Geographical and Economic Studies in the Mahabharata: Upayana Parva c5.29

c5.29

Now let us return for a moment to the nomad conquest of Bactria. It has been a practice with the older writers to attribute the fall of Bactria to Sakas, though the statement of Chang K'ien who attributes the conquest to Ta Yüe-Chï should have been taken as final. This mistake according to W. W. Tarn²⁵ who has made the latest contribution to the problem of the nomad conquest of Bactria, arose from a simple passage of Strabo (XI, 511) in which he says that the Sakas occupied Bactria. But as the context proves he is talking of the Achaemenid times or probably the 7th century B.C., when the great Saka invasion well-known from the Assyrian sources which had played its part in the fall of Ninevah and had penetrated as far as Cappadocian Pontus.