The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.19

c10.s7.19

For Kanishka’s reign itself the question must turn on his Greek title βασιλεὺς βασιλέων Κανέρκου, ‘Kanishka king of kings’, where a nominative, βασιλεύς, is in agreement with a genitive Κανέρκου. To Professor Thomas in 1913 this appeared to be an unintelligent copying of a dead language;¹ Dr Sten Konow in 1928 compared it with an idiom from Chinese Turkestan,² which I understand obtained in more than one language there. This no doubt is a possible origin, especially if Kanishka, as some believe, came from Chinese Turkestan; but there does seem now to be a simpler explanation. Inscriptions from Doura have given us some knowledge of the sort of Greek, alive enough but vulgarised, spoken by the less educated classes in the decay of what had once been a Hellenistic city, and its most marked feature is the substitution of genitive for nominative and the use of the two in agreement.³ We may believe that in Kanishka’s time educated Greeks and educated Greek were alike extinct in India; but some of his moneyers could evidently still speak Greek in a vulgarised form, whatever else they spoke also—incidentally an argument for not dating this king too late. As the coins of the Kushan kings after Kujula Kadphises show no moneyers’ marks, neither Greek monograms nor Kharoshthi letters, a thing which must reflect royal orders, we are deprived of our best means of judging what Kanishka’s moneyers were. There were still people with Greek names, and the father of Menander the wrestler⁴ must have had *some* Greek feeling if he named his son after the great Yavana king. The ‘slave Agesilas’⁵ who was the architect of Kanishka’s stupa near Taxila and made his relic casket may have been anything from a skilled Greek slave imported from the West to a subject of Kanishka⁶ with little Greek about him but his name; as he worked in the Gandhāra style the latter is more probable. After Kanishka no question arises.