The Greeks in Bactria and India c14: Appendix 2. The Names in -ηνη
The Greeks in Bactria and India c14
- Language
- English
Appendix 2. The Names in -ηνη
c14.1
THE NAMES IN -*HNH
c14.2
The form of name ending in -*ηνη* (or -*ιανη*) which is proper to the Seleucid eparchies has been considered in Chapter 1. But as in Chapter VI I have made use of this form as a test with regard to certain passages in Ptolemy’s account of India, it is necessary to consider the converse question: granted that the -*ηνη* form is the most characteristic form for the names of the Seleucid eparchies and for the satrapies of Seleucid Succession states or of states which were influenced by and copied the Seleucid (or, what comes to the same thing, the Parthian) organisation, do we find, eastward of the Euphrates, -*ηνη* (or -*ιανη*) forms which mean something other than such eparchies or satrapies; or, to apply it to the particular case in question, when we meet Greek -*ηνη* forms in Ptolemy’s (or anyone else’s) description of India, a country which at the period in question (second century B.C.) had never been under Seleucid or Parthian influence, are we justified in treating these names as the names of the provinces of a Greek kingdom? I have tried to collect any seeming exceptions I can find in the relevant Greek literature and must now go through them; I am not of course noticing the mass of such forms in Strabo, Ptolemy, and elsewhere which are obviously either eparchies of a known satrapy or satrapal provinces of a known kingdom. To avoid misconception, I must emphasise once more that I am only here dealing with Asia east of the Euphrates, the new world which the Greeks settled and which never became Roman, though in fact Pontus, Cappadocia, and Armenia Minor exhibit the same phenomena. I am not considering Syria, which is a world by itself,¹ and in particular I am not considering Asia Minor west of the Halys. I do not know what its organisation in this respect was, and no one has worked it out; when Strabo talks of Cyzicene or Amisene I do not know if he means eparchy or city territory; the names might, for all that is yet known, be related to the old Greek city-names in -*ηνη* like Mytilene, Priene, Cebrene. All this has nothing to do with the matter in hand, which is Ptolemy upon India.
c14.3
¹ U. Kahrstedt, *Syrische Territorien in hellenistischer Zeit* 1926; O. Leuze, *Die Satrapieneinteilung in Syrien* 1935.
c14.4
Three so-called towns in the Peutinger Table—Pantyene, Tazarene, Thybrassene—are really eparchies of Carmania and Gedrosia; it has long been recognised that in this part of Asia the Table gives provinces as towns.² Doubtless this is another of those traces of the Seleucid survey which Tomaschek detected in the Table.³
c14.5
² Müller, *GGM* 1, xcv, ‘Deinde (after Media and Persis) Tab. Peut. non oppida sed regiones memorat usque ad Besten’; K. Miller, *Itineraria Romana* 1916 col. 786 and map.
c14.6
³ *Wien SB* CII, 1883, p. 145.
c14.7
Stephanus (*s.v.*) gives a town Barene in Media near Ecbatana. In Isidore’s list of the Parthian satrapies (Seleucid eparchies) in Media along the great road he omits (§6) the name of the province between Gambadene and Rhagiane in which Ecbatana stood, merely calling it ἡ Μηδία ἡ ἄνω. Barene is not a town, but is the missing name of this eparchy.
c14.8
The Periplus (48) and Ptolemy (VII, 1, 62) both call the city of Ujjain ’Οζήνη. This has nothing to do with the -ηνῃ names; it is merely someone’s transliteration into Greek letters of the sound of the Indian name Ujjahini. It suggests however that other similar transliterations may exist.
c14.9
The Periplus (62) gives a region Dosarene on the coast of Orissa, where a Greek name is impossible. It is not given in Ptolemy, who only gives a town Dosara and a river Dosaron (VII, 1, 77). The author of the Periplus, in the middle of the first century A.D., was an unlearned trader who knew nothing about the long-vanished Seleucid eparchies; but he knew that in Asia a great many names of districts ended in -ηνῃ, and he just coined Dosarene from Dosara as a likely reproduction of the sound of the Indian name Dacharna.¹ I shall return to Dosarene, which is much later than the Hellenistic period.
c14.10
¹ Cited by Müller *ad loc.* from Lassen as the Sanscrit form.
c14.11
The ‘regio Attene’ near Gerrha of Pliny VI, 148 is identical with Polybius’ Χατρηνία, the third χώρα or province of the Gerrhaeans.² That the Gerrhaeans, who were closely associated with the Seleucids throughout, would organise on the Seleucid model, as did the Nabataeans, is obvious.
c14.12
² Polyb. x, 9, 1-3 = Steph. *s.v.* Λάβαι and Χατρηνία.
c14.13
Two names may be dismissed offhand. Maikene (Strabo XVI, 767) is a province of Characene, and Bubacene (Curt. VIII, 5, 2) is an eparchy of Sogdiana.
c14.14
Gouriane, a town in Margiane, is Ptolemy’s one mistake, if it be a mistake, for it appears from Polybius that the proper Greek name of the place was τὰ Γουρίανα.³ What probably happened is that the native name was something like Ghurian (a name existing to-day, but farther southward);⁴ Ptolemy’s source, an unlearned trader, turned it into Gouriane, not knowing any better, and Ptolemy, usually careful in this respect, overlooked it. Beside ’Οζήνη, there is a sort of parallel in Eratosthenes’ term Ariana for the Iranian plateau, which is not an -ανη name but only the Pahlavi āryān⁵ in Greek letters.
c14.15
³ On the identification of Gouriane (Ptol. VI, 10, 4) and τὰ Γουρίανα (Gutschmid’s certain correction of the MSS Ταγουριαν in Polyb. x, 49, 1) see CAH VIII p. 141 n. 1.
c14.16
⁴ Kiessling, *Guriane* in PW.
c14.17
⁵ Herzfeld, *Sakastan* p. 37.
c14.18
Pliny VI, 43 gives the Median Apamea, which was really in Choarene,⁶ as ‘Apamea Rhagiane cognominata’; this is only an adjective, Apamea ‘the Rhagian’,⁷ like its Antiochia Syria, ‘the Syrian’.⁸
c14.19
⁶ Isidore 8; unless there were two cities of the name.
c14.20
⁷ Strabo XI, 514 calls it περὶ τὰς ‘Ράγας.
c14.21
⁸ Pliny VI, 47; see p. 15 n. 1.
c14.22
I come now to the two real difficulties, which are in Hyrcania, a country where the town-names are so hopeless that not even Professor Kiessling has tried to straighten them out; no one of the lists we possess bears any recognisable relation to any other. Polybius gave a town ’Αχριανή,¹ and Patrocles, a century earlier, gave one called Σαμαριανή.² I have found nothing to throw light on Achriane; it may be a transcript of a native name ending in -ān, but that is guesswork. Samariane of course looks like ‘Samaritan’. There is a story, given only by Orosius (III, 7, 6) and other late writers, that Artaxerxes Ochus deported some Jews to Hyrcania;³ but even if he did, they would not in the fourth century B.C. have named their town after the hated Samaria. There are later legends which identify Gog and Magog, shut up behind the mountains, with the Ten Tribes;⁴ but one can hardly bring this into relation with Patrocles, neither did Assyrians really deport Samaritans to the Elburz, far outside their empire.⁵ A Greek epitaph of a ‘Samarian’, Eumenes, is said to have been seen near Kermanshah in Media (see p. 366 n. 8), but as his wife was named Arsinoe he presumably came from Samaria in the Arsinoë nome (Fayûm) in Egypt. A colony from Samaria in Palestine, settled by Alexander or some Persian king, is conceivable, but none such is known. Patrocles got his information through interpreters, and the name may be his own rendering in Greek of what he understood an interpreter to say; but what it means I do not know.
c14.23
¹ Steph. ’Αχριανή, πόλις ’Υρκανίας. Πολύβιος δεκάτῳ.
c14.24
² In Strabo XI, 508.
c14.25
³ See on this story A. R. Anderson, *Alexander’s Gate, Gog and Magog, and the Enclosed Nations* 1932 p. 59.
c14.26
⁴ Anderson op. cit. passim.
c14.27
⁵ As Anderson p. 58 suggests. For the real location of Gozan (Guzana) see Sidney Smith in *CAH* III p. 6 and Map 1.
c14.28
Lastly I must notice ’Αραπηνή in Arabia, as it comes in Strabo, and is instructive. Strabo (XVI, 781) says that Aelius Gallus, after leaving Leuce Come, went south through the land of Obodas’ kinsman Aretas and then through a land of nomads, largely desert, called Ararene, under a king Sabos. The Nabataean state, though never Seleucid, had the Seleucid province-names, like Saracene (the first occurrence of the name Saracen), but in the first century B.C. and later the southward boundary of that state was at Hegra,⁶ a little north of Al-’Ula, and Ararene was far beyond its bounds. But Ararene was not east of the Euphrates and is a late name, belonging to the reign of Augustus; it is the first example of a process, due to the -ηνή termination having become so usual throughout Asia, whereby under the Roman Empire that too familiar termination tended to be applied loosely to any territorial district; examples are the already mentioned Dosarene of the Periplus and the later Palmyrene. But this late usage has nothing to do with the second century B.C., and (Dosarene apart) I have only met with two instances of it east of the Euphrates. Writers of the Roman Empire, even Strabo, sometimes misused two particular words and wrote Bactriane and Parthyene for Bactria and Parthia;¹ but this is a mere mistake, due to the cause mentioned above, and cannot affect the general result arrived at for the Hellenistic period.
c14.29
⁶ Tarn, *JEA* XV, 1929, p. 23.
c14.30
¹ Isidore shows that there was a Parthian satrapy (Seleucid eparchy) called Parthyene; perhaps therefore there was also a Bactrian satrapy (Seleucid eparchy) called Bactriane.
c14.31
The conclusion for that period then is that we have found two difficulties, perhaps exceptions, in Hyrcania and one lapse in Ptolemy. Looking at the great number of -ηνῃ and -ιανῃ names known, this is little enough in the literature of a people who were often careless about, and perhaps even disliked, the consistent use of technical terms in the modern fashion, and, in the particular case of India, is little to set against the fact that Ptolemy, but for his one lapse, is always careful in his usage. Moreover the eparchy- or province-names in the Paropamisadae seem certain (pp. 96 sq.); and though prior to the second century B.C. that country had belonged rather to the Iranian than to the Indian system, it could not fail, from its position on the Indian side of the Hindu Kush, to be something more than a half-way house to India. It seems then that such exceptions as I have succeeded in finding do not provide any alternative to the view that the nine province-names collected in India—seven from Ptolemy and one each from Pliny and Arrian—and discussed in Chapter VI must have the same connection with the Seleucid terminology as is exhibited in the nomenclature of all the other Seleucid Succession states, that is, that they were provinces of the Greek kingdom in India.