The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.207

c10.s7.207

We may turn now to a matter more important to the Greek historian, the influence of India on her Greek invaders. Eratosthenes³ instanced, as the best ‘barbarians’ whom Greeks had met, Romans and Carthaginians in the West and eastern Iranians and Indians in Asia—the peoples who when he wrote were about to be included in Demetrius’ empire. Of the Bactrians and their cognate peoples in eastern Iran we know nothing; but it has already been indicated that the Greek attitude with regard to Indians was not quite the same as their attitude with regard to Asiatic peoples farther west. For one thing, many more Greeks relatively knew some Indian language. In other Hellenistic kingdoms, though there must always have been some officials who knew the language of the subjects, the mint officials needed only Greek, but in India the mint officials from the start had to know some Prakrit and be able to write Kharoshthi. And there is the matter of inscriptions. The fact, often emphasised, that India has yielded no Greek inscriptions means nothing; no place where Greek inscriptions are likely to be found has yet been excavated, and it will be time enough to draw deductions from their absence when Bucephala or Pushkalāvatī has been thoroughly dug out; I say ‘thoroughly’, for the excavation of Susa had lasted for nearly a generation before the workers came upon a pocket of Greek inscriptions. Taxila, the one town in the Greek sphere in India which has been excavated, was never a Greek city, and so far as I know, no cemetery of the Greek period has been unearthed anywhere. But it *is* important that we possess a number of inscriptions by Greeks written in Kharoshthi (and even in Brahmi), though unfortunately they give little or no information about the second century B.C., the time we want to know about; just as in the Seleucid empire we now know more about the Parthian period than about the constructive reigns of Seleucus I and Antiochus I, so in India we get material for the first century B.C. which is denied us for the age of Demetrius and Menander. But these inscriptions, which are chiefly dedications and votive offerings, do tend also to show the special place which India held in regard to Greeks, for no Greek votive inscriptions or *proskynemata* have, I believe, been found in any other Oriental language, like Aramaic or Egyptian.