The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.313

c10.s1.313

There is a story told by Onesicritus⁶ that the people of Bactra had once reared dogs known as ἐνταφιασταί, ‘entombers’, who were trained to devour the dying, and that Alexander had abolished the custom. It might, I suppose, be taken from some real trace of something pre- Iranian;¹ but the man who deliberately invented the Queen of the Amazons story cannot complain if one distrusts every other story he has to tell,² and it may be that he met with, and did not understand, a word translated to him as ἐνταφιασταί (whatever it really meant) and made up a story³ out of this word, the pariah dogs, and his own Cynic principles; for it was Cynic doctrine that what happened to a man’s corpse did not matter and that no care need be taken over its disposal.