Hi there. You're listening to the Hellenistic Age podcast. Interview episode, I Canum an Identity in Hellenistic Bactria with Dr. Rachel Maers. Hello everyone.

Today I have with me Dr. Rachel Maers, a professor of classics and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Reading.

Dr. Maers is one of the foremost experts of Hellenistic Central Asia, focusing primarily on identity and the

interaction between Greek and non-Greek communities. She has published books on the subject,

such as the Hellenistic Far East, archaeology, language, and identity in Greek Central Asia,

and served as editor of the recent The Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek world. She is also the founder

of the Hellenistic Central Asia Research Network, and she has joined us to talk about the famous Greco-Bactrian city of Aikannum. First off, just let me say thank you so much for taking the time to hop on the show. Hi, Derek, no problem. Thanks very much for having me on the podcast. So to begin with, would you care to give my listeners a bit

of your background and how it led to the study of the Greco-Bactrians and ancient Central

Asia in general? Sure. Well, like almost everybody that works on ancient Central Asia,

I started out working on something else. And the reason for this, of course, is that there are

so few opportunities to study ancient Central Asia in universities, schools, educational institutions in Europe, North America, in most of the world.

It's something that's not part of regular curriculums. There are very few places where you can do a university degree program and things to do with Central Asia.

I started out as an Egyptologist. My first degree was in Egyptology and had a very heavy linguistic focus.

I spent three years basically doing old, middle and late Egyptian and Coptic and also keeping up

my Greek because I had Greek and Latin from school. And if listeners are

familiar with Hellenistic Egypt, you'll know that one of the really fascinating things about it

is that it's a bilingual, multicultural society that we have really fabulous evidence on. It's so

rare to have this kind of evidence of how communities worked on a very intimate level from the

ancient world. And this is because of papyri, written in a variety of languages. So with my

linguistic background, what it made sense to do was to work on looking at Greek and Egyptian documents

from Ptolemaic period, Egypt. And I worked with Dorothy Thompson at Cambridge, who was an

amazing, amazing supervisor. Now, while I was looking at these topics in Hellenistic Egypt,

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