrase my argument in more general terms: that

the set-up at Ai Khanoum under Greek rule was designed to carry on what an Achaemenid

administration had already been doing in the area.

The other buildings at Ai Khanoum which have been compared to examples from the Near

East are the temples. Unfortunately, both the main city temple, which is known as the

temple with indented niches,30 and another temple just to the north of the city walls had

been completely destroyed and cleared of their contents, so we know nothing of the gods

26
See Kopsacheili 2011 for a useful comparative discussion of Hellenistic palaces and their Achaemenid and
Macedonian antecedents. On the palace institution in the Near East in the first millennium BC in general,
Nielsen 2001.
27
These features will be discussed at greater length in Mairs forthcoming-a, Chapter 3.
28
Robert 1968. The architecture of the sanctuary is principally published in Bernard 1973.
29
A possibility raised by Rapin 1992, 277.
30
Francfort 1984; Martinez-Sve 2010; Mairs 2013b.
 12

which were worshipped there, the names by which they were called, and relatively little

about cult activity. Like the palace, the initial reaction of Classical archaeologists to such

structures is that they do not look very Greek. They stand on stepped platforms, have niched

decoration along the outside of their walls, and tripartite shrines preceded by vestibules. The

niches and the steps are forms which we also encounter in the Near East and the Ai

Khanoum temples have been compared extensively to Mesopotamian temples of this sort.31

How did Ai Khanoum come to have temples in supposedly Mesopotamian form? The

obvious answer is that they represent the diffusion of a koine of religious architecture at a

time when Bactria was part of a Near Eastern Empire, that of the Achaemenids.32

There are of course problems with trying to explain the architectural landscape of Ai

Khanoum by recourse to putative Achaemenid Bactrian forebears, and that is that we do not

have the material remains of Achaemenid era temples at other Bactrian sites, and most

importantly the capital city at Bactra. So the Achaemenid hypothesis remains, at present, a

hypothesis. Nor do we have any evidence from the site of Ai Khanoum itself of what, if any,

Achaemenid period structures were present in the lower city. Any such remains, as I have

indicated, were either destroyed completely by the Greeks in the course of their grand

programme of constructions, or dismantled and had some of their stone elements reused.

There is, however, one fragment of material from Ai Khanoum which suggests the presence

of an Achaemenid administration on the site, or its continuity. With a single exception, all of

the small amount of written material recovered from the excavations at Ai Khanoum

inscriptions, economic texts from the treasury, fragments of literary texts is in Greek. The

sole exception is an ostrakon written in Aramaic script, bearing a text which contains a list of

names and quantities of grain.33 Obviously this is slim enough basis to argue anything at all,

especially since the ostrakon cannot be securely identified as an Achaemenid document or a

31
For example, by Downey 1988.
32
This point is argued by Mairs 2013b.
33
Rapin 1992, 105; Harmatta 1994, 390.
 13

Hellenistic one. But the very presence of Aramaic at Ai Khanoum, even in a single text, of

undetermined date, hints at the existence and reach of an Aramaic administration in

Achaemenid Bactria, and perhaps even its survival into the Hellenistic period, as we now

know from the Aramaic documents from Bactra.

In conclusion, there are several places where we can identify evidence for the existence of an

Achaemenid period installation on the site of the later Hellenistic city of Ai Khanoum. The

areas where I have suggested that one might profitably go looking for an Achaemenid Ai

Khanoum include: re-use of building materials, maintenance of craft traditions, retention of

architectural models and continuity in population, elements of administration and cultural

traditions (including writing). In places, there survive materials which indicate earlier phases

of occupation and construction on the site. The long history of occupation and exploitation

of eastern Bactria suggests that a site with the natural advantages of the river junction

position and high acropolis of Ai Khanoum would not have been neglected. And there are

also architectural elements of the Hellenistic city which might be viewed as survivors or

heirs of an earlier settlement. As I have already indicated, the balance of opinion among

the excavators appears to have been in favour of a relatively small-scale Achaemenid military

installation on the acropolis, with a settlement of some, unknown nature and magnitude in the

lower city. If this settlement was indeed small, it may well be the case that the buildings in

the Hellenistic city the palace and temples which seem to owe something to local

Achaemenid Bactrian predecessors were not built directly on the site of pre-existing

examples at Ai Khanoum itself, but were inspired by public buildings elsewhere, in other

towns and cities of the satrapy.

If we are to present compelling arguments for an Achaemenid era installation at Ai

Khanoum, it is important to stick to the limited evidence, and not stray too far into

supposition. What I have attempted here is an exercise is seeing how we might go about
 14

looking at this problem, and what evidence might be brought in in favour of an Achaemenid

predecessor to the Hellenistic city. There is a good case for laying out the evidence at the

present time, in the anticipation of more coming to light about Achaemenid Bactria, and in

particular in anticipation of new information, from the Aramaic documents and other sources,

on the transition from Persian to Greek rule in Bactria and elsewhere in the empire.

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