The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s2.32

c10.s2.32

Gandhāra,¹ the country between the Kunar river and the Indus, comprising the modern Bajaur, Swat, Buner, the Yusufzai country, and the country south of the Kabul river about Peshawur, was to be one of the strongholds of Greek power; it has been called a kind of new Hellas.² Asoka had converted much of the country, and it became to Buddhists a second Holy Land, where rose three of the four great stupas³ which recorded Buddha’s charity with his own body in earlier incarnations, those of the Body-gift at Manikyala, the Flesh-gift at (probably) Girarai in the hills between Peshawur and Buner, and the Eye-gift; this last may have towered aloft on the acropolis of what was to be the Greek capital, Pushkalāvatī (Charsadda), rendering, as has been said, ‘still more striking its resemblance to its more famous Athenian counterpart’.⁴ But Pushkalāvatī, like Taxila, was only partially Buddhist; Siva was still powerful enough there for his humped bull to become the coin-type of the Greek mint,⁵ while the Greeks were to worship Artemis as their city goddess.⁶ But she was not the Greek Artemis; she was Anaïtis (Anahita) of Bactra, for Anaïtis and her crown of rays appear as Artemis radiate on coins of the Saca king Maues⁷ which are shown by the humped bull on them to have been struck at Pushkalāvatī, just as in Bactra itself she had appeared as Artemis radiate on a coin of Demetrius (p. 115). Unfortunately it is not known whether the Greek invaders brought her with them from Bactra, which would throw light on Greek relations with Asiatic deities, or whether she had arrived long before with one of the earlier streams of invaders whom Indians comprehensively called Bāhlīkas, *i.e.* Bactrians (p. 169); the latter possibility would, if correct, imply an Iranian element at Pushkalāvatī, again as at Taxila. But, unlike Taxila, Pushkalāvatī became a Greek *polis* (doubtless somewhat of the type of Susa, p. 27), as is shown by the Fortune of the city on kings' coins;¹ the solitary coin of the city itself² which exists to prove that it was once for a time completely independent (p. 336) shows, beside Siva's bull, the Fortune of the ‘city of lotuses’ with her mural crown, holding in her hand the lotus of Lakshmī. Evidently Pushkalāvatī, when a Greek *polis*, was no less proud of her alien deities than was Ephesus of her alien Artemis, and Siva's bull is a parallel to Artemis' bee on the coins of the Ionian city. Pushkalāvatī stood at what was probably then the junction of the Swat and Kabul rivers,³ and as it and not Purushapura (Peshawur) became the Greek capital, the regular Greek line of communication westward probably did not run through the Khyber pass but by the route which Alexander had followed more to the northward; it seems unlikely that the Khyber was in *regular* use till the Kushans made Peshawur their capital.⁴