The Greeks in Bactria and India c8.10

c8.10

At present, coins apart, it seems to be only from the Indian side that fresh information can be looked for, and I must bear grateful testimony to the fact that (so far as I can see) the Indian material has been far better prepared for the Greek historian than the Greek material has ever been for the Indian; I can only hope that I have not missed too much of it, but the main task is to get the Greek side into some sort of order and to try to establish a framework which may be of use to others. The coins of course are all-important, and one cannot overpraise the work done on them by generations of numismatists; it seems to me one of the wonders of scholarship. But the numismatist as such has sometimes been unable to place or explain the facts which he has elicited; naturally so, for he is not expected to be a Hellenistic historian. Again I can only hope that I have not missed too much; with one or two exceptions, my knowledge of the coins has, of necessity, been confined to printed publications and the unrivalled collection in the British Museum; one is never safe from the unpublished coin in private hands, and it has proved impossible to ascertain what, if anything, there may be at Tashkent. Naturally I am not concerned with the coins as coins, but only as material for history.