Editorial

7 Editorial The present monothematic issue of Studia Hercynia emerged from the Third Meeting of the Hellenistic Central Asia Research Network (HCARN) held on the 14th–16th of November 2018 at Charles University in Prague. The first two conferences of this series – the inaugural one in Reading (2016) organized by Rachel Mairs and entitled Hellenistic Central Asia: Current Research, New Directions, and the second one staged at DAI in Berlin (2017) by Gunvor Lindström and Rachel Mairs under the title Ritual Matters: Archaeology and Religion in Hellenistic Central Asia were both positively received by the scholarly community and promptly became a respected platform for collaboration and debate between archaeologists, linguists, and historians of Central Asia. In order to boost the emerging international collaboration and strengthen the network ties under the aegis of HCARN, we decided to follow up without delay the organizing of a third meeting under the title Seen from Oxyartes’ Rock: Central Asia under and after Alexander. As the title suggests, the main focus of the conference was the local point of view and the question, how the peoples of Central Asia experienced the turbulent developments related to Alexander’s campaign and the arrival of new overlords from the Mediterranean. As in the previous meetings of the HCARN group, the conference brought together archaeologists, historians, and numismatists working on various aspects of Hellenistic Central Asia. In total, 29 talks were delivered by 34 active participants from 12 countries, addressing the various issues of mutual interaction between the local populations and newcomers and transformations of both societal and material culture. The organizing committee consisted of Ladislav Stančo (Charles University), Gunvor Lindström (German Archaeological Institute), and Rachel Mairs (University of Reading). From the very beginning we had planned a final publication of the proceedings, the best platform for which turned out to be Studia Hercynia, the periodical of the Institute of Classical Archaeology, the institution which took patronage over the organization of the third HCARN meeting as well. All of the 13 contributions submitted by the authors were subject to two double-blind reviews. Considering their extent and diversity of approaches, we decided to split these papers into two volumes. The volume you hold in your hands contains seven texts dealing mostly with written sources. A volume consisting of papers approaching the issue from archaeological perspectives is upcoming. The conference as well as works on the publication of its proceedings were kindly supported by the European Regional Development Fund project ‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World’ (reg. no.: CZ.02. 1. 01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). The Editors