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The Greeks in Bactria and India c23: Appendix 11. Chorasmia

The Greeks in Bactria and India c23

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Appendix 11. Chorasmia

c23.2

The name Chorasmia is never given by any Greek writer, but only a people Chorasmii. It is always assumed that this people lived in Chorasmia, *i.e.* Kwarizm, Khiva, the fertile country south of the Aral on the lower Oxus. It may be well to test this assumption and see whither that leads us.

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The Chorasmii are first mentioned by Hecataeus¹ as living in a land, partly plain partly mountain, eastward of the Parthava; this land is not Kwarizm, where there are no real mountains and which was not eastward of the Parthava. In Herodotus also the land of the Chorasmii is partly plain partly mountain, their neighbours being Hyrcanians and Parthians (Parthava), but in his day they had lost the plain to the Persian kings;² they were subject to the Persians, and in Xerxes’ army list they are brigaded with the Parthava and with no other people.³ Herodotus then agrees with Hecataeus, except that the Chorasmii had lost the best of their land. He puts them in the 16th satrapy with the Parthava, Arians, and Sogdians; the passages cited above show that this is correct for the Chorasmii, even though ‘Sogdians’ here are impossible.⁴ Darius’ three lists of lands give no help, as the eastern lands are not in any geographical order and moreover the position of the Chorasmii differs in the Behistun and Naks-i-Rustam lists; but in the inscription relating to the building of the Apadāna at Susa Darius obtained some substance from Chorasmia which, if the translation ‘turquoise’ be correct,⁵ agrees with Hecataeus and Herodotus, for turquoise could not come from anywhere but the famous mines in Khorasan; but as there are other translations this cannot be stressed. Lastly Arrian, describing the ‘Taurus-Caucasus’ line of mountains from an unknown source (? Eratosthenes), makes it run from Armenia by the Parthians and Chorasmians to Bactria and the Hindu Kush.⁶ So far, then, the Chorasmii are a people in the Hyrcanian-Parthian satrapy, and as Darius’ land-lists name them separately they differed recognisably from the Parthava, but they were apparently Iranians⁷ and not a pre-Iranian people like the Tapuri. It would seem therefore probable that Darius I never ruled Kwarizm.

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¹ Athen. II, 70 b.

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² Herod. III, 17.

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³ Ib. VII, 66.

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⁴ Ib. III, 93. I am not concerned here with the Sogdians; but Herat and Samarcand cannot have been governed by the same satrap when the Bactrian satrapy, which included Margus (Merv), cut communication between them.

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⁵ Kent’s translation, *JAOS* LIII, 1933, p. 1 l. 39. Scheil however gives haematite and Herzfeld grey amber; see Kent’s note and p. 103 n. 5.

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⁶ Arr. V, 5, 2.

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⁷ Pseudo-Lucian, *Macrobii* 4; not the best of evidence.

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By the time Alexander arrived the state of things had changed. The Chorasmii were now no longer subject to Persia; there are none in the army of Darius III. Instead, they had become members of the Massagetae confederacy,¹ though that does not locate them; but something may be learnt from the visit of their king Pharasmanes to Alexander.² Arrian makes him say that his kingdom bordered on the Colchians, a wild impossibility doubtless arising out of an interpreter’s blunder;³ but his offer to guide Alexander to the Euxine shows that he knew, or knew of, the trade route which ran through the land of the Aorsi north of the Aral and Caspian to the Black Sea,⁴ which certainly suggests that he and his people were at the time in Kwarizm. The Chorasmii then in the late Persian period had moved north, whether to escape Persian rule or because they had lost their best land; but the important thing is that their king should have had a good Persian name.⁵ Two other pieces of evidence belong to the time between Alexander and the nomad conquest of Bactria; Ptolemy⁶ puts the Chorasmii on the Oxus, *i.e.* in Kwarizm, and the Mihr Yast (§ 14) implies the same. It says that Mithras beholds the broad navigable waters hastening towards Mouru (Merv), Harôyu (Aria), Gava-Sughdha (Sogdiana), and Hvârizem (Chorasmia).⁷ The three first rivers are obviously the Margus, Arius, and Oxus; and the fourth must also be the Oxus on its way to Kwarizm,⁸ for no large river hastened towards the Parthian satrapy. Once we get to the time of the nomad conquest of Bactria, the name Chorasmii does not occur again in Greek sources.

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¹ Strabo XI, 513. Strabo adds that Spitamenes took refuge with the Chorasmii, while Arrian IV, 16, 4 says that he went to the country of the Massagetae; the Chorasmii therefore were already part of the Massagetae confederacy in Alexander’s day.

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² Arr. IV, 15, 4.

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³ Droysen I, 2, p. 66 (ed. 1877) saw that it was nonsense; and the Chinese evidence and that of Strabo XI, 506 as to the Aorsi lying round the heads of the Aral and Caspian is conclusive. U. Wilcken, *Alexander der Grosse* p. 162, has a most interesting idea: Pharasmanes (who had just given asylum to Spitamenes) was challenging Alexander to fight the nomad world.

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⁴ Strabo XI, 506.

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⁵ It must be the same name as Pharismanes, son of the satrap Phrataphernes, Arr. VI, 27, 3.

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⁶ Ptol. VI, 12, 4; doubtless ultimately from the Alexander-story.

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⁷ Darmesteter’s translation, *Sacred Books of the East* XXIII, 1883, p. 123, does not give ‘navigable’, but only ‘wide-flowing rivers’. ‘Broad navigable waters’ is the recent translation of A. Christensen, *Die Iranier* p. 216.

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⁸ So Darmesteter *loc. cit.* The Atrek flows away from Parthia proper.

c23.20

We now have to ask why the Chorasmii migrated from south to north against the general direction of all known Iranian migrations, and why they, a people living in northern Iran, had a king with a Persian (south Iranian) name. The hypothesis put forward in Chapter VII pp. 292 *sqq.* (to which I must refer) regarding the Pasiani-Parsii of Apollodorus will answer these questions: the Parsii (Parsua) were Persians who had stayed behind in Kwarizm when the rest of the Parsua-Persians went south, and the Chorasmii must have been a section or tribe of the Parsii. That is why the Chorasmii went *north* to Kwarizm; they had once migrated from it to the south and were now returning to their own people. That is why their chief had a Persian name; like the Parsii, they must have spoken some form of Persian. That is why they were in the Massagetae confederacy; the Parsii were members (p. 469). That is why their name died out in Greek writers; they were included in the Parsii. Though the Greeks had never had a name for the country of the Chorasmii, the Persians had; and that name, as the Mihr Yast shows, followed the Chorasmii to Kwarizm. I believe that my hypothesis covers all the facts at present known.

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