The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.67

c10.s5.67

I have said that Chang-k'ien is quite clear that the conquest of the Ta-hia (Bactria proper) was the work of the Yueh-chi.¹ But almost every modern writer known to me attributes that conquest to 'Sacas' driven southward by the Yueh-chi, who are supposed to have occupied the country until the Yueh-chi expelled or subdued them. Chang-k'ien, who was there, knows nothing about this, and no scrap of evidence for it exists; it arose originally from a misunderstanding of a simple passage in Strabo, and for many years one writer has just copied it from another, till it has become an obsession; every form of 'Saca'—Sacaraucae, Sai-wang, even Tochari—has been pressed into service, and the theories to which this belief has given rise have done more than anything else to obscure the history of the time. Certainly Strabo says that the Sacas occupied Bactria;² but the most cursory perusal of the context shows that throughout the whole section he is talking, not of the second century B.C., but of a time long before that—he calls it Achaemenid, but it was really the seventh century—the time of the great Saca invasion, well known from Assyrian sources, which had played its part in the fall of Nineveh and had penetrated as far as Armenia and Cappadocian Pontus.³ An attempt has indeed been made since the theory was started to found the supposed Saca conquest of Greek Bactria a little more plausibly by citing a passage in Trogus, but as a matter of Latin Trogus' text will not bear the interpretation put upon it.¹ There is in fact no reason of any kind for thinking that Chang-k’ien was mistaken;² and whatever happened to outlying parts of the Bactrian kingdom, the supposed Saca conquest of Greek Bactria proper is a myth.