The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.9

c10.s7.9

Little remained in India which could in any sense be called distinctively Greek after about the middle of the first century A.D., or say roughly the establishment of the Kushan empire which replaced in the North-West the rule of the Parthian Gondophares and his successor Pacores. Such cities as were Greek poleis—they were very few—lived on under Saca and Parthian rule in the same sort of quasi-autonomous relationship to their Iranian overlords as can be traced in the relationship of Seleuceia to the Arsacid monarchs; the unique coin of Pushkalāvatī (p. 336) shows that that city, like Seleuceia for a time in the first century A.D., was at some period completely independent. The number of representations of the Fortune of some city (i.e. the city itself) with her mural crown on Saca coins¹ tells its own story; most illuminating is a coin of Zeionises,² nephew and satrap of the Parthian Gondophares (A.D. 19 to 45 plus), which shows the Fortune of some city, undoubtedly Pushkalāvatī, confronting the king as a separate and obviously quasi independent entity. Literature gives little help here. The Periplus in the middle of the first century A.D. mentions Bucephala,³ which probably, though not necessarily, means that it was still surviving as a city; the second part of the Milindapañha twice mentions Alexandria of the Caucasus (p. 421 n. 4), but that document may not be later than the end of Greek rule, and in any case the name may simply have been borrowed from the first part. Fortunes of cities never appear on the Kushan coinage, and there can be little doubt that the cities, if not destroyed, had by the end of the first century A.D. become to all intents and purposes Indian, though that does not mean that some people may not still have understood the Greek language. This general result is borne out by the Greek monograms on the coins, for as long as they persist they show that Greek moneyers were still operating or controlling the city mints. On the coins of Azes and his dynasty Greek monograms are so numerous and varied that it seems as if Azes must have opened some fresh mints. They occur on the coins of Gondophares (who was still reigning in A.D. 45) and of his nephew and sub-king Abdagases, but not on those of Gondophares' successor Pacores, or later; that is, we meet no Greek moneyers, as we meet no Greek cities, after about the middle of the first century A.D.