The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.47

c10.s4.47

Consequently, as regards the Greek provinces in India, the first thing to consider is the date of Ptolemy’s information. Some of these provinces he locates in ‘Indo-Scythia’,⁵ the kingdom of the Sacas in India, which stops part of the way up the Indus, Abiria being the northernmost province (I shall take the several provinces presently). His source here then dates from a time when the Sacas, who went *up* the Indus from Abiria, had not yet reached the Punjab; and this intermediate stage in the Saca advance must have been stable long enough for it to find its way into history. Now ‘Indo-Scythia’ belongs to the generation which centres on 100 B.C.; the Saca invasion of India may have begun any time after about 120, and the Sacas reached Taxila before c. 77 B.C. but only shortly before, since on the Taxila copper-plate of that date Maues is not yet, as he is on the majority of his coins, Great King of Kings;¹ one may say therefore that the latest date for the advance northward from Abiria would be c. 80 B.C. Ptolemy’s kingdom of ‘Indo-Scythia’ will thus belong in the period c. 110 to c. 80 B.C., and c. 80 is the latest possible date for his ultimate source for the North-West, since in his north-western India the Sacas have not yet appeared. The Greek names of the provinces in his ‘Indo-Scythia’ were obviously not given to them by Sacas but by Greeks before the Sacas came; the names are therefore second century B.C., and in one case, Abiria, this can be proved from Patañjali (p. 235). But if the Greek names continued to be used in the Saca period, as they evidently were, then they were well-established names, that is, they go back some way into the second century. Now as the three fragments in Ptolemy which we possess belong to widely separated districts—Sind with Kathiawar, Gandhāra, and the eastern Punjab—there must once have been in existence a complete list of the Greek provinces in India, something like the list given by Hieronymus of Cardia of the satrapies of Alexander’s empire (p. 46); and as the names in the list, as has been seen, go well back into the second century B.C., there is no reasonable doubt that the list, whatever the date of its compilation, referred to the flourishing period of Greek rule, whether before the death of Demetrius or during the reign of Menander. Whether the original was an official or a historian’s list cannot be said, but there can be little doubt that the writer who reproduced the list if it was official or compiled it if it was not, and from whom bits of it ultimately reached Ptolemy, was the historian whom I have called ‘Trogus’ source’ (see p. 46) and who completed his history round about 85 B.C. and included in it an account of the reign of Menander.