Hellenistic Impact on the Iranian and Central Asian Cultures: The Historical Contribution and the Archaeological Evidence

Hellenism formally indicates the historical-cultural period within the ancient Mediterranean and Near East worlds, following the death of Alexander the Great. Among the distinguishing cultural features of the period, a more modern spread of the western civilization with the cultures of North Africa, Asia Minor, Syria and Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, Iran, India and Central Asia, and vice versa, played the most important role in creating a new socialeconomic and political system. The consequent birth of a new kind of civilisation constituted a model for other cultures in relation to different aspects of the human society, economics, politics, science, art, philosophy, and religion. The Hellenistic world, from a geographic point of view, comprised a vast area, ranging from Sicily and southern Italy (Magna Graecia) to India and Central Asia, and from the Black Sea to Egypt. After the Macedonian conquest of the Persian Empire, new kingdoms arose in North-Eastern Africa, the ancient Near East, Central and Southern Asia. The central event of this new historical phase was certainly the crisis of the ancient western “urban” and “political” model of the poleis, which invested large sectors of the society, from the eminently economic-social to the civil and cultural. If one thinks of the importance the poleis had assumed within the Greek society and history before, it is easy to imagine what its profound crisis caused to the Hellenic culture. For a long time, Hellenism was considered a period of transition between the magnificence of classical Greece and the rise of Roman power. Politically, the most important consequence of this revolution was the change from a political domain of the city-state to that of the great political unities, already dominant in the “Orient”, strongly centred on the divinised figure of the sovereign. The transformation of the political-state formations was accompanied by an economic and social evolution. The intensification of trade between the various political entities and the eastern regions, the flourishing of artisanship and the demographic increase brought an economic wellbeing that encouraged the growth of new urban areas.