The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.115

c9.s2.115

The fourth writer is the geographer Isidore of Charax; that is Charax Spasinu (Charax of Hyspaosines),¹ the Greek city at the mouth of the Tigris which had been successively an Alexandria and an Antioch and which in the first century B.C., as the capital of Characene, was one of the great trading ports of the East, with a motley population of many races and languages, as the names of its kings attest; Isidore himself knew Aramaic.² His traditional date is shortly before the Christian Era, and this has recently been confirmed by a fresh examination of the material.³ He refers to the second attempt of Tiridates to seize the crown of Parthia from Phraates IV in 26–5 B.C.,⁴ and he mentions that the Parthians called Arachosia ‘White India’, which, it has been pointed out, is only sense if Arachosia was at the time part of some Indian kingdom;⁵ in fact the statement can only belong to the time of the Azes dynasty (Chap. VIII), from c. 30 B.C. to A.D. 19, and as Isidore was a well-known man in 1 B.C. his writings must fall in the last quarter of the first century B.C. There is however an apparent difficulty. Pseudo-Lucian, speaking of the kings of Characene, quotes ‘Isidore of Charax the historian’⁶ as mentioning either the eleventh or the tenth¹ king of Characene, Artabazus. No Artabazus is known to the coins; and as the dated coinage of the kings goes down to A.D. 71–2, followed by a gap down to 100–1, Artabazus if historical should come in that gap,² which would put Isidore late in the first century A.D. He has recently in fact so dated;³ but this seems impossible, quite apart from Pliny’s knowledge of him, for in the Stathmoi he knows nothing later than Phraates IV (died 3–2 B.C.), and the expression ‘White India’ can only belong to the period c. 30 B.C.–A.D. 19. Pseudo-Lucian’s source on the kings of Characene was a late work on Characene which passed under the name of Charax’ greatest citizen—a thing common enough in Hellenistic times—and which ought to be cited as Pseudo-Isidoros;⁴ what it does prove is that Isidore’s city was Charax Spasinu and not Charax in Media.