The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.287

c10.s1.287

These seem to be all the indications which can at present be got about the trade of Bactria with Siberia and China in the reign of Euthydemus; the general question of the Chinese trade will be considered later (pp. 363 sq.). But from the beginning the trade with India must have been of considerable importance, for Bactria lay across the most used route from India to the West, and just after Greek rule ended Chang-k’ien called attention to the great markets and bazaars in Bactra itself,³ which did not grow up in a day; the capital must, under the Greeks, have been a clearing-house for the Indian trade, as it was later for the Chinese trade under the Kushans. In the first century B.C. Merv was another gateway for imports from the Far East (p. 364 n. 4), and *may* have been one much earlier. From Bactra the caravan trade followed the great road (p. 61) which ran by Hekatompylos and Ecbatana to Seleuceia and so to the West. One thing, however, the Indian trade did not do: it did not, in Hellenistic times, go down the Oxus into the Caspian and thence up the Cyrus river and down the Phasis. There must have been an active trade of some sort down the Phasis to the Black Sea, for in the third century B.C. Dioscorias on the Black Sea coast was one of the most polyglot of ports;⁴ but it cannot be said if the Caspian, which Strabo called ‘unnavigated’,⁵ came into this at all. Some of the trade which passed through Media⁶ may have gone by sea along its western coast from the mouth of the Kizil Uzen at the south-western angle of the Caspian to that of the Cyrus, but the only reason for supposing this would be that Patrocles had followed that coast from the mouth of the one river to the other, and against it of course is the vital fact that no harbour towns at the mouth of either river are known. As to the supposed Oxo-Caspian trade route from Bactria westward, the so-called ‘northern route’ from India which has played such a part in text-books and in theories,¹ there is no evidence that it ever existed and no reason whatever for supposing that it did. What happened was that Patrocles, sent to explore the Caspian, mistook the mouth of the Atrek, seen from the sea, for that of the Oxus,² and, believing that the Oxus flowed into the Caspian, reported to Antiochus I that such a trade route could easily be made; in due course his report was turned into a statement that it existed. The proof is given in Appendix 14.