The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.95

c10.s1.95

In some of the Kharoshthi texts of the third century A.D. brought by Sir A. Stein from the Khotan district in Chinese Turkestan there occur two Greek words for coins, stater and drachma, and a word milima, which is thought to be medimnos (a bushel);³ also the word Yonu or Yona (i.e. ‘Greek’) used as a proper name.⁴ These seem certain. Two others have been suggested; one is that a word khi is derived from χοῦς,⁵ another measure of capacity, and the other that a word hinajhasya is a translation of στρατηγός, ‘general’,⁶ which has however been thought too conjectural to be accepted.⁷ One cannot suppose that these words were brought by traders from Roman Asia in Imperial times, as many of the Greek seals from the Khotan country were (pp. 365 sq.), for it is impossible to see how they can have brought the word stater. But though no Greek king later than Eucratides coined staters, the word survived in India as a measure of weight; it occurs, together with drachma, in two Kharoshthi inscriptions from Taxila of about the Christian era;⁸ and another Kharoshthi inscription on a silver saucer from Taxila, early in the first century A.D., gives the signs of all three coins, stater, drachma, and obol.¹ Now a piece of silk, with a trader’s memorandum written on it in Brahmi, which was discovered at a ruined watch-station on the old Chinese Limes, is said to show that traders from India, coming for silk, had already reached the Limes in the latter part of the first century B.C.,² while in the first three centuries A.D. there were settlements of Indian-speaking people in the Khotan country (p. 365); it is possible therefore that these Greek words thus passed into Chinese Turkestan from India in the course of trade,³ in the same way that coins of some of the Greek kings—Hermaeus and probably Menander—passed into the same country from India.⁴