In ancient Bactria, Ai Khanoum offers one of the clearest expressions of the encounter between the Greek world and Eastern traditions.
Explored between 1965 and 1978 by the French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan, this city—founded by Alexander the Great or one of his successors, on the presentday border between Afghanistan and Tajikistan—is among the best-known Hellenistic foundations in the eastern part of the Greek world. Owing to the scale of its monuments, it ranks among the most spectacular sites in the region.
Often described as a Greek city equipped with familiar features—a theater, a gymnasium, fountains—Ai Khanoum was above all a royal city, laid out by the Seleucid and later Greco-Bactrian kings, for whom it served as one of the capitals.
This volume is devoted to the study of its principal sanctuary, reconstructed through the archives of the excavations carried out between 1968 and 1973. Situated at the center of the city on an elevated terrace, the sanctuary housed a massive temple standing alone in the middle of a courtyard, a dominant feature of the urban landscape. Rebuilt several times, sometimes completely and sometimes in close succession, it is one of the few monuments to have existed throughout the entire history of the city.
The hypothesis advanced here is that this was a royal sanctuary, closely associated with the Seleucid and Greco-Bactrian rulers, who worshipped there protective deities of Bactrian, Achaemenid, and GrecoMacedonian origin.