I am a commoner in the city of Ai-Khanoum, c. 170 BCE. What language would my neighbors and I have spoken? What religion would we practice? What jobs would we most likely have held?

by citysubreddits1
Daeres

Before I get into the meat of this answer, I do need to caveat that while Ai Khanoum is the best known Greco-Bactrian site, and the most comprehensively documented, there is a lot of relevant contextual information that we're missing about ordinary lives under that state and in that city, so I'm going to have to leave a little room for alternate possibilities to keep the answer honest.

By c.170 BCE Ai Khanoum was a monumental city, but that hadn't always been the case. Through recent re-examinations of the archaeological findings it's become clearer that the city only began to really resemble a city starting from the 220s-210s BCE, and had previously been little more than a large fortified enclosure with accompanying citadel. Given the military significance of the site up to that point, it's likely that the fertile, widely irrigated hinterland around the city would have been host to Seleucid-planted Greek settlers as klerouchs, that is to say families provided with land with the expectation of military service to the king, which was a system utilised in a number of the other Hellenistic kingdoms such as Ptolemaic Egypt.

If your family was descended from those settlers then there's a not insignificant chance that, even as commoners, you would potentially own land in the immediate area around the city and have a lifestyle not entirely removed from the landowning classes of a Greek polis, whereby the land is your primary source of income. However, it's not impossible that the same might be true, by 170 BCE, if your family was of other ethnic origins. The tendency across the history of the Seleucids was for non-Greek populations to become more involved and intermarried into the Greek 'citizen bodies' that existed in many of the important Seleucid cities, and Ai Khanoum's archaeology by the latest phases of its visible existence suggests a frequent intermixing of Bactrian and Hellenistic Greek material culture, from architecture to ceramics. However, there are still reasonably distinct productions of recognisably Bactrian or non-Greek household objects vs Greek ones even in that period, which does suggest that there was still a recognisable distinction between those identities even if the outer edges of those identities had become fuzzy.

If your family didn't own farmland in the city's irrigated hinterland, there's a significant chance that as a commoner you would have had two main sources of employment; artisanal work, or serving the bureaucracy of the city in a non-intellectual capacity. To elaborate further, Ai Khanoum seems to have become, by the 2nd century BC, one of the main destinations of trade, tribute, and loot from Greco-Bactrian expeditions into the Indus region and beyond. Even in the final years of the city we still find that there are shipments of karshapana silver coins coming into the city in large amounts. But there was also evidence that 'raw' lapis lazuli was being worked in the city. This to me strongly suggests the presence of a lot of subsidiary artisanal work related to the presence of those goods passing through the city, not to mention the more ordinary artisanal industries required to maintain the city and its population. As a city of fairly substantial character by 170 BCE there would have been numerous craft industries across the city. Not to mention that much of the city was constructed via mudbrick rather than stone, which seems to have been in short supply in the immediate region, and mudbrick construction is something that requires relatively frequent repairs and rebuilds in order to maintain integrity, as seen in Mesopotamia. The sheer quantity of Bactrian material culture still seen in Ai Khanoum by this period potentially suggests that Bactrians, and non-Greeks in general, might have been likelier on the whole to engage in that kind of labour, but somebody also had to be making, repairing, sculpting all of the Greek style material culture present in the city, so it's not at all a given that most Greeks would have been landowners and most Bactrians would have been craftspeople. As for the city's bureaucracy, there was an absolutely enormous city in the palace, and many ancillary buildings attached to it. Those kinds of buildings need a huge amount of additional labour involved to run successfully beyond scribes+bureaucrats, and whilst I've no doubt a segment of that involved state slaves, or slaves in general, it seems questionable to assume that everyone in that massive bureaucratic apparatus was either a slave or an aristocrat/high social status citizen of some stripe.

It is likely, however, that regardless of your ethnic origins/family's cultural identity, you spoke Greek if you lived in the city itself. By this period Aramaic had ceased to become a generally relevant administrative language in that part of the world, and was no longer a language that anybody seems to have really spoken. Instead, a process was underway whereby Aramaic was being adapted to write out local Iranian languages in much of what had been the eastern parts of the Achaemenid/Seleucid Empires at their respective heights. But this isn't quite what seemed to happen in Bactria. Unlike other Iranian-language speaking areas the script developed to write the Bactrian language, in the centuries after the collapse of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, was based on the Greek alphabet. This, and the retention of Greek deity names in the region for some time after the Greco-Bactrian kingdom's collapse, suggests a reasonably high degree of penetration for the alphabet's use in Bactria, and given that literacy is not by any means universal in this period it suggests a reasonably wide penetration of the Greek language in general. However, in the period we're talking about, 170 BCE, the material culture of the actual 'countryside' of Bactria, as opposed to its fortresses, temples, cities/towns, etc, seems to have remained almost exclusively local, that is to say Bactrian, in character. It paints a potential picture where Bactrians living in the countryside may have had significantly less contact with Greek utilising bureaucracy and institutions in the kingdom, and with Greek culture in general. Material culture is not an surefire indication of linguistic identity at all, but in this context it seems like a reasonable supposition. That suggests to me that, as a commoner living in Ai Khanoum, not the capital of the Greco-Bactrian period but by now one of its grandest and largest cities nonetheless, that as a Bactrian living there, or even perhaps somebody Indian, Scythian etc in origin, you are significantly likelier to speak Greek, even if it's not considered your mother tongue. With Bactrian, there is very little evidence in the period of Iranian languages being written down within Bactria, but there's two major caveats to that; there's only a limited number of Greco-Bactrian era sites that have been definitively excavated, and we know that Bactrian was still widely spoken in Bactria itself because in the Kushan era it became the lingua franca of the entire Kushan state.

Sadly we can't really evidence the situation of actively spoken languages in Ai Khanoum proper other than Greek, Aramaic, and Bactrian, we can't say for sure if you potentially might have spoken an Indic language, Scythian, or anything else from regions outside Bactria proper. But the sheer level of contact between Ai Khanoum and the other side of the Indus in the last 30-40 years of its existence strongly suggests the plausibility of other languages being spoken in the city, at least by some. In addition, regardless of your family's ethnic origins, by 170 BCE you would have been in a broad ecosystem with areas with other Greek populations in the Iranian Plateau and the Indus region, and if we use those as our analogy we can evidence Greeks having close contact with Indic language speakers, and individuals with Iranian (it's often hard to narrow it down to the specific language) personal names writing in Greek with reasonable fluency. There's every chance that, even if you couldn't speak all of the languages you heard, that you would have heard a lot of languages being spoken in the city on a daily basis.

As for what religion, that's a very complicated question. The short version is that it's likely that, regardless of your family's ethnic origins, you broadly shared a significant chunk of your spiritual existence with much of the city's population. Across our knowledge of its history Bactria is a major centre of what's termed syncretism, which is where previously distinct spiritual traditions increasingly share a common visual 'language', despite theoretically retaining separate origins, which can develop to the point of a full merger between those traditions. This predates the arrival of Greeks in this region, with evidence of Mesopotamian influenced traditions in Bactrian spirituality (mostly involving deity names) even in the Achaemenid and very earliest Seleucid periods, though one would still broadly categorise Bactrian spiritual practice as being in continuity with the general pool of 'Iranian' spirituality that Zoroastrianism belongs to (and eventually dominates). The issue for the Greco-Bactrian period, and thus 170 BCE, is that the contextual evidence is a little hard to come by at times.