During Alexander the Great’s conquests in a far, far away land in Central Asia, in modern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan the Macedonian military commander founded the Greek kingdom of Bactria that lasted 150 years. Thousands of years later, the many cities Alexander founded there lie in scattered ruins and are either heavily looted or dilapidated. But there’s one thing from his time that today stands intact almost everywhere in Afghanistan: the image from a Greek Hellenistic coin used in antiquity, and is depicted on every single banknote of the Central Asian country as the seal of Afghanistan’s Bank.
Da Afghanistan Bank, Afghanistan’s central bank, was established in 1939. On its seal, alongside the name of the bank written in Pashto (one of Afghanistan’s two main languages) in Arabic script at the top and in Latin at the bottom, there is text in ancient Greek: “ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΜΕΓΑΛΟΥ ΕΥΚΡΑΤΙΔΟΥ,” which means “Of the Great King Eucratides.”
Eucratides was a Greek king of Bactria in the 2nd century BC, and one of his coins, a silver tetradrachm, is represented in the center of the seal. The idea was to use the coin to improve Afghanistan’s image before establishing the bank. A central bank was part of a larger project to modernize Afghanistan under the reign of King Zahir Shah, who ruled the country from 1933 until he was deposed in 1973.
He presided over a cautious political and social modernization effort. Taking as its models European nations and “advanced” Islamic nations like Iran and Turkey, Afghanistan was giving itself the institutions of a developed state. In his book “Afghan Modern: History of a Global Nation,” Robert D. Crews says that “Afghans faced the test of demonstrating their right to belong in this world of nation-states by articulating a national language, culture, and past.” A 2,000-year-old coin, contradictory as it may have seemed, could symbolize this progress in Afghanistan in the 1930s.
So how did the image of Eucratides’ coin end up on the seal of Afghanistan’s central bank?
The ancient Greek coin becomes the image of Afghanistan Bank’s seal
Archaeological discoveries made in Afghanistan two decades before King Zahir’s reign may explain how an ancient Greek coin became the symbol of the central bank’s seal.
In 1922, another modernizer, King Ammanullah (first Emir and then King of Afghanistan between 1919 and 1929) signed an agreement with the French government to establish the rchéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA). By the late 1930s, the discoveries of French archaeologists in areas such as Bagram, near Kabul and Hadda, had started to attract the interest of the Afghan leadership. The National Museum of Afghanistan, which had moved into its new premises in Darulaman in Kabul in 1931 (and where it remains until today), was expanding its collection mainly because of the French discoveries. It soon boasted one of the richest collections in the world. “The excavations at Bagram have been visited by several ministers…the King himself visited the exhibition mounted at the Kabul museum,” the French chargé d’affaires said in 1937.
According to Nile Green, author of “The Afghan Discovery of Buddha: Civilizational History and the Nationalizing of Afghan Antiquity,” Afghanistan attempted to align its own historical identity with what Green calls the “civilizational norms” of the developed world that it aspired to join. By highlighting its Greek heritage, Afghanistan could claim a share of the classical origins of Europe and the West. A state-owned bank represented civilization and modernity in the 1930s, but so did a coin with Greek writing on it.
The coin didn’t appear on the banknotes until 1979, during the communist government of Barbak Karmal, as a non-Islamic motif. It replaced the previous “national emblems” on Afghanistan’s banknotes: a mosque containing a minbar (pulpit) and mihrab (the niche indicating the direction of Mecca) under King Zahir, an eagle under Mohammad Daoud Khan, and later the emblem of communist Nur Muhammad Taraki.
The Taliban, a hardline Islamist group, came back to power in 2021. Though they set Afghanistan many decades back by dismantling most of what the country had achieved during the West’s 20-year presence in the country, Eucratides’ ancient Greek coin depicted on the seal of Afghanistan’s central bank remains to this day in the same spot it was placed over 80 years ago.
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