The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.184

c10.s5.184

The Saca outbreak in the seventh century B.C. had been due to overpopulation. The same conditions obtained again in the second century, and the Saca lands, when the Yueh-chi appeared, were overpopulated and in a condition of unstable equilibrium; the impact of the Yueh-chi set up a series of movements which, after Parthia had dammed the flood on the west, were only to end with the Saca conquests in India (Chap. VIII), conquests carried out by a people clearly far more numerous than the Greeks in India had ever been. But all barbarians were not merely barbarous; the Sacas in India, like the Parni in Iran, did not destroy the work of the Greeks but used it for their own advantage (p. 243); and the Yueh-chi, too, may not have been mere destroyers. The legendary Ta-hia, like other fairy peoples, presumably lived in a fairy land, and if Chang-k’ien thought that he had found them in Bactria, Bactria must still have been the fertile garden of the earth which it had been before; it had not been essentially damaged, and that is borne out by Chang-k’ien’s account of the keenness of the people to trade. We must bear in mind Justin’s statement that Bactria bled to death; the fighting forces of the last Greek king can hardly have been equal to those with which Demetrius had invaded India; indeed it is possible that after her defeat by Mithridates in 141 Bactria was weak enough to attract an invader. On the other hand, the military strength of a nomad people was out of all proportion greater than that of any settled people of the West with the same population.¹ The regular Chinese reckoning for nomads was that each family supplied one horseman to the general levy;² Chang-k’ien put the Yueh-chi levy in 128 B.C. at 100,000 horse archers,³ and though this was far below their original strength, it was nevertheless a force with which the Bactrian Greeks had no chance whatever of coping; one recalls Rome’s failures in the first century B.C. against far smaller numbers of Parthian horse archers. Whether in addition the Yueh-chi aristocracy fought in mail on partially mailed horses, as did the Saca aristocracies, is unknown. Probably one battle, fought north of the Oxus, sufficed for the Yueh-chi to overthrow the Greek government and the aristocracy, entailing a minimum of damage to Bactria itself; one battle had sufficed to make the much weaker Galatae masters for a time of the much stronger Macedonia. But the nomad cavalry were helpless against walls, and the walls even of the villages fulfilled their purpose; the ‘walled towns’ Chang-k’ien saw some two years later were untouched and were carrying on for themselves by means of their own organisation without a central government, though possibly they paid the Yueh-chi tribute.