The Greeks in Bactria and India c8.9

c8.9

A word must be said here about the sources, though they will sufficiently appear as the book proceeds. They are of course very scrappy. But they were not always scrappy. There was once a Greek history which covered the Farther East generally, apparently down to 87 B.C. (pp. 45 sqq.), and there was another Greek history which also dealt with the Farther East, though seemingly only as an appendage to the history of Parthia (pp. 44 sq.); and the same thing has happened with regard to the Farther East as has happened with regard to another story whose historians have perished, that of the early third century in the Greek world about the Aegean: the scraps tend to combine, not into other scraps, but into at least the outline of a whole. There will be something to be said about this later (p. 46), but, as there was once a tradition, it is somebody’s business to attempt to recover the outline of it; one is not labouring in a vacuum. Our evidence is of many different kinds. On the Greek side, there are fragments of the lost historians preserved in several later writers, notably Strabo, Trogus-Justin, Plutarch, and Ptolemy the geographer (on whom see Chapter VI); various notices and indications in extant Greek and Latin writers, book VI of Pliny’s Naturalis Historia in particular containing much valuable Hellenistic material; and in place of the third-century inscriptions an almost unique wealth of coins, which give much more historical information than is usually the case with Greek coins. On the Indian side, there are some inscriptions and a little numismatic material, a bit of perhaps contemporary chronicle embedded in a later work (App. 4), indications of various sorts in literature (including Chinese and Thibetan translations of lost Indian writings), the excavations at Taxila, and the Milindapañha, which does not look quite the same to the Greek as to the Indian scholar and to which I have had to give a long Excursus. Towards the end we get a little real history, a rare blessing, in the Chinese historians Ssu-ma Chien and Pan-ku (App. 20); had China made the acquaintance of the ‘western countries’ a couple of generations earlier than she did, how thankful we should be.