The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.89

c10.s1.89

There seems no doubt that he conquered and held some part of that country. Apollodorus says that the conquests of the Greek kings of Bactria extended to the Seres and Phryni,⁴ which however does not necessarily mean that the two peoples were close together. The Seres will be considered later. The Phryni are mentioned again, under the name Phuni, by Pliny at a later period in association with the Tochari,⁵ i.e. the Little Yueh-chi (p. 276) who settled in the Tarim basin somewhere between 174 and 160; there has been so much confusion about this that it may be well to repeat⁶ the elementary fact that Apollodorus does not mention the Tochari because they were not in the Tarim basin in c. 200 B.C., the period he is talking about, and Pliny does mention them because they had arrived there in the interval between c. 200 and the date of his source. Who the Phryni or Phuni were cannot be said; most certainly they were not the Hiung-nu, whose power was not extended into Chinese Turkestan till after 174.¹ The Ch’ien-han-shu gives the names, in the first century B.C., of a great number of peoples and states in Chinese Turkestan, none of which seems to represent Phryni; but before they had more exact knowledge the Chinese had lumped together the peoples of the Tarim country on their western border under the general name of Ki’ang, and in the same way Phryni may be a general term for the peoples of the Kashgar-Yarkand or the Khotan country. Whether any Greek ever crossed into Chinese Turkestan by the more difficult southern route from Badakshan across the Pamirs² may depend on what follows.