The Greeks in Bactria and India c22.10

c22.10

This narrows the question down to two points. Ssu-ma Ch’ien says that Chang-k’ien travelled through Ta-yuan on ‘postal roads’.⁸ Persians made post roads before Greeks did, but it cannot be shown that the Persians ever ruled Ferghana. The ‘Sacas’ of the earlier lists of Darius’ empire (Behistun and Persepolis) were in the last list, that of Naks-i-Rustam, divided into their two components, the Sacas wearing pointed caps and the Amyrgian Sacas (haumauarga, ‘preparers of Haoma’),¹ the new province-list of Xerxes² agreeing in this respect with that of Naks-i-Rustam; but Herodotus, in his reproduction of Xerxes’ army list, specifically identifies the two,³ and even if not identical they cannot therefore have lived far apart; I know no reason for Professor Herrmann’s view that the Amyrgian Sacas lived on the Pamirs⁴ (which cannot possibly have belonged to Darius), and the Hellanicus fragment, the source of which must be Persian, says that they lived on a plain.⁵ It is now known from Darius’ gold plate⁶ that the Sacas he ruled, who must be these two bodies, lived para Sugdam, ‘beyond Sogd’, *i.e.* in the country between the mountains north of Samarcand and the Jaxartes; and the question is whether the expression ‘Saca-land beyond Sogd’, primarily no doubt the Chodjend country and the land to the westward, would also include Ferghana. (It would be no objection that Ferghana was an agricultural country; some Saca clans were no longer nomads.) I cannot answer that question; but it is certain that if Ferghana was ever Achaemenid it had been lost before Alexander’s day; he could not have left an outlying Persian province without either occupying it himself or sending a force to do so, and also Ptolemy’s Sogdiana does not include Ferghana.⁷ But supposing that Darius *had* ruled Ferghana and *had* made post roads, is it conceivable that the local population would have kept them in order for nearly four centuries till 128 B.C., when Chang-k’ien saw them? These roads are good evidence for the Greek occupation of Ferghana, but they are not actually conclusive.