The Greeks in Bactria and India c21.4

c21.4

It was seen long ago that the word Ki-pin imports a Greek place-name Kophen² or Kophene, obviously connected with the Kophen (Kabul) river. Cunningham, in the belief that this place-name does not actually occur in Greek (Kophene does not), gave the name Kophene, a properly formed eparchy name, to the district south of the lower Kabul river of which Purushapura (Peshawur) was the capital,³ thus making it one of the satrapies of Gandhāra; and in fact, though the names of several of the Gandhāra satrapies are known (p. 237), that of the Peshawur satrapy is missing (unless it were part of Peucelaitis and not a separate satrapy). But this cannot be right, for, though the province-name Kophene does not occur in Greek, a town-name Kophen does, and it cannot be Peshawur. Stephanus gives the name and identifies it with a town Arachosia ‘not far from the Massagetae’;⁴ his source for the identification is not given. By ‘Massagetae’ here he can only mean the people called Parsii (Pasiani of Apollodorus)⁵ who after the overthrow of the Bactrian kingdom had joined in the great Saca invasion of Parthia; his statement means that at the time of the invasion the Parsii were members of the Massagetae confederacy,⁶ for no other Massagetae had anything to do with Kophen. After the defeat of that invasion the Parsii had separated from the main body and had worked northward through Arachosia by the regular route which Alexander had once followed, by Ghazni to Kabul; this is clear from Ptolemy, who has preserved so much information from the Greek period in India (Chap. VI), and who, perhaps ultimately from ‘Trogus’ source’, records the Parsii by name as being in the Paropamisadae (which they could not have reached in any other way) and also gives two villages of theirs in that country, Parsia and Parsiana.⁸