The Hellenistic Far East: Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia

In honor of beloved Virgil—

O degli altri poeti onore e lume . . .

—Dante, Inferno

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Classical Literature Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which was established by a major gift from Joan Palevsky.

The Hellenistic Far East

The Hellenistic Far East

Archaeology, Language, and Identity in Greek Central Asia

Rachel Mairs

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Oakland, California

© 2014 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mairs, Rachel.

    The Hellenistic Far East : archaeology, language, and identity in Greek Central Asia / Rachel Mairs.

        p.    cm.

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-28127-1 (cloth, alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-520-95954-5 (electronic)

    1. Asia, Central—Antiquities    2. Greeks—Asia, Central—Antiquities.    3. Ay Khanom (Afghanistan)—Antiquities.    4. Bactria—Antiquities.    5. Excavations (Archaeology)—Asia, Central.    6. Cities and towns, Ancient—Asia, Central.    7. Garrisons—Asia, Central—History—To 1500.    8. Group identity—Asia, Central—History—History.    9. Asia, Central—Languages—History—History.    10. Social archaeology—Asia, Central.    I. Title.

DS328.M24    2014

958’.01—dc232014011416

Manufactured in the United States of America

23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16  15  14

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Natures Natural, a fiber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For My Grandfather

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

A Note on Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Administering Bactria: From Achaemenid Satrapy to Graeco-Bactrian State

2. Ai Khanoum

3. Self-Representation in the Inscriptions of Sōphytos (Arachosia) and Heliodoros (India)

4. Waiting for the Barbarians: The Fall of Greek Bactria

Conclusion

Appendix: Greek Documents

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

MAPS

1. The Hellenistic World

2. Hellenistic Bactria

3. Ai Khanoum city plan

FIGURES

1. The discovery of Ai Khanoum as reported in the Kabul Times

2. Bactrian Aramaic document with regnal year of Alexander the Great

3. Greek economic text from the Ai Khanoum treasury

4. Greek document of the reign of Antimachos

5. Ai Khanoum palace plan

6. The Saksanokhur palace

7. Inscription of Sōphytos

8. Bronze coin of Agathokles with bilingual legend

9. Imitation coin of Heliokles

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The book in which I first read about Ai Khanoum was a childhood gift from my grandparents, but my interest in Hellenistic Bactria began in earnest when I was an undergraduate in the library of St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, when I should have been writing an essay on something else. Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn’s The Greeks in Bactria and India had a title too intriguing and downright bizarre to possibly be ignored. It also left me with more questions than I could even begin to know how to go about answering.

Dorothy J. Thompson has been a supervisor and mentor without equal throughout my vacillations between Egypt and Central Asia. I owe her an immense debt for showing me how one can think critically and creatively about language and identity. Parts of this book originated in a PhD thesis under her supervision at the University of Cambridge.

The Hellenistic Far East does not have any real disciplinary home, but I have been grateful for the welcome given me by various centers of classics, oriental studies, and archaeology, as well as the institutions where I have worked over the past few years. The academic communities of the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (ISAW), New York University; Merton College, University of Oxford; the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, Brown University; and the Department of Classics, University of Reading, have all provided financial support and terrific opportunities to share and discover new research. My students at Brown gave me the chance to actually teach Central Asian archaeology for the first time. Sören Stark and Lillian Tseng kindly allowed me to participate in their seminar on Cultural Interactions in Eurasian Art and Archaeology at ISAW and to learn more about the archaeology of Central Asian nomads. Raymond J. Mairs provided an architect’s perspective on Ai Khanoum. Participants at numerous conferences over the years have also given me food for thought and have let me test the principle that you can only know if your ideas are actually crazy once you’ve said them aloud in front of a large, imposing audience.

Thanks also go to everyone who has contributed to my Hellenistic Far East Bibliography, named individually in the acknowledgements to Mairs 2011b and subsequent updates. I will continue to update the bibliography regularly at www.bactria.org (through which I occasionally get requests for logistical support in Afghanistan because of confusion with a similarly named website).

Lynne Rouse gave me the opportunity to excavate and conduct research in Turkmenistan, which was supported by a grant from the British Academy. Carol Mairs, Central Asian traveling companion extraordinaire, put up with the highs (Samarkand), the lows (Konye Urgench), and all the plov a person could reasonably eat.

Frank L. Holt and Matthew Canepa offered superb critique and advice in the preparation of this manuscript, for which I am very grateful indeed. Paul Bernard and Nicholas Sims-Williams provided kind assistance with the Sōphytos inscription and the Bactrian documentary texts. At University of California Press, Eric Schmidt, Maeve Cornell-Taylor, and Cindy Fulton have been supportive and astute editors, and Paul Psoinos an exemplary copy editor.

Thanks for everything must go to my family.

A NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS

For epigraphical publications, the abbreviations used in the notes to this volume follow those appearing in the frontmatter lists of Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition, revised (Oxford, 2003), and H. G. Liddell, Robert Scott, et al., eds., A Greek-English Lexicon, 9th edition, with supplement (Oxford, 1968); those for papyri are as given in the Checklist of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets, available online at http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/scriptorium/papyrus/texts/clist.html.

MAP 1. The Hellenistic World.

MAP 2. Hellenistic Bactria.

MAP 3. Ai Khanoum city plan.

Introduction

Coins with Indian inscriptions.

Those of the most powerful monarchs,

of Evoukratindaza, of Stratasa,

of Menandraza, of Heramaïaza.

That’s how the scholarly book conveys to us

the Indian writing on one side of the coins.

But the book shows us the other side as well,

that is, moreover, the right side,

with the figure of the king. And how quickly he stops there,

how a Hellene is moved as he reads the Greek,

Hermaios, Eukratides, Straton, Menandros.—

C. P. CAVAFY, COINS WITH INDIAN INSCRIPTIONS (1920; TRANS. AFTER MENDELSOHN 2012, 334)

A GREEK CITY IN AFGHANISTAN

In 1966, excavators at an ancient city on the river Oxus in northern Afghanistan discovered two short Greek inscriptions.¹ In one, from a gymnasium, two brothers named Straton and Triballos dedicate to Hermes and Herakles. In the second, the more famous inscription, a man named Klearchos states that he has copied down a series of ethical maxims at Delphi and brought them here to be set up in the sanctuary of Kineas. On the same stone, the surviving portion of a much longer inscription, we find the last of these precepts, which contain instructions for those at different stages in their lives: As a child, be well behaved; as a young man, self-controlled; in middle age, be just; as an elder, be of good counsel; and when you come to the end, be without grief.

It had long been known from brief references in the works of Greek and Roman historians that Greeks had settled in Central Asia in the aftermath of the campaigns of Alexander the Great, in the late fourth century B.C.E. The city that was being uncovered on the Oxus, however, was the first actual material remnant of such settlement to have been revealed. Its local name was Ai Khanoum (Lady Moon in Uzbek). In addition to the shrine of Kineas and the gymnasium, Ai Khanoum contained a fine array of grand public buildings, some of them strikingly Greek in architectural style, others with closer connections to the architecture of Central Asia and the Near East. Ai Khanoum has remained the most important source of evidence for the lives of the Greek settlers of Central Asia and their descendants, but many important questions remain unanswered. Is our impression of the overt Greekness of these communities correct? What languages did they speak, what gods did they worship, and what relationship did they consider themselves to have to their Greek ancestral homeland?

The territories with which this book will be concerned cover the easternmost regions crossed by Alexander the Great in his campaigns through the Persian empire, in the late fourth century B.C.E. These were Sogdiana and Bactria in the north, in what is now Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and northern Afghanistan; Arachosia, now southern Afghanistan; and Gandhāra, in today’s northwestern Pakistan. I will discuss some material from other regions also, in particular from Central India, where we have evidence of the presence of Greeks. The common history of these territories makes a catchall term convenient, and I have chosen to use the term Hellenistic Far East, which is imperfect but is of reasonably common currency.²

The history of the Hellenistic Far East is known only in the broadest of outlines. In the 320s B.C.E., Alexander the Great left garrisons of Greek and Macedonian settlers across the territories from Sogdiana to northwestern India.³ The whole region was inherited by his Seleucid successors, but Arachosia and the Indian territories were quickly lost to the Maurya empire, and by the mid-third century B.C.E. Bactria was effectively independent under a local Greek dynasty, the Diodotids.⁴ The Diodotids were overthrown by Euthydemos, whose independence the Seleucid king Antiochos III was forced to confirm at the end of the third century. Euthydemos’s son Demetrios spearheaded a Graeco-Bactrian expansion into India, but the realm fragmented into a large number of smaller kingdoms, ruled over by kings who began to strike coins with Greek inscriptions on one side and Indian on the other. In the 240s B.C.E., the Greek state of Bactria itself fell, to a combination of nomadic invasions from the north, war with Parthia, and internal dynastic conflict. Some Indo-Greek statelets struggled on in northern India until around the turn of the common era.

The archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the Hellenistic Far East is still patchy and problematic, despite the advances brought by the discovery of Ai Khanoum. In addition to the material from Ai Khanoum, we have a variety of other pieces of historical and archaeological evidence from across the region. (See Sources, below.) There are a small number of Greek inscriptions from sites other than Ai Khanoum, as well as one important mention of a Greek in a contemporary Indian inscription. There are also more mundane, everyday administrative and legal documents in Aramaic and Greek. There are the coins struck by the kings of a succession of Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kingdoms. There is evidence (mostly limited in quantity and quality) from archaeological sites across Bactria, Sogdiana, Arachosia, and Gandhāra. In this material, discussed in the following chapters, we will encounter such characters as a Greek ambassador to the court of an Indian king, a man with a non-Greek name writing sophisticated Greek verse, Greek and Bactrian officials working in a royal treasury, and Scythian mercenaries in Greek employ. This record is, however, fragmentary, and it demands to be better contextualized: geographically, historically, and in terms of theoretical approaches to questions of ancient colonialism, ethnic interaction, and identity formation.

Distance, terrain, and political boundaries isolate the Hellenistic Far East geographically from the better-known contemporary empires of the Mediterranean, Near East, and India. Its archaeological record displays a complex combination of material culture forms and stylistic traits, some of which are also found in these neighboring empires, and some of which are not. Scholarly territorial claims over the Hellenistic Far East (see below) appear to have given way to a common perception that the region does not really belong in either a classics department or an oriental studies or South Asian studies department—although the remains of Ai Khanoum, and the Greek inscriptions of the region, have on occasion provoked excitement and a certain amount of discussion among classicists. This material is exotic in a double sense. It presents a dramatic confirmation of the presence and persistence of Greek culture in a remote region, Central Asia and the Indo-Iranian borderlands, for a period of some three hundred years after the initial settlement under Alexander and the early Seleucids. Earlier generations of scholars spoke of the notion of a vibrant Greek culture in Central Asia, there to be discovered by adventurous archaeologists, as a mirage; but this mirage has turned out to have material substance.⁵ The other sense in which the archaeological and epigraphic record of the Hellenistic Far East is exotic is in analysts’ constant confrontations with material that will be unfamiliar to them, whatever their scholarly training. Ai Khanoum is exotically, intrusively, Greek in its Central Asian location, but it is also exotically un-Greek in terms of much of the archaeological material recovered from it. This is not Athens, nor even Alexandria, Antioch, or Seleucia. The challenge with such material is to move beyond its exoticism—or sheer oddness—and try to elucidate something of the social and cultural dynamics of the society that produced it, and to relate this society in a meaningful way to its regional hinterland and contemporary states in both the Near East and the Indian subcontinent. Material from the Hellenistic Far East may be novel and interesting, but what do we actually do with it?

These are all questions that I shall explore in the following chapters. This book is not, however, intended to be a general or comprehensive history of the Hellenistic Far East, and there are many topics—perhaps even ones familiar to a general audience—that I will not cover.⁶ These include the campaigns of Alexander the Great in the region, the Greek inscriptions of the Maurya emperor Aśoka from Kandahar, coinage of the Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek kings, and questions of political and dynastic history in general. I have selected my material in order to explore several broad research questions. In chapter 1, I ask how the Hellenistic Far East was administered by its rulers, and I discuss the evidence for continuity in administrative practices and personnel before and after the period of Greek rule. Chapter 2 is devoted to a study of Ai Khanoum in which I try to view the city as a living, working community rather than an abstract collection of diverse architectural traits, and to contextualize it within the wider and longer-term evidence for urban settlement in Bactria. Two inscriptions, one made by a Greek in Prākrit and the other by an Indian in Greek, are analyzed in chapter 3. Both inscriptions raise questions about the attachment of individuals in the Hellenistic Far East to the Greek language and culture, and the types of identities that they might try to construct and assert on the basis of this attachment. In chapter 4, I return both to archaeological evidence and to a longue-durée approach, examining the period of the fall of Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. I question the traditional viewpoint that the Greek civilization of Bactria was destroyed by barbarian nomadic invaders from the north.

In this preamble, I aim to set the historiographical scene, to explain how we came to have the textual and archaeological record that we do, and why this record has come to be viewed by scholars in the way that it has. I shall discuss the source material available from the Hellenistic Far East, whether textual or archaeological; the ways in which current debates on culture and ethnicity in the ancient world may help us to approach this source material; and the immediate intellectual and political context of the discoveries in Central Asia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

SOURCES

In his Coins with Indian Inscriptions, the Alexandrian Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy (1863–1933) describes his surprise in browsing through a catalogue of Indo-Greek coins and finding some with the names of Greek kings rendered in Indian script. Most of these kings are known only from the numismatic record and do not appear in any ancient historical account. Greek, Roman, Indian, and Chinese written sources preserve little of the history of the Hellenistic Far East in general. (What few sources there are will be considered in chapters 1 and 4.) Until the second half of the twentieth century, the amount of archaeological and documentary evidence available was also extremely limited.

The project with which modern historians of the Hellenistic Far East have therefore traditionally been faced is that of making the best of what there is. The outlooks of scholars (as stated in print) show a combination of pessimism and pluck. We might look at three examples. The German scholar T. S. Bayer (1694–1738) wrote on a range of classical and oriental topics, including Bactria. In his published writings and personal letters he often quoted from the Hellenistic poet Theocritus (an Alexandrian predecessor of Cavafy by over two thousand years): The Greeks got into Troy by trying. . . . Everything is done by trying!⁷ The French archaeologist Alfred Foucher, who became the first director of the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA) in 1922 (see further below), dug at Bactra without discovering any significant evidence of Hellenistic occupation for some eighteen months. He later wrote that the Greek dynasts of Bactria have failed in their most basic duty toward our scholarly societies in neglecting to construct in marble temples and palaces engraved with inscriptions.⁸ In his The Greeks in Bactria and India, first published in 1938, the British historian Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn tackled the historical sources:⁹

A word must be said here about the sources, though they will sufficiently appear as the book proceeds. They are of course very scrappy. But they were not always scrappy. . . . As there was once a tradition, it is somebody’s business to attempt to recover the outline of it.

In the following chapters, I examine a range of sources and suggest that we can do a lot more than simply make the best of what we have. A combination of documentary texts written on leather and ceramics, stone inscriptions, coins, and a wealth of archaeological data, from both excavation and field survey, provide something arguably more valuable than a connected narrative, political history: an insight into the lives, culture, and identities of the inhabitants of the Hellenistic Far East. That we can gain such an insight is thanks to a number of important recent discoveries of inscriptions and documentary texts, as well as ongoing archaeological projects in Afghanistan and Central Asia. Nevertheless, the foundation of our chronological framework for the Hellenistic Far East remains numismatic. Here, too, innovative scholarship of the past couple of decades has allowed us to pinpoint the regnal years of kings and the territorial extent of their kingdoms more accurately, and has also explored the political and cultural messages contained in the images and inscriptions on Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins.¹⁰

The most important step that we can take toward a better understanding of the material from the Hellenistic Far East is, in my view, to restore to it something of its context. I mean this in a regional sense—as part of a wider Hellenistic world, a topic to which I shall return in my conclusion to this volume—and in terms of diachronic perspective, an approach that I will adopt most notably in chapter 1, on the administrative continuity from the Achaemenids to the Greeks in Bactria, and in chapter 4, on the end of Greek rule in Bactria in the mid-second century B.C.E.

It is also important to recognize the apparent cultural contradictions in the archaeological and epigraphic evidence, in particular, and to find more nuanced ways of approaching these than a simple statement that a particular individual or structure is Greek or otherwise. Ai Khanoum, the Greek city in Central Asia,¹¹ complements its overtly Greek gymnasium, theater, and founder’s shrine with other institutions and architectural elements that are overtly non-Greek. This stylistic disunity is striking to modern archaeologists but must have made some kind of cultural sense to contemporary local populations: the onus is on us to find a reasonable model for the social dynamics of such a society.¹² The Greek epigraphic record of the Hellenistic Far East introduces a range of figures and concepts that we would be unlikely to encounter in more westerly Hellenistic inscriptions: Buddhist ethical terminology,¹³ Bactrian river gods,¹⁴ and Indian emperors.¹⁵ They present us with some odd juxtapositions: a man with an Indian name writing recherché Hellenistic verse with Homeric touches,¹⁶ or maxims from Delphi transcribed in northern Afghanistan.¹⁷ The appearance, more recently, of further material on the international antiquities market has only served to complicate the matter, for such finds—which include Greek¹⁸ and Aramaic¹⁹ documentary texts from Bactria and Greek inscriptions,²⁰ as well as large numbers of coins²¹ and some stunning jewelry with Greek artisans’ signatures and weight marks²²—are almost all without secure provenance.

There is still work to be done. Even with the archaeological work in Afghanistan in the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent excavations north of the Oxus in the Central Asian republics (discussed below), our archaeological picture of the Hellenistic Far East remains fragmentary in the extreme. Bactra (modern Balkh), the capital of the Achaemenid satrapy of Bactria and of the later Graeco-Bactrian kingdom, is still largely unknown, despite promising recent work by the Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan.²³ Across the Hellenistic Far East as a whole, only a few urban sites have been excavated, but many such excavations date to the mid-twentieth century or earlier, and the material unearthed is for various reasons inadequate or problematic, or both.²⁴ Extensive archaeological field survey has gone some way toward providing a regional context for such sites and has furnished much useful information on the agricultural and economic basis of settlement in the Hellenistic Far East, but here also much remains to be done.²⁵

IDENTITY

The region comprising Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the northwestern Indian subcontinent in antiquity was ethnically and culturally diverse. Greek settlers were only the latest addition to an already heterogeneous population, which spoke many languages and practiced a variety of religions. The annexation of the region by a foreign king, Alexander the Great, was also, in a way, nothing new. It had previously been ruled by Persia as part of the Achaemenid empire. What is novel and exciting about the history of the territory taken over by Alexander, from the late fourth century B.C.E. until around the turn of the common era, is the dynamic interaction we can see between the new Greek immigrant community and their neighbors. This interaction is visible in architecture and material culture at sites such as Ai Khanoum. Documents written on animal skin and on potsherds, recovered from excavations or purchased on the antiquities market, also provide us with insights into administrative structures and ethnic landscapes. The ethnic and cultural diversity of the region, in short, becomes very visible in our evidence from Hellenistic Central Asia and northwestern India—and much of this archaeological and documentary evidence has become known to scholarship only recently.

I use the word Greek in my title, although Greek, as will become clear, is not a term I would apply to any individuals, communities, inscriptions, or archaeological material discussed in this book without prophylactic inverted commas. Yet the Greek question is one that has dominated scholarly debates on the Hellenistic Far East, as on the wider Hellenistic world. How Greek, in culture, language, and identity (not to mention genetics) were the new kingdoms left in the wake of Alexander the Great’s campaigns? Does the use of Greek as an administrative language and a more general lingua franca indicate that it held cultural and political dominance, and that individuals may have sought to associate themselves with it for this reason?

I opened this chapter with a poem by Cavafy, a Greek from Egyptian Alexandria, writing at a time when the city still had something of the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the Hellenistic metropolis. As a Greek of the diaspora, Cavafy becomes emotional when he recognizes familiar Greek names on Indo-Greek coins.²⁶ Like Cavafy, many modern scholars have struggled to reconcile the Greek and the non-Greek side of the peoples and states of the Hellenistic Far East. As I will discuss at greater length in the conclusion, I view the region as part of a wider Hellenistic world, and concepts and theories that have allowed us to develop more productive approaches to culture and identity in other Hellenistic states are equally applicable to Bactria and the East.²⁷

Ethnic identity is one of my main preoccupations in this book. By ethnic identity, I mean not some monolithic, unchallenged, primal identity held by an individual or community but a fluid, situational identity, subject to change across time and space and in different social contexts. (See below on linguistic domains and code switching.) This model of ethnicity is fundamentally that of the anthropologist Fredrik Barth, who noted that a boundary between groups can be delineated in cases when there is little externally observable difference between the languages, cultures, and societies of the groups concerned, and that many different forms of behavior and culture can be given ethnic weight.²⁸ From a Hellenistic perspective, what this means is that communities may have defended strong ethnic identities even where their material record does not differ greatly from that of their neighbors. It also means, as I will argue in chapter 2, that it is important for us to try to differentiate between what we may view as external criteria of ethnic belonging (e.g., the use of Greek architectural forms) and those that were perceived as such by contemporary agents.

The postcolonial turn in classical studies²⁹ has also brought new ways of approaching the Hellenistic world. The Hellenistic Far East was, of course, a settler society, home to an incoming Greek colonial diaspora and to these settlers’ descendants.³⁰ May the lessons from more recent colonial encounters be brought to bear on evidence from the region? My approach here is more cautious. From the nineteenth century onward, with European colonization of the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia, Alexander and the Greeks of Bactria were viewed as predecessors of the British in India—an identification often claimed with some pride by the British themselves.³¹ But there are important differences between the two historical contexts, not least in attitudes toward intermarriage and mixing between ethnic groups and races. I will discuss the more recent history of European archaeological research in the region further below. Other concepts generated from postcolonial studies, such as hybridity and the middle ground, may perhaps be more productively applied to the evidence from the Hellenistic Far East, a subject to which I shall return in my conclusion.³²

Aside from identity and its construction, the most important theme in this book is that of interaction between communities, and this topic is again a preoccupation that I share with those who work on other regions of the Hellenistic world. This interaction may be broken down in several ways: between Greek and non-Greek, between polities, both inside and outside the Greek-ruled states of the Hellenistic Far East, and between settled and mobile populations. This last area will form the main theme of chapter 4, where I explore the myths of a strict nomad-settled divide in Central Asia and of the fall of a settled Greek civilization to nomadic horsemen from the steppe.

LANGUAGE

In most regions, for most of the period considered in this book, Greek was the dominant written language. The earlier use of Aramaic as an administrative language by the Persian empire left some legacy. In chapter 1 I will discuss how, in Bactria, the Persian bureaucracy may have been used as a model by the incoming Greeks. In Arachosia, Aramaic was used by the Maurya emperor Aśoka in a series of edicts to his subjects, alongside Greek, as late as the mid-third century. But the influence of Aramaic faded: it had always been a language of bureaucracy rather than a language of the street. Although many languages must have been spoken in the Hellenistic Far East, Greek remained the only language of literacy after the demise of Aramaic. It was only in a much later period that a local vernacular, Bactrian, was given a written form, and it is significant that it was the Greek alphabet—in the absence of any other available model—that was adapted for this purpose.

The Greek documents and Greek inscriptions discussed in this book are testimony to the enduring importance of the Greek language in the Hellenistic Far East, but they are the tip of the linguistic iceberg. The Hellenistic world as a whole was a profoundly multilingual place. In regions such as Egypt, we have written evidence of the variety of languages used by the population and the range of linguistic registers that a single individual might command. In Bactria we do not, but this absence of evidence should not be taken as evidence of absence. The makers and readers of Greek inscriptions—including those of the Delphic inscription from the sanctuary of Kineas at Ai Khanoum—were probably bilingual or multilingual, and the communities in which they lived must have contained speakers of many languages. This should be borne in mind throughout the following discussion. In one case, considered in chapter 3, we happen to have evidence of how a representative of an Indo-Greek king may have appeared in a different context, in a Prākrit inscription from a Central Indian kingdom. Here we find a man with a Greek name, Heliodoros, who is described as a Greek ambassador and a devotee of an Indian god. This inscription gives some insight into the ethnolinguistic complexity of the region and allows us to speculate about the range of languages—other than Greek—that Heliodoros may have spoken.

Thinking of the Hellenistic Far East as multilingual is useful because it reminds us that the individuals and communities who created the documents and monuments considered in the following chapters did not subscribe to some single, monolithic cultural identity; but it is also helpful from a theoretical point of view. Linguistic analogies have long enjoyed a vogue in studies