Marco Ferrario (Changchun), Royal Memoryscapes in Hellenistic Baktria and India

Since its discovery in the 1960s, the royal city of Āï Xānum in Eastern Afghanistan has been the focus on much scholarly research devoted to matters of cultural interaction (or the lack of it) between the Makedonian rulers and the local subjects. In exploring the settlement’s spatial politics, however, considerably less attention has been paid to the ways in which Baktrian kings shaped the town as a tool for the display of their royal persona. By focusing on the case study of Eukratides’ reign – to which we owe the best-known stage of the city’s monumental history – this paper explores the way in which Āï Xānum was transformed into the staging ground for the military exploit of a (divine?) monarch. Public and religious spaces, it is argued, were blended together through a calculated blurring strategy, and the city turned into a triumphal stage for the king to display his exceptional power and achievement, for subjects and peers to awe at.

Marco Ferrario (Ph.D. 2023) is currently visiting professor at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations in Changchun, PRC. His research focuses on the socioeconomic, political and cultural history of pre-Islamic Central Asia, from the Achaemenids to the Hellenistic period and on the anthropology of kingship. On these subjects he has published a book (District Twelve: Northeastern Central Asia From Cyrus to Antiochos: Local Histories of a World Empire, Brill 2025), chapters in edited volumes, and papers in several international journals.