From the archive, 22 February 1965: Site of Greek city found in Central Asia | From the Guardian | The Guardian

• Darsie Gillie

• Tuesday 22 February 2011

• Article history

PARIS, FEBRUARY 21

Two years ago King Mohamet Zahir of Afghanistan noticed some carved stones of a kind he had not hitherto seen in the extreme north-east of the country. He showed two examples to M. Daniel Schlumberger, the head of the French archaeological mission to Afghanistan. They had been found in an area close to the Soviet frontier closed to all visitors on the banks of the river Oxus. Encouraged by the King's evident interest in what he had found, M. Schlumberger applied for a permit to go to this site with a small group of scholars and they found themselves on what was evidently the site of a Greek city — a large settlement in Bactria. Such was the origin of the French discovery of the first Greek settlement in Central Asia.

The Greeks ruled the country for close on two hundred years, that is to say, for 100 years after the Greeks had lost the Persian territory which henceforth cut them off from direct communication with another Greek Power. But except for Greek coins there has been no trace of them. These indeed have been found in considerable numbers and one in the National Library, Paris, is the largest golden Greek coin ever discovered — so much so that it has been denounced as a forgery. A very fine smaller example of the same sun-helmeted type of warrior is in last year's finds of the French mission.

Apart from this, Greek influence has been evident from the inscriptions of Asoka about 250 B.C. near Kandahar, and later by the use of the Greek alphabet by the Kushans to write their own language. They reigned from the first to the third century A.D. in Northern India and Central Asia. The failure to find a Greek building has been something of a mystery, since the Greeks were evidently there in considerable numbers as soldiers and presumably traders. Now at last at Al-Khanoun, right on the Soviet frontier, the French mission has discovered buildings of the Greeks.

At present, the site is merely known in its broad outlines, a city of considerable size spread between the Oxus and its tributary the Kochka. On the one hand is the Acropolis with a series of ruined towers, and the stone wall between them washed away by the annual floods. Below, the city proper spreads on either side of a long street with repeated mounds, which evidently hide what is left of the more important buildings. The remnants of the aqueduct in the upper town have been found, though its course seems to have been interrupted by floods.

Enough could be done in ten days to make possible the work of a full expedition in September.