The Greeks in Asia

308 Pages·2015·54.95 MB·English

by  John Boardman

Indian gold finial inscribed OEA or 'goddess'. See PL. XXXVI.

For JULIA
About the Author
John Boardman is Professor Emeritus of Classical Archaeology and Art at
Lincoln College, Oxford. His previous books for Thames & Hudson, published
over a period of fifty years, include: The Greeks Overseas; The World of Ancient
Art; The Archaeology of Nostalgia; and multiple volumes in the World of Art
series: Greek Sculpture; Athenian Red Figure Vases (volumes on the Archaic
Period and the Classical Period); Athenian Black Figure Vases; Early Greek
Vase Painting; Greek Art; and Greek Sculpture (with volumes on the Archaic
and Classical periods). He is also a joint author of The Oxford History of the
Classical World, The Oxford History of Greece and the Hellenistic World, and
The Oxford History of the Roman World.
Other titles of interest published by
Thames & Hudson include:
The Greeks Overseas
Their Early Colonies and Trade
Persia and the West
An Archaeological Investigation of the Genesis of Achaemenid Art
The Making of the Middle Sea
A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World
The Great Empires of the Ancient World
Art & Archaeology of the Greek World
A New History, c. 2500 – c. 150 BCE
www.thamesandhudson.com
www.thamesandhudsonusa.com
Contents
Preface
1 Greece and the east: beginnings
Eastern origins
Greeks going east
2 Greeks and Achaemenid Persia
The confrontation
Greeks in the Persian Empire
The view from home
The view from Homeric heritage
3 Greeks and Alexander ‘the Great’
The invasion of the Persian Empire
Into Asia
The Hellenistic heritage: 3rd to 1st centuries BC
4 The new Greek kingdoms in the east
The kingdoms
Their cities and arts
Their coinage
5 Greeks and their arts in Central Asia
Greeks and nomads: Scythians, Sarmatians
The Yuehzhi and Tillya Tepe
The farther east
6 Greeks and their arts in India
The Mauryans and Buddhism
The Sunga dynasty
Taxila and Gandhara
Greek and/or Roman – a memo
The ‘Gandhara style’ in sculpture
7 Greeks, Romans, Parthians and Sasanians: before Islam
Epilogue: myth, history and archaeology
Abbreviations
Notes
Sources of illustrations
Acknowledgments
General index
Index of places
Preface
In 1948 I met an elderly Greek man on the island of Naxos who said he had been
with General Kitchener at Khartoum. As a boy he was helping his father sell
lemonade to the British troops, undercutting the prices of the local Arab
shopkeepers. The episode seemed typical of that Greek private enterprise and
success far from home which was as apparent in antiquity as it is today,
commercial rather than militant or imperial – consider Greek millionaire
shipowners. It may be that this quality was one imposed by the relative poverty
of the homeland. When the first Greek-speakers approached the Mediterranean
from the north they found themselves ushered into a peninsula whose southern
extremity was far less well provided with arable or pastoral plains than most of
the other countries bordering the Mediterranean; not at all like Italy or Spain. It
inevitably led to a complex of independent and often competitive states rather
than a united country, and this was apparent already under the Mycenaean
Greeks in the Bronze Age, with their separate kingdoms and fortress capitals.
Many Greeks took to the seas and looked to improve their fortunes elsewhere.
The ancient world was a relatively small place: Indian cinnamon could be found
in the Heraion of Samos in the 7th century BC, but had travelled hand-to-hand;1
amber arrived from the Baltic. But the Greeks would soon learn the merits of
distant travel for themselves.
They had come from the north and east originally.2 Their presence in Greece,
as what we call Mycenaeans, already provided opportunities to demonstrate their
readiness to look both east and west, to Anatolia, to Cyprus, to Italy. Barely
three centuries after the fall of the Mycenaean world in around 1200 BC their
attention again inexorably turned away from the homeland. To the west they
were partly looking for new homes, but were mainly acquisitive of the products
and wealth of peoples of, by comparison, relatively modest cultural
accomplishment and no threat.
The results were to mutual benefit: the Greeks grew richer and found some
new homes; the westerners were introduced to a wider world for their produce,
to a monetary economy, to literacy, and to an art that could express narrative
explicitly, after some centuries of relative stagnation. They were not physically
threatened. This is not quite ‘colonization’ in the modern sense of the word, but
there are points of comparison and any sensible scholar or student is not misled
by use of the word.
In the eastern Mediterranean the Greeks reintroduced themselves to the heirs