By conquering the Persian Empire, Alexander the Great had paved the way for further important changes. In the northeast, in Bactria and Sogdiana, he left several garrisons of Macedonians and Greeks behind. Here, in the Iranian heartland, the stiffest resistance had been offered to the conqueror from the west. Bactria comprised the northern parts of modern Afghanistan, separated from the Indus and its tributaries by the mountain range of the Hindu Kush. To the north of Bactria between the rivers Amu Darya and Syr Darya lay Sogdiana, its area largely within modern Uzbekistan. Both Bactria and Sogdiana were in antiquity and far into the Middle Ages fertile and densely populated lands with a mainly Iranian population. But to the north, they provided easy access to invaders from the Central Asian steppes. Nomad horsemen had already for some centuries been the cause of unrest in these regions, and in the 3rd century BC their pressure on the sedentary peoples increased—possibly because the growing power of a unifying China turned the
Figure 26 Coins of Greco-Bactrian and Greco-Indian kings (3rd-2nd c. BC). Around 240 BC, the regions of Bactria and Sogdiana broke away from the Seleucid Empire. The subsequent history of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom and the Greco-Indian communities that came into being is hardly known: textual information is largely lacking, and thus coins are our most important, and often our only, source. We have the names of 37 Greek kings who must have reigned in parts of what are now Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northern India. The quality of their coins is remarkable, and they seem to carry fairly realistic portraits of these rulers. All coins of Greco-Bactrian and Greco-Indian kings shown here are from the British Museum. a) A golden stater of Diodotus I, ca. 250 BC, the first king of an independent Greek Bactria, who is shown wearing the royal diadem. The reverse shows Zeus wielding his thunderbolt. b) Silver tetradrachm of Demetrius I, ca. 190 BC, the king who from Bactria crossed the Hindu Kush and conquered a large area in Gandhara and the Indus basin. He is portrayed with an elephant scalp. The first to have himself depicted in this way, as the conqueror of India, land of elephants, was Alexander the Great, and now Demetrius, invading northern India, shows himself as a new Alexander. The symbolism ultimately derives from Heracles, who donned the skin of the Nemean lion after defeating that animal. c) Silver tetradrachm of Antimachus, ca. 180 BC. This king, possibly the grandson of Diodotus I, ruled Bactria and Sogdiana after the death of Demetrius I. He too crossed the Hindu Kush in order to conquer the lands ruled by the sons of Demetrius. Antimachus, who on other coins calls himself Theos (“God”), is depicted here wearing the fcausiu, a traditional Macedonian head covering. From under the kausia the ends of his royal diadem are hanging down on his back. The reverse of this coin shows Poseidon, with a palm branch and his trident. d) Silver tetradrachm of Demetrius II, ca. 170 BC, son of Antimachus and conqueror of Gandhara. He too is wearing the kausia and the diadem. The reverse shows Zeus with a scepter and a thunderbolt. The inscription is in Kharosthi, one of the Indian scripts of the time. Thus, the coin is also addressing the Indian subjects of Demetrius. e) Silver tetradrachm of Menander, ca. 150 BC, the most famous of the Greco-Indian kings. He is shown with the royal diadem. Menander was a younger son of Demetrius II and ruled a kingdom south of the Hindu Kush that covered a large part of the Indus and Ganges basins (to the north of the Hindu Kush, other Greek kings ruled over Bactria). Of all Greek coins from these regions, the majority have been minted by Menander. Some of these carry Buddhist symbols, such as the wheel of rebirth. i) Silver tetradrachm of Archebius, ca. 100 BC. This king ruled part of Gandhara at a time when Menander’s empire had fragmented. He is portrayed as a superhuman warrior, wielding a spear. He wears a royal helmet decorated with the horns and ears of a bull, again over the diadem. The symbolism of the horns goes back to Alexander the Great, who was depicted with the ram’s horns of Ammon, his divine father. The bull’s horns might point to the god Dionysus, who in the mythic past was supposed to have conquered India. Seleucus I adopted this symbolism, as did the Greco-Bactrian kings before Archebius. Across his left shoulder, the king wears the aegis: gods and heroes who wore the aegis could not be defeated (see also Figure 25). The message of this coin was to no avail: some 50 years after Archebius’ reign there were no more independent Greek kings to be found. Photos: © The Trustees of the British Museum
Nomads’ attention more than before to the west. Plundering raids and threatening invasions from the north, therefore, were the dangers confronting Seleucus, Alexander’s heir in these regions.
For some time, Seleucus and his successors were successful in defending their northeastern territories, and some Greek cities could even flourish in the region: gumnasia and theaters, Greek porticos and Greek-Iranian fortresses, palaces, and sanctuaries arose at the feet of the Hindu Kush amid Iranian and Indo-Iranian populations. In the first half of the 3rd century BC, however, the Iranian Parthians, originating from the steppes around the Aral Sea, penetrated into modern Iran and succeeded in driving a wedge between the Greeks in Bactria and the core regions of the Seleucid Empire in Mesopotamia and Syria. Around 240 BC, the Greek satrap of Bactria declared his independence and minted coins with his own diadem-crowned head. There arose in Bactria a state with a Greek and partially Iranian military upper class, where Greek was the language of government and where Greek culture was in many respects dominant, but where the mass of the population must have been Iranian and Indo-Iranian. The Seleucid kings never succeeded in subduing their former province. The Greek kings of Bactria, on their part, shortly after 200 BC managed to extend their rule across the Hindu Kush and to subjugate large parts of the Indus valley. As a consequence of dynastic infighting and secessions, however, their empire fell apart into several kingdoms on both sides of the Hindu Kush. While the Greeks in Bactria after the middle of the 2nd century BC faced various nomad invaders, the Greeks on the Indian side of the Hindu Kush seem to have flourished for a while. King Menander in the middle of the 2nd century BC extended his rule probably toward the mouth of the Indus and eastward toward Pataliputra, the old capital of the Mauryas. His reign was celebrated as a golden age, and his name lived on in Indian Buddhist literature. In all probability, Menander became a Buddhist and thereby embraced what must have been the religion of a great many of his subjects. In any case, in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, Buddhism spread across the regions ruled by the Greek kings and after the beginning ofour era, Bactria in particular became a region where Buddhist monasteries vied with Iranian, Indian, and syncretic Iranian-Greek-Indian holy places. Here, Greek artists and artistic traditions influenced Indian and especially Buddhist art. Probably, the impulse to carve in sculpture or to depict in painting the Buddha in a human form instead of merely referring to his teachings by certain symbols was due to this Greek influence. The classic Buddha, standing or sitting in meditation with his folded robes, thus owes much to Greek and later Greco-Roman art. In any case, in the region of Gandhara in the northwest of India (now in western Pakistan), from roughly the beginning of our era a characteristic style of Buddhist art would flourish and spread over other parts of India and modern Pakistan and Afghanistan that shows great affinities with Greek art and would last for about five centuries, in its turn influencing Buddhist and Indian art in other regions and later periods.
The kingdom of Menander disintegrated after his death, and around the beginning of our era the last Greek states in the Hindu Kush were absorbed by the empire of the Kushans, originally Iranian nomads who extended their dominion over the Indus valley and northern India as well as Bactria and Sogdiana. It had been at the time when Greek rule in Bactria came to an end and the Kushans first appeared on the scene, around 120 BC,
That the Silk Road was established, linking China with Sogdiana and Bactria and hence with the countries farther to the west.
In Iran proper, it was the Parthians who became heirs to the empire of the Achaemenids that had been destroyed by Alexander. For although Seleucus after Alexander’s death had succeeded in taking possession of Iran, his and his immediate successors’ rule here was always precarious. The Iranian Parthians, in any case, could count on a certain sympathy on the part of the population when they established in around 230 BC their kingdom on the Iranian plateau and from there expanded to the south and the west, annexing after some time the old land of Persis from where the dynasty of the Achaemenids had originated. The Parthians, under their own dynasty of the Arsacids, did not ostensibly forge any links with the Achaemenid past, however, although they adopted the old Persian religion. The latter was not invoked, though, in any reaction against foreign, that is, Greek culture. On the contrary, the Parthians were well disposed toward Greek culture, and Greek-speaking minorities remained in the cities of their empire for a long time, while the kings themselves appreciated Greek art and Greek literature. In the 2nd century BC, the Parthians began their expansion toward the west until the Arsacids had eventually wrested the whole of Mesopotamia from their Seleucid neighbors. The Parthian capital was then transferred to Ctesiphon on the Tigris. In the 1st century BC, the remnant of the Seleucid kingdom was annexed by the Romans. The frontier between the Roman and the Parthian empires henceforth ran through the Syrian desert and along the Upper Euphrates river to the Caucasus mountains, where the kingdom of Armenia would function as a sort of buffer state, in name usually bound to Rome in some form of vassalage. Thus, the Parthian Empire occupied the whole area between Central Asia and the Roman Empire; the Silk Road ran in part through its territory all the way to the harbors on the head of the Persian Gulf or to the Syrian part of the Mediterranean coast. In times of political tension, the Parthians were able to block commercial traffic, but that would happen only rarely.
World History
