The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.50

c10.s4.50

The first fragment gives the Greek names of certain provinces in Ptolemy’s ‘Indo-Scythia’.² It begins with Patalene, the Indus Delta country, a province whose name and location are well known from Strabo. North of Patalene lies Abiria. South of Patalene, past the mouths of the Indus and round the ‘Kanthian Gulf’, lies Surastrene. Ptolemy knows absolutely nothing of the coast line here; he does not know of the Rann of Cutch, of Cutch, or of Kathiawar; his ‘Kanthian Gulf’ extends in a flat curve from the Indus mouth to the coast of Gujerat,¹ and his Surastrene apparently extends northward to adjoin Patalene, which would make a province of unmanageable size and cannot possibly be right. Surastrene, Apollodorus’ ‘kingdom called of Saraostos’ (p. 147), included both Kathiawar (Surāṣṭra) and, as the name has been preserved in the modern Surat, part of Gujerat also, *i.e.* the eastern coast of the Gulf of Cambaye with Surat and Barygaza (Broach); indeed the Periplus,² about the middle of the first century A.D. (p. 148 n. 4), says explicitly that Surastrene included part of Gujerat, and though, strictly speaking, this may not be evidence for the state of things two centuries earlier, Ptolemy leaves little room for doubting that the Sacas retained the Greek provinces. But Apollodorus mentions a second kingdom, also on the coast, that of Sigerdis (pp. 147 *sq.*), as held (imperfect tense, *i.e.* held for some time) by the Greeks; there must have been another province corresponding to this kingdom, and as it was on the sea it must have lain between Patalene and Surastrene and have included among other things Cutch; the only alternative would be to place it south of Surastrene, which need not be seriously considered. Now it was traditional at a later time that Sind should be divided into four provinces³—Upper and Middle Sind along the Indus, Lower Sind which was the Delta country and corresponded nearly enough to the Greek Patalene, and Chach (Cutch).⁴ So Hsüan Tsiang found it; but Cutch, according to the dimensions he gives, was far larger than the peninsula of that name and was supposed by Cunningham to have also included the country north of the Rann,⁵ and this supplies a *prima facie* reason for supposing that there was a Greek province whose name is lost between Patalene and Surastrene, roughly corresponding to the later province of Cutch. It has been seen that, beside Demetrias in Patalene, another Greek city with a (probably) dynastic name, Theophila, stood somewhere east of Patalene (p. 147): Greek cities in India were so scarce that Theophila must have been the capital of a province, and as it was much too far north to be the capital of Surastrene I take it to have been the capital of the province corresponding to the later Cutch. This does not necessarily mean that Ptolemy was wrong; for the form of his sentence about Surastrene is such that the name of a province could easily have dropped out.¹ Theophila can no more have been a completely new Greek foundation than Demetrias in Patalene; it would be an Indian town resettled and was probably the later Minnagara, ‘Min town’,² a capital of the Parthians, which also stood somewhere eastward of the Indus Delta;³ it is noteworthy that in the twelfth century an Arab writer recorded that a ‘descendant of Alexander’ was ruling in Minnagara,⁴ which might be an Islamite legend but might also mean that Minnagara had once been Greek. The Greek names of both Patalene and Surastrene lasted long, as can be seen from Strabo and the Periplus; both provinces were therefore under Greek rule long enough for the names to become well established, and this is confirmed by the curious discovery that the women of Surastrene continued to use as a form of greeting the Greek χαίρειν or χαῖρε.⁵ Whether Junagarh, the old capital of Kathiawar, be Yonagarh, ‘Greek-town’, as has been suggested, I do not know.