Greco-Bactrian Kingdom

A Greek state in Central Asia

Bactria had been settled with Greek colonists since Alexander's campaigns, and around the middle of the third century BCE its satrap Diodotus broke from Seleucid authority and struck coins in his own name. The kingdom that followed was wealthy — Bactria's irrigated plains supported dense agriculture — and strategically placed on the routes between India, Iran and the steppe.

The excavation of Ai-Khanoum on the Oxus, before the site was destroyed in the later twentieth century, recovered a Greek city with a gymnasium, a theatre, a treasury and an inscription copying the Delphic maxims, in a place two thousand miles from Delphi. It remains the clearest physical evidence of what these kingdoms were.

Coins and evidence

Greco-Bactrian coinage is exceptional: high-relief royal portraits of unmistakable individuality, struck to Attic weights, naming kings for whom there is often no other evidence at all. Much of the dynastic history of the region has been reconstructed from these coins — from overstrikes, monograms, hoards and stylistic sequence — which means it is a history of names and approximate order rather than of events.

The literary sources are thin and hostile to detail. Strabo, drawing on Apollodorus, records that the Bactrian Greeks extended their rule into India and conquered more peoples than Alexander had; this is nearly all that survives of their Indian campaigns in written form.

South of the Hindu Kush

Under Demetrius, in the early second century BCE, Greek forces crossed the mountains into Gandhāra and the Punjab, in ancient India (modern-day Pakistan). The territories they took became the Indo-Greek kingdoms, which continued long after Bactria itself was lost.

Bactria fell around 130 to 125 BCE to nomadic peoples moving in from the north — the Yuezhi of the Chinese sources, from whom the Kushans would emerge. The Han envoy Zhang Qian reached the region shortly afterwards and described what he found, providing an independent date for the conquest.