The course takes an emphatically interdisciplinary approach and focuses on the intersections, over the centuries, between peoples that can be traced back to Iranian culture and language and those of Ancient Indian and Vedic heritage, interactions that developed in the regions classically known as Bactria and Gandhāra. In particular, the course will focus on the surviving traces of the so called indo-iranian family (c.a. 2000 BCE) and on the cultural history of Gandhāra, as a contact area between Iraniate cultures, Vedic ones and, later, Achaemenid presence and Indo-Bactrian Kingdoms till the Kushana Kingdom. The focus will be on the linguistic sources and the use of linguistic data to trace the cultural history of an area but also arecheological records will be taken into account.
