Abstract/Summary

In recent years, there have been several major new publications of documentary texts from Bactria, in present-day northern Afghanistan, in the Aramaic, Greek and Bactrian languages. Although few in number, these span a period from the fifth century BC through to around the ninth century AD. They allow us to begin, tentatively, to trace the administrative history of Bactria through successive regime changes, as it moved from being a province of the Achaemenid empire, to an independent Graeco-Bactrian state, to the heartland of the Kushan empire. The Aramaic and the Greek documents offer remarkable parallels with contemporary material from Egypt, and indicate that administrative (and scribal) practices at opposite ends of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic empire(s) had much in common.