The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.200

c10.s5.200

and whether that Greek was actually of the royal blood of Bactria or not, he or she would certainly have soon become royal in the family tradition and therefore Alexander’s descendant. There are still traces to be got, I believe, of these descents in the period before Islam: when in 614 Omar’s general conquered Badakshan its king Bahram Shah was a descendant of Alexander;¹ and Marco Polo found a bit of the fictitious pedigree—the story that Roxane was a daughter of Darius III—current in Badakshan in the thirteenth century² as it had been current in the later Greek period (App. 3). Islam, which made Dhulcarnein one of its heroes, strengthened these beliefs—Marco Polo (I, XXIX) says that every ruler of Badakshan took the name Dhulcarnein; but it did not create them. Once the belief was established, a change in the ruling house would make little difference; conquerors or usurpers usually annexed the women of the conquered, and even if they did not they would annex any worth-while legend, just as the modern Mirs of Badakshan, who only went back to the seventeenth century, possessed both the legend and the heirloom. Provided people remain illiterate, such legends may run for ever; they are preserved in the memories of the women, which prior to printing were the world’s marriage registers and books of pedigree. Indeed one amazing story exists of a name-memory which may, and seemingly must, have run for nineteen centuries from the period treated in this chapter: it is said that a century ago a dilapidated monument on the southern shore of Lake Issyk Kul was still called by the natives ‘Chang-k’ien’s Tablet’,³ and no one will accuse those natives or their forefathers of reading Ssu-ma Ch’ien. This, as I see it, is the history of the Alexander-descents.