New Books in South Asian Studies · New Books Network

Warwick Ball, "Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan: From the Earliest Times to the Mongol Conquest" (Reaktion, 2025)

·46 min·4 clips

The resemblance between Romano-Buddhist art from Afghanistan and classical Roman sculpture is so close that only an expert can tell the difference.

Afghanistan is treated historically, not just as a place on a map. The exchange tracks how outside powers and nearby civilizations left uneven, sometimes odd traces in local languages, scripts, religions, and political life. The Greek case gets careful limits. The speaker separates the survival of the Greek alphabet from the absence of Greek as a lasting influence on later Afghan languages, while also noting Greek-language Ashokan inscriptions at Kandahar. That distinction gives the conversation its bite. It moves away from simple conquest stories and toward the tools that carried rule, language, and culture forward. Bactrian is the main example. In this account, the Greek alphabet remains important for writing Bactrian and some other local languages after the Greek or Bactrian kingdom. The Kushan empire is named as the empire that eventually succeeded that kingdom, though the host saves Kushan for later. The host then widens the frame. After Greek, Macedonian, and Persian movements from the west, he asks about influence from elsewhere in Asia, especially India and, to a lesser extent, China. India gets the fuller answer. The speaker describes Indian influence as very ancient and probably continuous, even noting Hindu minorities in Afghanistan today. The timeline reaches back to the Bronze Age, with the Indus Valley civilization and a French-excavated Indus Valley colony in northeastern Afghanistan. Buddhism adds another route. Ashoka's empire, in the third and second centuries BC, matters here because Ashoka embraced Buddhism and sent missions beyond India. Kandahar anchors the evidence, with proclamations in eastern Afghanistan, including inscriptions in Indian languages and Greek. The result stays messy in the useful way. Afghanistan comes through scripts, missions, colonies, minorities, empires, and afterlives, without forcing one clean label over all of it.

As heard by us

Afghanistan's ancient history seen through scripts, inscriptions, and overlapping imperial influence.

Warwick Ball's discussion offers a layered view of Afghanistan by tracing what remained after political power changed hands. It moves from the Greek alphabet in local languages to the Bactrian kingdom, the Kushan empire, and the overlapping Persian, Indian, and Macedonian…

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For when you want Afghanistan traced through a Greek alphabet, Ashoka, and Buddhist missions.

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