The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.205

c10.s1.205

I come now to the kernel of Euthydemus’ kingdom, Bactria itself, including southern Sogdiana, the Samarcand country; for the natural line of division is said to be the mountains north of Samarcand, and whatever the political boundaries might be southern Sogdiana belonged to the Oxus basin and northern Sogdiana (*para Sugdam*) belonged with Ferghana to the basin of the Jaxartes. Apollodorus says that what made the Bactrian Greeks so powerful was the fertility of the country.¹ We have to think, not of the Afghanistan of to-day, but of a second Babylonia;² a land of irrigation canals, where the Oxus and each of its tributaries were utilised to the utmost for cultivation, where Merv was the centre of one vast garden, and where the Samarcand district, said to be the most fertile land in Central Asia, was such a rich complex of water-courses and husbandry that its river, from which most of the water was drawn off before it could reach the desert, was known to Greeks as Polytimetus, ‘the most precious’; a land comparatively thick with settlement, whatever the nationality of the settlers; a land called by Greeks the Jewel of Iran.³ The goddess of the land, Anahita ‘the undefiled’ (Anaïtis), who in an old description has a thousand arms and a thousand canals, and streams mightily down from the mountains to the Aral Sea, was originally the personification of the mighty Oxus itself;⁴ Bactria almost *was* the Oxus, in the sense that Egypt was the Nile.⁵ It has been pointed out that, as a general thing, the deserts in north-eastern Iran given by Ptolemy are too small to accord with those now existing, that in Margiane he locates towns where to-day is only sand, and that remains of towns, villages, and cultivated land have been found beneath the Kizil-Kum desert in Sogdiana,⁶ as they have beneath the Taklamakan, the moving desert of Chinese Turkestan. The Achaemenids had always paid great attention to the maintenance and development of irrigation,⁷ a thing inculcated by the Zoroastrian religion,⁸ and parts of Iran, which otherwise would have been useless, were kept in cultivation by a system of underground channels which brought water down from the hills, known to Greeks as ὑπόνομοι¹ and to-day called Karezes;² Greeks, as was vital, continued the Persian policy, and two of the most important of the Greek inscriptions from Susa allude to the restoration or amelioration of the irrigation channels on its territory.³