The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.13

c10.s7.13

The question of whether Greek remained a living tongue in India as late as the reign of Kanishka was argued at a symposium of the Royal Asiatic Society in 1913, and the supporters of the negative view, led by Professor F. W. Thomas, had the best of the argument.¹ I am not going over that ground again; but several things are clear to-day which were unknown or not clear in 1913, and they are worth looking at. I must premise that the *sh* sign, *p*, on coins of Kanishka and his successors has nothing to do with it; that sign had appeared long before on the coins of Miaos and Spalirises (App. 17, 18). Greek was alive in the time of Kujula Kadphises; the square letter-forms and the different mistakes in the legend on his coins prove that much. But the coins of Wima Kadphises exhibit correct Greek written in the orthodox way except for the lunate sigma; *prima facie*, his moneyers were copying a dead language. Are there any signs of life? The significance of the verbal form τυραννοῦντος on the coins of Miaos, contemporary with Hermaeus, is noticed elsewhere (App. 17), and on the coins of Gondophares’ sub-king Abdagases the verbal form occurs again as βασιλεὺς βασιλευόν, ‘under the rule of king Abdagases’;² and as the use of βασιλεύοντος on the pedigree coins of Antimachus and Agathocles (App. 3) shows that it was regarded as the proper word to express the position of a sub-king, it follows that in Gondophares’ reign there were Greeks who still understood very well the distinction between βασιλεύς and βασιλεύων.³ This in itself takes us no further down than the Fortune of a city on Zeionises’ coins has already done; but βασιλεύων occurs again in the regular legend on the widespread coinage of the ‘Nameless king’. ⁴ This shows that to some of his moneyers Greek was still alive, and also shows that he was a sub-king of some sort; and as the Hou-han-shu says that Wima Kadphises governed his Indian possessions through a viceroy, and as it has usually, though not universally, been supposed that that viceroy can only have been the Nameless king,⁵ this may take us down nearly to the reign of Kanishka.