Indo-Greek Kingdoms

Over the mountains

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

Around 180 BC Demetrius, son of the Greco-Bactrian king Euthydemus, took an army south through the passes of the Hindu Kush into Gandhara and the Punjab, and the Greek kingdoms of India begin there.

The timing was not accidental. The Mauryan empire had ended in 185 BC when its last king was killed by his own general, and north-western India was consequently a set of successor kingdoms rather than a single power. A Greek army coming down from Bactria found the same kind of opening the Bactrians had found in the Seleucid east forty years earlier.

What followed is difficult to narrate and there is no point pretending otherwise. The classical sources have almost nothing; the Indian sources mention the Yavanas — Ionians, meaning Greeks — in passing and hostilely; and the reconstruction is again from coins. What the coins show is that after about 130 BC there were several kings issuing at once in overlapping territories, and whether they were branches of one family, rivals, or a sequence that has been misordered is the argument rather than the background.

That is why the kingdoms are named in the plural, and why nobody can say how one of these kings was supposed to be succeeded by the next.

Two things are clear enough to build on. The kingdoms lasted: the last Indo-Greek issues are around the turn of the era, which is nearly two centuries after Demetrius crossed and a century and a half after the Bactrian half was gone. And they were not a garrison holding a foreign country at arm's length, which is what the coins show and what the third chapter is about.

Forty kings and no chronicle

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

There is no narrative history of the Indo-Greek kingdoms. There is no king list, no chronicle, no inscription from any of their courts recording a reign. What there is, is coins — and from the coins, something like forty rulers have been recovered whose names are otherwise entirely unknown.

How a kingdom is reconstructed from money

The method is worth setting out because it is nearly all there is.

Each king struck coins with his own name and portrait, and often with an epithet — Soter, saviour; Nikephoros, bringer of victory; Dikaios, the just; Aniketos, the invincible. The names are Greek and the portraits are individual enough to be recognisable as different men.

From that, and from the find-spots, the monograms of the mints, the metals, the weight standards and the way one king's types are copied or overstruck by another, the sequence and the geography can be partly reconstructed. Two overlapping series emerge: kings in Bactria north of the Hindu Kush, and kings in the Kabul valley, Gandhara and the Punjab south of it.

The result is a political history with an unusual shape. We know roughly how many rulers there were, roughly where each of them minted, and something about who followed whom. We know almost nothing about what any of them did.

Bilingual by necessity

The southern kings struck bilingual coins: Greek legend on the obverse, the same titles in Prakrit in Kharosthi script on the reverse.

That is not a cultural gesture. It is what a Greek-speaking dynasty does when its taxpayers do not read Greek, and it is the single most useful thing the Indo-Greeks did for anybody afterwards — because a coin with the same text in two scripts is a bilingual key, and it is how Kharosthi and then Brahmi were eventually approached.

The Indo-Greek coinage is also technically the best of the ancient world outside the Mediterranean. The portraits are individual, unflattering and superb; Eucratides struck the largest gold coin surviving from antiquity.

Expansion into what

The push south through the passes in the 180s BC took Greek rule from Bactria into the Kabul valley, Gandhara, the Punjab and — on the strength of a statement in a much later Sanskrit grammatical text and a Greek geographer's notice — as far east as Mathura and possibly Pataliputra.

That eastern raid is one of the most argued-over claims in the field. Patanjali, writing on Sanskrit grammar, gives as an example of a past-tense construction a sentence about the Yavana besieging Saketa and Madhyamika; the Yuga Purana describes Greeks reaching Pataliputra. Strabo says the Greeks of Bactria took more of India than Alexander.

None of it is a campaign narrative and all of it is compatible with a deep raid rather than an occupation. What is not in doubt is that a Greek-speaking dynasty was minting coins in the Punjab a century and a half after Alexander had left.

Why there are so many of them

The forty kings are the diagnosis. A territory that produces that many sovereigns in about a hundred and fifty years, several of them minting simultaneously in overlapping regions, is not a kingdom passing peacefully from father to son.

The epithets tell the same story: too many saviours and invincibles, too many men asserting on their money that they had won. A dynasty confident of its position does not need to.

What the coins record, in other words, is not an empire expanding. It is a Greek military aristocracy in the Punjab, dividing, quarrelling and re-dividing, on increasingly small parcels of a country it had taken and could not agree how to hold.

Menander

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

Menander I ruled somewhere in the middle of the second century BC, and by every measure that survives he was the largest of these kings.

His coins are the most numerous of any Indo-Greek ruler and are found across a very wide area, from the Kabul valley in the west to Mathura in the east, which is the basis for saying his kingdom was the biggest of them. Strabo, quoting Apollodorus, says he crossed more peoples than Alexander did. His portraits show him young on some issues and old on others, which points to a long reign, and the coins were still in circulation on the Gujarat coast generations after he was dead.

What being the largest of them amounted to

Not, on the evidence, an empire in any centralised sense.

The Indo-Greek kingdoms were a set of overlapping royal authorities in Gandhara, the Kabul valley and the Punjab, several of them issuing at once, some of them certainly contemporaries who have been read as a sequence. Menander is the one whose issues cover the most ground, and even for him there is no capital that can be named with confidence, no administrative document, no account of how a province was governed or a tax collected. There is a very large amount of excellent silver and nothing that explains it.

What the silver does show is what he was addressing. His coins carry his titles in Greek on one face and in Prakrit, in Kharoshthi script, on the other, and some of them use the formula that answers to the Pali dhammika dhamma-raja — the king who rules by the Dhamma. A number of the Greek kings of this region did the same. That is a statement made in public, in quantity, in a vocabulary his subjects rather than his soldiers would recognise.

Some of his issues put a wheel on the reverse. It is a Buddhist symbol and it is also a general Indian one, and the difference matters: being surrounded by Buddhist subjects whose views you want to meet is not the same as being a Buddhist, and nothing on the coins settles which of the two this was.

The reason we know his name at all

He died on campaign, and Plutarch preserves what happened next: the cities disputed possession of his ashes, and the quarrel was settled by dividing the relics among them so that each could raise a monument.

That is precisely what the Buddhist tradition says was done with the remains of the Buddha.

It may be a coincidence, and the classical writers who report it certainly had no idea they were describing a Buddhist funeral. But it is the first sign of what happened to Menander afterwards, which turned out to be more consequential than anything he did while alive.

Two faces of a coin

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

North of the Hindu Kush, the Bactrian coins are Greek objects: round, on the Attic weight standard, with a Greek portrait, a Greek legend and a Greek god.

South of the Hindu Kush they change. The flan becomes square, in the Indian manner. The weight standard becomes Indian. And the reverse carries the king's titles in Prakrit, written in Kharoshthi — the Aramaic-derived script of Gandhara — while the obverse keeps them in Greek.

That is a small change standing in for a very large one. A coin is a public document produced by a government in quantity for people to hold, and a bilingual coin is a statement about who is expected to hold it. The Bactrian kingdom's money addressed a Greek-speaking settler and administrative class. This kingdom's money addressed the country.

The Ptolemies in Egypt were doing something that looks similar and turns out not to be. That dynasty was divine in Greek and pharaonic in Egyptian, and published the Rosetta decree in three scripts because three audiences had to be able to read it — a state making different claims to different people, deliberately and in parallel.

The difference is the direction of travel. The Ptolemies ran the two vocabularies side by side for three centuries and the Greek one stayed on top; Cleopatra was reportedly the first of them to learn Egyptian. Here the movement runs the other way, and it is visible in the objects. Greek names give way to local ones. The Greek legends get smaller and eventually get misspelt. Indian deities appear. And the dynasties that took these kingdoms — Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian, Kushan — went on striking coins in the same idiom for centuries after the last Greek king, the Kushans using the Greek alphabet to write an Iranian language for four hundred years. That is this coinage's grammar outliving the people who brought it by three centuries and more.

Whether the men producing these coins still thought of themselves as Greeks is Mairs' central question, and her answer is that the question is badly posed. Identity in Bactria and Gandhara was situational and plural; the evidence is objects rather than statements; and asking for one label for the people who made them is asking the material for something it does not contain.

The silver thins

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

The end of Greek rule in India can be watched happening in the metal.

What debasement records

The early Indo-Greek coinage is good silver, struck on the Attic standard, with portraits of a quality that stands comparison with anything from the Mediterranean.

The later coinage is not. The silver content falls; the weight standard shifts to a lighter Indian one; the flans get smaller; base-metal issues multiply; and the portraiture, on the last kings, becomes formulaic — the same face with a different name.

A coinage does that when the state issuing it has lost either its bullion or its territory or both. In this case it is both, and the sequence is legible in the find-spots: kings whose coins circulate over a wide area are succeeded by kings whose coins are found in a district.

Squeezed from two sides

North of the Hindu Kush, the Greco-Bactrian kingdom was destroyed by the Yuezhi and the other steppe peoples moving south-west in the 130s BC. That removed the Greek homeland, the recruiting ground and the source of everything the southern kings had depended on.

From the west and south-west came the Sakas — Scythians, pushed along by the same movement — who took Arachosia and then moved into the Indus valley and Gujarat, and later the Indo-Parthians after them.

From the east, the Indian dynasties of the plains had recovered from the Mauryan collapse and had no reason to leave Greek princes in the Punjab.

So a Greek aristocracy that was already dividing its own territory among forty claimants lost its reinforcement, its hinterland and its market at roughly the same time.

The last of them

Strato II was minting in the eastern Punjab around the beginning of the first century AD, on debased flans, in a small territory, in a script and language his soldiers by then probably spoke better than they spoke Greek.

He is the last. After him there is no Greek-legend coinage struck by a Greek king anywhere in Asia.

What did not stop

Greek did not disappear from the region when Greek rule did. It goes on being used.

The Sakas and then the Kushans kept striking coins with Greek legends and Greek letters, because that was what money looked like there. Kanishka's coinage names Iranian and Indian and Buddhist deities in Greek script. The Bactrian language — an Iranian language — was written in the Greek alphabet, with an extra letter added for a sound Greek did not have, for the next seven hundred years.

Ashoka's Kandahar edicts had been cut in Greek and Aramaic a century and a half before all this, for populations already living there.

The kingdom that went out with a thin silver drachm in the eastern Punjab left an alphabet in use on the Oxus until the Islamic conquests, which is a longer survival than most empires manage and not one that any of the forty kings could have intended.

The same movement, later

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

The chain of steppe displacements that ended the Bactrian kingdom did not stop at the Hindu Kush. The Sakas — the Scythians of the Iranian world — had been pushed south and west by the Yuezhi, who had been pushed west by the Xiongnu; some of them went into Iran, where they gave their name to Sistan, and some came down into the Indus valley and the Punjab.

They took the Indo-Greek kingdoms piece by piece over about a century. Maues was ruling in Taxila by the 80s BC; Azes and his successors held most of the Punjab by the 50s; the last Greek issues, of a king called Strato, are around the turn of the era in a small territory in the eastern Punjab.

There is no last battle and no year that can be given as the year the Greek kingdoms of India ended. There is a decade in which the coins stop.

What is worth saying at the end is what did not stop. The Sakas struck coins on the Indo-Greek model, bilingual, with Greek legends they eventually stopped being able to spell correctly. So did the Indo-Parthians after them. So did the Kushans, who used the Greek alphabet to write Bactrian — an Iranian language — for four hundred years, and in whose territory the Buddha was first shown in human form, in drapery that had come east from Hellenistic Greece by way of these kingdoms.

The political project failed completely. A Greek ruling class governing Central Asia and north-west India from Greek cities did not survive, left no institutions anybody kept, and produced no successor state of its own. The visual and monetary vocabulary it carried east outlived it by half a millennium and was taken up by everyone who replaced it, none of whom were Greek and none of whom appear to have thought about it much.

The king in the Pali book

Drafted from Davids, The Questions of King Milinda (1890)afterlife

Greek kingship in India ended without a battle and without a chronicle, and the fullest surviving portrait of any of these kings was written by a Buddhist, in Pali, in a work of religious argument, some generations after he was dead.

Everything the Greek and Roman writers say about Menander can be set out in four sentences, and Rhys Davids sets them out. Strabo names him as one of the two Bactrian kings who carried Greek rule furthest east, across the Hypanis and as far as the Isamos — the Sutlej, and probably the Jumna. The lost forty-first book of Justin carries his name in its title, together with that of Apollodotus, calling them Indian kings. And Plutarch reports that he was noted for justice, that he died in camp, and that the cities divided his ashes.

That is the whole classical record of the most important Greek king in India. Rhys Davids notes that it is more than survives for any of the others, which tells you something about the rest.

The dialogue

The Milinda-pañha, the Questions of King Milinda, is a long conversation between a Greek king and a Buddhist elder called Nagasena, on the self, on rebirth without a soul, on merit, on what a chariot is when you have taken it to pieces and on what it is that continues when a person does. It is a work of didactic ethics and religious controversy cast in the form of a historical romance, and it became a classic — quoted by Buddhaghosa, carried across Buddhist Asia, treated as near-canonical in Burma, still read.

Its Milinda is not a foil. He is quick, well-read, sceptical and hard to satisfy, and the whole method of the book depends on his being difficult. That is a strange compliment to pay a foreign king who had been dead for generations before the author was born.

At the end of the text as it stands, the king is convinced, hands the kingdom to his son, enters the Order and attains arahatship.

Rhys Davids does not believe it

His reasons are worth having, because they are a model of how to handle a source that says what you would like it to say.

The passage sits exactly where a lost final leaf would sit. The Sinhalese manuscripts flag its context as coming from a copy brought from Siam. None of Menander's coins — twenty-two types, eight with his portrait — shows any decisive sign of a conversion. And the coin epithets that do point towards Buddhism prove something narrower than they appear to: that at least six Greek kings of the region wanted to be known to their subjects as righteous, in a formula answering to dhammika dhamma-raja. That is firm evidence of Buddhist subjects whose views the kings were meeting. It is no evidence at all of a Buddhist king.

His conclusion is that a writer composing in north-western India, at a distance from the events, converted Menander because conversion was the fitting close to the argument — and that the author would have been astonished at later critics who took his history literally while treating his ethics as optional.

What is left of a kingdom

Set the two records side by side.

From the Greek side: a name, two rivers crossed, a death in camp and a disputed funeral. From the Buddhist side: a character with a speaking voice, a philosophical position, a named attendant, a birthplace, and an argument he loses over several hundred pages.

Nobody in these kingdoms wrote a history of them. The coins are magnificent and they are mute about everything except who was king and who was expected to spend the money. What preserved one of these men as a person rather than a profile was a religion his subjects held and he probably did not, in a language he probably could not read, in a book composed to win an argument he was not present for.