The Greeks in Bactria and India c21.12

c21.12

One must first try to be clear about this town Arachosia, for no serious examination of the difficult geography of the Arachosian satrapy has been made since Droysen. Stephanus’ town Arachosia is the town Arachosia of Pliny VI, 92 and the Arachotos of Ptolemy VI, 20, and is also ‘the Arachosians’ of Eratosthenes in Strabo XI, 514¹ and of Pliny VI, 62, two notices which both go back to Alexander’s bematists and give their distances; the name ‘the Arachosians’ indicates the Persian capital of the Arachosian satrapy. ‘The Arachosians’ has nothing to do with any Alexandria, or with Kandahar or Ghazni; we have the bematists’ figures, and Droysen² proved conclusively that ‘the Arachosians’ was somewhere in the neighbourhood of Kalat-i-Gilzai, a natural enough situation for the seat of the Persian satrap who had to govern both the plains of Seistan and the hill country to the north and east. But Alexander separated Seistan from the Arachosian satrapy and left that satrapy nothing but the hill country, identical with the later Parthian satrapy of Arachosia in Isidore 19; and ‘the Arachosians’ ceased to be a good centre for government. Alexander, therefore, who had already provided for Seistan by the foundation of Alexandria-Prophthasia (p. 14) on the Hamun Lake, proceeded to found, much farther to the north than Kalat-i-Gilzai, an Alexandria which was to be capital of the hill country; the foundation of this Alexandria is recorded in Arrian III, 28, 4 as made *before* Alexander crossed the Caucasus into the Kabul valley but when he was already in the hills and in a district where the people were ‘Indians’ (*ib.* III, 28, 1); without any doubt therefore it is now represented by Ghazni. This Alexandria is the μητρόπολις ’Αραχωσίας of Isidore 19, which Droysen rightly saw was Ghazni;³ Isidore, in calling the Parthian satrapy of Arachosia ‘White India’, recalls Arrian’s ‘Indians’. It is also Alexandria ‘among the Arachosians’, no. 12 in Stephanus’ list, and may also be no. 15, ‘beside the Arachosians (or “the Arachosians”) but bordering on India’.⁴