Bagram - History

History

It is unknown when the site was originally settled. In the mid 500s BC, Cyrus the Great of the Persian Achaemenid Dynasty destroyed the city as part of his campaign against the Saka nomads in the region. The town, however, was soon rebuilt by his successor Darius I.

In the 320s BC, Alexander the Great captured the city and established a fortified colony named Alexandria of the Caucasus. The new town, laid out in the "hippodamian plan" or iron-grid pattern--a hallmark of Greek city planning, had brick walls reinforced with towers at the angles. The central street was bordered with shops and workshops.

After his death in 323 BC, the city passed to his general Seleucus, who traded it with the Mauryans of India in 305 BC. After the Mauryans were overthrown by the Sunga Dynasty in 185 BC, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom invaded and conquered northwestern India (present-day Pakistan) with an army led by Demetrius I of Bactria. Alexandria became a capital of the Eucratidian Indo-Greek Kingdom after they were driven out of Bactria by the Yuezhi in 140 BC.

Bagram became the capital of the Kushan Empire in the 1st century, from here they invaded and conquered Peshawar in the south. The "Bagram treasure" as it has been called, is indicative of intense commercial exchanges between all the cultural centers of the classical time, with the Kushan empire at the junction of the land and sea trade between the east and west. However, the works of art found in Bagram are either quite purely Hellenistic, Roman, Chinese or Indian, with only little indications of the cultural syncretism found in Greco-Buddhist art.

• An Indian ivory from Bagram, 2nd century.

• Statue of Harpocrates, Bagram, 2nd century.

• Statuette of Serapis from Bagram.

• Statuette of the young Alexander the Great.

• A Greco-Roman gladiator on a glass vessel, Bagram, 2nd century.

• Bagram vase depicting the rape of Ganymede by Zeus.

• Bagram vase fragments depicting a fighting scene.

• Plaster mold from Bagram.

• Plaster mold from Bagram depicting a cupid.

• Plaster mold from Bagram.

• Plaster mold from Bagram.

• Plaster mold from Bagram depicting a Greek soldier.