The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.234

c10.s4.234

Menander’s enormous coinage, found in quantities from Kabul to Mathurā, attests both the size of his empire (since it cannot be supposed that, as sole king, he had a very long reign) and its flourishing commerce. In his time Barygaza was the great port for the sea trade between India and the West—the Red Sea for Egypt and the Persian Gulf for Babylonia; and it was no doubt partly for the sake of trade with the West that the Greeks held Surastrene and its ports. Shipping still had to follow the Gedrosian coast, as Nearchus had done, calling at Patala on the way to and from Barygaza,¹ and some curious allusions to these coasting voyages remain; one notice calls Barygaza ‘a port of Gedrosia, very famous’,² another puts Patalene in Gedrosia,³ and a third states that ‘Alexander forbad the fish-eaters (of Gedrosia) to eat fish’,⁴ which must mean that someone had sought to make these coasting voyages easier by trying to establish centres of agriculture along the dreary coast of the Mekran; farther west, the number of rivers in Carmania given by Ptolemy (VI, 8) suggests that the coast of that province was well known to voyagers. Trade from the Indian side was no doubt largely carried on in Indian bottoms. For Egypt the southern Arabs were the middlemen; and there must have been middlemen also for the trade from India to Charax Spasinu and Seleuceia, or Graeco-Indian coins would sometimes be found in Babylonia,¹ and Seleucid coins would not be so rare in India. One intermediary would be the wealthy and enterprising Gerrhaeans (p. 62); but as regards coasting voyages they were on the wrong side of the Persian Gulf, and one would expect an exchange depot somewhere on the Iranian coast also. Even before Alexander’s day there may have been a centre of maritime trade on the Gulf of Ormuz, the natural place for it, for Nearchus was able to get an Iranian pilot who knew the coast between the Amanis (Minab) river and the Tigris;² and it is a possible hypothesis that, when after the battle of Magnesia the Seleucid empire began to break up in the lands about the Persian Gulf, a Greek state formed for a time in the same district, with its centre and harbour on the Gulf of Ormuz. This question is examined in Appendix 12, but it may be well to indicate here the enormous importance, in the second century, of the Indian trade to Seleuceia; the outburst of prosperity in that city between about the years 175 and 150, as attested by the heavy increase in the output of its mint,³ coincides with the great period of Greek rule in India.