The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.141

c10.s7.141

Literature must have first place. A few common Greek words found their way into Sanscrit, terms for pen and ink and book (which tell their own story), a horse’s bit, a mine used to sap a fortress wall,² and a camel;³ the mine, *syrinx*, may show that Indians had something to learn from Greeks in the matter of besieging ‘fenced cities’. That Sanscrit should have borrowed the name camel is interesting, for India already possessed both the camel and a name for it, *ustra*; a new name, in these circumstances, *ought* to indicate a different animal. The camel¹ of India, as of China, was the two-humped camel of Central Asia, the so-called ‘Bactrian’ camel, which at this time was *not* the camel of Bactria; the Bactrian Greeks had used the camel of Iran, the one-humped Arabian camel which by Alexander’s day had already been domiciled about the Persian desert; whether it was Persians or Greeks who brought it to Bactria is not known, but it was the one-humped camel which the Yueh-chi found and used in Bactria.² One would have expected, from the Sanscrit word, that the Greeks had brought their one-humped camels to India with them,³ but of this there is no sign; all the camels on coins in India from Menander to the Kushans are the two-humped species,⁴ and this particular borrowing remains a mystery. On the other side, the Greeks must have used some common Indian words, as the English in India do to-day, but the only ones which reached the West were terms for ‘camp’, ‘army’, and ‘general’, preserved by a Greek lexicographer;⁵ they illustrate the native armies of the Greek kings.