The Greeks in Bactria and India c29.18

c29.18

I have given in the text of Chapter VIII (p. 343) the reasons for supposing that Hermaeus gave a relative—sister is more probable than daughter—in marriage to a Kushan chief who was ancestor, probably grandfather, of Kadphises I. He can I think be identified. A Kushan chief is known, prior to the time of Kadphises I, who struck a Greek coinage with a Greek legend: Miaos (or Heraos—the name is said not to be certain) who calls himself ‘Kushan’ on his coinage.⁴ The obverse shows his head, while the reverse has the type of the Hermaeus and Calliope coins,⁵ ‘King on horseback’; but a flying Victory crowning the king, natural enough in the circumstances, has been added, a design repeated later on the coins of Gondophares. Miaos’ coins are earlier than the Hermaeus-Kadphises coins, since for a monogram they bear the Greek letter B, while one class (class 2) of the Hermaeus-Kadphises coins has Kharoshthi letters but none have Greek letters. The portrait of Miaos bears a very strong resemblance to some of those of Wima Kadphises,⁶ the son of Kadphises I, who if I am right was his great-grandson. The legend is TYPANNOYNTOΣ MIAOY (or whatever the name is) ΣANAB KOPPANOY, with many variants in the spelling. The last word is certainly ‘Kushan’, the P being the *sh* sign (see App. 18); this is its first appearance on coins in the Farther East, though it was soon followed by the *sh* sign on the coins of Spalirises (p. 509). The word τυραννοῦντος shows that Miaos was not a king, but a local ruler of some sort whose position was less than royal; τύραννος is regularly used in that sense by the author of the Periplus⁷ about a century later, and τυραννοῦντος shows not only that the moneyer knew Greek as a still living tongue but that he could appreciate the distinction between τύραννος and τυραννοῦντος—not ‘ruler’ but ‘under the rule of’; he probably had in mind βασιλεύοντος on the pedigree coins of Antimachus and Agathocles. The Kushan Miaos must in fact have been one of the five princes of the Yueh-chi, the yabghu (yavuga) of the Kuei-shuang, who at this time are said to have been somewhere between Chitral and the Panjshir country (p. 342); there is said to be tolerably easy communication by the Dorah pass between Badakshan on the Bactrian and Chitral on the Indian side.¹ The Greek moneyer did not attempt to render Miaos’ title; perhaps he did not know very well what yavuga meant, and so used the indefinite τυραννοῦντος; on the later Kushan coinage yavuga was to be transliterated. So far everything agrees well enough with the view that Miaos was a contemporary of Hermaeus and ancestor of Kadphises I.²