The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.238

c10.s5.238

I have related the story of the ‘heavenly horse’ because the recognition of this legendary creature and its offspring in the flesh by Wu-ti is such a valuable parallel to the recognition of the legendary Ta-hia by Chang-k’ien; but the story contains one other point of interest for the Greek historian, the man from Ts’in. Though the name Ts’in for China may be usually later, there are said to be cases in the Han period of the expression ‘men of the Ts’in’ meaning Chinese,² and the favourite interpretation has naturally been that the ‘man from Ts’in’ was a Chinese deserter;³ it may be so, but my difficulty is that Ssu-ma Ch’ien has shortly before mentioned Chinese deserters quite explicitly in another connection,⁴ and if he had meant the same thing in the passage in question he would presumably have said so. Another meaning of Ta Ts’in, later than Ssu-ma Ch’ien, is the Greek Orient generally, which by the time that the expression came into use meant in practice Roman Syria,⁵ for the term never included An-si (Parthia); but in 101 B.C. Parthia already extended to the Euphrates, and the presence of a Syrian engineer in Ferghana at the time of the final break-up of Seleucid rule in Syria is too remote a possibility to be worth considering. But there still remains one other meaning of the word: a definite part of the Greek Farther East. In the Chinese translation of the Milindapañha Menander says that he was born in Ta-Ts’in,⁶ when he had in fact been born in the Paropamisadae; and his capital Cho-kie (Sāgala) is said in one place to be in India⁷ and in another ‘in the kingdom of Ta-Ts’in, in the regions of the North’;⁸ that is, Ta-Ts’in is here used to signify the Yavana country,¹ the country of the Bactrian Greeks. The ‘man from Ts’in’ in Ferghana *might* therefore be a Greek engineer of the Farther East, and this is certainly suggested by the wells, which are a parallel to the great wells of the Periplus near Barygaza, memorials of the Greek occupation of Surastrene (p. 148); in both the Greek and the Chinese accounts ‘wells’ mean deeper wells than the native inhabitants could dig for themselves. Nothing therefore prevents us from believing, if we wish, that the ‘man from Ts’in’ who foiled the Chinese army was the last Greek of the Bactrian kingdom to be mentioned in history.