The Greeks in Bactria and India c23.11

c23.11

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.