The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.246

c10.s1.246

So far the matter is simple; in Darius’ day the Siberian gold was coming to Bactria, in Euthydemus’ day it was not. But when we turn to India the question is more complex. According to Herodotus, Darius received every year at Susa 4680 talents in gold-dust as the tribute of his Indian satrapy, a tribute utterly out of proportion to that paid, in silver or in kind, by any other satrapy.⁶ How came it then that the Greeks found no gold worth mentioning in India, and that Darius sent to the distant satrapies of Sardis and Bactria to get gold for his Apadāna instead of using the great amount which reached Susa every year from India? For he did not use Indian gold; the inscription is specific that India only contributed ivory (l. 43) and Gandhāra (l. 34) Yakā-wood.⁷ In Herodotus’ story, which he got from Persians who had got it in turn from Indians, the Indian gold was ‘ant-gold’, dug up by ants in the burning Thar desert,⁸ *i.e.* just beyond the world he and the Persians knew. Megasthenes too was told of ‘ant-gold’ by his Indian informants, but, as he knew Rajputana, the ants were shifted to Dardistan,¹ to the upper gorges of the Indus, *i.e.* just beyond the world he knew. The reference to ‘ant-gold’, *pipilika*, in the Mahābhārata shows, as these stories show, that the name was current among Indians and was not a Greek or Persian invention. The name in fact came with the gold; it has been shown that the ant-gold was only the Siberian gold again and that the name is known in Mongolian and Thibetan sagas.² It has been suggested that the name arose from a confusion of the name of a Mongolian tribe with the Mongolian word for ant;³ but how old these words may be I do not know, and as the gold in question was gold-dust I would rather suppose that the name was derived from the well-known class of folk-tales in which the ant-king and his subjects, to help the hero, collect for him a mass of little grains of something which he cannot collect for himself;⁴ for it was this meaning which ultimately lay behind the story told to Herodotus of the ants extracting the grains of gold from the sands of the desert. The application of the name to the gold was no doubt due to the middlemen on the gold route, who wished to prevent their clients discovering the source of supply.⁵ Indians did not know the source of supply, but they knew how the gold came to them (whether it came through Bactria or across the difficult passes into Gandhāra or Kashmir), and they in turn were ready to tell any story which might put too inquisitive westerners off the scent; hence the fairy-tale told to Herodotus of the ants digging up grains of gold in the desert, while some skins of the ants were exhibited to the honest Nearchus, who said that they were very like the skins of leopards.¹