The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.189

c10.s5.189

But a few members of the aristocracy, Greek and Bactrian, must have escaped to the hills and taken refuge in the high valleys, beyond reach of the horsemen of the plains; such, or descendants of such, might be one or two of the very obscure kinglets known only from coins.¹ Some of these refugees may for a time have ruled petty semi-Greek kingdoms, which ultimately merged in the native element; it may be worth notice that Greeks had various stories of small Greek communities (though not in Bactria) being cut off and becoming ‘barbarised’,¹ and Plutarch has a fanciful account,² possibly based on a traveller’s tale, of a body of Greeks thus cut off in another world beyond the Ocean stream who lost their nationality and language but miraculously recovered them. The Greeks who thus took refuge in the hills were the basis of the Alexander-descents of various hill chieftains on the Bactrian side of the great mountain wall formed by the Mustagh and the Hindu Kush (see App. 3). I have never seen a complete list of these descendants of Alexander; some were swept away in modern times by the Afghans, and if any still survive to-day they are Soviet citizens, but among them used to be the ruling families in Karategin, Darwaz, Roshan, Shignan (extinct), Wakhan (extinct), Pokhpu,³ and, most important, the now extinct family of the Mirs of Badakshan, celebrated by Marco Polo,⁴ whose very horses descended from Bucephalus⁵ and whose Greek heirloom, a famous silver patera not later than the third century A.D.,⁶ is now in an English museum.⁷ Whether the hill-men in the period before Islam really retained any memory of Alexander or not (and it is possible), what lay at the bottom of the claim to descent from him was that fictitious Seleucid pedigree (App. 3) which, as we have seen, played such a part in the history of the Bactrian Greeks and under which not only the Seleucids but both the Greek houses who successively ruled Bactria traced their descent from the great Macedonian; it must be so, for that pedigree was demonstrably the origin of the Alexander-descents in the West (App. 3).