Page:History of India Vol 2.djvu/237

BACTRIA AND PARTHIA 199 days one of the most famous cities of the East. The country, which was said to contain a thousand towns, had been always regarded, during the time of the AchaB- menian kings, as the premier satrapy, and reserved as an appanage for a prince of the blood. When Alex- ander shattered the Persian power and seated himself upon the throne of the Great King, he continued to bestow his royal favour upon the Bactrians, who in return readily assimilated the elements of Hellenic civilization. Two years after his death, at the final partition of the empire in 321 B. c., Bactria fell to the share of Seleukos Nikator, and continued to be one of the most valuable possessions of his son and grandson. The Parthians, a race of rude and hardy horsemen, with habits similar to those of the modern Turkomans, dwelt beyond the Persian deserts in the comparatively infertile regions to the southeast of the Caspian Sea. Their country, along with the territories of the Choras- mioi, Sogdioi, and Arioi (Khwarizm, Samarkand, and Herat), had been included in the sixteenth satrapy of Darius, and all the tribes named, armed like the Bac- trians, with cane bows and short spears, supplied con- tingents to the host of Xerxes. In the time of Alex- ander and the early Seleukids, Parthia proper and Hyr- kania, adjoining the Caspian, were combined to form a satrapy. The Parthians, unlike the Bactrians, never adopted Greek culture, and, although submissive to their Persian and Macedonian masters, retained un- changed the habits of a horde of mounted shepherds,