The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.132

c10.s5.132

One part of the story of the conquest of the Bactrian kingdom has always been omitted by modern writers; no one has really considered Apollodorus' fourth people, the Pasiani,³ who happen to be important, for it was they who a century later put an end to Greek rule in India. As Asiani is the (Iranian) adjectival form of Asii, so Pasiani would be the similar adjectival form of, and would imply, a name *Pasi or *Pasi; and there can be no doubt that this name is the Parsii (Πάρσιοι) of the Greek geographers. For the same stem occurs again in southern Iran, and the known Greek variants on the word Pasargadae⁴ and Parsagadae,⁵ make the equivalence *Pasi-Parsii certain;⁶ they may also suggest that the word Parsii was really not Saca but Persian. The adjectival form of Parsii occurs again, alongside the substantival form, in the names of the villages Parsia and Parsiana in Ptolemy (p. 332), Parsiana being identical with Pasiani.