The Discoveries of a Civilized Bactria by the Roman and Han Empires: A Comparative Perspective

Flanked by the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountains, Bactria, an ancient Central Asian regime, covered the flat region that straddled present-day Afghanistan. Known for its fertile land and oases, rich water resources, military prowess, and shrewd merchants, Bactria enacted a crucial role in Central Asian history. Recently, many historians (such as Christopher I. Beckwith and Richard Lim) have often noted the interactions between the East and the West via Central Asia from the second to the fifth centuries CE. Nevertheless, what enabled such interactions to transpire is largely overlooked yet historically significant. From the third century BCE to the first century CE, the Roman and Han empires discovered and saw a civilized Bactria as a linchpin between their territory and the rest of the world. The discoveries of a sedentary landscape, coupled with the demand of imperialism, encouraged the Romans and Chinese to produce relevant geographical and ethnographical narratives about Bactria.

Rather than tracing the history of Central Asia as the middle point of the Sino-Roman interactions, my research paper aims to probe and articulate the groundwork that prepared the East and West to feel necessary and comfortable to engage with each other. My research paper uses Bactria as a case study to reexamine the interrelation between the geographical visionary and imperialistic agenda of the Roman and Han empires. This paper thus solidly places Bactria into a much broader historiographical discourse of the ancient world.

The argument of my research paper is twofold. For one, the Roman and Han empires perceived Bactria differently because of their differences in intellectual traditions. Roman elites inherited the preexisting Hellenistic tradition to document the advanced irrigation system, land fertility, and sedentary civilization in Bactria. However, Han imperial envoys used population as the parameter to evaluate the sophistication level of a civilized Bactria, which derived from the Legalism’s populace household system (in Classical Chinese, bianhu qimin 編戶齊民) of seeing population as the foundation of military expansion and economic growth. Secondly, the discoveries of a civilized Bactria modified how the Roman and Han empires envisioned the outside world and, in turn, fueled their imperialistic agendas. The discovery infused the Romans with modified knowledge of the eastern steppe world. They perceived Bactria to be a gateway pushing the boundary of the Greco-Roman civilization forward by conquering more land of the easternmost countries, including Serica (in Greek, Σηρικά). By contrast, the Han empire’s consistent engagements with the eastern steppe world (such as the Xiongnu) informed the Han imperial court about the existence of Bactria as a sedentary society, which fundamentally reshaped Chinese self-perception over the centuries. In what followed, the discovery informed Emperor Wu of the Han empire (156 BCE – 87 BCE) about Bactria’s contacts with the Indian subcontinent, which fueled the emperor’s aggressive imperialistic moves to annex the Dian, a landlocked kingdom situated in present-day southwest China.