Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/627

EMPIRE.] PERSIA 599 To understand who his helpers were we must take up again the thread of the history of the far Eastern lands. It was now a century since the Tibetan races who had supplanted the Greeks to the north of the Hindu Kusli had first exercised a decisive influence 011 western affairs, and during most of that time there had been little change in the boundaries of empire in eastern Iran. Since the time of Eucratides the centre of Greek influence had lain more to the south of the Hindu Rush and in India proper, and this was perhaps one reason why Sogdiana and Bactria were lost so early ; since that loss Greek power and culture had their chief and most lasting seat in the Cabul valley, where colonies of Alexander were particularly numerous. The places where coins have been found and these are almost our only source of knowledge 1 prove that on the death of Eucra tides the Indian country fell to Apollodotus and Bactria to Heliocles. Each of these held for a time the greater part of east Iran, but Apollo dotus was the last Greek king who ruled over Kandahar and Sistan. For a time there were also separate kingdoms in the Cabul valley under Autialcides, and in the district of Peshawar under Lysias, but after a period of civil wars they were all merged in one great Grreco- Indian realm extending from Cabul to the Sutlej, and at times as far south as Barygaza ; the capital was Cakala (officially called Euthy- demia). Eight Yavana kings, says the V&yu-Pw&na, reigned eighty- two years, and just eight names 2 are found on coins whose distri bution justifies us in attributing them to kings whose sway extended over the whole Greek realm. This confirms the historical value of the Indian source, and the eighty-two years will have to be reckoned from the time when Demetrius was driven out of Bactria and fixed his residence in the Punjab (c. 175), so that the end of the kingdom will fall about 93. Menander, the most important of the eight (c. 125 -c. 95 ?), 3 carried his arms farther than any of his predecessors, crossed the Hypasis, and pushed as far as the " Isamus," a locality which must be sought much farther east than used to be supposed, since his coins are common as far as Mathura (Muttra) and Rampur, and Indian sources 4 tell us that the Greeks subdued Ayodhya, the land of the Panchala, and Mathura, and even took the old capital, Pataliputra. The Greeks were too few to hold these exorbitant conquests without much concession to native habits and prejudices, and we learn without very great surprise from a Buddhist book that Menander became a Buddhist. The same source 5 tells us that Menander was born at Alasanda (Alexandria ad Caucasum) or at the (neighbouring ? ) village of Kalasi. Buddhism was strong in this quarter at an early date, and a Buddhist stupa appears as type on a coin of Agathocles, who reigned in Arachosia and Drangiana about 180-165 (Sallet, op. cit., p. 95). A Greek source praises Men- ander s just rule ; the Milinda-prasna says, " In the whole of Jam- bud ipa there was no one comparable to Milinda R;ija . . .he was endowed with riches . . . and guarded by military power in a state of the utmost efficiency" (Jour. As. Soc. Seng., v. 532). When he died in the camp he received every honour paid to a deceased " chakravartti," and his ashes were divided, as Buddha s had been, in cenotaphs erected in every town. Perhaps political mingled with pious motives ; the struggle for the dust of Menander mentioned by a Greek writer may be compared with that among the "diadochi " for the bones of Alexander, and so will be one phase of the many and long divisions among the Indian Greeks testified to by the coins. In little less than a century we have the names of twenty-three kings all later than Eucratides, and nine of them apparently later than Menander. They appear to belong to four kingdoms, the upper and lower Cabul valley, Peshawar, and the Punjab, and as there are but two names common to more than one king we may conclude that the rapid changes were often violent, that these were not fixed dynasties, perhaps that the kings rose by military election. All this confirms the Indian source (in Kern, ut supra, p. 38), " the fiercely-fighting Greeks did not stay in Madhyadeca ; there was a cruel dreadful war in their own kingdom between themselves. " All the time that the Greek kingdom lasted there was beside it another whose kings bear Scythian or Parthian names ; their coins belong chiefly to the western Punjab, the outrunners of the Kashmir Himalayas, and west of the Indus, Bajawar, and sometimes Bamian. The founder of this kingdom was Maues, a younger contemporary of Demetrius and Apollodotus, whose types are imitated on his coins. The coins confirm the Chinese notice that the Sse, driven from their scats at Balkash and Issi-kul, founded a kingdom in Kipin (Cabul valley) about 161, with the correction that the kingdom did not at once extend so far west, the coins of Maues being found only in the Punjab. Now this is just the country is said to have submitted ! For the facts used in this paragraph see especially Cunningham, in Num. Chron., new series, x., xii. 2 Demetrius, Eucratides, Apollodotus, Strato I., Strato II., Zoilus, Menander, Dionysius. 3 He must have had a long reign ; see Sallet, Nacltfolfter Al. rf. Or., p. 34. 4 "Gargi-Sanhita," in Kern, Vardka-Mihira, p. 37. This is an astronomical work of the 1st century of onr era. The Isamus of Strabo, xi. p. 516, is prob ably the Sambus of Arr., Intl., 4, 4. The name is presumably corrupt, and Cunningham s conjecture, 2ocivotr(the Cona) for Iad/j.ov, would suit best but for the graphical difficulty it involves. "Milinda-prasna," in Hardy, Manual of Buddhism, pp. 510, 440. without a war to Mithradates I. of Parthia, and we must probably c. 175-32 assume that it was the Sse who put themselves under the Parthian B.C. empire, but that the arrangement was not a lasting one, the parties to it lying so far apart. The kings of the Sse do not seem to have been Parthians, 6 but Kings of the nation was one of the many Iranian nomad tribes that once the Sse. roamed over the steppes north of Sogdiana, while their coins show that they were influenced by the culture of the Indian Greeks, from whom they copied the titles of "satrap" and " strategtis. " The kingdom lay north of the Greeks, roughly bounded by the Cabul river and a line continuing eastward in the same latitude, and it is one of the unsolved puzzles of this obscure history how such a strip of mountain-land ever became so prosperous and powerful as it did under the second king, Azes, and how it was able to resist the might of Menander. We know from the Pcriplus that on the lower Indus the Parthians who fixed themselves there in the first Christian century had been preceded by a Scythian kingdom of sufficient permanency to leave to the district the name of Scythia or Indo- Scythia. But that the Sse were the founders of this remote kingdom is not so certain as is usually supposed ; it is quite as possible that at the time when the Scythians overran Iran the founders of the Indo-Scythian kingdom advanced from Sacas- tane through the Bolan Pass. The Sse certainly did not force themselves wedge -like between the Greek settlements, and the chronology of the coins precludes the easy solution that their power developed only after the fall of the Greeks. The coins name five supreme kings Maues, Azes, Azilises, Onones, Spalirises ; the dynasty began about 161 ; Azes, the second king, restruck coins of Apollodotus ; and there is not the least reason to doubt that he directly followed him, and that the power of the Sse under Azes fell in the time before Menander, when the Greeks were weak and divided. It was probably Menander who again drove the Scythians within narrower limits. The coins show further a lack of unity in the late~ days of the Scythian kingdom, and, taking this fact with the smallness of the total number of names, we cannot con clude that it lasted much later than the Greek realms. Hermreus, the last of the Greek kings, held the lower valley of Chinese the Cabul river and Peshawar with the district around it and the annals, belt of the Punjab opposite, and he reigned, as the effigies on his coins show, from youth to old age. These last days of Greek rule in the East fortunately receive light from the Chinese Annals (of the first If an). 7 After the opening of trade with the West about 105 B.C. the Chinese also visited Kipin, but their agents in this remote realm were repeatedly plundered by the King U-to-lao (between 105 and 87). At length, under the son of the latter, the Chinese commander on the frontier joined In-mo-fu. son of the king of Yung-khiu, in a sudden attack on the king of Kipin, who was slain and In-mo-fu installed in his place. Difficulties arose between the new king and China, and when In-mo-fu ultimately tried to make his peace the emperor Hiao-yuan-ti had just resolved to break off all connexion with the distant western lands. As the Chinese kept no military guard of the western frontier till 59 B.C., 8 and the new policy of Hiao-yuan-ti began soon after 49, y In-mo-fu must have begun to reign in Kipin some time between 59 and 51. In 32 he again, but still in vain, sent tribute and attempted to reopen the profitable commerce with China. The coins keep us so well in formed of the names of rulers in this period that In-mo-fu must be capable of identification, and no ruler can be meant but Hermams, who in the commonest dialect of Prakrit would be Hermaio, a word necessarily mutilated by Chinese inability to pronounce r. Yung- khiu is therefore Yonaki " the city of the Greeks." The dethroned king of Kipin and his father U-to-lao must, from what the Chinese records tell of the origin of their power, be kings of the Sse ; U-to-lao is probably Azo Rao, "king Azes." We have Chinese accounts of the eastern lands of Iran in the time of open trade along the great south road from Phi-shan on the Chinese frontier over the Hanging Pass (beside Lake Yashil-Kul at the west end of the Alichur Pamir"), 10 and so south-west to Hian-tu (the Indians), and then to the fruitful and temperate plain of Kipin. The king of Kipin, a mighty lord, resided at Sim-Sun (perhaps kiovvaov, Dionysopolis or Nagara, now Jalalabad). The inhabitants were industrious and ingenious in carving, building, weaving, and embroidery, and in silk manufacture ; vessels of gold and silver, utensils of copper and tin, were found in their bazaars. Their coins of gold and silver had a horseman on one side and a human head on the other. The silver pieces here described may be those of Hippostratus, or of any other of the later Greek, or of the Scythian kings ; but as none of these kings struck gold the pieces of 6 Mau??s differs only by a formative syllable from Mai ci/C7;s, leader of the Sacse at Gaugamela (Arr., iii. S, 3). Ovwv-rjs is a Parthian name, but really identical with that of Eunones, king of the Aorsi (Tac., Ann., xii. 15); the other five names can hardly be Parthian. 7 See Ritter, Frdkunde, vii. 3, 682 sq. ; and Abel Remusat, Nou reaux Melanyis Asiatiqitcs, i. 205 sq. 8 Abel Remusat, Mem. de I Ac., viii. (1S27) p. 110. 9 See what is related for the year 46 in Hist. Gen. de la Chine, iii. 161. 10 This identification is obtained by comparing the old description of the Hanging Pass (Remusat, Xour. Mi 1., i. 200) with that of the pass traversed by the Chinese expedition to Badakhshan in 1759 (Hist. Cen., xi. 572).