The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.246

c10.s2.246

Two peoples on the Indus remain to be mentioned. The Sauviras or Sauvīra-Sindhus⁵ (the names are never separated) had entered India shortly before the Persian period and had worked southward. In the Mahābhārata they are on the Upper Indus; by the beginning of the Maurya period they were on the Lower Indus, and their capital Roruka, supposed to be Alor, was in the tradition destroyed by natural forces about the time that Pātaliputra became important, one man alone escaping to found Barygaza;⁶ in the second century B.C. they were occupying the Indus Delta with an unknown extension eastwards, and the second part of the Milindapañha accordingly places them on the sea.⁷ Two Greek cities, Demetrias and Theophila, were founded among them, and in literature they were classed with the Bāhlīkas and the Yavanas;⁸ we shall see that they supplied some citizens to Demetrias (p. 257). The Abhīras were the latest comers of all; it seems that they only entered India during the confusions after Alexander’s death.¹ There will be something to say about them later; at present they were on the Indus north of the Sauvīras, where they gave their name to the Greek satrapy of Abiria (p. 235). Their advance down the Indus must have caused, or been made possible by, some displacement of peoples, and the Malli, so prominent in the Alexander story, are not heard of again; the likeliest of the theories about them is that they had gone, or been driven, southward and that they were the Mālavas who gave their name, Malva, to Avanti.