Читать книгу A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set - Группа авторов - Страница 167

The texts relating to the Central Asian provinces are rather scarce and fragmentary. The most ancient references in the Iranian context are given by the Avesta, according to which eastern Bactria was the cradle of the Zoroastrianism (infra). For the Achaemenid period, most of the sources belong mainly to the corpus of propagandistic and administrative documents from the heart of the empire. The local perspective is represented only by a group of recently discovered administrative Bactrian parchments of the fourth century BCE (Naveh and Shaked 2012). Among the Greek sources, the reports relating to pre‐Achaemenid Bactria by Ctesias and Xenophon are controversial, while Herodotus knew little more than the earlier geographer Hecataeus. Similarly, the historicity of the presence in Bactria and Sogdiana of Mediterranean communities like the Barceans cited by Herodotus (4.204), or the Branchidae by Curtius Rufus (7.5.28–35), cannot be confirmed by any archeological site. Besides rare non‐dated “Persian” short inscriptions (Kandahar and Ai Khanum), most of the texts related to the Achaemenid presence belong to the later Aramaic tradition (inscriptions of Ashoka and later evidences from Bactria, Parthia, Margiana, and Chorasmia). The administration illustrated by the Graeco‐Bactrian inscriptions of Ai Khanum and Graeco‐Bactrian parchments recently discovered to the north of the Hindukush must be partly considered as the Hellenistic heir of the Achaemenid financial and fiscal system. The glyptics, however, is practically not represented (Francfort 2013).

From a literary point of view, the analysis of the Achaemenid past of the region relies mainly on the Graeco‐Roman sources relating to Alexander and his successors (Briant 2020; Rapin 2018).