It may be well to begin with a statement of the plan of this book.

Asia under Greek rule, as matter of political history and not of distinctions of race or civilisation, may be divided into three parts. The first division consists of the countries west of the Euphrates and of the Syrian desert, Asia Minor and Syria, which were to become Roman and were for centuries to be dominated by Graeco-Roman civilisation before they ultimately returned to the East; with this division this book has nothing to do except by way of an occasional illustration. The second division, roughly speaking, consists of the countries between the Euphrates and the Persian desert, which were subsequently to form the kingdom of the Arsacids, known to Greeks and Romans as Parthia; from the Greek point of view it may be called the Middle East. The third division, which I call the Farther East, comprises Iran east of the Persian desert and India so far as it was under Greek rule. This division by the Persian desert is a real one, and very old; it is found in one of Darius' lists of the provinces of his empire. This book is really concerned only with the Farther East, the story of eastern Iran and northern India under Greek rule; it is an attempt to recover what can be recovered of the history of a lost dynasty and of a rather extraordinary experiment. This story begins with Chapter III, and from that chapter to the end the book (except for art) is meant to be as complete as I can make it.

Much was lost to the history of Hellenism when the Greek accounts of their empire in Bactria and India which once existed were allowed to perish. The story of the Greeks in the Farther East is notable in two aspects, first as the history of a march state and secondly as a unique chapter in the dealings of Greeks with the peoples of Asia; and to omit the Euthydemid dynasty from Hellenistic history, as has usually been done, and to confine that history to the four dynasties which bordered on the Mediterranean—one of which, the Attalids, was of very secondary importance—throws that history at least out of balance. A few words may be said by way of conclusion about these two aspects of the Graeco-Bactrian empire.

Professor Toynbee in his great work has dealt once for all with the characteristics of the march state at large and has given many instances of how such a state, under the stimulus of external pressure, might be expected to develop such strength that it would not only master the pressure but would have plenty of energy over for other purposes. It might perhaps be said that in the Greek world Macedonia had been such a state: exposed to barbarian pressure from the North and to the pressure of Olynthus and Athens from the side of the sea, the little country developed such amazing vitality that it not only mastered both pressures and for two centuries shielded Greece from the barbarism of the Balkans but was able also to conquer the great empire of Persia.

No competent person to-day believes that the Oxus ever entered the Caspian bodily in historical times. The dominant modern theory about the Oxus in the Greek period, as put forward by Professor A. Herrmann, is that the river itself entered the Aral, as to-day, but that before reaching the Aral it threw off a branch into the huge Sary Kamish depression south-west of the Aral, and that that branch issued southward from Sary Kamish, flowed down the Uzboi channel, and entered the Caspian at Balkan Bay, admittedly the only point where a lost river could enter the Caspian. He relied on two things: (1) a study by W. (V. V.) Barthold of Arab evidence of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, and (2) an article in German by W. Obrutschew, who explored the Uzboi and published his results in Russian in 1890, of which book his German article is a summary.

Herrmann has envisaged a regular lost river, perennial and large enough to carry shipping, not an occasional spill-way, though Obrutschew called it an overflow channel for Sary Kamish when it got full; but both were rather obsessed by the belief that they had got to explain the northern or Oxo- Caspian trade-route from India, which never existed (App. 14). It was unfortunate therefore that Obrutschew discovered two (dry) waterfalls on his line of route, which would necessitate unloading and reloading vessels twice, a point already rubbed in.

With the death of Menander the little thread of literary information which has been our guide through the maze breaks off, and except for one episode the story of Greek rule in India can be taken no further from written history. In places that rule lasted for well over a century after Menander's death, and a large number of kings are known: taking Bactria and India together, and assuming that the first Diodotus took the royal title, we know from literature and coins of thirty-six kings and one queen, Agathocleia; a Kharoshthi inscription has added one more name, Theodamas. The labours of numismatists have succeeded in producing a broad outline of events, and some points of interest can be recovered, notably as regards the revival a generation before the end; that is all, for no Greek historian seems to have taken the story of the Farther East further down than the death of Mithridates II in 87 b.c. (pp. 45, 48). Putting it very roughly, until the coming of the Sacas the house of Eucratides ruled most of the country between the Hindu Kush and the Jhelum, though we may meet some Euthydemid kings to the west of that river, and the houses of Euthydemus and Menander ruled from the Jhelum to Mathurā; somewhere about 80 b.c. the Sacas, who had previously established a kingdom in Sind and the Greek sea-provinces to the southward, came up the Indus, occupied Taxila and Gandhāra, and drove a wedge in between the two realms or state-groups.

After the death of Eucratides his eldest son Heliocles ultimately acquired control of the Bactrian kingdom. It may be supposed that the country rallied to him as the one effective force against the Parthians; the fact that the title on his coins, δίκαιος, The Just, was adopted from the Euthydemids may conceivably mean that he tried to reconcile the Euthydemid partisans. Doubtless the return of the rest of Eucratides' army from India gave him an accession of strength; but whether Mithridates of Parthia was expelled or bought off, or whether the virtual defection of his Sacas (Chap. v) induced him to quit the hostile country which he could hardly have held, and make sure of Seistan and Arachosia which he could hold, does not appear. Certainly the outlying provinces of the Bactrian empire in Iran were lost; the Parthian frontier was again the Arius, and (though there is no evidence) Mithridates presumably retained Herat, or he would have had no through communication between Parthia proper and Seistan. Heliocles probably retained Merv; otherwise his kingdom was apparently reduced to Bactria and southern Sogdiana. What happened to northern Sogdiana, the plain of the Jaxartes, will be considered later.

Justin, speaking of the result of the wars of Eucratides, says that Bactria bled to death; the statement may be true, though it is put too early, for Heliocles' conquests in India show that the country must still have possessed a fair degree of strength; he would of course retain Eucratides' mercenaries.

The copperplate inscription from Taxila which mentions ‘the Great King, the Great Moga’ (i.e. Maues (p. 496), subsequently Great King of Kings), is dated on the 5th day of the Macedonian month Panemos in the year 78 of some unknown Era. That Era has been the subject of many theories; but I have to treat it afresh, for there is a definite piece of evidence which has not been utilised, and the date of Maues is vital to any understanding of the first century b.c. in India, including the problem of the Buddha-statue (Chap. ix). It is obvious that the inscription must come very soon after the Saca occupation of Taxila, for Maues was not yet Great King of Kings, as on the majority of his coins. It is possible to clear the ground somewhat at the start.

First, the Era was used by a Saca king and was therefore a Saca Era; theories like that of Mr Banerji which make it a Parthian Era can be ruled out. Certainly it was for long believed that in India Sacas and Parthians (Pahlavas) were so closely associated that they could not be distinguished; but they must be distinguished, for they were perpetual antagonists, and it is incredible that a Saca king would have used a Parthian Era. This also puts out of court the view of M. A. Foucher, that this Era was the Arsacid Era with the hundreds omitted; moreover, apart from systems with omitted hundreds being open to damaging criticism, the Arsacid Era is not known to have been used by the Pahlava kings in India, which means that it was not used in the east Parthian realm of the Surens of Seistan.

The end of Greek rule east of the Hindu Kush closely and rather dramatically coincided in date with two linked events in the Mediterranean world, the end of the last Hellenistic kingdom in the West, Egypt, and the establishment of the Roman empire of Augustus; as Augustus entered Alexandria on the first of August 30 b.c., it is conceivable that one or even both of the two remaining Greek kingdoms in India was actually the last Hellenistic kingdom to survive in independence. The reign of Augustus, though he had nothing much to do with the world east of the Euphrates, forms a convenient line of division both in India and in the Parthian empire, though not in the same way. For the Greeks of Parthia it marks, very roughly, the time when the period of achievement passes over into the period of decay, though in some places, as Seleuceia on the Tigris and Seleuceia on the Eulaeus (Susa), the latter process was perhaps not very marked till the second century a.d. In India, however, the period of achievement seems to have ended with Menander's death, though that may be an illusion due to the fact that the succeeding half century is to us a blank; but in any case it will appear that the process of Indianisation of the Greeks cannot have well begun later than the early part of the first century b.c. The division which Augustus' reign makes in India is a hard and fast division in the nature of our evidence.

Among the seal-impressions found in excavating Seleuceia on the Tigris is one which differs considerably from the ordinary run of impressions made by seals of local or western manufacture; it is the head of a man, between youth and middle age, who wears the flat kausia of the Euthydemids known from the coins of Antimachus and Demetrius II, and the portraiture is so strong and vivid that to my mind there can be little doubt that the seal was engraved in Bactria by one of the good artists. Mr McDowell, in publishing it, called it Timarchus, but I see no possibility of it being Timarchus; the head is not diademed, and bears not the least resemblance to the head of Timarchus on his coins, quite apart from the Bactrian kausia. If, after the death of Antiochus IV, Eucratides, as seems certain enough, acknowledged no allegiance to the Seleucid Demetrius I and stood with the rebel Timarchus (p. 218), Demetrius I cannot have been badly disposed towards Eucratides' enemies; and it might therefore be conceivable that the portrait in question was that of some member of one of the Euthydemid families who had escaped the slaughter of his house by Eucratides and found refuge in Seleuceia after the accession of the Seleucid Demetrius I.

It was common enough for Hellenistic kings to give asylum to other states' exiles, who might one day have their uses; one need only recall the number of the dispossessed who had found shelter in their time at the courts of Lysimachus and Ptolemy II.

Few inscriptions have evoked so much discussion as the long document in the Hāthigumphā cave (Cave of the Elephant) in Orissa which records the acts of Khāravela, king of the Kalingas. It ought to be a valuable historical record, but it is said to be so defaced and so difficult to decipher that almost everything about it seems to be matter of controversy or conjecture, including its date; for though the dominant opinion has been, and is, that it belongs to the middle of the second century b.c. (the reasons for this belief have differed considerably at different times), this opinion has not passed undisputed; there are archaeological difficulties for one thing, and if an eminent scholar could declare in 1930 that on epigraphical grounds it must be very much later than 150 b.c., a layman cannot regard the date as settled. What interests the Greek historian, however, and the reason why this Appendix has to be written, is the fact that of recent years this inscription has been supposed to contain, and may contain, a reference to Demetrius.

In 1919 the late Dr Jayaswal and the late Professor R. D. Banerji made a fresh examination of the rock, and Jayaswal announced that he had read the word Yavanaraja, followed by the proper name Dimata; he has stated that he found the syllable -ma- clear and ultimately with great difficulty read Dimat[a. This reading, and its interpretation as the Greek king Demetrius, were accepted both by Banerji and by Dr Sten Konow.

Had the story of the Bactrian Greeks survived, it would be considered one of the most remarkable of a remarkable time; but though it was treated by two Greek historians of the Farther East (Chap. ii), nothing has come down to us directly but some fragments and scattered notices and the coins. And there is not even the help which can be got in India from Indian literature and inscriptions and from archaeological research; nothing seems known of any native Bactrian literature at this period, and though the brief Chinese account of the country is invaluable China did not get into touch with Bactria till Greek rule had just ended. Moreover, the situation of the country, which to-day forms the northern part of Afghanistan, has always precluded archaeological research. There is said to be a certain amount of archaeological material in the museum at Tashkent, but if so it has never been made available to European scholars generally. A French archaeological mission was able to visit the upper Kabul valley in 1923, and permission was obtained for a brief visit to Balkh; a trench was sunk in a mound believed to represent the citadel of Bactra, but it got no further down than the fifteenth-century city, the Balkh of the Timourids. The ruin mounds on the plain of Balkh are said to extend for 16 miles, and the excavation of Bactra alone would occupy many years; that of Susa has been going on for over a generation, and it was not till 1928 that Greek inscriptions began to be found.

The controversy whether the Chinese Ki-pin in the Kushan period meant Kapisa or Kashmir is now, or ought to be, ancient history; there is no reasonable doubt that the word meant the Kushan empire, which included Kapisa and Kashmir and much else; if you went to either place you went to Ki-pin. But the Chinese had the word long before the Kushan period; and its earlier meaning has its bearing on the story of the Greeks in India.

It was seen long ago that the word Ki-pin imports a Greek place-name Kophen or Kophene, obviously connected with the Kophen (Kabul) river. Cunningham, in the belief that this place-name does not actually occur in Greek (Kophene does not), gave the name Kophene, a properly formed eparchy name, to the district south of the lower Kabul river of which Purushapura (Peshawur) was the capital, thus making it one of the satrapies of Gandhāra; and in fact, though the names of several of the Gandhāra satrapies are known (p. 237), that of the Peshawur satrapy is missing (unless it were part of Peucelaïtis and not a separate satrapy). But this cannot be right, for, though the province-name Kophene does not occur in Greek, a town-name Kophen does, and it cannot be Peshawur. Stephanus gives the name and identifies it with a town Arachosia ‘not far from the Massagetae’; his source for the identification is not given.

The name Chorasmia is never given by any Greek writer, but only a people Chorasmii. It is always assumed that this people lived in Chorasmia, i.e. Kwarizm, Khiva, the fertile country south of the Aral on the lower Oxus. It may be well to test this assumption and see whither that leads us.

The Chorasmii are first mentioned by Hecataeus as living in a land, partly plain partly mountain, eastward of the Parthava; this land is not Kwarizm, where there are no real mountains and which was not eastward of the Parthava. In Herodotus also the land of the Chorasmii is partly plain partly mountain, their neighbours being Hyrcanians and Parthians (Parthava), but in his day they had lost the plain to the Persian kings; they were subject to the Persians, and in Xerxes' army list they are brigaded with the Parthava and with no other people. Herodotus then agrees with Hecataeus, except that the Chorasmii had lost the best of their land. He puts them in the 16th satrapy with the Parthava, Arians, and Sogdians; the passages cited above show that this is correct for the Chorasmii, even though ‘Sogdians’ here are impossible. Darius' three lists of lands give no help, as the eastern lands are not in any geographical order and moreover the position of the Chorasmii differs in the Behistun and Naks-i-Rustam lists; but in the inscription relating to the building of the Apadāna at Susa Darius obtained some substance from Chorasmia which, if the translation ‘turquoise’ be correct, agrees with Hecataeus and Herodotus, for turquoise could not come from anywhere but the famous mines in Khorasan; but as there are other translations this cannot be stressed.

As circumstances have made it impossible for me, cut off from libraries, to prepare a full revision of the text of this book, and as a simple reprint would have been unfair to readers, I have added some notes (Addenda 1950) to the reprint, in order, as far as I could, to indicate the advance of knowledge; some are really revisions of the text. They represent, not what I would, but what I could; and in two subjects at least, the peoples of the nomad invasion of Bactria and new coin-finds, my knowledge is sadly deficient. To friends who have helped me I am most grateful. One new book has recently appeared which covers the whole field and a good deal more, Professor Franz Altheim's Weltgeschichte Asiens im griechischen Zeitalter (2 vols., 1947, 1948), a book of vast learning that is not always matched by the use made of it; for my preliminary chapters on the Seleucid Empire Professor M. Rostovtzeff's great work The Social and Economic History of the Hellenistic World (3 vols., 1941) is now indispensable. My best thanks are due to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press for reprinting this book and permitting me to include the 1950 Addenda, and to the Staff of the Press for the way in which it has been carried out.

This route from India to the West by the Oxus and the Caspian, sometimes called the northern route, is supposed to be given twice by Strabo and once by Pliny; there is nothing else, for Solinus 19,4 is merely copied from Pliny. The correct explanation was given by Professor Kiessling in 1914, but it was given in a couple of sentences in the middle of a very long article on Hyrcania and has never been taken up or followed; and the whole subject has been such a mass of misunderstanding that it is worth setting out the formal proofs.

Strabo ii, 73. A comparison with xi, 509 shows both that this is from Patrocles and that it is not Eratosthenes' version of Patrocles; it may therefore be taken to be what Patrocles said himself. The literal translation is: ‘The Oxus is sufficiently navigable for the Indian trade to be carried across to it and to be easily brought down the river to the Hyrcanian (sea) and the places beyond as far as the Black Sea by way of the rivers’, i.e. the Cyrus and the Phasis. This sober statement is part of Patrocles' report to Antiochus I, and in Greek, as in English, it can mean two things: (1) that the Indian trade was being brought down the Oxus to the Caspian and beyond, and (2) that it was not being so brought but easily could be. The word ‘easily’ shows that (2) is the real meaning of Patrocles' report; he told Antiochus that it would be easy to make a trade route.

In the first century b.c. there was in existence a fictitious pedigree of the Seleucid house which derived the descent of the dynasty from Alexander. The fact is clearly shown in a series of inscriptions set up by Antiochus I of Commagene below the representations of his ancestors, each inscription giving the name and patronymic of the corresponding figure; these inscriptions professedly give the respective pedigrees of his father, going back to Darius, and of his mother Laodice Thea Philadelphos, who was a Seleucid princess, a daughter of Antiochus VIII Grypus; and his mother's pedigree is the ordinary Seleucid pedigree but begins with Alexander.

How was Alexander brought into the Seleucid pedigree? I must emphasise that the Commagene inscriptions mean that some member of the direct Seleucid line was (supposed to be) a lineal descendant of Alexander. This member could not be the first Seleucus and the story could not have originated in his reign, as a great many people knew that he and Alexander were contemporaries and much of an age. Professor Rostovtzeff in an. interesting paper has suggested that the explanation is that in 306 Seleucus was trying to connect himself with Alexander by connecting his own mother Laodice with Alexander's mother Olympias. The method suggested is not too convincing, seeing that Laodice was a Macedonian name and Olympias was an Epirote; however, his quotation from Libanius may be taken to show that Seleucus I, like Ptolemy I and Antigonus I, did claim some connection with the Argead line.

The form of name ending in -ηνη (or -ιανη) which is proper to the Seleucid eparchies has been considered in Chapter i. But as in Chapter vi I have made use of this form as a test with regard to certain passages in Ptolemy's account of India, it is necessary to consider the converse question: granted that the -ηνη form is the most characteristic form for the names of the Seleucid eparchies and for the satrapies of Seleucid Succession states or of states which were influenced by and copied the Seleucid (or, what comes to the same thing, the Parthian) organisation, do we find, eastward of the Euphrates, -ηνη (or -ιανη) forms which mean something other than such eparchies or satrapies; or, to apply it to the particular case in question, when we meet Greek -ηνη forms in Ptolemy's (or anyone else's) description of India, a country which at the period in question (second century b.c.) had never been under Seleucid or Parthian influence, are we justified in treating these names as the names of the provinces of a Greek kingdom? I have tried to collect any seeming exceptions I can find in the relevant Greek literature and must now go through them; I am not of course noticing the mass of such forms in Strabo, Ptolemy, and elsewhere which are obviously either eparchies of a known satrapy or satrapal provinces of a known kingdom. To avoid misconception, I must emphasise once more that I am only here dealing with Asia east of the Euphrates, the new world which the Greeks settled and which never became Roman, though in fact Pontus, Cappadocia, and Armenia Minor exhibit the same phenomena.

Of all the Seleucid satrapies Carmania is the least known; it seems to have no history. Strabo (xv, 726) has scarcely a word more recent than Onesicritus and Nearchus; his notices of the mines and the gold-bearing river are explicitly ascribed to Onesicritus; the head-hunters might be new, but as they come between references to Onesicritus and to Nearchus they are probably taken from one of them. Except for some names in Ptolemy, the only writer with any new information is Pliny in book vi, and it can be isolated by first taking out the old information. The mines and the goldbearing river (vi, 98) are from Onesicritus, as a comparison with Strabo xv, 726 shows; the distance (ib.) of the crossing from the ‘promontory’ of Carmania (Cape Jask) to Macae (Ras Mussendam) in Arabia is shown by the name Macae to come from Nearchus, though Pliny's ‘five miles’ must be a corruption, for it is neither the actual distance nor Nearchus' ‘one day's voyage’. The statement (vi, 110) that beyond the ‘promontory’ are the Harmozaei is from Nearchus.

Deducting these passages, and omitting for the moment vi, 152, Pliny's information later than Onesicritus and Nearchus is as follows.