Indo-Greek Kingdom

The kingdoms

Greek rule south of the Hindu Kush began with the Bactrian expansion under Demetrius and continued, through a confusing succession of rival houses, for roughly two centuries. Some forty kings are known, almost all of them from coins alone; several ruled simultaneously in different parts of the territory, and the sequence is still argued over on numismatic grounds.

The coinage is the most informative thing about them. Indo-Greek kings struck bilingual issues — Greek legend on the obverse, Prakrit in Kharoṣṭhī on the reverse — and adopted the square format familiar in Indian usage alongside the round Greek one. A coinage designed to be read by two populations is a statement about how the kingdoms were governed.

Menander

Menander I, ruling in the second century BCE from Śākala, in ancient India (modern-day Sialkot, Pakistan), is the one king known from more than his coins. The Milindapañha, a Pali text of some length, presents him as Milinda, a king who puts a series of searching questions about the self, rebirth and the nature of the person to the monk Nāgasena, and is satisfied by the answers. The work is a classic of Buddhist philosophical literature; how much of the historical Menander is in it is another matter.

Plutarch reports that when Menander died the cities disputed his remains and divided them, building monuments over the portions — a story told in almost the same terms of the Buddha, which suggests the account reached the Greek world through Buddhist channels.

The Yavanas in India

Indian sources call these rulers and their people Yavanas, a word derived ultimately from Ionian, which came to mean Greek and later, more loosely, westerner. Patañjali's grammatical commentary and the Yuga Purāṇa refer to Yavana incursions into the Ganga plain reaching Sāketa and Pāṭaliputra; whether these were raids or a sustained occupation is unclear.

The Heliodorus pillar at Besnagar, erected by a Greek ambassador from Taxila who calls himself a devotee of Vāsudeva, and the many Greek names among the donors recorded at Buddhist sites in the northwest, show a population that was absorbed rather than segregated. Indo-Greek rule was ended in the first century BCE by Scythian arrivals from the north, but the artistic and administrative habits of the region persisted, and Gandhāran sculpture of the following centuries is unintelligible without them.