The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s6.57

c10.s6.57

The beginning of the end for all the Greek kingdoms in India was the Saca conquests. After the Suren, whom Mithridates II had put in command of the country east of the Persian desert (p. 499), had broken the Saca invasion of Parthia and had recovered the country from Herat northward to Merv, the larger body of the invaders, driven by Parthian pressure, had entered India from Seistan (p. 321 n. 4), while the victorious Parthians brought into subjection the previously existing Saca state in Sacastene on the lower Helmand. The victories of the Suren took place somewhere between 124 and 115 (p. 281), and the Saca invasion of India may have begun any time after *c.* 120. The route of the main body of the invaders is unknown, but if they started from Sacastene they probably took the usual road which Craterus had once followed, by Kandahar and the Bolan or the Mulla pass, and if so their first conquest from the Greeks would have been the satrapy of Abiria on the Indus, which is known to have been theirs. They had come steadily southward since leaving the Jaxartes and the Caspian steppes, and southward from Abiria they still went, conquering Patalene and the Greek sea-provinces of Cutch and Surastrene; Indian tradition remembered their conquest of Sind, and how they went down the Indus in ships to the conquest of Kathiawar.² This kingdom, extending from Abiria to Surastrene, was their original kingdom in India and remained in that shape long enough to find its way into Greek tradition; it is Ptolemy’s ‘Indo-Scythia’ and may be roughly dated *c.* 110 to *c.* 80 B.C. (p. 233).