The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s1.167

c9.s1.167

So far we are in a purely Greek city; but other inscriptions show that foreign peoples shared Susa with the Greeks. One Greek makes a dedication to the Cappadocian goddess Mā,¹ whose presence attests that of Anatolians; the vocative θεέ in Herodorus’ ode (p. 39), elsewhere confined to Jewish and Christian texts and to magical texts where it probably shows Jewish influence,² reinforces the known fact³ that there was a Jewish community; a Babylonian woman frees one of her slaves;⁴ and a Greek epigram addressed to Apollo by the Syrian title of Mara, ‘Lord’, and praising a Persian inhabitant of Susa, Zamaspes, for something he had done in Parthian service, shows that the city included Syrians and Persians.⁵ But the borrowing from the native Elymaeans was more important. The gods of the Greek settlers had been Apollo and Artemis the Twins;⁶ and if Apollo had got himself a Syrian title, he was still at bottom Apollo, who had appeared in person to two Greek women of Susa to deliver them in some trouble.⁷ But Artemis had ceased to be anything Greek and was merely a name for the Elamite goddess Nanaia; Nanaia’s great temple, called τὰ Ἄζαρα, which had financial autonomy like the great Greek temples,⁸ stood at Susa, though possibly outside the wall (App. 7), and Artemis-Nanaia had become the city-goddess of the Greeks, as other mother-goddesses did from Ephesus to Pushkalāvatī under the name of Artemis; on some coins of Elymais of the first century A.D. she does actually appear as the city-goddess,⁹ radiate like Artemis-Anahita at Bactra (p. 115); the symbol of the Ephesian Artemis, the bee, was transferred to her (p. 6 n. 8); and the Greeks of Susa manumitted their slaves in her temple (pp. 68 sq.).