The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.233

c10.s2.233

Many of the peoples of the North-West had been immigrants, from Iran or elsewhere, and some were not yet fully Indianised; some north-Iranian names occur in the Alexander-story,² traces of foreign words are found even in the Punjab, and Indian writers classed all these semi-foreign peoples together as Bāhlikas (Bactrians),³ a term which in a narrow sense meant the Bhallas west of the Jhelum.⁴ I must run through the principal peoples; the difference in nomenclature since Alexander’s day may sometimes be accounted for by migrations or by supposing that we hear of peoples instead of kings, though the important Āratta people Cathaei are not mentioned again. The most foreign of all, unless the Abhiras, were the Kambojas¹ of Kafiristan, the country behind Kapisa, which city perhaps bore their name (p. 138 n. 1); Asoka’s Edicts class them definitely with Greeks,² like the Greeks they were regarded as degenerate Kshatriyas, and they spoke a language which was either half Indian and half Iranian or anyhow had an infusion of Iranian words.³ The importance of Kapisa as a Greek centre, and the legend, which like other Alexander-descents (p. 302 and App. 3) should really go back to the Greek period, that the ‘White Kafirs’ of Kafiristan were descended from Alexander’s Macedonians, show that there was little hostility here. The Asvaka (Aspasii and Assaceni) of Bajaur and Lower Swat, who had fought hard against Alexander, had since been converted to Buddhism by Asoka; in his edicts he classes them, under the name of Gandhāras, with Greeks and Kambojas,⁴ and Gandhāra became a Greek stronghold; there can have been little hostility here. The Sibi of the Lower Punjab had been spared by Alexander for sentimental reasons (he thought they were descended from followers of his ancestor Heracles); now they contributed troops to the Greek armies, for the only explanation of a settlement of Sibi at Madhyamikā as early as the middle of the second century B.C. must be that it was made by Apollodotus (p. 151). Statements in some modern writers that the Sibi were a very primitive race are merely reproductions of a mistake in, or rather perhaps of a false impression given by, the Alexander-historians;⁵ they were at least as civilised as their neighbours, as is shown by the Greek praise of their capital,⁶ by their coinage at Madhyamikā, and by the story in the Sibi-Jātaka of the charitable Sibi king who was the hero of the Flesh-gift and was reincarnated as Buddha.