The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.32

c10.s7.32

That is as far as one can get with the cities, though it seems obvious that if there were Indian officials of the mints they were not likely to be the only officials who were Indians; it has already been pointed out that the great loosely hung satrapies could only have been worked by the retention of much of the existing Indian arrangements. The one Indian governor mentioned, an unnamed meridarch, seems to belong to the early Saca period;¹ but undoubtedly it must be supposed that, while the Seleucids occasionally fitted an Iranian official into their own Greek system, the Euthydemid provincial administration in India was essentially Graeco-Indian. Still it must not be forgotten that the undivided empire of Demetrius and Menander was in form a Hellenistic kingdom, one that had originally branched off from the Seleucid kingdom though it had taken a somewhat different complexion; and the Greek satrapies, with their *strategoi* and meridarchs, became so firmly impressed on the country that the Sacas took over the Greek provincial organisation with even less change than the Parthians made when they took over the Seleucid, while the four satrapies into which the Greeks had divided Sind lasted, with whatever boundary modifications, far down into Indian history as the four traditional divisions of that land. Other things too, for a time, were firmly impressed by the Greeks upon that part of India which they ruled. The bilingual coinage, with legends in Greek and Kharoshthi, was continued by Sacas, Parthians, and the earlier Kushans, though with the passing of Greek rule its meaning and significance had passed also; the Kharoshthi legends were first discontinued by Kanishka.²