The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.175

c10.s5.175

Chang-k’ien’s account of the Ta-hia,² who are the people of Bactria proper, is that they had fixed abodes (i.e. were agriculturists, not nomads) and lived in walled towns and regular houses like the people of Ta-yuan; they were shrewd traders but poor fighters, so they had become subject to the Yueh-chi; their numbers he estimates at over a million. He calls their capital Lan-chi, i.e. Alexandria (Bactria, p. 115 n. 1), and was struck by its bazaars; he says however that they had no great king or chief, but that everywhere the cities and towns had, or were accustomed to set up, their own petty chiefs (see p. 122).³ Most of the Ta-hia wore beards; and from Ferghana to Parthia, though the dialects differed, the people could understand each other⁴ (the beards and language are Iranian). One other statement which Chang-k’ien makes⁵ once provoked some discussion: ‘they place high value on women, and husbands are guided in their decisions by the advice of their wives.’ All it means, I think, is that he had heard of some local phenomenon, one that has been common at many periods and in many lands; probably no racial deductions can safely be drawn from it, but it might very possibly be a pre-Iranian survival.¹ His statement that the Ta-hia were poor fighters is doubtless only his compliment to his Yueh-chi hosts: but one may suppose that the warlike elements had been destroyed or driven out, for certainly what he saw was a country more or less derelict: the central government had been destroyed and not yet replaced by another (for the Yueh-chi did not actually occupy Bactria till later),² and every town had to shift for itself. Those Ta-hia who did not wear beards would be Greeks; but as even some Greek kings occasionally wore beards—the Seleucids Seleucus II and Demetrius II, and Strato I in India—there may have been more Greeks left than Chang-k'ien's statement would suggest.