The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s4.99

c10.s4.99

The Indian satrapies, as one would expect, were governed by generals, *strategoi*, like those of the Seleucids; this is clear from the use of the word *strategoi* on the coins of both Saca and Parthian kings in India.¹ It is perhaps not certainly known what term the Parthians themselves may have used for the governors of their satrapies, but Greek and Jewish writers and scribes as a rule called them satraps, though occasionally they translated the Parthian term by *strategos*, a word borrowed from the Seleucid organisation which they knew;² if therefore in the Kharoshthi legends on Saca and Parthian coins in India their moneyers used *stratega* as a translation, they too must have taken it from something *they* knew, which could only be the Greek organisation in India. This conclusion is not affected by the fact that the Sacas, who stepped into the shoes of the Greeks, also used the term satraps,¹ as an Iranian people naturally would. Whether there was any and what subdivision of the more remote satrapies cannot be said, but there was subdivision in the North-West, for inscriptions have revealed the existence there of meridarchs, ‘governors of fractions’; of the two known, one² was a Greek and belonged to the later period of Greek rule in Swat, and the other,³ who was certainly an Indian, belonged to the Taxila kingdom and seemingly held office under some Saca king, another proof of how closely the Sacas followed the Greeks. Meridarchs are not heard of in the Seleucid empire except in Palestine, and there only in Jewish writers; it is impossible to say what they mean.⁴ In Ptolemaic Egypt the Arsinoite nome, the Fayûm, was, unlike others, divided into three *merides*,⁵ but the purpose of this is obscure. It is strange therefore to meet meridarchs in India, and one cannot explain them more closely than as subordinate governors of parts of a satrapy; I imagine that the Greek kings adopted this word because, as they had not the triple Seleucid division of satrapy, eparchy, hyparchy, they could not use the Seleucid terms and only wanted some indefinite word which would express the subdivision of the satrapy into districts.⁶ Incidentally it shows that they were acquainted with the Seleucid organisation in Palestine.