Uno, nessuno, centomila. L’Asia centrale achemenide e le sue fonti: alcune note di merito e di metodo. Parte 1

The primary goal of the present contribution is to reflect on some aspects of the literary dossier of sources relating to Achaemenid Bactria- Sogdiana (a region of Central Asia corresponding roughly to south-eastern Turkmenistan, southern Uzbekistan, south-western Tajikistan and northern Afghanistan). Despite the fact that it has by now become common practice to claim otherwise, we have, as an even cursory examination can testify, a large amount of information from the historiographical tradition on this region of the Achaemenid (and later Seleukid) empire: such a vast amount, in fact, that to date a truly exhaustive catalogue has yet to be compiled. The real problem, therefore, is not so much the quantity, but the quality of the sources we have at our disposal, which in no small measure affects the type of questions that the historian is able to ask this documentation. In contrast to a lasting scholarly tradition, this article seeks to demonstrate how the attempt to distinguish Achaemenid administrative «realia», masked by a veil of misunderstandings and intentional distortions typical of the Graeco-Roman rendering of the Persian world, cannot take us much further beyond the results achieved by the – indeed masterful – analysis conducted years ago by Briant. For this reason, the contribution seeks to tease out some of the other questions that can be posed to the sources we have, and with what results, focusing in particular on the interactions between 1) the «imperial» level of Bactria-Sogdiana territorial organization, 2) the local population (not only the élite strata of it) and 3) the satrapy’s landscape, conceived here not as a static background, but as a social actor in itself, with which both the imperial power and the locals had to interact, each with different modalities and aims.