The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.212

c10.s7.212

The Kharoshthi inscription of the wrestler Menander (see p. 355 n. 4), who may not have had much that was Greek about him, is of the Kushan period. But we get two Greeks of about the Parthian period, the first half of the first century A.D., who used the Indian forms of their names, King Theodamas on his signet-ring found in Bajaur,¹ and Theodorus son of Theoros on two silver bowls from Taxila.² Theoros, though sufficiently attested as a Greek name,³ was a tolerably rare one and not one that an Indian would adopt, even if Indians did take Greek names; there is no evidence that they ever did, and as we have seen there is some evidence that they did not (p. 255). Theoros then, round about the Christian Era, really was a Greek, which is interesting; but his son, evidently a well-to-do man, put his name on his votive offering⁴ not in Greek but in Kharoshthi.