Word: bactria
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...Xian, a general during the short-lived Northern Zhou dynasty (559-581) in Ningxia. The ewer's shape is typical of the Sasanians who ruled the area that is now Iran, and whose designs the Chinese appropriated for everything from tableware to clothing. But it probably comes from Bactria, in modern-day Afghanistan. And the figures on its surface seem to be characters in the Trojan War. Whoever cast the ewer seems to have been more concerned with style than mythological substance. But General Li probably didn't care. The foreignness of the design alone gave the jug its allure...
...history of man can be read as a litany of metropolises risen and fallen. The first major clusters of wealth, such as Babylon, Bactria, Nineveh, Persepolis, Samarkand and Thebes, were mostly located around the Nile, Euphrates and Tigris rivers and along the Silk Road. With the rise of the seafaring Phoenician trading empire, prosperity and power shifted toward the Mediterranean Sea. At different times, this led to the emergence of Alexandria, Athens, Carthage, Constantinople, Rome and Tyre. And in the 15th century, it culminated in the first centers of capitalism: the Italian trading cities of Florence, Genoa, Pisa and Venice...
Astride the silk and spice routes, the region, known as Bactria in ancient times, came under the influence of numerous cultures: Indian, Mongolian, Parthian (a Persian people), nomadic (from the Eurasian steppes) and even Roman. All collided with the Hellenistic Greek domination of Alexander the Great, who conquered Bactria in 331 B.C., and his Seleucid successors. Two centuries later, the Greco-Bactrian kingdom was overrun by nomadic groups, among them the Parthians, Saka from the steppes and five Central Asiatic tribes called the Yiieh-Chih...
...this point that Bactria's history becomes a mystery. Not until one Yüeh-Chih ruler united the five tribes circa A.D. 50 to form the Kushan dynasty does the record resume...
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