The Greeks in Bactria and India c33.15

c33.15

Certain sources, then, or a certain source, of Pliny and Ptolemy knew the Tochari as Tagorae or Takor(aioi) or Tagour(aioi), all unaspirated forms. But such source or sources also knew of the sojourn of the Tochari in the Lake Issyk Kul district and of their crossing the Jaxartes southward. The information here, then, in Pliny and Ptolemy does not come from merchants’ itineraries or anything similar; it must go back ultimately to some historian who related the movements of the Tochari, and, as Apollodorus used the form Tocharoi, the only possible historian is ‘Trogus’ source’, to whom, as this book has shown, a good deal in Ptolemy ultimately goes back; therefore, though it is only deduction, it is at least as likely that this historian, our best authority, used some unaspirated form like Tagorae as that he used the aspirated form Thocari or Thogari. If Professor Bailey’s suggestion⁶ that the Chinese in the second century B.C. were trying to copy a form τογαρα be right, the unaspirated form is very old, which supports the virtual certainty that the form Tagorae is Hellenistic. The form occurs again, as ttaugara, in a Khotan Saca document of c. A.D. 800.¹