Our understanding of viniculture in the Iranian Plateau, which extends from the Zagros Mountains to the Indo-Gangetic Plain, is mired in hellenocentric perspectives originally put forward by classical archaeologists before the twentieth century. Classical and Silk Road scholarship alike have been subject to an unsubstantiated view derived from a single line in Strabo: ‘The vine did not grow there [in Susa] until the Macedonians planted it, both there and at Babylon’ (15.3.11). Consequently, the presence of vines and the vinicultural technology that came along with it were assumed to be a Greek introduction. By extension, any evidence of wine culture became an indicator of local participation in ‘hellenism’. Strabo's comment became a generalization for the whole east and established an imbalanced power dynamic in scholarship between the colonizing Greeks and the colonized natives. Of course, this perspective reflects eighteenth- to early twenty-first-century interpretive biases more than it does an ancient reality. Within such praxis, the presence of Roman objects or iconography is theorized as simply picking up where the Greek material left off.
The project I undertook while at the BSR was in the form of a chapter of my larger dissertation project on wine culture in the Iranian Plateau between the second century BC and the third century AD. The goal of the chapter was to remove the yoke of colonial scholarship regarding the Hellenistic East from the study of Rome's unique relationship to the Plateau. Consequently, an adverse impact is produced: unpacking the complicated interregional relationship between Rome and Parthia in terms of peer-polities and the role of trade between the two in shaping wine culture has remained under-studied. While in Rome I was able to access objects and archives collected by Italian excavations in the Plateau and Roman comparanda. Particularly important are the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East (IsMEO) library, as well as the Museo Nazionale d'Arte Orientale ‘Giuseppe Tucci’, which hold the excavation material from Afghanistan and Pakistan (Gandhara), and the Centro Ricerche Archeologiche e Scavi di Torino that contains the materials from the excavations of Nisa in Turkmenistan (Parthia).
