The Greeks in Bactria and India c9.s2.203

c9.s2.203

The other thing which appears to me to be certain is the general rise in the level of Asia, not merely the evolution of the settlement into the city and of the village into the settlement, but the kind of intangible Greek atmosphere, already noticed, which affected many Asiatics; it has left one literary monument of itself, Ecclesiastes, whose Greek atmosphere has been the despair of those scholars who have sought to pin it down to some definite source. Even so, in the actual world, that atmosphere cannot be pinned down to definite data, but it can be felt and occasionally its effects can be seen. Two instances may be given. Where the Kurdistan hills come down to the Tigris there had lived in Xenophon’s day a savage people, the Karduchi. The country became successively the Seleucid eparchy of Gordyene and then a little Succession kingdom; as no Greek settlements are known there the Greeks in it must have been few, but by the first century B.C. the Karduchi had become the comparatively civilised Gordyeni¹ whom we meet in Plutarch, merely because a better way of life was in the air and they felt it. Another instance, though outside the actual Seleucid bounds, is furnished by the Nabataeans, who in the third century B.C. were pirates and who by the Christian Era had become a civilised state.