The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.305

c10.s1.305

Bactra, ‘Mother of cities’ and ‘Paradise of the earth’, represented by the modern Balkh, was the capital, but it has never been excavated and little enough is known about it; probably we should think of a city of the type of Susa (p. 27). It was the traditional home of Zoroastrianism, and its other name, Zariaspa,⁵ may represent that of its great fire-temple, Azar-i-Asp;⁶ as Strabo (XI, 516) says that it stood on both sides of the river Bactrus, the united stream of the Band-i-Emir and the Darrah which then reached the Oxus, it is possible that the second name Zariaspa was the name of one definite part of it. It had been refounded by Alexander as an Alexandria, a name which curiously enough was used by Chinese historians though not by Greek ones;¹ it must therefore by the time of Euthydemus have possessed full Greek city forms and, besides being an important clearing-house of trade, had become a very great fortress, while the temple of its native goddess Anaïtis probably formed a centre for the native population in the same way as did E-sagila at Babylon and Nanaia’s temple at Susa. The old goddess of the Oxus had now developed into a goddess of fertility on the Babylonian model, and had acquired Babylonian elements and become equated with Ishtar; her worship had been officially promulgated throughout the Persian empire by the Achaemenid Artaxerxes II, together with her festival the Sacaea during which a mock king held rule, also derived from Babylon.² In her temple in Bactra stood a famous cult-image of her wearing a golden crown with eight rays and a hundred stars³ and clad in the skins, dear to Persians, of thirty beavers ‘of the sheen of silver and gold’;⁴ she and her crown of rays figure on coins of Demetrius,⁵ which must mean that she was the city-goddess of Greek Bactra as she subsequently was of Greek Pushkalāvatī (p. 135) and as Nanaia was of Greek Susa.