The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.188

c10.s2.188

A peculiar feature of Agathocles' coinage is that the Prakrit legends are often written in Brahmi instead of Kharoshthi, which Demetrius II had already used and which was to be used by every subsequent Greek king; Agathocles and Pantaleon are the only two to use Brahmi. Brahmi, believed to have come by sea from Babylonia, would no doubt have become the universal writing of India, as it did later, but for the subsequent intrusion of Kharoshthi, a script derived from Aramaic, the common writing in Persia for official use in Achaemenid times, which is supposed to have reached India about 500 B.C. in the train of Darius' conquests; it drove like a wedge into the Achaemenid provinces of the North-West and became the usual writing in Gandhāra and Taxila. But we hardly know the position in the Paropamisadae; for though Kharoshthi inscriptions have been found in abundance in Gandhāra and the Taxila country, none have come from westward of the Panjkora river,¹ though this may in part be due to lack of facilities for exploration. It is now believed that where Brahmi and Kharoshthi are both employed (as on Agathocles' coins) a dialectical difference is indicated,² and the natural explanation of the use of Brahmi by Pantaleon and Agathocles is that in the Paropamisadae there were districts whose dialects were normally written in Brahmi, as were the legends on the already mentioned Vatasvaka coinage from Swat, and on some of the coins of Taxila;³ but as no other Greek king in the Paropamisadae used Brahmi they must have overestimated its importance in relation to Kharoshthi, a mistake easy enough for strangers to make.