The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.139

c10.s5.139

Who were these Parsii? The word seems to be the Old Persian Parsua,² which means Persians. The Persians of Persis called themselves Parsā; but the form Parsua is old—it has been suggested that it was the Median form of Parsā—and had already played a part in the history of the Iranian invasions as the name of a people who had reached north-east Iran and south Armenia and appear in Assyrian records;³ of the known original Iranian tribes⁴ they belonged to the Parsā-Parsua-Persian tribe. The Parsii of Apollodorus and Ptolemy, then, were a branch of the Persian people who had remained behind when their kinsfolk went south. But if they remained behind, where did they live? In Persian tradition the original Iranian ‘home’, that is, the centre from which the Iranian peoples set out on their conquests to the southward, was called Ērānvēj, and Ērānvēj has recently been identified with Chorasmia (Kwarizm).⁵ Now Kwarizm, sandwiched between the Sacaraucae and the Massagetae, is too important a country not to have played some part in the second-century invasions; and my suggestion—naturally it is only conjecture—is that the Parsii-Parsua had stayed behind in Ērānvēj-Kwarizm when their kinsfolk originally went south. Unless I am entirely wrong in my interpretation of Stephanus,¹ the Parsii were at this time members of the great Massagetae confederacy (as would be almost inevitable from their geographical place in the invasion, which has already been considered); and, as I see the facts relative to the Chorasmii given in Appendix 11, the Chorasmii, who were also members of the Massagetae confederacy, were a tribe or section of the Parsii; after the latter people come on the scene they are not again mentioned. The Parsii were an important people, as is shown by Apollodorus naming them beside the Yueh-chi and the Sacaraucae; and the identification of them as Parsua, who might feel themselves different from their Saca neighbours if only because they doubtless spoke a form of Persian while the Saca speech was North Iranian, would explain the fact (which will play a considerable part in the subsequent story) that, when a large part of the Sacas who invaded Parthia passed on into Sind, the Parsii did not go with them but took a line of their own (App. 9). Though (if I am right) the Parsii were not strictly speaking Sacas (in the sense that probably they did not speak Saca), I shall, when we come to their kingdom of Ghazni-Kabul, sometimes have to use the term Saca for them; for the coins of this kingdom with Greek and Kharoshthi legends are known to numismatists as Saca, and any other course would lead to much confusion.