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37-664: Takht-i Sangin is located on a raised flat area sandwiched between the west bank of the Amu Darya river and the base of the Teshik Tosh mountain to the west. This terrace is about three kilometres long from north to south and varies from 100 to 450 metres in width. The site is immediately south of the point where the Vakhsh / Amu Darya river (the ancient Oxus) is met by the Panj river (the ancient Ochus), about five kilometres north of Takht-i Kuvad , where

74-402: A better and more refined nature. This thought is indeed so old that the one who first uttered it is no longer known; it has been passed down to us from eternity, and hence doubtless it is true. Moreover, you know what is so often said and passes for a trite expression. What is that, he asked? He answered: It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live; and this

111-399: A goat, though usage of the two words is not consistent enough to permit a sharp distinction. Silenus presides over other daimons and is related to musical creativity, prophetic ecstasy, drunken joy, drunken dances and gestures. In the decorative arts , a "silene" is a Silenus-like figure, often a "mask" (face) alone. The original Silenus resembled a folkloric man of the forest, with

148-579: A part. His costuming includes a body stocking tufted with hair ( mallōtos chitōn ) that seems to have come into use in the mid-5th century BC. A theme in Greek philosophy and literature is the wisdom of Silenus, which posits an antinatalist philosophy: You, most blessed and happiest among humans, may well consider those blessed and happiest who have departed this life before you, and thus you may consider it unlawful, indeed blasphemous, to speak anything ill or false of them, since they now have been transformed into

185-477: A philosophy which mocks "slow Silenus" for being sober. In Brian Hooker 's 1923 English translation of Edmond Rostand 's Cyrano de Bergerac , Cyrano disparagingly refers to the ham actor Montfleury as "That Silenus who cannot hold his belly in his arms." Professor Silenus is a character in Evelyn Waugh 's first novel, Decline and Fall . He features as the disaffected architect of King's Thursday and provides

222-740: A physical appearance like that of Silenus, with broad flat faces and fat bellies. In the Renaissance , a court dwarf posed for the Silenus-like figure astride a tortoise at the entrance to the Boboli Gardens , Florence. Rubens painted The Drunken Silenus (1616–17), now conserved in the Alte Pinakothek , Munich – the subject was also treated by van Dyck and Ribera . During the late 19th century in Germany and Vienna, symbolism from ancient Greece

259-637: A point completely at rest, if one could only find it.... Lots of people just enjoy scrambling on and being whisked off and scrambling on again.... But the whole point about the wheel is that you needn't get on it at all.... People get hold of ideas about life, and that makes them think they've got to join in the game, even if they don't enjoy it. It doesn't suit everyone... Silenus is one of the two main characters in Tony Harrison 's 1990 satyr play The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus , partly based on Sophocles ' play Ichneutae (5th century BC). Carl Linnaeus used

296-430: Is but for a day, why do you compel me to tell you those things of which it is better you should remain ignorant? For he lives with the least worry who knows not his misfortune; but for humans, the best for them is not to be born at all, not to partake of nature's excellence; not to be is best, for both sexes. This should be our choice, if choice we have; and the next to this is, when we are born, to die as soon as we can.' It

333-442: Is confirmed even by divine testimony. Pertinently to this they say that Midas, after hunting, asked his captive Silenus somewhat urgently, what was the most desirable thing among humankind. At first he could offer no response, and was obstinately silent. At length, when Midas would not stop plaguing him, he erupted with these words, though very unwillingly: 'you, seed of an evil genius and precarious offspring of hard fortune, whose life

370-468: Is plain therefore, that he declared the condition of the dead to be better than that of the living. This passage is redolent of Theognis ' Elegies (425–428). Silenus' wisdom appears in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer , who endorsed this famous dictum. Via Schopenhauer, Nietzsche discusses the "wisdom of Silenus" in The Birth of Tragedy . Both Socrates and Aesop were sometimes described as having

407-504: Is said to be "in the land of the Hebrews ". Papposilenus is a representation of Silenus that emphasizes his old age, particularly as a stock character in satyr play or comedy . In vase painting , his hair is often white, and as in statuettes, Papposilenus has a pot belly , flabby breasts and shaggy thighs. In these depictions, it is often clear that the Papposilenus is an actor playing

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444-677: Is stranded with the satyrs in Sicily , where they have been enslaved by the Cyclopes . They are the comic elements of the story, a parody of Homer 's Odyssey IX. Silenus refers to the satyrs as his children during the play. Silenus may have become a Latin term of abuse around 211 BC, when it is used in Plautus ' Rudens to describe Labrax, a treacherous pimp or leno , as "...a pot-bellied old Silenus, bald head, beefy, bushy eyebrows, scowling, twister, god-forsaken criminal". In his satire The Caesars ,

481-676: The Amu Darya (ancient Oxus). It is generally considered as the original findspot of the Oxus Treasure , which dates from the 6th to the 4th century BC. The first mention in print of the treasure was an article in a Russian newspaper in 1880, written by a Russian general who in 1879 was in the area enquiring into the Trans-Caspian railway that the Russians had just begun to construct. He recounted that local reports said that treasure had been found in

518-417: The Oxus Treasure was discovered. Another significant Greco-Bactrian site, Ai Khanoum , is also located on the Panj river, a little over a hundred kilometres to the east. Pottery finds indicate that the whole terrace of Takht-i Sangin was populated in the third and second centuries BC. The river and the mountain provided natural defences on the eastern and western sides of the settlement, but city walls bounded

555-579: The Saka (Scythian) period. 37°5′56″N 68°17′6″E  /  37.09889°N 68.28500°E  / 37.09889; 68.28500 Takht-i Kuvad Takht-i Kuwad ("throne" or "platform of Kuwad"), also Takht-i Kuwat, Kawat, Kuad, Kawadian or Kobadian, is an archaeological site in the Kuliab district, Tajikistan . It is located near the junction of the Vakhsh and Pyandzh rivers, which continue they course as

592-778: The Tajik Academy of Sciences , in collaboration with the Maecenas Foundation and then the Miho Museum . These excavations came to an end in 2010 and preliminary reports have been published in the Bulletin of the Miho Museum . A French-Tajik team led by Mathilde Gelde of the French National Centre for Scientific Research have been attempting to carry out further excavations since 2013, but owing to security concerns arising from

629-700: The conflict in Afghanistan excavations have only taken place once, in 2014. Most of the finds from the temple and the surrounding site are now kept in the National Museum of Antiquities of Tajikistan and the National Museum of Tajikistan in Dushanbe . This site was added to the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List on November 9, 1999 in the Cultural category. Various artefacts are also dated

666-460: The central hall of the temple and the corridors behind it, both above ground and in buried caches. These votives include portraits of Greco-Bactrian kings, jewellery, and furniture, but especially weapons and armour. Many of these votives were probably buried when the community was sacked by the Kushans in the 130s BC. After the sack, the rest of the site was abandoned, but the temple remained in use until

703-461: The central religious site for the worship of Oxus for the whole of Bactria . In the 130s BC, the site was sacked, probably by the Kushans and under their rule most of the site was abandoned. In the middle of the terrace, there was a citadel, measuring around 170-210 metres by 240 metres, on top of a ten-metre-high artificial mound. This mount was surrounded by a ditch and a two-metre-high stone wall on

740-400: The city at the north and south ends. Further east-west walls divided the site into a number of sections. The site could not have been supported from the very limited arable land in the area immediately surrounding it. The site's political and/or religious significance must have enabled it to draw on resources from further afield. Lindström proposes that the settlement and its temple functioned as

777-434: The corners and in the centre of each side. The wall is 6 metres thick, 85 metres wide in a north-south direction and 100 metres long in an east-west direction. A propylon (gateway) in the east side of this wall leads to a large courtyard containing dedications and altars, measuring 44 metres north-south by ca. 20 metres east-west. This temple building is oriented to the compass directions, with its entrance facing east, towards

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814-416: The ears of a horse and sometimes also the tail and legs of a horse. The later sileni were drunken followers of Dionysus, usually bald and fat with thick lips and squat noses, and having the legs of a human. Later still, the plural "sileni" went out of use and the only references were to one individual named Silenus, the teacher and faithful companion of the wine-god Dionysus. A notorious consumer of wine, he

851-588: The emperor Julian has Silenus sitting next to the gods to offer up his comments on the various rulers under examination, including Alexander the Great , Julius Caesar , Augustus , Marcus Aurelius (whom he reveres as a fellow philosopher-king ), and Constantine I . Silenus commonly figures in Roman bas-reliefs of the train of Dionysus, a subject for sarcophagi , embodying the transcendent promises of Dionysian cult. In Book VI of Pausanias' Description of Greece, his grave

888-544: The northern, western, and southern sides. On the eastern side it bordered the river, and there are traces of a dock, which is now inaccessible. The centre of the citadel contained the Oxus Temple, which was first built around 300 BC. The size of the temple suggests that its construction was financed by an external authority, probably the Seleucids . The temple is surrounded by a massive mud-brick wall with tower-like projections at

925-411: The novel with one of its primary motifs. In the prophetic style of the traditional Greek Silenus he informs the protagonist that life is a great disc of polished wood that revolves quickly. At first you sit down and watch the others. They are all trying to sit in the wheel, and they keep getting flung off, and that makes them laugh, and you laugh too. It's great fun... Of course at the very centre there's

962-485: The river. It is made of mud-brick with a flat roof and measures 44 metres wide and 50 metres long. The facade of the temple building stretches along the whole western side of the courtyard. At the centre of the facade is an aiwān (a pillared vestibule), with two rows of four columns. This is flanked on the left and right by wings, each with three rooms and a small tower. Behind the aiwān is a square central hall measuring about 11.5 x 12.7 metres, with four columns supporting

999-410: The roof. There are blocks of stone at the back of the hall, probably the base of a cult image. Doors on the south and north sides of this hall leading to two corridors, which each wrap around the central hall in an L-shape. The excavators, Igor Pichikyan and Boris Litvinsky , argued that the temple was the earliest known Zoroastrian fire temple , because they found remains of ashes in the rooms in

1036-667: The ruins of an ancient fort called "Takht-i Kuwad", which was sold to Indian merchants. The site is close to, but different from Takht-i Sangin . The site of Takht-i Sangin is immediately south of the point where the Vakhsh / Amu Darya river (the ancient Oxus) is met by the Panj river (the ancient Ochus), about five kilometres north of Takht-i Kuvad. 37°03′14″N 68°16′55″E  /  37.053819°N 68.281938°E  / 37.053819; 68.281938 Silenus In Greek mythology , Silenus ( / s aɪ ˈ l iː n ə s / ; Ancient Greek : Σειληνός , romanized :  Seilēnós , IPA: [seːlɛːnós] )

1073-975: The temple and surrounding site in 1976, under the aegis of the South Tajik Archaeological Expedition , a branch of the Institute of History, Archaeology, and Ethnography in the Academy of Sciences of the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic . These excavations continued until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, at which point the site was completely recovered for its protection. The final reports on these excavations were published in Russian in three volumes between 2000 and 2010. The Tajikistani Civil War prevented any excavation work until 1998, when Anjelina Drujinina began new excavations under

1110-414: The third century AD, with the Kushans continuing to dedicate weapons, especially arrowheads, in very large numbers. In the courtyard, excavators recovered a small stone base surmounted by a little bronze statuette of a Silenus , perhaps Marsyas , playing the aulos , with a Greek inscription reading "[in fulfilment of] a vow, Atrosokes dedicated [this] to Oxus." This is the basis for the identification of

1147-466: The tutor of Athena . When intoxicated, Silenus was said to possess special knowledge and the power of prophecy. The Phrygian King Midas was eager to learn from Silenus and caught the old man by lacing with wine a fountain from which Silenus often drank. As Silenus fell asleep, the king's servants seized and took him to their master. An alternative story was that when lost and wandering in Phrygia , Silenus

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1184-645: The whole sanctuary as a temple of Oxus. Lindström calls the combination of Greek mythological figure, a man with an Iranian name, and a local Bactrian deity "a mixture of influences that is characteristic of ... the Hellenistic Far East." Takht-i Sangin is a suspected original location for the Oxus Treasure that now resides in the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Museum . Brief investigations of Takht-i Sangin were undertaken in 1928, 1950, and 1956. Igor Pichikyan and Boris Litvinsky began major excavations of

1221-592: The wings flanking the aiwān and pits filled with pure ashes in the central hall. Lindström disputes this interpretation, since the pits in the central hall are located under the columns and seem to be foundation deposits, because there is no evidence for a fire-altar in the central hall, and because there is a Greek-style sacrificial altar in the courtyard. Somewhere between 5,000 and 8,000 other votive offerings in gold, silver, bronze, iron, lead, glass, plaster, terracotta, precious stones, limestone, shell, bone, ivory, and wood have been found. Most of these were located in

1258-467: Was a companion and tutor to the wine god Dionysus . He is typically older than the satyrs of the Dionysian retinue ( thiasos ), and sometimes considerably older, in which case he may be referred to as a Papposilenus . Silen and its plural sileni refer to the mythological figure as a type that is sometimes thought to be differentiated from a satyr by having the attributes of a horse rather than

1295-502: Was reinterpreted through a new Freudian prism. Around the same time Vienna Secession artist Gustav Klimt uses the irreverent, chubby-faced Silenus as a motif in several works to represent "buried instinctual forces". In Gargantua and Pantagruel , Rabelais referred to Silenus as the foster father of Bacchus. In 1884 Thomas Woolner published a long narrative poem about Silenus. In Oscar Wilde 's 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray , Lord Henry Wooton turns praise of folly into

1332-512: Was rescued by peasants and taken to Midas, who treated him kindly. In return for Midas' hospitality Silenus told him some tales and the king, enchanted by Silenus' fictions, entertained him for five days and nights. Dionysus offered Midas a reward for his kindness toward Silenus, and Midas chose the power of turning everything he touched into gold . Another story was that Silenus had been captured by two shepherds, and regaled them with wondrous tales. In Euripides 's satyr play Cyclops , Silenus

1369-453: Was usually drunk and had to be supported by satyrs or carried by a donkey . Silenus was described as the oldest, wisest and most drunken of the followers of Dionysus, and was said in Orphic hymns to be the young god's tutor. This puts him in a company of phallic or half-animal tutors of the gods, a group that includes Priapus , Hermaphroditus , Cedalion and Chiron , but also includes Pallas ,

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