About the research project
The Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms existed between c. 250 BCE and the beginning of the first century CE and covered areas of modern Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Pakistan, and India.
Formed in the wake of Alexander the Great’s incursion into the region, these kingdoms remain some of the least understood and most understudied political and social entities of the ancient world. One of the main reasons for this is the limited nature of the surviving evidence: only eight of these rulers are known from literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources, while over 40 can be identified on coins alone.
The OXUS-INDUS project has created a new typology of the coins of these kingdoms, to be available both in print and as an innovative Linked Open Data resource: Coins of the Bactrian and Indo-Greek rulers (BIGR).
Research aims
- To resolve current cataloguing, identification and collection accessibility problems by providing a freely accessible and technologically sophisticated Linked Open Data web-based portal that will offer a new, up-to-date typology of the coins.
- To allow users access to the images and data of thousands of coins of the major collections of the Ashmolean Museum, the ANS, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Leeds University Library, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the State Bank of Pakistan via the portal.
- To study this material from a decolonial perspective and to allow users to access the portal in more than 20 languages, including Arabic, Urdu, Hindi, Dari, and Pashto in addition to most modern European languages.
