Greco-Bactrian Kingdom

A satrap stops answering

formationDrafted from Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014)

The Seleucids lost the east without noticing, and this is what they lost.

Around 256 BC Diodotus, the Seleucid satrap of Bactria, stopped acknowledging the king and began striking coins with his own portrait. There is no account of why or how. The classical sources give the whole of Greco-Bactrian history a few paragraphs — Strabo, Justin's epitome of a lost work, some notices in Polybius — and they were written by people who had never been there, from sources that are gone.

Cabinet des Médailles, Paris · Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014) · Photograph: World Imaging · CC BY-SA 3.0

What exists instead is coins, in very large numbers and of remarkable quality; one excavated city; a handful of inscriptions; some administrative documents on parchment and leather; and archaeology across northern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan that is difficult to conduct for reasons that have nothing to do with the ancient world.

Mairs' book is written from that material rather than around it, and the alternative is four hundred words of dynastic narrative the evidence will not carry. The dynastic sequence itself is a reconstruction. Kings are known because coins exist; their order is inferred from overstrikes and hoards; several of them were plainly issuing at the same time in different mints. Nobody can say how a Bactrian Greek king was supposed to be succeeded, because it is not certain in what order they reigned.

What can be said is that Bactria was worth having. It is irrigated country, the most agriculturally productive in Central Asia, with a dense settled population that long predates any Greek and a position on the routes between India, Iran and the steppe. Alexander had fought hardest here and had settled the most colonists here. When the chain of Seleucid cities running back to the Mediterranean stopped functioning, the far end did not collapse. It became a kingdom.

A Magnesian in Bactria

expansionDrafted from Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889)

In about 206 BC the Seleucid king came east with an army to take Bactria back, besieged its king in Bactra, and went home having recognised him. The argument that produced that result is preserved by Polybius and it is the best evidence anywhere for what this kingdom thought it was.

Not a rebel

Euthydemus was, Polybius notes, himself a Magnesian — a Greek from the Ionian coast of Asia Minor, ruling in Central Asia, two thousand miles from where his family came from.

His case to Antiochus was a lawyer's, and it turned on a distinction:

He was not himself a revolted subject, but had destroyed the descendants of some who had been such, and so had obtained the kingdom of Bactria.

Somebody had certainly seceded from the Seleucids — Diodotus, two generations back. Euthydemus had killed that man's heirs and taken the throne from them. Whatever crime founded the kingdom, he had punished it, and therefore held Bactria not against the Seleucids but in succession to people he had removed on their behalf.

It is an argument entirely about legitimacy rather than about strength, made by a man under siege. He is asking to be treated as a king, and the whole claim rests on how he came by the throne rather than on his ability to keep it.

The warning

The second half of the argument is the reason it worked, and it is the sentence the whole kingdom turns on.

Euthydemus urged the envoy to press Antiochus not to begrudge him the royal title — because if he refused:

neither of them would be safe: seeing that great hordes of Nomads were close at hand, who were a danger to both; and that if they admitted them into the country, it would certainly be utterly barbarised.

The king of Bactria told the king of Asia that their war was the opening the steppe was waiting for. Two Greek armies grinding each other down on the Oxus would use up exactly the force that kept the frontier shut.

Antiochus had been looking for a way out of the siege anyway, and took it.

Demetrius

The settlement was sealed by sending Euthydemus's son.

Antiochus received Demetrius, and Polybius records the grounds on which he decided: from the young man's appearance, his conversation and the dignity of his manners, he judged him worthy of royal power. He promised him one of his own daughters, and conceded the royal title to his father.

So the dynasty got what it had asked for — recognition, a marriage into the Seleucid house, and a king's name — and paid for it in elephants and supplies for an army that then marched away over the Hindu Kush.

Demetrius would later take Greek arms into India and give this kingdom its widest reach, and the Indo-Greek states that followed him lasted long after Bactria itself was gone.

British Museum, London · Polybius, The Histories of Polybius (1889) · Photograph: PHGCOM · Public domain

The warning came true

Euthydemus was right about the nomads and wrong only about the sequence.

The two Greek kingdoms did not destroy each other. They made a treaty, exchanged a prince, and parted on good terms. And roughly sixty years later the Yuezhi came over the Oxus anyway and ended the kingdom of Bactria — not because two Greek armies had exhausted each other, but because the frontier needed holding by somebody, permanently, and a Greek dynasty two thousand miles from Magnesia eventually could not.

He had identified the thing that would kill his kingdom and used it as a bargaining chip, and both of those were correct.

The city on the Oxus

peakDrafted from Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014)

At the confluence of the Oxus and the Kokcha, in what is now Takhar province in northern Afghanistan, a French mission excavated between 1964 and 1978 the only extensively dug Hellenistic city in Central Asia. Its ancient name is not certainly known; it is called Ai-Khanoum, which is Uzbek for lady moon.

What came out of it is the reason the kingdom is not a footnote. A gymnasium of considerable size. A theatre seating several thousand. A palace with a courtyard of over a hundred columns. Corinthian capitals, a mosaic, a sundial calibrated for a latitude that is not Bactria's. A treasury with inscribed jars. Fragments of a philosophical text on papyrus and of a Greek literary papyrus, surviving only as impressions in the soil where the papyrus itself had rotted.

National Museum of Afghanistan, Kabul · Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014) · Marco Prins · CC0

And in a sanctuary, a stone inscribed by a man called Klearchos, who recorded that he had copied the Delphic maxims — know thyself, nothing in excess — at Delphi and brought them here to set up. It is about four thousand kilometres.

Musée Guimet, Paris · Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014) · World Imaging · Public domain

Mairs' argument is that the obvious reading of this material is the wrong one. Ai-Khanoum is routinely described as a piece of Greece transplanted, a homesick colony reproducing the metropolis at the ends of the earth. What the site actually shows is a place where a Greek civic vocabulary coexists with Bactrian temple architecture, Achaemenid administrative practice, local building techniques and a population that was overwhelmingly not Greek. The sanctuary Klearchos put his stone in is not a Greek temple; it is a stepped platform of Mesopotamian and Iranian type.

The people who lived there were not Greeks abroad. They were, after three or four generations, Bactrians who used Greek — which is what the coins show too, and what the site's later material shows when the Greek names give way to local ones in the same offices.

The city was abandoned around 145 BC. There is destruction, there is looting of the treasury, and there is a squatter occupation afterwards. What ended it is the subject of the last chapter, and the honest answer is that nobody knows precisely.

A polity known from its money

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014)

Most ancient kingdoms are known because somebody wrote about them. This one is known because it minted, and the difference is worth a chapter, because it changes the kind of thing that can be known.

The Greco-Bactrian coins are, by common consent, among the finest produced anywhere in antiquity. The portraits are individual to the point of being unflattering — Euthydemus as a heavy-jawed old man, Antimachus in a flat hat with an expression of visible amusement, Eucratides in a plumed helmet — and they are executed at a level of die-cutting that classical numismatists rank with the best Sicilian work. Eucratides struck a twenty-stater gold piece of about a hundred and seventy grams, the largest gold coin surviving from the ancient world, which was found in the nineteenth century and is now lost again.

Staatliche Münzsammlung, Munich · Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014) · Photograph: ArchaiOptix · CC BY-SA 4.0

From that material a dynasty has been reconstructed: perhaps twenty kings, their approximate order, their approximate dates, their titles, the gods they claimed, the mints they controlled and roughly when they lost them. It is a remarkable piece of scholarship and it is inference from objects.

Consider what that leaves and what it does not. How the kings claimed the right to rule can be read off the reverses — Soter, Nikator, Theos, Aniketos, and Zeus and Herakles and Apollo standing behind them — which is a thin basis for a statement about how a dynasty described itself in public, and is the only basis there is. How much territory they held, and how many people lived in it, cannot be read off anything: no cited figure exists for either.

Compare a kingdom like Saba' in South Arabia, known from tens of thousands of its own inscriptions and from no narrative whatever. Neither wrote history about itself, which is true of most of the ancient world, and each therefore survives only in the shape of whatever it happened to be in the habit of producing — inscriptions in the one case, silver in the other. What we know about the past is heavily determined by what its inhabitants were in the habit of making.

There is one more thing the coins show, and it is the beginning of the next page. South of the Hindu Kush the same dynasty's issues change: the weight standard becomes Indian, the shape becomes square, and the reverse legend is in Prakrit written in Kharoshthi alongside the Greek. A currency is a public document, and a bilingual one is a statement about who is expected to use it.

What came out of the steppe

endDrafted from Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014)

The end of Greek Bactria is a chain of displacements that begins two thousand kilometres east and is recorded, unusually, from the Chinese side.

The Xiongnu — the steppe confederation that Han China spent two centuries managing — defeated the Yuezhi on the Gansu frontier in the 170s BC and drove them west. The Yuezhi displaced the Sakas, the Sakas moved south and west into Sogdiana and Bactria and eventually into Iran and India, and the Yuezhi followed them. Zhang Qian, the Han envoy who opened the first Chinese contact with Iran, was sent to find the Yuezhi and propose an alliance against the Xiongnu; he reached them in Bactria around 128 BC and reported that they had settled there and were no longer interested in revenge.

Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014) · Unknown artist · Public domain

His report is the best contemporary description of Bactria anybody wrote, and it describes the country as prosperous, walled, full of markets, and militarily feeble.

By then the Greek kingdom north of the Hindu Kush was finished or finishing. Ai-Khanoum was abandoned around 145; the northern mints stopped; the last Bactrian Greek issues are of the 130s. There is no battle in any source and no year that can be given as the year the kingdom ended — only a decade in which the coins stop and nobody appears to have taken the country from anybody.

The Yuezhi settled, divided into five principalities, and a century and a half later one of them — the Kushanas — absorbed the others and produced an empire that would rule from the Oxus to the Ganges. So Bactria's Greek period ends and its Kushan period begins, in the same valleys, with a good deal carried across: the Kushans struck coins on Greek models with Greek legends for generations, used the Greek alphabet to write their own Iranian language, and out of their territory came the Gandharan sculpture that put Greek drapery on the Buddha.

Mairs, The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia (2014) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 3.0

The other half of the dynasty was south of the mountains, in a different country, and outlasted the northern kingdom by more than a century.

The Mother of Cities

afterlifeDrafted from Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905)

Bactria the kingdom lasted about a hundred and twenty years. Bactra the city was there before it and was still the greatest city in Khurasan a thousand years afterwards, under the name Balkh. The Arabic geographers call it the Mother of Cities.

The geographers describe a place of a size that is hard to reconcile with the ruin standing there now. In the ninth century Ya'qubi calls it the greatest city in all Khurasan, with forty congregational mosques in it. It had had three concentric walls and thirteen gates in the old days; by the tenth century it had seven, and the list of their names is a census of who lived there — the Gate of the Square, the Iron Gate, the Gate of the Sixty Dykes, the Jews' Gate, the Gate of the Hindus.

Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905) · AhmadElhan · CC BY-SA 4.0

The houses ran three miles square. A stream called the Dahas, meaning ten mills, turned them as it passed the Naw Bahar gate and went on to irrigate the farms towards Termez. Around the city were gardens growing oranges, sugar cane and the water lily, and the produce was exported in quantity. Muqaddasi runs through the beauty, the many streams, the cheapness of food, the broad streets and the well-built palaces, in the tone of a man who had enjoyed himself there.

The New Monastery

Outside the walls stood the suburb the Arabic writers call Naw Bahar, and their account of it is the most interesting thing in the chapter, partly for what it describes and partly for what they thought they were describing.

They report it as a fire temple: one of the chief sanctuaries of the Zoroastrians in Sasanian times, whose hereditary chief priest was a man called Barmak. It was built, they say, in imitation of and in rivalry with the Ka'ba. Its walls were set with precious stones and hung with brocade curtains, and were anointed with perfumes, particularly in spring — Naw Bahar means early spring, and spring was when the pilgrimage was made. The central building carried a dome more than a hundred ells high, and around it stood three hundred and sixty chambers housing three hundred and sixty priests, one for each day of the year. A silk banner on the summit streamed out in the wind for an implausible distance. Inside were figures, and before one of them the pilgrims from Kabul, from India and from China prostrated themselves, afterwards kissing the hand of Barmak. The sanctuary owned the land for seven leagues around and drew a great revenue from it.

Read that again with the geography in mind. Pilgrims from India and China, prostrating before an image, in a domed building with three hundred and sixty cells for monks, in Bactria.

Naw Bahar is not Persian for anything. It is Sanskrit — nava vihara, the new monastery. What the Muslim writers are describing, several centuries later and through a Zoroastrian vocabulary because that was the vocabulary they had for Iranian religion, is one of the great Buddhist foundations of Central Asia. The priest is an abbot; the hand-kissing is what pilgrims did; the three hundred and sixty chambers are cells.

The sanctuary was destroyed by Ahnaf ibn Qays in the conquest of Khurasan under the caliph Uthman. Barmak's family converted, and his descendants became the Barmakids — the viziers who effectively ran the Abbasid caliphate under Harun al-Rashid until he destroyed them in a night.

What finally did it

Balkh survived the loss of its sanctuary by five hundred years.

The Ghuzz Turks laid it in ruins in 1155; the population came back and rebuilt it a little way off, and it had substantially recovered by the time Yaqut described it in the early thirteenth century. Then the Mongols came in 1220. Ibn Battuta, passing through more than a century later, found Balkh still completely ruined and uninhabited — Chinggis Khan had pulled down a third of the Great Mosque looking for treasure that was not there — with a scatter of tombs and shrines outside the walls that pilgrims still visited. Timur rebuilt part of it at the end of the fourteenth century.

So the sequence in this one place runs: a Greek kingdom minting the best coins in the ancient world, a Buddhist monastery drawing pilgrims from China, a Zoroastrian priesthood whose heirs governed Baghdad, forty Friday mosques and sugar cane, and then two devastations eighty years apart from which it never fully returned.

The Greek kingdom is the shortest item on that list by a wide margin. It is also, in Europe, the only one of them anybody has heard of.