The Social Network: The Local Experience of Empire(s) Across Ancient Afghanistan

This article offers a comparative analysis of two corpora, the Bactrian Documents from Northern Afghanistan and the Aramaic Documents from Ancient Bactria, to show how empires that attempted to rule over the territory of present-day Afghanistan (and beyond through Northeastern Central Asia), relied upon particular strategies of control and exploitation of people and natural resources. In particular, it highlights the crucial role of inter-aristocratic ties within the imperial administrative apparatus, which in turn offered local elites a valuable resource to exploit within the arena of local politics, sometimes even to the detriment of the empire itself. Against this backdrop, a dialectical relationship emerges between central and regional authorities. Understanding the social mechanisms of such a dialectic is crucial to make better sense of the reasons for the expansion, consolidation, and fall of empires, ancient and modern, in this region of Eurasia. Building on recent scholarship on both the Late Antique and the wider Early Medieval Iranicate world, this article seeks to show how a diachronically broad-ranging and boldly comparative methodology can substantially enrich our understanding of Eastern Iran and Central Asia under the Achaemenids, despite the challenging evidentiary record at hand.