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Warwick Ball, "Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan: From the Earliest Times to the Mongol Conquest" (Reaktion, 2025)
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Warwick Ball
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Nicholas Gordon
Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the
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Asian Review of Books podcast, done in partnership with the New Books Network. In this podcast we interview fiction and nonfiction authors working in, around and about the Asia Pacific region. Today, Afghanistan, if it ever reaches global headlines, is portrayed as an unstable land known more for the wars great powers fight and often lose on its territory.
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Yet for a lot of human history,
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Afghanistan was non the margin of civilizations, but a cultural hub in its own right. In his new book, Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan from the Earliest Times to the Mongol Conquest, archaeologist Wark Ball argues that this land was a center where the worlds of Iran, India, Central Asia, and even the Mediterranean met and mingled. BAAL takes readers from the Bronze Age, Oxus and Helman civilizations through Greek Bactria, the Kushan Empire, the spread of Buddhism, and the rise of powerful Islamic dynasties.
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Warwick Bal is an archaeologist and author
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who spent over 20 years carrying out excavations, architectural studies and monumental restoration throughout the Middle East. He is the author of many books on the history and archaeology of the region, including the Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan.
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Warwick, thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about your book Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan. You know, before we get into it, I mean, what's your own experience with this, with this part of the world? I mean, why were you first so interested in in this part of Central Asia?
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Warwick Ball
Well, I first arrived in Britain. I'm originally from Australia back in 1970, without any firm idea at all of what I wanted to do, but decided I wanted to go on an archaeological dig. And I came across this calendar of British excavations, all of which offered places on digs in Britain. Didn't interest me all that much, all this rain and mud. But there was one that was asking for volunteers on a dig on the Persian Gulf. So I went and saw the director. He interviewed me. The interview went roughly, have you any archaeological experience? Nope. Have you any archaeological qualifications? Nope. Do you have a driving license? Yes. Right, you're on. Simple as that. What it is is that back in Those days, the only way to get dig teams out to the Middle east was by Land Rover. And he desperately needed people to drive team and equipment out to the Persian Gulf. Anyway, that got me started on that part of the world. And then I think about two years later, 1972, I was working on a dig in southeastern Iran, which ended in disaster. Not quite disaster, but anyway, that's another story. And then the acting director who took over said, rather than wait for the bitter end, why don't I go and visit Afghanistan just across the border? So me and, I think two other people from the dig traveled down through the rest of southeastern Iran into Pakistan and up into Afghanistan and traveled around for there for, I think, a month or so. And that first got me interested in Afghanistan, and then roughly all throughout the 1970s and into the early 80s, I was working mainly between Iran and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, I was working at the British excavations at Kandahar. There I met my wife and eventually I became the last head of mission, head of the archaeological mission in Afghanistan, remaining there under the Soviet occupation up until the end of 1981, I think. And then it became untenable to remain there any longer under the Soviets. So we left and the British archaeological mission was closed down. So that's in brief is my experience of Afghanistan and how I got there. Obviously, it's a lot more complicated than that because since then I remained very much involved in the archaeology of Afghanistan. I published a massive big reference book on the archaeology of Afghanistan, became the main source book on the archaeology there that was published in, I think, 1982, and a second edition and expanded edition of that came out in 20, 2019. So I've been working on and off academically on Afghanistan, the archaeology of it, ever since.
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Nicholas Gordon
So, you know, why did you want to write this book? I mean, why did you want to write this kind of study?
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Warwick Ball
Yeah. I was originally approached by the publisher, Reaction Books of London, to do something on Afghanistan, but aimed at a more general audience because there's. There's nothing out there on it. And on doing so, the two things were uppermost in my mind. First of all, Afghanistan as a country that's been in the news almost every day for the last 30 or so years. There's a huge amount just in the general press, but nobody knows anything about it at all. By not knowing anything about it, everybody knows about, you know, what's happening, the news there, the US led invasion, the Soviet invasion, the Taliban, et cetera, et cetera, but nobody really knows anything about its history. It's enormously rich history, its culture, the civilizations there which are astonishing. So I wanted to bring that to a general public. The second aim was partly academic in that Afghanistan has always been looked upon as being part of somewhere else. It's usually described certainly in academia as part of the greater Iranian world or part of the Indian subcontinent, part of Central Asia. The Indo Iranian borderland is described as. And the second aim of the book was to put Afghanistan fair and square right in the center of cultural events in Asia broadly. And that I hope I've set out to do and achieved.
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Nicholas Gordon
Maybe let's start kind of right at the beginning. I mean, what are some of the earliest civilizations that we know of in this part of the world? The book talks about kind of the Oxus and then the Helmon civilizations. I mean, what were these societies?
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Warwick Ball
Well, again, the term civilization is a little bit called into question. Archaeologists get into great tangles about actually what defines a civilization. But I think both the Oxus civilization and what's more recently been named the Helman civilization, being described in terms of the rivers, rather like civilization of Egypt as described in terms of the Nile or Mesopotamia between the two, the two rivers. The Oxus has straddled Afghanistan and Central Asia in what now Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and northern Afghanistan. It had monumental buildings. It had an extensive trade network that reached out throughout the adjacent regions. Nothing much has been known about it in Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion. There's been no work done on it. The Helmand civilization is main named known from many two excavations. The huge site of Mundigak in Afghanistan near Kandahar and the site which was excavated by the French archaeologists in the 1950s. And a site called Shari Sokhta in the far southeastern corner of Iran, which was excavated by Italian archaeologists in the 1970s and since by Iranian archaeologists. And these were again big cities, monumental remains, trade connections all over the adjacent regions. The Helmand civilization did have writing. We only know that from one or two texts that were found in southeastern Iran. The Oxus civilization. So far there's been no signs of writing whatsoever. The third civilization that infringed on Afghanistan was of course the Indus Valley civilization, taking place mainly in Pakistan and of northwestern India, but that the Indus had an outlying colony in the far northeastern part of Afghanistan as well, which was excavated by French archaeologists in the 1970s and that impinged on all the other two civilizations. So the Helmand we know probably less about because a that took place entirely, almost entirely in southern Afghanistan and no work has been done on that since about 19. Well, since 1979.
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Nicholas Gordon
So then how does the onset of the Iron Age change in Afghanistan? Because I know elsewhere in the world, the onset. I was just in Greece and there's all this stuff about the Greek Dark Ages and how the Iron Age plays into that. But how does the onset of the Iron Age in Afghanistan kind of change societies there and kind of. What can we see in the archaeological record of this change?
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Warwick Ball
Well, the Iron Age is again. Well, you said you were just in Greece, and it's a bit similar in a way, in there is a sort of Dark Age. There was a general collapse of Bronze Age civilization, still the Oxus and the Helmand civilization, but also the Indus Valley civilizations as well, round about the. Well, the late mid, late second millennium bc and nothing much happens until the advent of the Iron Age. Some centuries after that, there's a little bit of a Dark Age with not much continuity. The old Bronze Age civilizations remained abandoned. But with the Iron Age, we see the beginnings of the beginnings of the big urban centers that remained urban centers for many, many hundreds of years, even thousands of years after that. It also was a time when Afghanistan as a distinct entity, a distinct identity, started to take place. The American historian, anthropologist Tom Barfield sees Afghanistan in terms of four major centers. Balkh in the north, Kabul in the east, Kandahar in the south, and Herat in the west. And these began back in the Iron Age and has remained as major urban centers continuously ever since. So the Iron Age, I would think, is when Afghanistan as we know it started to take place and with remarkable continuity. It's also the period when we first hear about it in written sources, mainly with the advent of the Persian Empire at the end of the Iron Age and the expansion of the Persian Empire right into Afghanistan and Central Asia. And the texts preserved in the Royal Persian Archives at Persepolis do describe these regions and even some of the people involved with us. So it was a period of change when, as I say, when Afghanistan began to take shape.
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Nicholas Gordon
Eventually kind of the region becomes Hellenistic. And I know everyone talks about, oh, it's because Alexander the Great march through there. I know the history is probably a lot more complicated than that, but kind of when we talk about Afghanistan, well, we're talking about this part of the world, not just Afghanistan becoming kind of Hellenistic and having Hellenized kingdoms. I mean, what does that kind of mean in practice? I mean, how did Greek and Macedonian influences actually present themselves in these societies?
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Warwick Ball
In many ways, Alexander the Great is a bit of a red herring. I mean, he is the great Western hero. The fact remains that first of all, one has to make a strong distinction between Macedonian and Greek. The two were hated enemies. Alexander came into Greece and as a conqueror. And all his actions since his campaigns right across Asia were really as a warlord, not as a torchbearer for Greek civilization. Indeed, there were more Greeks fighting against Alexander than Greeks in his own army. These, first of all, were the Greeks in Alexander's rear who on every occasion rose up and revolted against Alexander back in Greece itself. But also there were more Greeks fighting on the Persian side against Alexander all the way through. And the Greeks in the Persian army remained loyal to the Persians all the way through. So it was a conflict. How then did the areas of Afghanistan end up Hellenistic or Greek? Well, again, there's a lot of discussion about that. Once Alexander had finished mopping up the remnants of the Persian Empire, he was confronted with all of these Greeks fighting on the Persian side. And this was in Bactria, northern Afghanistan. Figures are put as high as 60,000 Greeks falling capture to the Macedonians. According to some sources, Alexander simply massacre. Massacred a whole lot of them. But a more convincing argument is that he settled these Greeks as colonists in his own conquered territory in Bactria, northern Afghanistan. These Greeks then Greek colonists then eventually ceded from Alexander's empire, his successor's empire, the Seleucid Empire, and declared unilateral independence. And this became the kernel of the later Hellenistic kingdoms of Afghanistan, Greco, Bactria and the related Indo Greek kingdom as well. And Greek. There were elements of Greek civilization that came into Afghanistan in that way. One particular element that took hold was the Greek Alphabet, not the Greek language. There's no traces of the Greek language in subsequent languages in Afghanistan. But the Greek Alphabet and the Greek Alphabet remained the main written Alphabet of local languages, the local language of Bactrian language and some of the other languages as well. So it did have this important impact, particularly on the empire that eventually succeeded the Greco Bactrian kingdom, which was the Kushan Empire.
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Nicholas Gordon
So I do want to talk about the Kushan in a bit, but I want to kind of make a sidebar. And we've talked a lot about kind of the Greek Macedonian also. I know the Persians are involved here too, kind of coming in from the west. But I want to talk about kind of influences from elsewhere in Asia, particularly India, which I'm sure there's a lot to talk about, and probably China to a lesser extent. Kind of what influences do we see from both of these kind of large cultures in Afghanistan?
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Warwick Ball
Well, certainly the Indian influence was very, very ancient and probably continuous. I mean, there are still Hindu minorities in Afghanistan to this day. The Indian influence started back in the Bronze Age with the Indus Valley, extended the Indus Valley civilization extending to some extent into Afghanistan. I mentioned this Indus Valley colony that the French excavated at Shoretogai in northeastern Afghanistan. But then in the 3rd and 2nd century BC there was a massive new empire in India founded by Ashoka. And Ashoka embraced Buddhism and proselytized Buddhism as well, sent Buddhist missions down into all throughout India and also into Afghanistan. And at Kandahar and one or two other places in eastern Afghanistan, there are proclamations by the Indian emperor Ashoka proclaiming the Buddhist message. And these are several inscriptions found in Indian languages in Kandahar, but also in the Greek language as well, proclaiming the triumph of Buddhism in eastern Afghanistan. Extraordinary enough, one of these edicts of Ashoka even claimed to have sent missionaries to the far west as well into the Hellenistic kingdoms, as far as Greece, as far as Epirus, now Albania, as far even as Egypt and North Africa, and claim to have converted all those countries to Buddhism. What we know from our own sources, that didn't happen. But it's certainly evidence, certainly extraordinary Indian influence into Afghanistan at least. And this was the beginnings of the extraordinary flowering of Buddhism. Buddhist monuments, Buddhist art, Buddhist sculpture. In Afghanistan. Chinese influence was much less direct, of course, except perhaps very indirectly, how the construction in the Han empire in the 2nd century BC of the Great Wall of China deflected various tribes from inner Asia westwards eventually to come into Afghanistan, and namely the Scythians. But also later on, the people known as the Kushans, who originally came from, came from China, which although they were not Chinese as such, your little one
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Nicholas Gordon
Well, that's a great segue to start talking about, about the Kushan, you know, I guess. Who were they and how did they kind of make their mark on Afghanistan?
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Warwick Ball
Well, it's. If one can look at Asia as a whole in say, yeah, the second century ad, second third century AD the whole, most of the Eurasian land mass was occupied by just four Great empires in the Far west there was Rome, of course, then there was Persia and in the Far east there's the Chinese Empire, the Chinese Han Empire. Bang in the middle of all that is the Kushan Empire. The straddled Afghanistan, much of Central Asia and much of Europe, the northwestern Indian subcontinent. Now we know a huge amount about the Roman Empire of course. I mean whole libraries. Think of Gibbon. I mean think of. We know all about it and to a lesser extent the Persian Empire and the Chinese Empire as well. What do we know about the Kushan Empire? What does the general public know about the Kushan? This, is this equal, the important great empire there is. Offhand, I can't think of one single book in English at least that is a history of the Kushan Empire. Very, very little is known about it. Its greatest emperor was Kanishka in the 2nd century AD. Until a few years ago we didn't even know the date of Kanishka. It was one of the most hotly debated problems in the archaeology of Afghanistan and estimates ranged over a period of 200 years. I mean, as if we didn't know the date of Augustus within 200 years. And it was only the discovery of an inscription in Afghanistan in about the year 2003, I think that settled the dates down to what most people agree is 127 AD is the accession of Kanishka. It was an extraordinarily powerful empire. It had a gold based currency. It was one of only two great powers, well, three great powers that had a gold based coinage, the other being Rome and the other one Ethiopia. The Kushans also enthusiastically embraced Buddhism which had by then entered Afghanistan as I've talked about, and promoted Buddhism throughout the kingdom. And there was a huge upsurge in Buddhist monuments in Afghanistan. It was through them that Buddhism entered into Central Asia and eventually going eastwards into China and ultimately ending up in the Far east in China, Japan, Southeast Asia. We think of Buddhism which originated in northeastern India and Buddhism today mostly in the Far east, as going that way. But the point is Buddhism spread west before it spread east. We saw that with the Ashokan edicts it spread west into Afghanistan. It was under the Kushans that it became a world religion, eventually to reach the Far east via the vigorous dynasty of the Kushans. The Kushan emperors themselves also in their titles were King of Kings, the ancient Persian title as well. They also took on the title of the Chinese title of the Son of Heaven and they also took on an ancient Indian title. But the later Kushan Emperors also took on another title, which was Caesar. So they embraced pretty well all the civilizations of Asia at the time.
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Nicholas Gordon
Yeah, I know that. I saw that note in your book and I was like, the fact that the Caesar title made its way all the way out there. And I guess speaking of that kind of cultural synthesis, I mean, that's a great segue to talking about just the Greco Buddhist style in general, which to me is just like a very strange and very fascinating just synthesis of these two different things. I think I saw some Greco Buddhist work and I guess the Museum of the Buddhas in Siem Reap in Cambodia. And it's all just. It's very odd. Like it looks. It is a very strange. Well, it's, I guess odd from kind of our standpoint of how we think about Greek art and Buddhist art today. But could you talk a bit more just about kind of Greco Buddhism and kind of how this style came about and kind of where we see it in the archaeological record?
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Warwick Ball
Well, it is in some ways one of the great mysteries of archaeology. A term that probably more accurately describes this is Romano Buddhist, because the art and the art of Buddhism in Afghanistan and, well, mainly northern Pakistan, the area known in ancient time as Gandhara, which has also given its name to the art form as Gandharan, is the. It's an art of Buddhist monuments and of Buddhism, the Buddha figure in particular. But the art style is overwhelmingly Roman and this gave rise to the term Romano Buddhist, which is now slightly. Not so much favored as thought of as perhaps neo colonial. But the classical Roman styles of the art are beyond question. It's been described as by one major Western British classicist, as the resemblance almost uncanny. So how did the, how did that Roman Western style of art reach Afghanistan and northwestern India? The short answer to that is nobody knows. It's still one of the hotly debated subjects. I mean, some years ago there was a series of workshops in, in Oxford to try to try and work out firstly, the dates of this extraordinary art form and also how it got there. And it's still not been properly settled. One of the problems is because of its. Because this art is inherently collectible. So so much of the art that are in museums all over the world comes from illicit excavations or excavations that were not properly recorded. So they're out of context. The Buddha image itself, one of the most familiar aspects of Buddhist art, derived from classical examples, and that's been fairly well proved, although many in India do debate that. But the earliest representations of Buddha were entirely abstract and it's only when it met this classical, Western classical art in Afghanistan. And one particular object in the British Museum is often pointed out as the very earliest Buddha image. That Buddha was dressed in classical Greek form, as it were, and the, the sculptures were every. The, the art is so close as if one put a sculpture from a Buddhist monument in Afghanistan or Pakistan next to a sculpture, a Roman sculpture from the Mediterranean. The resemblance is so close that only an expert can tell the difference at all. It is quite uncanny how it got there. Well, Alexander the Great, everybody screams, but no, the dates just don't match up. Most of this Greco Roman or Romano Buddhist Gadharanath took place in mainly the 3rd, right down to the 9th centuries AD. So there's a long gap from Alexander's invasion and the establishment of the Greco Bactrian kingdom, which collapsed in the first century bc. So this is extraordinary gap. Many have suggested that there were actually Roman craftsmen. The art is so close and so Roman. They've suggested there were Roman craftsmen that journeyed all the way out to Central Asia to teach this art form. And it seems almost impossible that this could be so. But the art is demonstrably very, very close indeed and is still debated how it got there, but it certainly is there. And it's this fusion of Western classical art forms with Buddhism that is the face of Buddhist art throughout Asia even down to this day. You can still trace these Western classical elements in the, I don't know, the Great Buddha of Nara in Japan, for examp. And even in much of the art of Buddhism in Southeast Asia. So it's an extraordinary story, part of the story of the Kushan as well. And also it continued to flourish. Astonishingly, there was a final upsurge in Romano Buddhist art in the first few centuries of Islam in Afghanistan. This, of course, was the time of the construction of the great Buddha, bamiyan in the 7th and 8th centuries AD under a new dynasty, a Turkish dynasty. This was one of the early Turk dynasties of Inner Asia. And again, these early Turks patronized Buddhism and there was this huge upsurge in late Buddhist art that continued right down to the 9th, even the 10th centuries in Eastern Afghanistan, particularly in and around Kabul, but other centers as well. So this was at a time when there was a coexistence of early Islam in the first, well, the first three centuries of Islam as well, before eventually it disappeared. There was no sudden destruction at all of Buddhism or Buddhist art and early Islam. It just slowly, slowly disappeared.
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Nicholas Gordon
Well, let's quickly talk about kind of the entry of Islam kind of into this region. How does this kind of new religion and Afghanistan kind of interact with each other again?
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Warwick Ball
Once more, Afghanistan was fundamental to the development of Islam. Just briefly, to recap, the first Islamic dynasty was the Umayyad dynasty, centered on Damascus in Syria. But in the far eastern Islamic lands in the borderlands of Iran and Afghanistan, there was a revolt, a revolt against the mainly against the Arabs themselves, the Umayyad Arabs themselves, by local people. And eventually the Umayyad dynasty was overthrown and a new Islamic dynasty, a new caliphate, was set up in Baghdad. But this revolt came from the western borderlands of Afghanistan itself, was fundamental to that. And then Afghanistan and Central Asia played an important role in the subsequent history of Afghanistan and Iran in particular, and of the Persian language. The Persian language was first revived in this eastern Iranian world of Afghanistan, of Central Asia, under local dynasties of the Iran Afghan borderlands and in Central Asia, Central Asian dynasty of the Samanids and the new Persian language of Persian, what we call Persian or Farsi, it's in many ways a misnomer. Farsi, Fars is the region of southern Iran on the Persian Gulf. But in fact, it was Central Asian development of new Persian written in the Arabic script that took place in Central Asia and Afghanistan. And then under another dynasty of Turks, which created an empire centered in eastern Afghanistan at Tagazni, to the south of Kabul. This was a dynasty of Turks, but they again patronized the culture and the languages of Iran itself. It was under the the Ghaznavid dynasty that the great Iranian epic, the Persian Book of Kings, was written by Ferdowsi at the Ghaznavid court. It was also the Ghaznavids, although they were Turks, not native Afghans as such. But that was the first Turkish Islamic empire. And there would be the first of the Turkish Islamic empires that would again become later developed further west under the soldiers, ultimately the Ottomans. But they also was the first time that Islam was spread down onto the Indian subcontinent. So an important major empire once again developed on Afghan soil. So almost a revival of the Kushan Empire. They were overthrown by a native Afghan dynasty from western Afghanistan called the Ghoribs, who again spread right the way down onto the Indian subcontinent into Iran as well, establishing this second great Islamic dynasty. They built one of the best known monuments in India, the Qudra Binar in Delhi. They conquered Delhi. They were in turn overthrown by the Mongol invasions under Genghis Khan. So early Islam, Afghanistan was central to early Islam. It was central to the development of Persian, Iranian Culture, the Persian language, and it was the seat of two major early Islamic powers.
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Nicholas Gordon
So I kind of want to, I want to end this conversation by kind of talking about Afghanistan today and how that affects kind of people trying to do archaeological work in this parallel. I mean, obviously it's been, you know, beset by conflict and political instability. You have the Soviet invasion and then you have the Taliban, then you have the US invasion and now US withdrawal. The Taliban are back. It's all like, it's like Afghanistan has been politically unstable for a very long time, often by regimes who, you know, at best don't care about the historical record and at worst, actively try to destroy it. Again, thinking about the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas back in the 2000s. But, you know, as an archaeologist, I mean, you know, what does all of this mean for someone who's trying to uncover and understand the region's history and how difficult is it still to kind of do historical research there?
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Warwick Ball
Well, first of all, there was a brief revival of international involvement in the archaeology of Afghanistan between the collapse of the overthrow of the Taliban, which was 2001, I think, wasn't it, and the return of the Taliban in a few years ago. So there was a revival and there was very active archaeological work. Since then, international work has all but ceased. Afghan archaeologists are continuing their work, although on a limited scale. They don't have much money. There is some international involvement as well under the, the Taliban. A colleague of mine is working there as a consultant, as a consultant architect, an architectural restorer who has been working under the Taliban restoring Buddhist monuments which are protected by the Taliban. So the news is not entirely bad at all. UNESCO remains, has a presence still in Afghanistan. So the monuments are being protected and indeed the restoration of non Islamic monuments is being encouraged by the Taliban. They are even trying to encourage tourism to tourists to come back to Afghanistan. The French archaeological mission also remains in Afghanistan, but a very, very limited mission presence as well. They've been working on the citadel at Kabul itself. So there is some very, very limited work going on in Afghanistan. Clearly nothing major is happening at all. Regrettably, there is still a huge amount of illicit excavations and of antiquities being illegally exported from Afghanistan. But that's nothing new. That's nothing new at all that's been going on, you know, all through the last 50, all through the last hundred years. Even when I was in Afghanistan in the 1970s and into the early 80s, the export of antiquities was all, all but overt. So that's part of a, well, a worldwide trade in Illicit antiquities, that's a general problem, not just located within Afghanistan.
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Nicholas Gordon
So I think that's a great place to end our conversation with Wark Ball, author of Ancient Civilizations of Afghanistan from the Earliest Times to the Mongol Conquest War. I actually have two final questions for you, which are where can people find your work? Not just this book, but all of your work, and what's next for you? What do you think the next project might be?
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Warwick Ball
Well, I've, yeah, I've written certainly about, I think four or five or even six books on Afghanistan. They're all out there, so. Well, the obvious answer is Amazon. But also, yeah, any, any good book bookshop can find them. The one, the last one that published last year, Ancient Civilization to Afghanistan, is the one mainly written for a general public, although I hope it has something in it for specialists as well. The big major reference work which came out, the new edition was 2019, I think is for specialists only. It's an archaeological gazetteer of Afghanistan, which is just for specialists. It's not for general reading, it's for consulting. Also in 2019, I edited a multi authored book just called the Archaeology of Afghanistan published by Edinburgh University Press. That's out there, but again, it's really for specialists. With this, this last book, Ancients, that we're talking about today, it is my swan song, I think, on Afghanistan. I've more or less run out of new things to say. I'm not actively involved in the country anymore, so, you know, I can't come up with, with anything new. And I've turned to other matters. A book I've had on the back burner now, on the front burner for many, many years. It's a book called the Ghosts of Rome and it's returned to some extent to a book on Rome in the East I wrote many years ago. And this is a book about the idea of Rome after the fall. The idea of Rome that spread all over the world and is still ongoing and is becoming unstoppable. That's my next book.
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Nicholas Gordon
Well, you know what I mean. The Kushan, calling themselves like the Caesar is evidence of how much weight that idea had.
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Warwick Ball
Oh, yes. I mean, there was even an obscure Turkish king of Kabul in the early 8th century who styled himself Caesar of Rome. There was a mythical 12th century king of Tibet who also styled himself Caesar of Rome. So this idea of Rome was a very, very powerful one that, yes, spread and is still spreading. Yes. So it is, yeah. As I say, my next book, which I'm almost finished, so you can follow
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Nicholas Gordon
me, Nicholas Gordon on Twitter Ick R I Gordon. That's N I C K R I G O R D O n. You can go to asreviewbooks.com to find other reviews, essays, interviews and excerpts. Follow them on Twitter ookReviewsAsia. That's reviews, plural. And you can find many more author interviews at the New books network. @newbooksnetwork.com we're on all your favorite podcast apps, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, rate us, recommend us, share us with your friends to support us. Anybody goes running in around and about Asia next week, join us for a conversation with Rhian Thum, author of Islamic China and Asian History. But before then, Warwick, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Thank you, Sam.