Abstracts

Bronze enjoyed a special status in Hellenistic Asia both because of its ability to take on a bright finish and for its associations with prestigious cultic and royal contexts. Although the medium was certainly not unknown in the lands of the former Achaemenid Empire and the earlier cultures of ancient Western Asia, the new Graeco-Macedonian modes of representation and royal cultures transformed the role of bronze sculpture in these regions.

This paper examines the dynamic intersection between medium, style, and political and religious power in the dissolution of the Seleucid Empire and rise of the new Iranian political and visual cultures of power under such dynasties as the Arsakids, Orontids, and Mithradatids.

According to historical tradition, Bactria was called “the land of a thousand cities,” one of which was Termez, Uzbekistan, where a large-scale study of the archaeological monuments of the Hellenistic period is now under way. The materials from the excavations, which allow us to reconstruct the extent and boundaries of the Hellenistic transfers in the region, are stored in the Termez Archaeological Museum.

Analysis of materials from monuments in the region allows us to associate them directly with events that followed the campaign of Alexander the Great and colonization activities of the Greek settlers, who brought to the territory of Central Asia completely new elements of Greek culture. However, the Greeks borrowed a lot of local technologies and practices to adapt to the particularities of nature, climate, and population, which resulted in a transformation. For example in sculpture, technological development was associated with a limited number of materials using local stone types, although preference was given to clay.

The development of technology for clay sculptures on the basis of ancient, preexisting traditions received a powerful boost from the emergence of a new genre of art—painted clay sculptures—the style and iconography of which remained Greek. Thus, the composition of the products of Bactria in the third to first century BC in general corresponds to that in the Greek cities; the emergence of a variety of styles testifies to the intense processing of the imported traditions.