From Bactria to Taxila

NOTE: Articles, sources and reviews added now every three days since March 2013.

The web is a fantastic tool, whose applications and implications are progressing at an exponential rate. So are the studies on Hellenistic and Imperial Central Asia, that really have begun to develop in the 70s and are increasing since the last twenty years. Websites dealing with ancient Central Asia exist, as well as digitized version of books, articles and reviews on the subject. But, even at the dawn of the “semantic web”, they are dispatched and thinly spread, the consequences being a great difficulty for everyone to find them and, often, the frustration to find digitized sources in a later stage, way after it would be needed.

The work presented here is made of the will to resolve this problem. This blog will mostly function like a portal: internet ressources will be listed in a large bibliography, with incorporated links to their current location on the web. This site will not host books neither articles. In this way, if an author wants to remove its work from the net, he won’t have to pay attention of this website. It’s also a way to thank those authors for their work, by repercuting in the statistics of their homepage the amount of views that can bring our website.

The main focus of the works presented here is what lays between Eastern Iranian plateau to the West and the Ganges Valley to the East, the Russian steppes to the North and the Indian Ocean to the South. This area don’t show any geographical unity, but shall be taken as one entity to understand what happened during Hellenistic and Imperial times in Antiquity. The chronological timeframe will mostly be from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the Sassanian uprising in 224 AD.

Most of the work will come from databases like Persee, Encyclopaedia Iranica Online or homepage of specialists. Partially available work like in GoogleBooks are also now being added, with the  symbol next to.

Works are listed as follows:

– Books: Name, Abbreviated surname, title, location and date. [Language in flag].

– Articles: Name, Abbreviated surname, “title of the article”, name of the journal, number (and date) of the issue, pages of the article. [Language in flag].

– Part of collective work:  Name, Abbreviated surname, “title of the chapter”, in Name, Abbreviated surname, name of the collective work, location and date. [Language in flag].

– For work on electronic version only: same but the link is shown at the end of the sentence. [Language in flag].

– Maps: Intitled of the map, author

– Sources: Author if known, Name of the source, (book from which it is extract). [Language of the translations and commentaries in flag]. [Script or/and language of the source by a letter]

Internet usually gives free copyright translations, so they should be used carefully and only give you indications on the text’s meaning (you always should use the latest translations for academic works). For ancient languages, here are the symbols used:

: ancient Greek (script and language).

: Kharosthi (script. Usually Prakrit language).

: Brahmi (script. Usually Prakrit language, sometimes sanskrit).

: Sogdian (script and language).

: Runic (script. Unknown or untranslated languages from nomadic people).

: Latin (script and language)

: Chinese (script and language)

Do no forget to read the “How to use the database” thread in order to correctly begin your researches on the website!

Interview on AHE: here.

Many thanks to Aditya Banerjee for helping sharing interesting and useful books!