Providing a Comparative Geo-referenced Database for Religious Artefacts in Ai Khanoum and Taxila’s Sirkap Mound

Abstract

The cities of Taxila in Pakistan, and Ai Khanoum in Afghanistan, are emblematic of the post-Alexandrian and post-Mauryan political landscapes of the broader South and Central Asian regions. While both have been thoroughly excavated, there has been little comparison of their material culture. Through the construction of repositories with artefacts of religious nature for both cities and through illustrating maps for the two cities with the distribution of variables such as material or item categorization can serve as a springboard for studies of hybridity in the ancient world. In addition, I hope to build on larger depositories of said resources for other scholars to use in the future and to have a common resource of artefact databases to build upon. The databases can provide research with templates for the two cities and a corpus of their artefacts for future research.

Keywords

• religion
• hybridity
• urbanism
• greece
• india
• iran