Uno, nessuno, centomila. L’Asia centrale achemenide e le sue fonti: alcune note di merito e di metodo. Parte 2

The present article completes a previous work dedicated to the study of literary sources for the historical reconstruction of the dynamics within the «imperial space» (sensu Lauren Morris) of Achaemenid Bactria. It is divided into two main sections. The first starts by a brief but - hopefully - exhaustive review of the main advances in archaeological research and, above all, of the most recent studies on the Upper Satrapies as they were seen, and administered, through the «spectacles» of the Persepolis Fortification Archive. While recognizing and pointing out the fundamental progress that such a - significant - expansion of the available documentary dossier has meant not only for the scholarship on Bactria, but for a better understanding of Central Asia as a whole, this section also lists its most conspicuous limitations, in order to focus the attention of scholars (and especially of those less familiar with the evidence scrutinized here) on what 1. archaeology does not reveal and 2. archival material tends to overshadow. Against this background, the second section of the paper addresses a category of evidence (ethnography) that has so far been relatively neglected in studies on Achaemenid Bactria but, as it is attempted to demonstrate, is however capable not only of enriching the currently available documentary corpus, but even of casting a revealing light on precisely those blind spots that the first part of this contribution has tried to sort out. As it will become clear in the final pages of the present paper, this last remark is particularly valid with regard to what, in a recent collection of essays, Richard Payne and Rhyne King have called The Limits of the Empire in Ancient Afghanistan: i.e. the complex dialectic between the Persian administration and a wide spectrum of local actors (remarkably, not only members of the elite) in order to control the abundant resources of this strategic region of Eurasia.