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New Light on the Fate of Greek in Ancient Central and South Asia*

New Light on the Fate of Greek in Ancient Central and South Asia*

doi: 10.2143/AWE.9.0.2056307 AWE 9 (2010) 181-192

NEW LIGHT ON THE FATE OF GREEK IN ANCIENT CENTRAL AND SOUTH *

STANLEY M. BURSTEIN

Abstract One of the most unexpected results of the Great’s conquest of the Persian empire was the establishment of Greek rule in , essentially modern , and parts of north-west . For approximately two Greek was the language of the politi- cal and cultural elite in much of what is now Afghanistan and until ca. 140 BC, when the was conquered by Central Asian . Less clear is what happened to Greek and Greek culture after the conquest. The usual assumption is that both quickly disappeared. This article calls attention to recently discovered evidence that suggests, however, that until at least the late 1st or early 2nd AD Greek not only survived but was either that the or one of the official languages of the and its predecessors.

One result of the conquests of was that for the first time Greek and Greek culture became significant factors in world history. For over two centuries Greek was the language of power and elite culture over an area extending from to the borders of India. Not surprisingly, there is an enormous body of scholarship on this phenomenon and its significance.1 Much less studied and, therefore, much less understood is a closely related topic: the history of Greek and Greek culture on the periphery of the Greek world after the fall of the Hellenistic kingdoms, in this case in ancient Bactria, and India, essentially modern Afghanistan, Pakistan and adjacent portions of northern India. This neglect is largely but not entirely the result of trends in contemporary historiography. The end of the modern European empires was followed by an understandable shift of scholarly interest from the colonisers to the colonised. As a result, resistance to colonial rule, the survival of local cultures, and the formation of postcolonial states and societies have become staple topics in contemporary historiography, but not the fate of the former colonial rulers or colonial elite cultures.

* I would like to thank Profs. F.L. Holt of the University of Houston and J.D. Lerner of Wake Forrest University for reading and commenting on an earlier version of this paper. Any remaining flaws are solely the responsibility of the author. 1 Good introductions to these issues are Momigliano 1975; Kuhrt and Sherwin-White 1987.

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Ancient history is not immune to changes in the broader historiographic envi- ronment. Decolonisation also affected the study of ancient empires including those of the in Central and . While histories of the Greek kingdoms in Bactria and India written during the heyday of the British empire in India such as V.A. Smith’s The Early History of India2 and W.W. Tarn’s famous The Greeks in Bactria and India3 placed the Greeks and Greek culture at the centre of their accounts, histories written after Indian independence emphasised the continuity and strength of Indian culture in the Greek ruled kingdoms. So, A.K. Narain,4 ironically echoing Julius Caesar, observed that ‘their [the Greeks] history is part of the and not of the Hellenistic states; they came, they saw, but India conquered.’ Both Tarn and Narain agreed, however, and correctly so, that Greeks and with them Greek and Greek culture ultimately disappeared from Central and South Asia, but neither was particularly interested in trying to explain how this happened, only that it did.5 At the same time, it must be admitted that neither Tarn nor Narain nor their immediate successors had access to evidence that would illuminate this process. Recent discoveries have changed this situation, and the purpose of this paper is to explore the implications of this new evidence. The disappearance of Greek and Greek culture from Central and South Asia was the final phase of a long and complex history that at a minimum extended over almost five centuries. The sources for reconstructing that history are meagre now and were poor in antiquity, hardly more than a few sentences in a handful of Greek and texts, a number of obscure passages in Indian literature, a small but growing number of inscriptions, and an abundant and varied coinage that is our only evidence for most of the Greek kings of Bactria.6 The basic outlines of the story, however, are clear. The first Greek settlers in Bactria were Ionians from west- ern relocated to by the after the suppression of the Ionian Revolt in 494 BC.7 Despite their isolation from their Greek homeland, they still preserved their knowledge of Greek,8 when Alexander the Great encountered

2 Smith1924. 3 Tarn 1985. 4 Narain 1957, 11. 5 Cf. Tarn 1985, 304–05; Narain 1957, 164. 6 The sources for the Greeks in Bactria and India are surveyed in Kartunen 1997, 287–315. 7 The Branchidae, who allegedly betrayed the Temple at to the Persians (Diodorus Arg. 17; 11. 11. 4; Q. Curtius Rufus Historiae Alexandri Magni 7. 28–34; cf. Bosworth 1988, 108–09). 8 According to Q. Curtius Rufus (Historiae Alexandri Magni 7. 29), the Branchidae were bilin- gual, but their Greek was gradually being corrupted due to the influence of the local language.

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them in the early 320s BC. The meeting was tragic, however; Alexander had them massacred as traitors because of their collaboration with the Persians a century and a half earlier. Despite this atrocity, the Macedonian conquest of Bactria decisively changed the status of Greeks and their language and culture in the region.9 Alexander founded several cities in Bactria10 and left behind garrisons totalling over 20,000 Greek soldiers, when he invaded India in 326 BC. Although Alexan- der never returned, the garrisons remained, and once they became reconciled to their new home,11 they became the core of a new elite that dominated Bactria for almost two centuries,12 first under a series of Seleucid and then after ca. 240 BC under a dynasty of Greek kings. Greek rule in Bactria finally ended about 140 BC, however, when the – Iranian-speaking nomads – pushed south by the – probably Tocharian-speaking nomads – who were themselves fleeing westward from the border of after being defeated by the overran Bactria.13 Approximately a century later the Yuezhi followed the into Bactria proper, first conquering Bactria and Arachosia and then the surviving petty Greek kingdoms in north-western India. The process was long and complex and little known in detail. Numismatic evidence indicates, however, that after the ini- tial Saka conquest of Bactria, Greek rule continued south of the Hindu mountains, but split into multiple competing states, allowing the Yuezhi gradually to pick them off one by one until by the mid- BC the last independent Greek kingdom had disappeared, thereby ending the almost five-century-long his- tory of Greek and Greek culture in Central and South Asia. Or did it? The ancient sources provide little help in answering that question. The early 1st-century AD geographer Strabo merely refers to nomads ‘who took away Bactria from the Greeks’ (11. 8. 2) and his older contemporary Pompeius Trogus to the occupation of Bactria by ‘Scythian tribes’ (Prologue 41). Most his- torians, whether supporters of Tarn or Narain, offer a more dramatic, even apoca- lyptic view of these events and their effects. Following the lead of the historian (11. 39. 4–5), they have placed the conquest of Hellenis- tic Bactria in the familiar context of the supposedly eternal struggle of settled agri- cultural peoples against pastoral nomads. Isolated from the rest of the Greek world,

9 For Alexander’s campaign in Bactria, see Holt 1989; 2005. For a more negative evaluation, see Bosworth 1996. 10 The evidence for Alexander’s city foundations in Bactria is reviewed by Fraser 1996, 153. 11 For the hostility of Alexander’s garrisons to the idea of staying in Bactria, see Holt 1989, 87–91. 12 For the origins of the Greek kingdom of Bactria, see now Holt 1999b; Lerner 1999. 13 The fullest reconstruction of the events leading up to the conquest of Bactria is Benjamin 2007.

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Bactria would have succumbed after a heroic but ultimately futile struggle against hordes of nomadic barbarians from the of Central Asia. A vivid but not atypical statement of this interpretation is that of Peter Green: ‘Bactria held out till about 140, when the last regnant Graeco-Bactrian king, Helio- cles I, went down fighting the Saca hordes from the Asiatic steppes, leaving his descendants a landless dynasty.’14 In such reconstructions, it is also assumed that the political and military debacle was total, and that it was quickly followed by the destruction of the Greek elite, the withdrawal of the surviving Greek population to India,15 and the consequent disappearance of Greek and Greek culture from Cen- tral Asia. The collapse of Greek culture in Bactria would, moreover, have been hastened by the fact that Hellenism had always been the culture of a minority and that by the time of the Saka conquest the quality of Greek culture in Bactria had declined to the point that much of the population had become ‘thoroughly orien- talized’.16 Any evidence of Greek cultural influence in Bactria after the Saka con- quest, therefore, was to be explained either by the presence of ‘Greek travellers and journeying artisans of a later date who kept alive the contacts between the Hellen- istic and Central Asia’17 and/or the copying of objects imported from the . What has given this reconstruction continued scholarly life is the fact that it has seemed to be supported by archaeological and numismatic evi- dence, the twin anchors of modern Graeco-Bactrian studies. Archaeological support for this reconstruction of the end of Greek ruled Bactria has been claimed to exist ever since the discovery in 1964 of the ruins of a huge Greek city at the site of Ai Khanum – possibly to be identified with the city of Oxiana – on the banks of the Oxus river, the modern , in north-eastern Afghanistan.18 Excavation revealed there the remains of a Greek city complete with a theatre, a gymnasium, monumental temples, elegant villas deco- rated with mosaics, and Greek inscriptions. Unfortunately, the site of Ai Khanum was devastated by looters during the Afghan civil wars, but before that happened, excavations by French archaeologists during the 1960s and 1970s established that the city’s history extended from the late 4th to the mid- BC, when it was destroyed and abandoned, approximately at the time of the Saka invasions.

14 Green 1990, 335. 15 Cf. Leriche 2007, 130, 134–35. 16 Green 1990, 322. 17 Fraser 1982, 78. For further examples of Greeks in Kushan service, see Monneret de Villard 1948, 242–44. The evidence for Greek cultural influence in Bactria after the Saka conquest is col- lected in Posch 1995. 18 The literature on Ai Khanum is enormous. A lucid overview of the evidence is Lerner 2003– 04.

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In addition to the archaeological evidence for the violent end of Ai Khanum, a recent study of the Greek inscriptions on the coinage of Heliocles, who ruled Bac- tria in the mid-2nd century BC, revealed an extraordinarily high number of spell- ing and grammatical errors,19 suggesting that on the eve of the Saka invasion the quality of Greek spoken in the area had deteriorated to the point that the royal mint at Ai Khanum had difficulty finding die designers and cutters capable of cor- rectly composing and accurately engraving stereotyped Greek texts that consisted of little more than the king’s name, the title basileus, ‘king’, and an epithet. When one adds to the archaeological and numismatic evidence monuments such as the famous 1st-century BC pillar dedication to Vishnu by a self-identified Greek ambassador and devotee named Heliodorus, son of Dion, from Besnegar in north-western India20 and the numerous Buddhist cave dedications in western India by individuals called Yavanas or Yonakas, that is, Greeks,21 it is not surprising that the case for the rapid disappearance of Greek and Greek culture in the region after the Saka conquest has seemed compelling. In contrast to Greek historians, however, contemporary historians of Central Asia have generally been sceptical of such melodramatic reconstructions of the aftermath of the Saka conquest of Bactria. They rightly point out that total destruc- tion of settled populations does not typically accompany the formation of nomad empires.22 Instead, they tend to take over existing administrative systems and to rely on existing local elites to govern their subjects and ensure the provision of . Consequently, they suggest that the Saka and later Yuezhi conquests prob- ably were not nearly so destructive as Greek historians assume23 and that Greek may even have survived as an administrative language in the area;24 and, as it has turned out, they had good reason for their scepticism. The Saka conquest of Hellenistic Bactria is a seminal event in world historiog- raphy, the first historical event documented in both European and Chinese sources.25 In 139 BC, the Han emperor Wudi, concerned over the rising power of the Xiongnu, sent an ambassador named Qian to negotiate an alliance with the Yuezhi.26 ’s mission took over a to complete, only to ulti- mately fail. The report he filed on his mission unfortunately does not survive.

19 Holt 1999a. 20 Sircar 1965, 12.2. Cf. Kartunen 1997, 297; Burstein 2003, 234. 21 Tarn 1985, 387–90; Kartunen 1997, 297–98; Lerner 1999–2000. 22 Cf. Christian 1998b. 23 Leriche (2007, 135, n. 37) notes that to date ‘no [Bactrian] site shows any traces of assault’. 24 For example Frye 1996, 124; Enoki et al. 1999, 180; Puri 1999, 202–03. 25 V.V. Barthold quoted in Christian1998a, 174. 26 For Zhang Qian’s mission, see now Benjamin 2007, 130–209.

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Excerpts from it were quoted, however, by the early 1st-century BC Chinese histo- rian and reveal that the conditions that he found in Bactria when he finally arrived there in 126 BC – a little over a decade after the Saka conquest – were dramatically different from those assumed in current reconstructions. Far from being destroyed and abandoned in the way a frontier city like Ai Kha- num had been, Zhang Qian found that cities in the interior of Bactria not only continued to exist –albeit as separate city-states, each with its own ruler – but they were even flourishing and trading with China in 126 BC:

Its [Bactria’s] people cultivate the land and have houses…. It has no great ruler but only a number of petty chiefs ruling the various cities. The people are poor in the use of arms and afraid of battle but they are clever at commerce…. The population of the country is large, numbering some million or more people. The capital is called the city of Lan- chih [Bactra] and has a market where all sorts of goods are bought and sold…. Zhang Qian reported, ‘I saw canes from Ch’iung and cloth made in the province of .’ When I asked the people how they had gotten such articles, they replied, ‘Our mer- chants go to buy them in the markets of Shen-tu.’27

But did Greek and Greek culture survive along with the cities? Theories that live by archaeology tend also to die by archaeology. Zhang Qian, of course, said noth- ing about the language of the cities’ inhabitants. Revealing evidence concerning the state of Greek in the interior of Bactria at the time of the Saka conquest is, how- ever, provided by a Greek inscription discovered at in southern Afghan- istan, ancient Arachosia, and published in 2004.28 The inscription, which dates to the mid-2nd century BC, and had been set up beside a road – probably near a family tomb – contains a 20-line autobiographical epigram composed in almost flawless elegiac couplets by a Greek educated Indian merchant named Sophytus, son of Naratos, who flaunted his education and poetic skill by making esoteric allu- sions to Greek gods and boasting of his authorship in an acrostic consisting of the first letter of each line of the poem: ‘by Sophytus, son of Naratos’.

Stele of Sophytus The house of my ancestors had flourished for a long time, when the irresistible strength of the three Fates destroyed it. But I, Sophytus of the family of Naratos, while still a child, was deprived of the wealth of my ancestors. I cultivated the excellence of the Archer [= Apollo] and the Muses together with noble wisdom. Then I devised a plan to restore my ancestral house. Gathering from various places fruitful money, I left home, intending not to return before I had acquired great wealth. For this reason, I went to

27 Watson 1969, 279. 28 Bernard et al. 2004, 227–59.

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many cities as a merchant and blamelessly gained great wealth. Full of praise, I returned to my fatherland after countless and became a source of joy to my friends. At once my ancestral house, which had decayed, I restored to an even greater state. I also pre- pared a new tomb to replace the one that had fallen into ruin, and I placed a stele that would speak of my life by the road. The deeds I have done are worthy of emulation. May my sons and grandsons preserve my house.

Equally important, Sophytus makes it clear that he chose a public location for his stele because he wanted his poem to find readers: ‘I placed a stele that would speak of my life by the road’. He also provided aids to ensure that readers would under- stand the content of his poem and not miss his authorship by including a heading identifying its character – Stele of Sophytus – at the beginning of the text and hav- ing his acrostic signature engraved separately at the left side of the stele where read- ers would not miss it. Clearly, the level of literacy of die cutters in a frontier city like Ai Khanum cannot be assumed to be an accurate index of the state of Greek throughout the territories ruled by the Greek kings of Bactria on the eve of the Saka conquest. Unfortunately, no similar evidence exists for the state of Greek in the immediate post conquest period. There are, however, hints that suggest that some knowledge of Greek survived at least until the early centuries AD. These include most obvi- ously, the adaptation of the to write Bactrian,29 but also the use of Greek titles30 for government officials, and the presence of Greek phrases and the names of Greek gods on Yuezhi and early Kushan coins31 and inscriptions together with the use of the Greek numerical system32 and a calendrical system that included not only Greek month names but also such typical Hellenistic procedures as inter- calation and era dating.33 Further and more compelling evidence is, however, pro- vided by two Bactrian inscriptions that were published almost half a century apart: the first in 1954 and the second in 1994. The relevant part of the first inscription consists of just two Greek words, dia Palamßdou, ‘by Palamedes’, at the end of a fragmentary three-line Bactrian inscrip- tion written in Greek letters carved on an architectural block from the royal Kushan

29 The Bactrian alphabet was developed during the reign of the predecessor of the Great, (Harmatta 1999a, 422). 30 Posch 1995, 132–33. 31 Posch 1995, 129. 32 For example, the date formula in the Dasht-i Nawur inscription of Vima Kadphises is in proper Greek form and includes not only the month name ‘Gorpaios’ in genitive but also the numer- als for 279 and 15: SOQ Gorpaio ie, ‘ 279, 15 Gorpaios’. Quoted in Harmatta 1999a, 422. 33 Posch 1995, 130–32.

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sanctuary at .34 Those two words are, however, enough to show that a craftsman with the Greek name Palamedes, who worked for one of the Great Kushan monarchs,35 believed – whether or not he was a ‘journeying artisan’ from the Mediterranean – that the best way to publicly claim credit for his share in cre- ating the Kushan sanctuary commemorated in the Bactrian portion of the inscrip- tion was to use a Greek phrase to indicate his role; and that can only mean that there were still individuals capable of reading and writing simple Greek in Bactria in the late 2nd or early AD.36 Further confirmation and clarification of the place of Greek in early Kushan Bactria was provided by the second inscription, one of the most important epigraphic discoveries of the past half-century: the Rab- atak inscription of Kanishka the Great.37 The inscription was discovered in 1993 by Mujahadeen in the ruins of a Kushan temple – unfortunately later destroyed by looters – near the village of Rabatak in northern Afghanistan and is now preserved in the Museum. The inscription reports a number of actions taken by Kanishka in the first year of the so-called Kanishka Era including the authorisation of the construction of a sanctuary in honour of Kanishka’s four predecessors, and his establishment of a new era. It also details the territories that Kanishka ruled in Bactria and India. For the purposes of this paper, however, it is the third line, which refers to Kanishka’s language reform that concerns us: otjia i iwnaggo oaso ohoasto tadjia ariao wstado. Interpretation of the text is difficult and three have been proposed: either ‘It was he [Kanishka] who laid out (i.e. discontinued the use of) the Ionian language and then placed the Arya speech’;38 or ‘He [Kanishka] issued a Greek edict (?) and then he put it into ’;39 or finally and more bluntly, ‘il [Kanishka] bannit la langue grecque et la remplaça en aryen’.40 Fortunately, there is no need to determine which is correct, since the implications of all three are the same. Far from disappearing shortly after the Saka conquest, Greek not only sur- vived, but it apparently enjoyed official status until the first year of the Kanishka Era, when Kanishka ordered that it be replaced by Aryan, that is, Bactrian written in Greek letters. Evidence of the thoroughness and far reaching of Kanish- ka’s language reform can be seen in the replacement of the names of Greek gods with Kushan equivalents in official documents and on coins, the re-cutting of dies

34 Canali de Rossi 2004, 314; Curiel 1954; Fraser 1982. Its significance for the survival of Greek was pointed out by Harmatta (1999a, 408). 35 For a good survey of the state of current scholarship on the Kushan, see Benjamin 1998. 36 For the date, see Fraser 1982, 77. 37 IEOG 318A. The standard edition is Sims-Williams and Cribb 1995–96. 38 Tr. B.N. Mukherjee, quoted in Fussman 1998, 642. 39 Sims-Williams and Cribb 1994, 78. 40 Fussman 1998, 598.

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to replace Greek legends with Bactrian ones on Kushan coins, and, of course, the use of Bactrian written in the new Bactrian script on official inscriptions.41 Exactly when Kanishka ordered the replacement of Greek by Bactrian is not clear since scholarly views on the date of the beginning of the Kanishka Era vary from ca. AD 78 to ca. AD 128 or even later.42 Nor is it clear how long it took for Greek to disappear as a written and spoken language in the territories of the Kushan empire after it was deprived of royal patronage, but the Surkh Kotal inscription discussed above suggests that the process probably took some time since it was still possible to find individuals in Bactria who could read simple Greek in the late second or early 3rd century AD. Equally unclear is the closely related question whether or not and to what extent Greek culture had survived in Bactria along with the . The question is easier to ask than answer. The evidence for Greek influence in post-conquest Central Asia is primarily artistic such as the famous Bud- dhas, but even the most classical examples of Gandhara presuppose only knowledge of Greek techniques and forms, not culture. Similarly, Greek style athletic equipment such as athletic weights43 discovered in the Gandhara region is only evidence for the survival of Greek athletic technique in the region, not the values that underpinned athletics in . There are, however, two monuments that are more suggestive. The first is a fragment of a stone relief discovered in the late and now in the . The theme of the relief has long been recognised. It illustrates an episode in the in which the Trojan priest Laocoon tests the Trojan while the prophetess Cassandra futilely warns that it will bring disaster to Troy.44 For obvious reasons, art historians usually cite the relief as an example of the mixture of Indian and Greek styles typical of Gandhara art. Generally ignored is the more important fact that there is no known parallel in Greek or Roman art that could have served as a model for it, the few extant examples of the artistic treat- ment of the Laocoon theme focusing on the death of Laocoon and his sons by sea serpents, not his testing of the Trojan Horse.45 In other words, the British Museum relief is most likely an original composition by an artist who knew the story of

41 Sims-Williams and Cribb 1994, 110–11. 42 Fussman 1998, 622–41. Benjamin (1998, 41) prefers a still later date, setting Kanishka’s reign at ca. AD 129–152. 43 Milleker 2000, 142–43. 44 Boardman 1994, 136, fig. 4.78. 45 Virgil Aeneid 2, ll. 31–56; Ps.-Apollodorus Epitome 5. 16–17; Quintus of The Fall of Troy 12, ll. 390–394; cf. Boardman 1994, 136 for the lack of possible artistic models for the relief.

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Laocoon, and that suggests that versions of the Trojan War story – either written or oral – continued to circulate in Bactria after the Saka conquest. This suggestion is confirmed by the second piece of evidence, a fragment of a relief discovered north of Peshawar depicting the next step in the story, the emergence of soldiers from the wooden horse inside Troy.46 At the same time, the fact that the second Trojan War relief was found in a Buddhist context suggests that by the time the relief was created the story of the fall of Troy may have lost its specifically Greek reference and been integrated into Buddhist legend. This is obviously a long way from the 2nd-century AD Greek essayist Plutar- ch’s47 romantic picture of Bactrians worshipping Greek gods thanks to Alexander’s conquest. It does suggest, however, that more than the Greek language survived the end of Greek rule in Bactria. For how long Greek survived cannot be determined without the discovery of new evidence, but at a minimum it is clear that Greek speakers did not abandon Bactria ‘soon’ after the Saka conquest and that Greek, albeit probably Greek influenced by local languages,48 continued to be written and possibly spoken for at least an additional two centuries if not more. Equally impor- tant, the final demise of Greek in Central and South Asia was the result of deliber- ate action by the Kushan government and not the sloughing off of a superficial imperial ‘veneer’ as is usually assumed.

Bibliography

Benjamin, C. 1998: ‘Introduction to Kushan Research’. In Christian, D. and Benjamin, C. (eds.), Worlds of the Roads: Ancient and Modern (Turnhout), 31–49. —. 2007: The Yuezhi: Origin, Migration and the Conquest of Northern Bactria (Turnhout). Bernard, P., Pinault, G.J. and Rougemont, G. 2004: ‘Deux Nouvelles Inscriptions Grecques de l’Asie Centrale’. JSav July–December, 227–356. Boardman, J. 1994: The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity (London). Bosworth, A.B. 1988: Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge). —. 1996: Alexander and the East: The Tragedy of Triumph (Oxford). Burstein, S.M. 2003: ‘The Legacy of Alexander: New Ways of Being Greek’. In Heckel, W. and Tritle, L.A. (eds.), Crossroads of History: The Age of Alexander (Claremont, CA), 217–42. Canali de Rossi, F. (ed.) 2004: Iscrizioni dello Estremo Oriente Greco: Un Repertorio (Bonn).

46 Khan 1990. 47 Plutarch De Alexandri Magni fortuna aut virtute 328D. 48 Cf., for example, n. 8 (above) on the influence of local languages on the Greek of the Branchi- dae. The languages potentially involved included besides the local Bactrian, , which was used for administrative purposes throughout the history of the Greek kingdom of Bactria (Holt 1993, 61–62; Frye 2006, 57–59), and Indian languages expressed in both the Brahmi and Kharoshti scripts on Bactrian coins (Holt 1999b, 119).

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History Department California State University, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA 90032 USA [email protected]

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