afghanistanof deliberate iconoclasm, the taller of the Buddhas is now in the process
of being restored. Recently the Bamiyan valley was inscribed as a unesco
World Heritage Site.
Afghanistan had been called the Highway of Conquest, for many
invaders from India, Persia, Arabia, the Asian steppes, Mongolia and
even China have ruled at various eras of the region’s history and have
contributed to the cultural and ethnic diversity of the country. However,
Afghanistan could equally be called the Highway of Commerce, for the
region has been defined as much by its position on ancient trans-Asian
trade routes as it has been by war or conquest. Most of the major cities
and towns of Afghanistan owe their importance to their position on what
is misleadingly called The Silk Road.6 This term is misleading because
there was never a single highway linking east and west, or north with
south, while the transfer of goods across thousands of kilometres was the
outcome of dozens of localized transactions – very much in the same way
as goods are still bought and sold in weekly markets in most provincial
towns of Afghanistan.
This transcontinental trade dates back to at least the third millennium
bce when there was already commercial and cultural contact between the
emerging Bronze Age city-states of the Amu Darya basin, the Sistan, the
Indus Valley, China, the Eurasian steppes and Mesopotamia. Items of early
trans-Asian trade included gold, silver, copper, lapis lazuli, Indian ivory
and probably slaves, horses and mercenaries, for the Bactrians in particular
had a formidable reputation as warriors. Silk as a significant element of
this transcontinental trade came much later. Equally important was the
technological, ideological and cultural interchange that was a side effect of
commercial activity. A Mesopotamian-style bull relief appears on a Bronze
Age gold bowl from Tepe Fullol in Afghanistan, while the solid-wheeled
chariots depicted on the famous royal banner from the Mesopotamian city
of Ur are inner Asian in style. The Achaemenids (see Table 1) introduced
irrigation techniques modelled on those of the Tigris-Euphrates, while
the Akkadian goddess Nana was incorporated in the pantheon of Graeco-
Bactrian and Kushan kingdoms. When Alexander the Great conquered the
region in 330 bce his followers introduced Hellenistic deities and the Greek
script. Under the Seleucid and Graeco-Bactrian kingdom that succeeded
Alexander’s brief reign, Hellenistic, Iranian and north Indian artistic styles
synthesized to produce the Gandharan culture, a style that had a profound
influence on the iconography of early Buddhism. One of the most spec-
tacular archaeological discoveries of recent times was the Hellenistic city
of Ai Khanum at the confluence of the Kokcha and Amu Darya.