The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.62

c10.s1.62

When Eratosthenes said that the Jaxartes separated Sacas and Sogdians¹ his statement was only true for the Chodjend district at the great southward bend of that river; for though in his day and later there were Saca peoples north of the Jaxartes, a considerable proportion of the Saca name lived to the south of it, and these were the people with whom the Bactrian Greeks were primarily concerned. Bactria’s defence against the nomads, until the arrival of the Yueh-chi, was a domestic matter, a defence against those backward Iranian tribes in the steppes to the west and north-west who were perpetually attracted by the rich settled lands; it was not altogether a conflict between the desert and the sown, for some of the Sacas were now only semi-nomads. The peoples south of the Jaxartes who principally came in question, and of whom more will be heard later, were essentially three, the Dahae, Massagetae, and Sacaraucae. The Dahae, who originally came from the Jaxartes steppes,² were a comparatively small confederacy of three tribes now living on the Caspian northward of Hyrcania³ and only semi-nomad; they occupied some oases, including Dihistan (which long bore their name), and though primarily horse-archers were also known as good fighters on foot. They had not appeared in Darius’ province-lists, but had been subject to Xerxes;⁴ whether they were still subject to Persia when Alexander came cannot be said.⁵ Their importance to history was that one of their three tribes, the Parni, had in 248–7, according to their own reckoning, founded a kingdom in the Hyrcanian-Parthian satrapy, but when Euthydemus came to the throne there was nothing to suggest that ‘Parthia’ would ever be more than a local principality. The Sacaraucae, the Sacas of ‘Saca-land beyond Sogd’ which Darius I had ruled, will be described later (p. 291); they occupied the country south of the Jaxartes from the Chodjend district westward toward the Oxus, but as Ptolemy knows of other Saca peoples between the lower Jaxartes and the lower Oxus the Sacaraucae, as we shall meet them later, were probably also a confederacy of several tribes. Most important to the Greeks were the Massagetae, whose name is now supposed to signify ‘the great Saca horde’.¹ They were a huge confederacy of tribes, lords of the Caspian steppes northward from the Great Balkan mountains to the lower Oxus and the Aral; eastward of the Aral they may or may not have extended to the mouth of the Jaxartes, westward of it they stretched northward for an unknown distance, possibly to the Aorsi at the head of the Caspian. Five of their tribes are recorded—Derbices,² Apasiacae (p. 91), Attasii, Chorasmii,³ Augasii;⁴ and we shall meet another later.⁵ What their confederacy really meant is unknown; the tribes apparently often acted independently.⁶ Some of the Massagetae fought on foot,⁷ which means that they were agriculturalists; but the majority still led a pastoral life and fought on horseback after the universal fashion of the nomads, horse-archers led by an aristocracy of mailed warriors on mailed horses.⁸ They ruled various subject races, including primitive ‘fish-eaters’ in the swamps at the river mouths and along the sea shores, some of whose peculiar customs were transferred by Greek writers to their Saca overlords;⁹ they had slain the great Cyrus and had defied Alexander.¹⁰