The Greeks in Bactria and India c24.21

c24.21

What now was the political position on the Gulf of Ormuz after the Greeks had occupied Barygaza and got the Indian end of the great sea-route to Babylonia? After the Seleucids had lost Seistan, Persis, Elymais, and Characene, a process begun after Magnesia and completed at latest soon after the death of Antiochus IV in 163, they cannot have retained the then isolated Carmania. But this province was not at the time included, so far as is known, in the Bactrian or Parthian realm; two centuries later Persis ruled the Kerman country,¹ but that is not in point. The general of the Carmanian satrapy, like others, must have done something for himself in the universal break-up, but no record remains; Carmania in the second century B.C. is a lost land. And by a curious coincidence the British Museum possesses a lost coin.² It is a well-executed Greek copper coin, showing jugate heads, both diademed, of a king Bellaios and his queen, whose name is effaced; the reverse type is the prow of a Greek war-galley, and ‘the strongly bevelled edge recalls Seleucid influence’. It ought then to belong to some Seleucid Succession State on the sea, but it will not fit any place whose coinage is known. The name Bellaios appears to be Macedonian.³