NOTES

 

INTRODUCTION

1. The modern rediscovery of Bactria had been going on for two hundred years before the German scientist Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg invented the term “bacteria,” which has since caused all manner of trouble for cataloguers and search engines that confuse these words. It is probably too late for either side to change its terminology, and given the long priority of the Latinized “Bactria” for the ancient land of Baktriana (Greek ), this book will retain the traditional spelling as found in, e.g., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition.

2. The precise geographic boundaries of Bactria have long been disputed: B. Lyonnet, “The Problem of the Frontiers between Bactria and Sogdiana: An Old Discussion and New Data,” pp. 195–208 in A. Gail and G. Mevissen, eds., South Asian Archaeology 1991 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1993). In this book the name refers generally to the heart of the ancient kingdom in northern Afghanistan, as well as its occasional dependencies north of the Amu Darya (technically, ancient Sogdia) and south of the Hindu Kush toward Pakistan (ancient India). Some now prefer a different generic name, the Hellenistic Far East (HFE): Rachel Mairs, The Archaeology of the Hellenistic Far East: A Survey (Oxford: BAR, 2011), p. 8.

3. Stanley Burstein, “New Light on the Fate of Greek in Ancient Central and South Asia,” Ancient West and East 9 (2010): 185.

4. On the classical sources, particularly for Eucratides, see chap. 1; for Chinese and Indian sources, see the notes below.

5. On Menander, see I. B. Horner, trans., Milinda's Questions (Bristol: Pali Text Society, 1963–64). This work takes the form of a dialogue between Milinda (Menander) and the Buddhist sage Nagasena.

6. Osmund Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991), pp. 76–88. On the coin type, see Agnes B. Brett, “Athena of Pella,” American Numismatic Society Museum Notes 4 (1950): 55–72, esp. pp. 64–65.

7. Xinru Liu, “Migration and Settlement of the Yuezhi-Kushan: Interaction and Interdependence of Nomadic and Sedentary Societies,” Journal of World History 12.2 (2001): 261–92.

8. Burton Watson, trans., Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian (New York: Research Center for Translation, 1993), pp. 231–52.

9. Yang Juping, “Alexander the Great and the Emergence of the Silk Road,” The Silk Road 6.2 (2009): 15–22; K. M. Baipakov, “The Great Silk Way: Studies in Kazakhstan,” Archaeological Studies 16 (1994): 89– 93; and for some exciting archaeological evidence of cultural crosscurrents, see Robert Jones, “Centaurs on the Silk Road: Recent Discoveries of Hellenistic Textiles in Western China,” The Silk Road 6.2 (2009): 23–32.

10. According to the apocryphal Acts of the Apostle Thomas, the twin brother of Jesus soon reversed this journey to Bactria and India in order to convert the East to Christianity: Albertus Klijn, The Acts of Thomas: Introduction, Text, and Commentary (Leiden: Brill, 2003). The pagan holy man Apollonius allegedly followed a similar path eastward, as chronicled in Philostratus's Life of Apollonius of Tyana. See Marco Galli, “Hellenistic Court Imagery in the Early Buddhist Art of Gandhara,” Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 17 (2011): 288–92.

11. The quotation in the epigraph comes from Louis's article “Concerning Language and Gold,” Old and New 7 (Apr. 1873): 410.

1. THE ADVENTURE BEGINS

1. Jacob Spon, Voyage d'Italie, de Dalmatie, de Grèce et du Levant (Lyon: Antoine Cellier, 1678), pp. 17–22.

2. For the career of Vaillant, see Ernest Babelon, Traité des monnaies grecques et romaines, vol. I: Théorie et doctrine (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1901), cols. 137–43.

3. The expedient of swallowing coins in anticipation of being captured has a long, and sometimes grisly, history. When Jewish refugees from the Roman siege of Jerusalem were seen picking coins from their own fresh excrement, some two thousand prisoners were quickly slaughtered and their intestines searched for hidden gold: Josephus, Jewish War 5.13.4.

4. Spon, Voyage, p. 21.

5. Irène Aghion, “Collecting Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal of the History of Collections 14.2 (2002): 193–203; Alexander McKay, “Archaeology and the Creative Imagination,” pp. 227–34 in McKay, ed., New Perspectives in Canadian Archaeology (Ottawa: Royal Society of Canada, 1977).

6. Warwick Ball, The Monuments of Afghanistan: History, Archaeology and Architecture (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008), p. 136, n. 26.

7. See, for example, Harlan Berk, 100 Greatest Ancient Coins (Atlanta: Whitman Publishing, 2008), part of a series of such books aimed at the collector/enthusiast market. The author polled collectors, dealers, curators, and others to establish a somewhat arbitrary checklist and then illustrated each item on it. A coin of Eucratides figures as no. 80. Similarly, Prashant Srivastava, Art-Motifs on Ancient Indian Coins (New Delhi: Harman, 2004), produces a list of “Masterpieces of Numismatic Art” and checks off Eucratides as no. 2.

8. J. F. Vaillant, Arsacidarum Imperium, sive Regum Parthorum Historia ad Fidem Numismaticum Accommodata (Paris: Moette, 1725).

9. Ibid., pp. 28–44. On Eucratides II, see below, n. 29. Another king, Apollodotus, was confused with the writer Apollodorus.

10. On Bruce's career, see Grant Simpson, ed., The Scottish Soldier Abroad, 1247–1967 (Edinburgh: John Donald Publishers, 1992), pp. 56–63.

11. Bruce's death occurred on April 19 (Old Style, which is April 30 New Style).

12. On Bayer, see Knud Lunbaek, T. S. Bayer (1694–1738): Pioneer Sinologist (London: Curzon Press, 1986).

13. T. Bayer, Historia Regni Graecorum Bactriani (St. Petersburg: Academia Scientiarum, 1738). The appearance of Bayer's history of Bactria was much anticipated as far away as London: Omar Coloru, Da Alessandro a Menandro: Il regno greco di Battriana (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra, 2009), p. 34.

14. Ibid., p. 100. On the denomination of this historic coin, see F. Holt, “Bayer's Coin of Eucratides: A Miscalculation Corrected,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 174 (2010): 289–90.

15. On these kings, see F. Holt, Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

16. Bayer (Historia Regni, p. 95) considered Eucratides I to have been pro-Parthian and Eucratides II to have been anti-Parthian.

17. Bayer, Historia Regni, p. 45. There is no indication that this specimen derived from Bruce's collection.

18. J. Pellerin, Recueil de médailles de rois (Paris: Guerin and Delatour, 1762), p. 129; Pellerin, Additions aux neuf volumes de Recueiles de médailles de rois (Paris: Desaint, 1778), pp. 95–96. See also Holt, “Bayer's Coin,” pp. 289–90. The rare exception was Marie-Thérèse Allouche-LePage, L'art monétaire des royaumes bactriens (Paris: Didier, 1956), p. 197.

19. H. H. Wilson, Ariana Antiqua: A Descriptive Account of the Antiquities and Coins of Afghanistan (1841; reprint, Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1971), pp. 3 and 218.

20. See Graham Shipley, The Greek World after Alexander, 323–30 BC (London: Routledge, 2000).

21. Klaus Karttunen argues that Eucratides was at one time relatively well known in antiquity: “King Eucratides in Literary Sources,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 6 (1999–2000): 116; see also Karttunen, India and the Hellenistic World (Helsinki: Finnish Oriental Society, 1997).

22. Valerii Nikonorov, “Apollodorus of Artemita and the Date of His Parthica Revisited,” Electrum 2 (1998): 107–22. For a very extensive, up-to-date bibliography on Parthian history, compiled by Valerii Nikonorov, see the new Russian edition of Neilson Debevoise's 1938 classic A Political History of Parthia (St. Petersburg: Akademii Nauk, 2008).

23. Strabo, Geography 15.1.3.

24. Strabo, Geography 11.9.2.

25. Strabo, Geography 11.11.1. Euthydemus and his son Demetrius are also mentioned in Polybius, Histories 10.49 and 11.34. See Holt, Thundering Zeus, pp. 181–82.

26. Strabo, Geography 11.11.2. Eucratides' namesake city is also mentioned by the geographer Claudius Ptolemy (6.11.8) and by Stephanus of Byzantium in his Ethnica, s.v. “Eucratidia.” Strabo's Turiva may be a mistake for Tapuria, a place name cited by other ancient writers: Polybius 10.49; Ptolemy 6.14.7 and 12.

27. The connection is patent in the survival of Apollodorus's stock phrase “the thousand cities of Bactria,” which Trogus passed on to Justin.

28. Justin, Epitome of Pompeius Trogus's Philippic History 41.6.1–5.

29. In more or less quoting Justin's passage word for word, Vaillant (Arsacidarum Imperium, p. 44) wrote “a filio Eucratide II,” as though the name actually appeared in his source. He probably just supplied the name as a supposition of his own.

30. The story is given by the historian Livy, a contemporary of Pompeius Trogus, in his Histories (1.46).

31. Aelian, On the Nature of Animals 15.8.

32. See Lionel Casson, The Periplus Maris Erythraei: Text with introduction, Translation, and Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 80–81 and 204–6.

33. Plutarch, Moralia 821D.

34. On this strange account, see Coloru, Da Alessandro a Menandro, pp. 104–9.

35. The Latin of this Renaissance poet does not make it entirely clear whose son, Eucratides' or Demetrius's, was the assassin. In the 1520 Paris manuscript housed in the British Museum, an anonymous person added a clarification in the margins of Boccaccio's work explaining that “Eucratides was killed by his own son, whom he had made his co-ruler.”

36. See, for example, A. D. H. Bivar, “The Death of Eucratides in Medieval Tradition,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1950): 7–13; Omar Coloru, “Reminiscenze dei re greco-battriani nella letteratura medievale e nella science-fiction Americana,” Studi Ellenistici 20 (2008): 519–39. Laurent and Lydgate give variant accounts of Eucratides' death, making Demetrius's son the villain.

37. “The Knight's Tale,” ll. 2155–86.

38. This literary connection would not be made, however, until Alexander Cunningham, “Coins of Alexander's Successors in the East,” Numismatic Chronicle 9 (1869): 140–53, republished in Cunningham, Coins of Alexander's Successors in the East (1884; reprint, Chicago: Argonaut, 1969), pp. 146–59; see also Henry Hinckley, “The Grete Emetreus the King of Inde,” Modern Language Notes 48 (1933): 148–49. There is little to commend the suggestion that Chaucer may have been inspired by a portrait coin of Demetrius or a so-called pedigree coin of Agathocles, for which see Rachel Mairs, The Archaeology of the Hellenistic Far East: A Survey (Oxford: BAR, 2011), p. 12. Nothing in Chaucer's description resembles the coins, except perhaps the king's age, and that Polybius records. Surely the poet would have been likely to incorporate from the coins something of Demetrius's remarkable elephant headdress, but he imagines instead a green laurel garland.

39. Bayer, Historia Regni, pp. 100 and 133–34.

40. Pellerin, Recueil, pp. 130–31.

41. Pellerin's collection, and the beautiful cabinets designed for it, were acquired by Louis XVI: Aghion, “Collecting Antiquities,” pp. 195– 96. See also Thierry Sarmant, Le Cabinet des Médailles de la Bibliothèque Nationale, 1661–1848 (Paris: École des Chartes, 1994), pp. 136–39.

42. See above, n. 29.

43. For example, see H. K. E. Köhler, Serapis (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1850), p. 7.

44. Now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, this coin is Eucratides I no. 38 (p. 205) in Osmund Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991). See also Dominique Gerin, “Becker et les monnaies bactriennes du Cabinet de France, Part I,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Numismatique 38.4 (1983): 305–9.

45. Pellerin, Additions, pp. 95–106.

46. Ibid., p. 95: “Tout concourt à la rendre une des plus précieuses & des plus intéressantes que l'on ait jamais vues.” This coin is also now in the French collection: Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, Euthydemus I no. 2 (p. 154).

47. Pellerin, Additions, pp. 96–106.

48. Pellerin suggested that the figure of Hercules on the reverse might be taken as a characterization of Euthydemus himself, resting from his triumphant struggles and ruling henceforth in peace. Although the French scholar immediately abandoned this notion, it still survives among some numismatists today.

49. Pellerin, Additions, p. 102: “sûrement d'une main grecque, l'on ne doit pas être surpris de sa beauté.”

50. J. Tod, “An Account of Greek, Parthian, and Hindu Medals, Found in India,” Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society 1 (1826): 313–42.

51. Ibid., p. 314.

52. Ibid., p. 315.

53. H. K. E. Köhler, “Description d'un médaillon rapporté de Boukharie par M. le Colonel Baron Georges de Meyendorff,” pp. 321–28 in E. K. Meyendorff, Voyage d'Orenbourg à Boukhara, fait en 1820 (Paris: Librairie Orientale de Dondey-Dupré, 1826).

54. For full details of these discoveries, see Holt, Thundering Zeus, pp. 74–77.

2. A DANGEROUS GAME

1. Rudyard Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling, maintained the Lahore Museum, a splendid repository of Graeco-Bactrian and Gandharan (Graeco-Buddhist) art. Kipling showcased this museum in the opening pages of Kim.

2. For short biographies of some of these remarkable individuals, see John Ure, Shooting Leave: Spying Out Central Asia in the Great Game (London: Constable, 2009). On the Great Game in general, see Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1992); and Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia (Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 1999).

3. Arthur Conolly, Journey to the North of India through Russia, Persia and Afghanistan, 2 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1834).

4. On Conolly and the phrase, see Hopkirk, The Great Game, p. 1.

5. Meyer and Brysac, Tournament of Shadows, pp. 132–33.

6. Joseph Wolff, Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, in the Years 1843–1845, to Ascertain the Fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly (London: J. W. Parker, 1845), p. v.

7. Ibid. Wolff had met Conolly at Cawnpore in 1833, and so he volunteered in 1843 to search for Conolly, who had gone, in turn, to search for Captain Stoddart. Wolff himself barely survived the emir's wrath through the timely intervention of the shah of Persia.

8. Ibid., pp. 176–77. On the fruits of Conolly's numismatic interests, see the notice in Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1834): 246–47.

9. Wolff, Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, p. 224.

10. F.-P. Gosselin and C.-P. Campion, Catalogue des médailles antiques et modernes, du Cabinet de M. D'Ennery (Paris: de Monsieur, 1788).

11. Ibid., pp. x and 40 (coin no. 253). This coin entered the French national collection: Osmund Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991), Heliocles I no. 13 (p. 224).

12. See Dominique Gerin, “Becker et les monnaies bactriennes du Cabinet de France, Part II,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Numismatique 38.5 (1983): 321–22.

13. T. E. Mionnet, Catalogue d'une collection d'empreintes en soufre de médailles grecques et romaines (Paris: L'Imprimerie de Crapelet, 1799), p. 66 (coin no. 1230).

14. L. Stephani, ed., H.K.E. Köhler's gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, Serapis (St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy, 1850), pp. 4–6 and 9–10.

15. F. Holt, “The Problem of Poseidon in Bactria,” pp. 721–26 in E. A. Antonova et al., eds., Central Asia: Sources, History, Culture (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2005).

16. Stephani, ed., H. K. E. Köhler's gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, Serapis, pp. 2 and 5–6. The nickel specimen (types: obverse, Apollo: reverse, tripod) is described thus: “Elle a été anciennement couverte d'une lame en argent, et il en reste des vestiges sur son avers.”

17. Ibid., pp. 2–3 and 6–7.

18. Ibid., pp. 3–4 and 7–8.

19. Ibid., pp. 7–8.

20. See, for example, Augustus Wilhelm von Schlegel, “Observations sur quelques médailles bactriennes et indo-scythiques nouvellement découvertes,” Journal Asiatique 2 (1828): 321–49.

21. Ibid., p. 327.

22. Ibid., pp. 334–35.

23. On Burnes, see James Lunt, Bokhara Burnes (London: Faber and Faber, 1969).

24. James Prinsep, “Continuation of the Route of Lieutenant A. Burnes and Dr. Gerard, from Peshawar to Bokhara,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1833): 1–22, esp. 14 and 18. On Moorcroft, see Garry Alder, Beyond Bokhara: The Life of William Moorcroft, Asian Explorer and Pioneer Veterinary Surgeon (London: Century, 1985).

25. A. Burnes, Travels into Bokhara, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1834).

26. H. H. Wilson and J. Prinsep, “Observations on Lieut. Burnes's Collection of Bactrian and Other Coins,” in Burnes, Travels, vol. III, pp. 369–84. Prinsep presented an earlier report, “Notes on Lieutenant Burnes' Collection of Ancient Coins,” in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1833): 310–18, reprinted in Edward Thomas, ed., Essays on Indian Antiquities (1858; reprint, Varanasi: Indological Book House, 1971), vol. I, pp. 25–29. Uncharacteristically, Prinsep errs in his reference to “the gold [sic] coin from the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea, described by Bayer.”

27. On the casts, see J. Prinsep, “Bactrian and Indo-Scythic Coins,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1833): 406.

28. Mohan Lal, Travels in the Panjab, Afghanistan, and Turkestan to Balkh, Bokhara, and Herat (London: William Allen, 1846), esp. pp. 31–32, and a notice in the “Proceedings” of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1834): 364. On this important munshi (secretary), see C. A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 230–32.

29. “Proceedings” in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1834): 247.

30. Reported by J. Prinsep, “New Types of Bactrian and Indo-Scythic Coins,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 5 (1836): 721.

31. On the doctor, see his memoir Thirty-Five Years in the East (London: H. Ballière, 1852); on the generals, see in particular Adrian de Longpérier, “Collection numismatique du Général Court,” Revue Numismatique (1839): 81–88; Elizabeth Errington, “Rediscovering the Coin Collection of General Claude-Auguste Court: A Preliminary Report,” Topoi 5 (1995): 409–24.

32. Eugène Jaquet, “Notice sur les découvertes archéologiques faites par M. Honigberger dans Afghanistan,” Journal Asiatique 2 (1836): 234– 304; Longpérier, “Collection,” p. 83. There is some discrepancy about how many cannon were cast from old coins. In his published article, Longpérier states that there were several (“il put faire fondre plusieurs pièces de canon avec les rebuts,” whereas in his elegantly handwritten manuscript still in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Longpérier wrote that there was one (“il peut faire fondre une pièce de canon avec les rebuts.”

33. Gordon Whitteridge, Charles Masson of Afghanistan (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1986); Bijan Omrani, “Charles Masson of Afghanistan: Deserter, Scholar, Spy,” Asian Affairs 39.2 (2008): 199–216.

34. On Josiah Harlan, who also befriended Reverend Joseph Wolff, see Ben Macintyre, The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).

35. On the intellectual milieu of British interest in Alexander, see Christopher Hagerman, “In the Footsteps of the ‘Macedonian Conqueror’: Alexander the Great and British India,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition 16 (2009): 344–92; cf. Robert Rabel, “The Imitation of Alexander the Great in Afghanistan,” Helios 34 (2007): 97–119.

36. Harlan, The Man Who Would Be King, p. 65; cf. Alexander Burnes, “On the Reputed Descendants of Alexander the Great, in the Valley of the Oxus,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 2 (1833): 305–7, and Mohan Lal, Travels, p. 201.

37. C. Masson, “Memoir on the Ancient Coins Found at Beghram, in the Kohistan of Kabul,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 3 (1834): 153–75, esp. 154–56.

38. C. Masson, “Second Memoir on the Ancient Coins Found at Beghram, in the Kohistan of Kabul,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 5 (1836): 1–28, esp. 10.

39. See also P. B. Lord, “Some Account of a Visit to the Plain of Kohi-Damin, the Mining District of Ghorband, and the Pass of Hindu Kush,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 7 (1838): 537, who reports on Masson's finds and adds that two children hired by John Wood gathered some twenty or thirty coins in the space of a few hours at Begram.

40. C. Lassen, Points in the History of the Greek, and Indo-Scythian Kings in Bactria, Cabul, and India, as Illustrated by Deciphering the Ancient Legends on Their Coins, trans. H. Roeer (1840; reprint, Delhi: Indological Book House, 1972), p. 8. Lassen's translated work appeared in Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 9 (1840): 627–76 and 733–65.

41. Witness the important Masson Project in the British Museum begun in 1993, for which see Elizabeth Errington, “Rediscovering the Collections of Charles Masson,” pp. 207–37 in Michael Alram and Deborah Klimburg-Salter, eds., Coins, Art, and Chronology: Essays on the Pre-Islamic History of the Indo-Iranian Borderlands (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999). See also the valuable collection of materials in Errington and Vesta S. Curtis, From Persepolis to the Punjab: Exploring Ancient Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan (London: British Museum, 2007). See below, chter 7.

42. To the further credit of these scholars, it must be noted that they generally took a very broad view of Central and South Asian history that encompassed far more than the Hellenistic era. Thus, they were wrestling with an enormous range of historical problems. For background, see O. P. Kejariwal, The Asiatic Society of Bengal and the Discovery of India's Past, 1784–1838 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1988).

43. R. Rochette, “Deuxième supplément à la Notice sur quelques médailles grecques inédites de rois de la Bactriane et de l'Inde,” Journal des Savants, 1836: 65.

44. R. Rochette, “Supplément à la Notice sur quelques médailles grecques inédites de rois de la Bactriane et de l'Inde,” Journal des Savants, 1835: 513–28.

45. Rochette, “Deuxième supplément,” p. 75; C. Lassen, “Points in the History of the Greek, and Indo-Scythian Kings in Bactria, Cabul, and India,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 9 (1840): 649 and 752. See also the discussion of the Agathocles commemorative coins, below.

46. J. Prinsep, “Further Notes and Drawings of Bactrian and Indo-Scythic Coins,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 4 (1835): 327–46, esp. 328. The similar portrait on a silver specimen owned by General Ventura added to the confusion: p. 337.

47. Rochette, “Deuxième supplément,” p. 75.

48. For example, Masson, “Second Memoir,” p. 17.

49. Charles Masson gives an interesting tally in his “Third Memoir on the Ancient Coins Discovered at the Site called Beghram in the Kohistan of Kabul,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 5 (1836): 547. On the chronology, see Prinsep, “Further Notes,” p. 339.

50. Multiples of homonymous kings remain a matter of dispute among scholars today. See, for example, F. Holt, “Did King Euthydemus II Really Exist?” Numismatic Chronicle 160 (2000): 81–91.

51. See Prinsep, “New Types of Bactrian and Indo-Scythic Coins,” p. 721.

52. J. Prinsep, “Additions to Bactrian Numismatics, and the Discovery of the Bactrian Alphabet,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 7 (1838): 637–38.

53. Ibid., p. 638.

54. Ibid., where Prinsep appends an addendum that acknowledges a letter received from Cunningham on this matter.

55. H. H. Wilson, Ariana Antiqua: A Descriptive Account of the Antiquities and Coins of Afghanistan (1841; reprint, Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1971), p. 267.

56. Recounted in Alexander Burnes, Cabool: A Personal Narrative of a Journey to, and Residence in that City in the Years 1836, 7, and 8, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1843), pp. 204–5.

57. Prinsep, “Further Notes,” p. 329. Prinsep notes that he was following up a suggestion made by Masson.

58. For a useful introduction, see Richard Salomon, Indian Epigraphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

59. Her diary has been published: Patrick Macrory, ed., Lady Sale: The First Afghan War (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1969).

60. A. Cunningham, “Notes on Captain Hay's Bactrian Coins,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 9 (1840): 543–44.

61. Ibid. Cunningham offered a more comprehensive treatment in his “Second Notice of Some Forged Coins of the Bactrians and Indo-Scythians,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 9 (1840): 1217–80.

62. A. Cunningham, “An Attempt to Explain Some of the Monograms Found upon the Grecian Coins of Ariana and India,” Numismatic Chronicle 8 (1845–46): 177.

63. Cunningham began this line of research in 1841 and summarized the results in “Coins of Alexander's Successors in the East,” Numismatic Chronicle 8 (1868): 181–218, republished in Cunningham, Coins of Alexander's Successors in the East (1884; reprint, Chicago: Argonaut, 1969), pp. 45–77.

64. Compare his “Attempt to Explain Some of the Monograms,” pp. 178–79, and Coins of Alexander's Successors, p. 60. In spite of these geographic options, the same monogram was still being interpreted as a date many years later: Rudolf Hoernle, “Monograms of the Baktro-Greek King Euthydemos,” The Indian Antiquary 8 (1879): 197–98.

65. Cunningham, Coins of Alexander's Successors, p. 62.

66. Ibid., p. 68.

67. Ibid., p. 61–63. See also F. Holt, Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 51–52.

68. Edward Thomas, “Bactrian Coins,” Numismatic Chronicle 2 (1862): n. 2, pp. 179–80.

69. Cunningham, Coins of Alexander's Successors, pp. 55–56 (Syrian monogram 1) and p. 70 (Bactrian monogram 62).

70. See, for example, A. N. Lahiri, Corpus of Indo-Greek Coins (Calcutta: Poddar Publications, 1965), pp. 52–62; Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, pp. 31–34. A novel and as yet unvetted proposal for Seleucid (and perhaps some Bactrian) monograms may be found in G. G. Aperghis, “Recipients and End-Users on Seleukid Coins,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 53.2 (2010): 55–84.

71. On his travels, see Nikolai de Khanikoff, Bokhara: Its Amir and Its People (London: James Madden, 1845).

72. Jean de Bartholomaei, “Notice sur les médailles des Diodotes, rois de la Bactriane,” Köhne's Zeitschrift für Münze-, Siegel- und Wappenkunde 3 (1843): 66. The current disposition of this specimen is uncertain; a similar example may be seen in Osmund Bopearachchi, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum: The Collection of the American Numismatic Society, part 9, Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Coins (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1998), no. 259.

73. Raoul Rochette, “Troisième supplement à la Notice sur quelques médailles grecques inédites de rois de la Bactriane et de l'Inde,” Journal des Savants, 1844: 117, describing this tetradrachm as “le monument numismatique le plus curieux peut-être et le plus rare qui ait apparu, jusqu'ici, dans toute cette suite de découverts, qui constitue un des faits archéologiques les plus neufs et les plus importants de notre époque.”

74. On this controversy, see the discussion below.

75. Bartholomaei, “Notice,” pp. 65–77.

76. J. G. Droysen, Geschichte des Hellenismus, vol. II, Geschichte der Bildung des hellenistischen Staatensystemes (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1843), pp. 760–64. Droysen first turned his attention to numismatics in 1836: Droysen, Briefwechsel, ed. Rudolf Hübner (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1929), vol. I, pp. 90 and 108.

77. The New Testament (Acts 6:1 and 9:29), as well as 2 Maccabees 4:13, uses the much-discussed Greek word Hellēnistēs to describe those natives who in some sense embraced Hellenic culture.

78. J. de Bartholomaei, “Réponse à Mr. Droysen sur ses conjectures concernant les premiers rois de la Bactriane,” Köhne's Zeitschrift für Münz-, Siegel- und Wappenkunde 6 (1846): 129–62, esp. 144. To be fair, Bartholomaei did miss the mark in his critique of where Agathocles likely ruled.

79. See, for example, E. Thomas, “Bactrian Coins,” Numismatic Chronicle 2 (1862): 184–86; cf. E. Thomas, “Bactrian Coins,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 20 (1862–63): 123–24.

80. E. Thomas, ed., Essays on Indian Antiquities, vol. I, p. xvi.

81. E. Thomas, “Bactrian Coins,” Numismatic Chronicle 2 (1862): p. 186. Thomas later argued that the obverse portraits of the “superior” kings, such as Diodotus and Euthydemus, were actually struck from dies of those kings, modified only by the addition of the name and epithet: E. Thomas, Bactrian Coins and Indian Dates (London: Truebner, 1876), pp. 22–23.

82. A. Cunningham, “Coins of Alexander's Successors in the East,” Numismatic Chronicle 8 (1868): 281, republished in Cunningham, Coins of Alexander's Successors in the East (1884; reprint, Chicago: Argonaut, 1969), p. 103.

83. Ibid., p. 108. Cunningham (p. 115) suggests the word “Lieu-tenant” for this relationship.

84. Ibid., pp. 92–93. Cunningham (pp. 123–25) identified this “Antiochus Nikator” with the Seleucid king Antiochus III, the adversary of Euthydemus.

85. Ibid., p. 110.

86. Ibid., p. 117.

87. Alfred von Sallet, Die Nachfolger Alexanders des Grossen in Baktrien und Indien (Berlin: Weidmann, 1879), pp. 14–31.

88. P. Gardner, “On Some Coins of Syria and Bactria,” Numismatic Chronicle 20 (1880): 181–91. See also Alfred von Sallet, “Alexander der Grosse als Gründer der baktrisch-indischen Reiche,” Zeitschrift für Numismatik 8 (1881): 279–80.

89. Gardner, “On Some Coins,” p. 182.

90. Ibid., p. 184.

91. New kings still occasionally turn up in the numismatic record, such as Thrason, Nasten, and Heliodotus, but the pace of such discoveries has slowed since the extraordinary days of the Great Game.

3. THE GOLD COLOSSUS

1. For the date, and the phrase “ce monstre de la numismatique,” see Anatole Chabouillet, “L'Eucratidion: Dissertation sur une médaille d'or inédite d'Eucratide, roi de la Bactriane,” Revue Numismatique (1867): 383.

2. Ibid., p. 388.

3. Ibid., p. 389.

4. New York Times (Mar. 9, 1879): 4; reprinted verbatim (without attribution) in American Journal of Numismatics 14.1 (July 1879): 18–20; and in Gleason's Monthly Companion 8.6 (June 1879): 278–79. Unless otherwise noted, the quotations that follow derive from this account.

5. Parts of the story appear prominently on the back cover of Osmund Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991); in Frank Holt, Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), p. 45; and in the documentary film The Mystery of the Afghan Gold (where a dramatization accompanies this author's narration of the story).

6. Vincenzo Cubelli, “Moneta e ideologia monarchica: Il caso di Eucratide,” Rivista Italiana di Numismatica e Scienze Affini 95 (1993): 252 n. 2.

7. Osmund Bopearachchi and Philippe Flandrin, Le portrait d'Alexandre le Grand: Histoire d'une découverte pour l'humanité (Monaco: Éditions du Rocher, 2005), pp. 19–33. In 1991, Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 202 n. 16, had written of “un spécialiste français dont on ignore le nom.”

8. Bopearachchi and Flandrin, Portrait d'Alexandre, pp. 22 and 27, were not aware of the original source of the story, nor of the additional evidence cited below; they relied instead on the American Journal of Numismatics reprint.

9. This information derives from the editorial section of the American Journal of Numismatics 14.2 (Oct. 1879): 56, which states: “The article on ‘A Coin of Eucratides,’ in our July number, was originally printed in the ‘New York Times’ of March 9, 1879. It was communicated to one of the editors of that journal by Mr. Feuardent, the well known numismatist.”

10. See “Obituary: Gaston L. Feuardent,” New York Times (June 13, 1893): 4. The firm's London office was originally located at 27 Haymarket: s.v. “Rollin, Claude Camille” in Warren Dawson and Eric Uphill, Who Was Who in Egyptology, 2nd ed. (London: The Egypt Exploration Society, 1972), p. 252.

11. “Born of a Ball of Fire: What Might Have Been a Very Good

Story about a Huge Sword,” New York Times (June 17, 1883): 10. Gaston Feuardent did not tolerate untruths for the sake of a very good story.

12. See Anna Marangou, Life and Deeds: The Consul Luigi Palma di Cesnola, 1832–1904 (Nicosia: The Cultural Centre of the Popular Bank Group, 2000), esp. pp. 297–329; Michael Gross, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money That Made the Metropolitan Museum (New York: Broadway, 2009), pp. 23–64.

13. Gaston Feuardent, “Tampering with Antiquities: A Serious Charge against the Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” The Art Amateur (Aug. 1880): 48–50.

14. Oliver Hoover, “The History of the ANS: The Third Decade,” American Numismatic Society Magazine 1.3 (2002): 41.

15. “Thanking Mr. Feuardent, Resolutions Passed by the Numismatic and Archaeological Society,” New York Times (Mar. 6, 1884): 8. Feuardent sued Cesnola for libel but failed.

16. Chicago Daily (Dec. 17, 1882): 24.

17. M. E. G. Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872 (London: John Murray, 1897), vol. II, p. 111.

18. Feuardent, whose Jewish background became an issue in his fight with Cesnola, did not himself refer to the Bukharan as a Jew.

19. A. Cunningham, “Literary and Miscellaneous Intelligence,” Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 36 (1867): 143. Cunningham may have attended the same council meeting referred to in Sir Mountstuart's diary.

20. A later, shorter extract (the one usually referenced by scholars) appeared in London's Athenaeum (Mar. 21, 1868): 2108; later still in the “Varia” of the American Journal of Numismatics 3 (1868): 23; and again in “Newspaper Cuttings,” American Journal of Numismatics 8 (1874): 56; followed there by the remark: “The coin mentioned in this article certainly caused one of the real numismatic sensations of this century. The coin was brought to Europe about 1837 [sic], and was finally bought for the collection attached to the Bibliothèque Impériale, now Nationale, at Paris, at the price of 12,000 francs [sic].”

21. The tribal name Zebalun (or Zebulun) was associated with Jewish communities in Bukhara and neighboring regions: Joseph Wolff, Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, in the Years 1843–1845, to Ascertain the Fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly (London: J. W. Parker, 1845), p. 287.

22. Both Clarke and Feuardent joined the Royal Numismatic Society at about the same time: Gaston on November 15, 1866, and Hyde on April 18, 1867.

23. A. Cunningham, “Coins of Alexander's Successors in the East,” Numismatic Chronicle 9 (1869): 220, republished in Cunningham, Coins of Alexander's Successors in the East (1884; reprint, Chicago: Argonaut, 1969), p. 164.

24. For example, Athenaeum (Mar. 21, 1868): 2108; American Journal of Numismatics 3 (1868): 23; American Journal of Numismatics 8 (1874): 56; and Otago Witness (June 13, 1868): 3.

25. A similar pattern may be seen after the discovery of the first of Alexander's elephant medallions: Holt, Alexander the Great and the Mystery of the Elephant Medallions, pp. 86–90.

26. I carefully examined these casts, along with several forgeries, at the British Museum in June 1984.

27. Torrey, Gold Coins of Khokand and Bukhara (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1950).

28. In Greek mythology, the Dioscuri “Sons of Zeus”) were hatched by Leda. The distinctive caps (piloi) worn by the twins resembled the tops of the eggs from which they had emerged; the egg caps were surmounted by a star. (See here figs. 10, 23, and 26.) This ancient myth has parallels to the Vedic Asvins.

29. Lionel Fletcher, “The Avent Sale of Oriental Coins,” [Spink and Sons] Monthly Numismatic Circular 6 (Jan. 1898): 2543–44. These specimens weighed 117.09 and 148.55 grams; each bore a different monogram.

30. Ibid. The da Cunha coin was sent from Bombay to London in 1889 to be sold: “Archaeological News,” American Journal of Archaeology and of the History of the Fine Arts 5.3 (1889): 402. According to the British Museum forgery trays, however, Mrs. da Cunha possessed a gold Eucratidion in May 1906.

31. Formerly the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society. (See ch. 4, below). Coin: Schulman Mail Bid Auction (June 1953): 805A; but note that the photograph of this piece has been switched with that of item 805B. This coin weighs 26 grams and is said to be from the Aboukir find. The ANS fake (1949-11-9) weighs 80.60 grams.

32. British Museum forgery trays, which contain an electrotype copy of this specimen with a blundered inscription.

33. Raymond Hebert, Aditi: The Monies of India (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1985), fig. 8.

34. For yet another plated example in Paris, see Vrai ou faux? Copier, Imiter, Falsifier (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1988), p.142 (85g).

35. Fletcher, “The Avent Sale,” p. 2544.

36. For example, E. Rtveladze, Drevnie Monety Srednej Azii (Tashkent: Gulyama, 1987), p. 47: “Only two coins of this series are known today: according to A. A. Semyonov one was kept in the treasury of the Emir of Bukhara, the other is now in Paris.”

37. The connection of these specimens to India perhaps accounts for the assumption made by some numismatists that the Eucratidion itself came, or at least passed through, the subcontinent. See, for instance, William Hazlitt, The Coin Collector (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1896), p. 40.

38. Even in a news story about postage stamps, the gold Eucratides coin was invoked for price comparisons: F. W. Crane, “Titians in Stamps,” New York Times (Apr. 16, 1922): 94, “The highest price paid for a coin…was $10,000, paid several [55!] years ago in Europe for a unique specimen of a large gold piece struck by Eucratides.” The pride of the collector Count Michael Tyskiewicz was that his four Tarsus medallions (a purchase also negotiated by Rollin and Feuardent) eventually rested in the Bibliothèque Nationale alongside “the large medal of Eucratides.” See his Memoirs of an Old Collector (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898), p. 9.

39. Hyman Montagu, “On Some Unpublished and Rare Greek Coins in My Collection,” Numismatic Chronicle 12 (1892): 37–38.

40. On the colorful history of this specimen, see F. Holt, “The Autobiography of a Coin,” Aramco World 48.5 (1997): 10–15.

41. The next Eucratides stater would not be found until 1968: Georges Le Rider, “Monnaies grecques récemment acquises par le Cabinet de Paris,” Revue Numismatique 6 (1969): 27; F. Holt, “Eukratides of Baktria,” Ancient World 27.1 (1996): 72–76.

42. Percy Gardner, The Coins of the Greek and Scythic Kings of Bactria and India in the British Museum (1886; reprint, Chicago: Argonaut, 1966); particularly useful is the information assembled by Elizabeth Errington and Vesta S. Curtis, From Persepolis to the Punjab: Exploring Ancient Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan (London: British Museum, 2007).

43. The first Eucratides coins to enter the American Numismatic Society in New York were accessioned in 1911 from the bequest of Isaac Greenwood (one silver, seven bronze). See Osmund Bopearachchi, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum: The Collection of the American Numismatic Society, part 9, Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Coins (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1998). The ANS now holds one of the finest collections of Bactrian coins in the world.

4. TELLING TALES

1. Frank Adcock, “Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn,” Proceedings of the British Academy 44 (1958): 253–62.

2. W. W. Tarn, “Patrocles and the Oxo-Caspian Trade Route,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 21 (1901): 10–29; Tarn, “Notes on Hellenism,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 22 (1902): 268–93.

3. Tarn patriotically interrupted his private pursuits during World War I. He was precluded from service in the army because of poor eyesight but volunteered for the Red Cross and worked at Whitehall for the Intelligence Division of the War Office. He even drafted many leaflets that were dropped over Germany: Adcock, “Sir William Woodthorpe Tarn,” p. 255.

4. See, for example, Richard Todd, “W. W. Tarn and the Alexander Ideal,” The Historian 37 (1964): 48–55; A. B. Bosworth, “The Impossible Dream: W. W. Tarn's Alexander in Retrospect,” Ancient Society 13 (1983): 131–50; and W. W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India, 3rd ed., ed. F. Holt (Chicago: Ares Press, 1984), pp. iii–vi.

5. Tarn, “Notes on Hellenism,” pp. 270–71.

6. W. W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938), p. 220.

7. Ibid., p. viii.

8. When Tarn took up the numismatists' catalogues, he cared little about the minutiae of weights, monograms, and die axes; he found portraiture far more interesting, as discussed below.

9. The separation into independent disciplines of those interested in the past has Balkanized ancient studies, but the new millennium has brought forth efforts to bridge some parts of this great divide: Eberhard Sauer, ed., Archaeology and Ancient History (London: Routledge, 2004).

10. This, of course, was the institution that had steadfastly supported Gaston Feuardent against Luigi Palma di Cesnola. (See ch. 3, above.)

11. Archer Huntington, “President Huntington's Annual Address,” Proceedings of the American Numismatic and Archaeological Society (1907): 24–27, esp. 26.

12. H. G. Rawlinson, Bactria: The History of a Forgotten Empire (London: Probstbain, 1912; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1969). Rawlinson considered kings like Eucratides to be “thoroughly Greek” (p. 83) and judged the Eucratidion to be the “high-water mark of Bactrian prosperity,” after which Hellenism “gradually decayed” (p. 84).

13. E.J. Rapson, ed., The Cambridge History of India, vol. I (Cambridge, 1922; reprint, Delhi: S. Chand, 1962), pp. 384–419 and 487–507.

14. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, p. lvi.

15. C.A. Robinson, Jr., “The Greeks in the Far East,” Classical Journal 44.7 (1949): 406. See also the review by G. Bobrinskoy in Classical Philology 35.2 (1940): 189–99.

16. Tarn likened the writing of this book to fiddling with a jigsaw puzzle: P. M. Fraser, Cities of Alexander the Great (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. viii.

17. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, p. 410.

18. Tarn admitted in the preface to the first edition (1938) that he could not write the book impersonally. In one of his published letters, Tarn reveals that he did not see himself as unduly certain about anything: “I desired above all things to avoid creating an illusion of knowledge which neither I nor anyone else could possess.” See Julian Romane, “W. W. Tarn on the Art of History,” Ancient World 15 (1987): 21–24.

19. Percy Gardner, The Coins of the Greek and Scythic Kings of Bactria and India in the British Museum (1886; reprint, Chicago: Argonaut, 1966), p. xxiv.

20. Rawlinson, Bactria, p. 154.

21. Ibid., p. 156. The italics are Rawlinson's own.

22. In Rapson, ed., Cambridge History of India, vol. I, p. 408.

23. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, pp. 184 and 196.

24. Tarn ignores the fact that Eucratides' pedigree coins, issued earlier to bolster his claim against Agathocles and Antimachus, had somehow already proclaimed him Megas.

25. Ibid., pp. 183–224.

26. As noted by Charles Edson in a review of the second edition (1951), appearing in Classical Philology 49 (1954): 112–18.

27. Franz Altheim, Weltgeschichte Asiens im griechischen Zeitalter, 2 vols. (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1947–48). On Altheim's work for the Nazis (arranged through his partner Erika Trautmann), see Heather Pringle, The Master Plan: Himmler's Scholars and the Holocaust (New York: Hyperion, 2006), pp. 102–20 and 304–5.

28. For example, Franz Altheim and Ruth Stiehl, Geschichte Mittelasiens in Altertum (Berlin: Walter DeGruyter, 1970).

29. Ibid., pp. 560–77.

30. See the preface to his second edition (written Jan. 1950). In this work, Tarn managed under the circumstances only to add some notes to his first edition, without revising the original text.

31. Reprinted in 1969 by Argonaut Publishers, Chicago.

32. R. B. Whitehead, “Notes on the Indo-Greeks,” Numismatic Chronicle 20 (1940): 90.

33. Ibid., p. 95.

34. A. K. Narain recounts these events in “Approaches and Perspectives,” Yavanika 2 (1992): 5–34, an address aimed in part at my remarks in Alexander the Great and Bactria: The Formation of a Greek Frontier in Central Asia (Leiden: Brill, 1988).

35. A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957). There is now a second edition: The Indo-Greeks, Revisited and Supplemented (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 2003). This work, like Tarn's second edition, entails not a rewrite but rather a reprint with the addition of later materials. For convenience, this second edition will be cited unless otherwise noted.

36. Ibid., pp. 477–84, taking issue specifically with my remarks about the ethnocentrism of The Indo-Greeks. Narain agrees, however, with my statement that Tarn was ethnocentric and reactionary: p. 480.

37. Ibid., p. 18.

38. Ibid., p. 479: “I cannot agree more with Holt's statement that surely Bactria belongs to the history of both the Hellenistic and Indian worlds.”

39. Tarn uses about 17 percent of his book to cover Seleucid matters; A. K. Narain, only 9 percent. Conversely, Narain devotes 55 percent of The Indo-Greeks, Revisited to the kingdoms in India proper; Tarn, only 46 percent.

40. A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks, Revisited, p. 480.

41. Holt, Alexander the Great and Bactria, pp. 1–4. The place of Bactria in world history cannot so exclusively be claimed by Greece or India, and surely Iranian history has something to say on the matter. Being Hellenistic excludes none of the constituent cultures: the period of the Ptolemies is no less a part of Egyptian history whether we call it Hellenistic, Egypto-Greek, or anything else.

42. Olivier Guillaume, “Naïve Anthropology in the Reconstruction of Indo-Greek History,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 27.4 (1990): 475–82, esp. p. 476. Against this historiographic trend, see Rachel Mairs, “Hellenistic India,” New Voices in Classical Reception Studies 1 (2006): 19–30. A.K. Narain acknowledges in another context that scholars are products of their own ages and groups: The Indo-Greeks, Revisited, p. 490.

43. Guillaume, “Naïve Anthropology,” pp. 476–77. The term “Indo-Greek” reverses the usual order for such hyphenated descriptors. As with “African-American,” “French-Canadian,” and “Chinese-American,” the first word normally indicates whence a group originated; the latter, where they settled.

44. Whitehead, Catalogue of Coins, p. iii.

45. A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks, Revisited, p. 481: “I had begun detecting his [Tarn's] weaknesses in dealing with the numismatic evidence. I was a student of numismatics and was being trained in the discipline by eminent teachers.”

46. Ibid., pp. 486–501.

47. Ibid., p. 493.

48. Ibid., pp. 38–40.

49. Ibid., p. 51.

50. Ibid., pp. 71–90.

51. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, p. 229, shows his methodology. He knew of the 1926 Bajaur Hoard in his first edition, but apparently not of the 1942 Bajaur Hoard in time for his second edition. These hoards are numbers 1845 and 1846 in Margaret Thompson, Otto Mørkholm, and Colin Kraay, eds., An Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1973).

52. A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks, Revisited, pp. 140–46. See R. Curiel and D. Schlumberger, Trésors monétaires d'Afghanistan (Paris: Klincksieck, 1953); and R. Curiel and G. Fussman, Le trésor monétaire de Qunduz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1965).

53. Subtitled Essai d'interprétation de la symbolique religieuse gréco-orientale du IIIe au Ier s. av. J.-C. (Paris: Didier, 1956).

54. Ibid., p. 207.

55. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, p. lviii.

56. For example, M.-T. Allouche-LePage, L'art monétaire des royaumes bactriens: Essai d'interprétation de la symbolique religieuse gréco-orientale du IIIe au Ier s. av. J.-C. (Paris: Didier, 1956), p. 57.

57. Originally published by Wayte Raymond, Inc.; later by the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. This influential work has endured into the twenty-first century as required reading for graduate students attending the summer seminar of the American Numismatic Society (ANS) in New York.

58. Newell's admiration for Tarn's work is attested secondhand: Alfred Bellinger, “Review of Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India,” American Journal of Archaeology 45.4 (1941): 648.

59. E. T. Newell, Royal Greek Portrait Coins (Racine, Wisc.: Whitman Publishing, 1937), p. 9.

60. Ibid.

61. Ibid., p. 10.

62. For examples, see Norman Davis and Colin Kraay, The Hellenistic Kingdoms: Portrait Coins and History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973); Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, ed., Ancient Portraiture: The Sculptor's Art in Coins and Marble (Richmond, Va.: Virginia Museum, 1980); and the works discussed below.

63. E. Rtveladze, Drevnie Monety Srednej Azii (Tashkent: Gulyama, 1987), p. 47 (emphasis added).

64. Newell, Royal Greek Portrait Coins, p. 78, a passage quoted approvingly by the art historian Gisela Richter, The Portraits of the Greeks (London: Phaidon Press, 1965), vol. III, p. 278.

65. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, p. 75.

66. Ibid., p. 92. See also Jentoft-Nilsen, Ancient Portraiture, p. 26 (coin 22).

67. Ibid., pp. 75–76. The smile, or at least a hint of it, remains topical: Adrian Hollis, “Greek Letters from Hellenistic Bactria,” pp. 104–18 in Dirk Obbink and Richard Rutherford, eds., Culture in Pieces: Essays on Ancient Texts in Honour of Peter Parsons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 112.

68. C.-Y. Petitot-Biehler, “Trésor de monnaies grecques et gréco-bactriennes trouvé à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Revue Numismatique 17 (1975): 38–39. She quotes Tarn on the personality of Euthydemus I.

69. O. Mørkholm, Early Hellenistic Coinage from the Accession of Alexander to the Peace of Apamea (336–188 B.C.), ed. Philip Grierson and Ulla Westermark (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 121. Archaeologists Svetlana Gorshenina and Claude Rapin also write of “un réalisme psychologiquement nuancé” on the coins: De Kaboul à Samarcande: Les archéologues en Asie centrale (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), p. 78.

70. Some have been duly skeptical: Olivier Guillaume, L'analyse de raisonnements en archéologie: Le cas de la numismatique gréco-bactrienne et indogrecque (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1987); and Peter Mittag, “Methodologische Überlegungen zur Geschichte Baktriens: Könige und Münzen,” Schweizerische Numismatische Rundschau 85 (2006): 27–46. See ch. 7, below.

71. K. Trever, Pamiatniki greko-baktriiskogo iskusstva (Moscow: Akademii Nauk, 1940), p. 7; note the similar claim that Euthydemus II's “gentle, un-Greek face” suggests that his mother “was a daughter of the Iranian nobility”: Davis and Kraay, The Hellenistic Kingdoms, p. 245. This notion persists in K. A. Sheedy, Alexander and the Hellenistic Kingdoms: The Westmoreland Collection (Sydney: Australian Centre for Ancient Numismatic Studies, 2007), p. 157.

72. A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks, Revisited, p. 259 (emphasis added).

73. Ibid., p. 52.

74. S. Kalita, “Portraits of Rulers on Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Coins: An Attempt at Classification,” Notae Numismaticae 2 (1997): 16.

75. Ibid., p. 10.

76. G. K. Jenkins, Ancient Greek Coins (London: Seaby, 1990), pp. 154 and 155.

77. Ibid., p. 155.

78. G. Woodcock, “The Indian Greeks,” History Today 12 (1962): 563.

79. Ibid., p. 566. George Woodcock later enshrined his views in a popular narrative entitled The Greeks in India (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).

80. P. Green, Alexander to Actium: The Historical Evolution of the Hellenistic Age (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 350–51.

81. Green (ibid., p. 351) calls Demetrius I “pompous and determined, every inch the heavy Indian conqueror.”

82. Ibid.; and G. Hanfmann, “Personality and Portraiture in Ancient Art,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 117.4 (1973): 266.

83. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, p. 209.

84. Ibid., p. 438.

85. Rawlinson, Bactria, pp. 83–84. The adjective “magnificent” is often used: Jens Jakobsson, “The Greeks of Afghanistan Revisited,” Nomismatika Khronika 26 (2007): 61; cf. Vincenzo Cubelli, “Moneta e ideologia monarchica: Il caso di Eucratide,” Rivista Italiana di Numismatica e Scienze Affini 95 (1993): 259: “uno splendido, forse un po' arrogante documento.”

86. S. Narain, “The Twenty-Stater Gold Piece of Eucratides I,” Journal of the Numismatic Society of India 18 (1956): 217.

87. Allouche-LePage, L'art monétaire, p. 59, citing Jean Babelon, Le portrait dans l'antiquité d'après les monnaies (Paris: Payot, 1942), p. 87.

88. A. Chabouillet, “L'Eucratidion: Dissertation sur une médaille d'or inédite d'Eucratide, roi de la Bactriane,” Revue Numismatique (1867): 389–90. This view was challenged by Charles de Linas, Les origines de l'orfèvrerie cloisonné (Paris: Édouard Didron, 1878), vol. I, pp. 270–72.

89. See, for example, Kjetil Kvist, “Tetradrachms of Antimachos Exhibit the High Quality of Greek Art,” The Celator 11 (Mar. 1997): 18–20. Although generally cautious, he concludes: “I will not speculate on the ethnicity of the die engraver, but, like Head, end up in the old-fashioned view that the celator had to be Greek” (emphasis added).

90. Chabouillet, “L'Eucratidion,” p. 391.

91. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, p. 209.

92. Ibid.

93. For which see chter 8, below.

94. Guillaume, L'analyse de raisonnements, p. 78. See further discussion below, chter 7.

95. See the discussion in F. Holt, Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 68–69 and 126–27.

5. WANTED—ONE GREEK CITY

1. Strabo 15.1.3 and Justin 41.4.6.

2. W. W. Tarn, “Notes on Hellenism,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 22 (1902): 292.

3. Ibid., p. 271 (emphasis added).

4. W. Flinders Petrie, Seventy Years in Archaeology (Holt, 1932; reprint, New York: Greenwood Press, 1969), p. 15.

5. The lure of Alexander proved irresistible: General Ventura dug out the Great Stupa at Manikyala because he thought it was the site of Bucephala, a city founded by Alexander in honor of his legendary war-horse, Bucephalus: J.-B. Ventura, “Account of the Excavations of Tope Manikyala,” Asiatic Researches 17 (1832): 600–603.

6. On Masson's nickname, see Bérénice Geoffroy-Schneiter, Gandhara: The Memory of Afghanistan (New York: Assouline, 2001), p. 8. To his credit, Masson did strive to document and publish what he found.

7. On this Alexandria, see P. M. Fraser, Cities of Alexander the Great (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 140–51; and Paul Bernard, “Diodore XVII, 83, 1: Alexandrie du Caucase ou Alexandrie de l'Oxus?” Journal des Savants, 1982: 217–42, which responds to a different interpretation by Paul Goukowsky, Essai sur les origines du mythe d'Alexandre (336–270 av. J.-C), vol. I: Les origines politiques (Nancy: Bialec, 1978), pp. 155–59. The stage had been set for such investigations by James Rennell in 1788, when he correctly identified modern Patna as the location of ancient Pataliputra, known from classical sources as the capital of the Mauryan empire. On this discovery, see Dilip Chakrabarti, India: An Archaeological History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5.

8. A splendid summary may be found in Elizabeth Errington, “Charles Masson and Begram,” Topoi 11 (2001): 357–409.

9. For archaeological work carried out in Afghanistan down to 1981, an indispensable reference is Warwick Ball, Archaeological Gazetteer of Afghanistan, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilizations, 1982). This work is supplemented now by Ball, The Monuments of Afghanistan: History, Archaeology and Architecture (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008). See also the convenient new introduction by Rachel Mairs, The Archaeology of the Hellenistic Far East: A Survey (Oxford: BAR, 2011) and, for the Achaemenid period, Henri-Paul Francfort, “Asie centrale,” pp. 313–52 in Pierre Briant and Rémy Boucharlat, eds., L'archéologie de l'empire achéménide: Nouvelles recherches (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 2005).

10. On the politicization of archaeology, see S. Gorshenina and C. Rapin, De Kaboul à Samarcande: Les archéologues en Asie centrale (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 51–67; and discussion below.

11. Paul Bernard, “L'œuvre de la Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (1922–1982),” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2002: 1287–1323. Françoise Olivier-Utard, Politique et archéologie: Histoire de la Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (1922–1982) (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1997), provides a detailed account of the creation of the DAFA and its subsequent personnel, budgets, and operations.

12. Geoffroy-Schneiter, Gandhara, p. 9. Foucher had a passing interest in numismatics: O. Bopearachchi, “Alfred Foucher et les études numismatiques en Afghanistan,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2007: 1875–97.

13. Joseph Hackin, Recherches archéologiques à Bégram: Chantier no. 2 (1937), 2 vols. (Paris: de Nobele, 1939); Hackin, Nouvelles recherches archéologiques à Bégram (1939–1940), 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954); and Roman Ghirshman, Bégram: Recherches archéologiques et historiques sur les Kouchans (Cairo: Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale, 1946).

14. These finds were among those featured in the international exhibition “Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul.” On the objects and arguments about them, consult the catalogue of the same title edited by Fredrik Hiebert and Pierre Cambon (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2008).

15. Sanjyot Mehendale, “The Begram Ivory and Bone Carvings: Some Observations on Provenance and Chronology,” Topoi 11 (2001): 485–514.

16. One excavator for the DAFA used coin finds of Eucratides to date parts of the site: Ghirshman, Bégram: Recherches archéologiques, pp. 23–26.

17. Polybius 10.49 and 11.39; cf. 29.12.8.

18. Robert Byron, The Road to Oxiana (1937; reprint, New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), p. 257: “Until Foucher came here a few years ago and bought them all up, the old Greek coins of Bactria were still in circulation. Since then, people have begun to think them priceless and ask twenty or thirty times the museum value for them.”

19. Joseph Hackin, “Répartition des monnaies anciennes en Afghanistan,” Journal Asiatique 226 (1935): 287–92.

20. Olivier-Utard, Politique et archéologie, pp. 59–60. Article 1 of the Convention gave a monopoly to the French, but Article 11 (later invoked) gave the Afghan government the right to allow other nations to dig sites not being explored by the DAFA. Bernard, “L'œuvre de la Délégation Archéologique Française,” p. 1290, notes that Foucher supported in vain an exception to the monopoly on behalf of Sir Aurel Stein, who had wished to excavate at Balkh since 1902.

21. Olivier-Utard, Politique et archéologie, p. 71.

22. A. Foucher, La vieille route de l'Inde de Bactres à Taxila, 2 vols. (Paris: de Nobele, 1942–47), esp. vol. I, pp. 73–141.

23. Paul Bernard, “Ai Khanoum on the Oxus: A Hellenistic City in Central Asia,” Proceedings of the British Academy 53 (1967): 72.

24. Jaquetta Hawkes, Mortimer Wheeler: Adventurer in Archaeology (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982), pp. 253–54. Wheeler later had A. K. Narain among his students: Narain, The Indo-Greeks, Revisited and Supplemented (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 2003), p. 484.

25. Mortimer Wheeler, “Archaeology in Afghanistan,” Antiquity 21 (1947): 63. The well-known historian Arnold Toynbee also felt the allure of this place: “Today I have seen Balkh with my own eyes.” Toynbee, Between Oxus and Jumna (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 92.

26. Mortimer Wheeler, Archaeology from the Earth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 90; see also “Archaeology in Afghanistan,” pp. 62–63.

27. Wheeler, “Archaeology in Afghanistan,” p. 65.

28. Hawkes, Mortimer Wheeler, p. 325. On subsequent work at Balkh, see R. S. Young, “The South Wall of Balkh-Bactra,” American Journal of Archaeology 59 (1955): 267–76; and D. Schlumberger, “La prospection archéologique de Bactres (printemps 1947),” Syria 26 (1949): 173–90.

29. Cunningham undertook some archaeological work as early as 1861: Chakrabarti, India: An Archaeological History, pp. 8–9.

30. John Marshall, Taxila, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951).

31. Ibid., vol. I, p. xv.

32. For problems surrounding the site's development, see P. Callieri, “The North-West of the Indian Subcontinent in the Indo-Greek Period,” pp. 293–308 in Antonio Invernizzi, ed., In the Land of the Gryphons (Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettre, 1995); and Robin Coningham and Briece Edwards, “Space and Society at Sirkap, Taxila: A Re-Examination of Urban Form and Meaning,” Ancient Pakistan 12 (1997–98): 47–75.

33. Ibid., p. 41.

34. See the early arguments and evidence laid out by Daniel Schlumberger, “Descendants non-méditerranéens de l'art grec,” Syria 37 (1960): 131–66 and 253–318. Mortimer Wheeler's suggestion (contra Marshall, Taxila) still carries weight: Kurt Behrendt, The Buddhist Architecture of Gandhara (Leiden: Brill, 2004), p. 271.

35. Mortimer Wheeler, Charsada: A Metropolis of the North-West Frontier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). The site has since been reinvestigated: R. Coningham and I. Ali, Charsadda: The British-Pakistani Excavations at the Bala Hisar (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2007).

36. Mortimer Wheeler, Flames over Persepolis: Turning Point in History (New York: Reynal, 1968), pp. 96 and 101.

37. Ibid., pp. 99–101 (with photograph).

38. Ibid., p. 101, citing also the soundings of A. H. Dani in 1963 and 1964.

39. Gérard Fussman, “Southern Bactria and Northern India before Islam: A Review of Archaeological Reports,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 116.2 (1996): 255. See especially Domenico Faccenna, Butkara I (Swat, Pakistan) 1956–1962, 5 vols. (Rome: ISMEO, 1980). For other explorations, see M. Ashraf Khan, “Outline of the Archaeological Field Research in Swat Valley Carried Out by Pakistani Institutions,” Journal of Asian Civilizations 34 (2010): 81–93.

40. Anthony McNicoll and Warwick Ball, Excavations at Kandahar 1974 and 1975 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1996); Svend Helms, Excavations at Old Kandahar in Afghanistan 1976–1978 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1997).

41. Irina Kruglikova, “Les fouilles de la mission archéologique soviet-afghane sur le site gréco-kushan de Dilberdjin en Bactriane (Afghanistan),” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1977: 407–27, esp. p. 410, and (in Russian) Delbarjin, Temple of the Dioscuri (Moscow: Nauka, 1986). Note, however, the dissenting views of Ciro Lo Muzio, “The Dioscuri at Dilberjin (Northern Afghanistan): Reviewing Their Chronology and Significance,” Studia Iranica 28 (1999): 41–71.

42. Alberto Simonetta, “Some Hypotheses on the Military and Political Structure of the Indo-Greek Kingdom,” Journal of the Numismatic Society of India 22 (1960): 56.

43. Bernard, “Ai Khanoum on the Oxus,” pp. 73–74.

44. Z. Tarzi, “Jules Barthoux, le découvreur oublié d'Ai Khanoum,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1996: 595–611.

45. P. Bernard, “Ai Khanoum en Afghanistan hier (1964–1978) et aujourd'hui (2001): Un site en peril,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2001: 971–1029.

46. See the extensive “Bibliographie de Paul Bernard” in Bulletin of the Asia Institute 12 (1998): 3–11. In spite of these efforts, some specialists have strongly criticized Bernard's excavation and publication practices: Fussman, “Southern Bactria and Northern India before Islam,” pp. 245–54. See Bernard, “Ai Khanoum en Afghanistan hier (1964–1978) et aujourd'hui (2001),” pp. 1012–14.

47. See the works of P. Bernard, O. Guillaume, H.-P. Francfort, P. Leriche, C. Rapin, A. Rougeulle, and S. Veuve listed below in the Select Bibliography.

48. The pottery promises to be very important for numerous problems beyond chronology, including considerations of ongoing contact between Bactria and the Mediterranean world: Jean-Claude Gardin, “La céramique hellénistique en Asie centrale: Problèmes d'interpretation,” Akten des XIII. Internationalen Kongresses für klassische Archäologie, Berlin 1988 (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 1990), pp. 187–93; Bertille Lyonnet, “Contributions récentes de la céramologie à l'histoire de l'Afghanistan,” Arts Asiatiques 40 (1985): 41–52. See also note 88, below.

49. Fountain: P. Leriche and J. Thoraval, “La fontaine du rempart de l'Oxus à Ai Khanoum,” Syria 56 (1979): 171–205; hoards: the original French publications have been conveniently collected, translated (by Osmund Bopearachchi), and republished (with additional materials) in Olivier Guillaume, ed., Graeco-Bactrian and Indian Coins from Afghanistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Separately published: F. Holt, “The Euthydemid Coinage of Bactria: Further Hoard Evidence from Ai Khanoum,” Revue Numismatique 23 (1981): 7–44. See chter 7, below.

50. Some highly important questions, such as the chronology of the site, remain unsettled pending final publication. See, for example, Jeffrey Lerner, “Correcting the Early History of Ay Kanom,” Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 35–36 (2003–4): 373–410; and note 88, below.

51. Surkh Kotal was discovered in 1951 and excavated by Daniel Schlumberger from 1952 to 1963; on its inscriptions, see the following chter.

52. Bernard, “Ai Khanoum on the Oxus,” p. 78.

53. P. Bernard, “Chiteaux corinthiens hellénistiques d'Asie centrale découverts a Ai Khanoum,” Syria 45 (1968): 111–51.

54. Bernard, “Ai Khanoum on the Oxus,” p. 91.

55. For his recent views, see Paul Bernard, “The Greek Colony at Ai Khanoum and Hellenism in Central Asia,” pp. 81–105 in F. Hiebert and P. Cambon, eds., Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2008).

56. Olivier Guillaume and Axelle Rougeulle, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. VII, Les petits objets (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1987), pp. 3–74.

57. Henri-Paul Francfort, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. III, La sanctuaire du temple à niches indentées (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1984); Frantz Grenet, “Mithra au temple principal d'Ai Khanoum?” pp. 147–53 in Paul Bernard and Frantz Grenet, eds., Histoire et cultes de l'Asie centrale préislamique: Sources écrites et documents archéologiques (Paris: CNRS, 1991).

58. C. Rapin, “Greeks in Afghanistan: Ai Khanoum,” pp. 329–42 in Jean-Paul Descoedres, ed., Greek Colonists and Native Populations (Canberra: Humanities Research Centre, 1990), pp. 340–41.

59. J.-C. Gardin and P. Gentelle, “Irrigation et peuplement dans la plaine d'Ai Khanoum de l'époque achéménide à l'époque musulmane,” Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient 63 (1976): 59–99; Gardin and B. Lyonnet, “La prospection archéologique de la Bactriane orientale (1974–1978): Premiers résultats,” Mesopotamia 13–14 (1978–79): 99–154; Gardin, Gentelle, and Lyonnet, Prospection archéologiques en Bactriane orientale, 1974–1978, 3 vols. (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les Civilizations, 1980–98). See also P. Bernard and H.-P. Francfort, Études de géographie historique sur la plaine d'Ai Khanoum (Paris: CNRS, 1978).

60. See J.-C. Gardin, Archaeological Constructs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). On these developments (which will be relevant to discussions of numismatics in subsequent chters), see C. Renfrew and P. Bahn, Archaeology: Theories, Methods and Practice, 3rd ed. (New York: Thames and Hudson, 2000).

61. H.-P. Francfort, Fouilles de Shortughai: Recherches sur l'Asie centrale protohistorique (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1989).

62. C. Rapin, “Nomads and the Shaping of Central Asia: From the Early Iron Age to the Kushan Period,” p. 41 in J. Cribb and G. Herrmann, eds., After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Rapin, “Le nom antique d'Ai Khanoum et de son fleuve,” p. 115 in O. Bopearachchi et al., eds., De l'Indus à l'Oxus: Archéologie de l'Asie centrale (Lattes: Imago, 2003); A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks, Revisited and Supplemented, pp. 373–84. Alternatively, Alexandria Oxiana may have been located at Termez: Bernard, “Diodore XVII, 83, 1: Alexandrie du Caucase ou Alexandrie de l'Oxus?” p. 236.

63. See, for example, P. Bernard, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. IV, Les monnaies hors trésors (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1985), p. 9.

64. The majority of finds from storeroom 109 seem to be from India, including coins: Claude Rapin, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. VIII, La trésorerie du palais hellénistique d'Ai Khanoum (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1992), p. 282. On other Indian treasures such as a throne and inlaid plaque, assumed to have been seized by Eucratides, see Rapin, Indian Art from Afghanistan: The Legend of Sakuntala and the Indian Treasure of Eucratides at Ai Khanoum (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1996).

65. Bernard, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. IV, pp. 83–84. On this mint, see Holt, Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 124–25.

66. On the coins in general, see Guillaume, ed., Graeco-Bactrian and Indian Coins from Afghanistan, pp. 25–195.

67. These hoards have become famous for their richness: Hélène Nicolet-Pierre, Numismatique grecque (Paris: Armand Colin, 2005), p. 37.

68. Holt, “The Euthydemid Coinage of Bactria.” See chter 7, below.

69. Osmund Bopearachchi, “Récentes découvertes de trésors de monnaies pré-sassanides trouvés en Afghanistan et au Pakistan,” Cahiers Numismatiques, Sept. 1994: 7–14, and “Recent Hoard Evidence on Pre-Kushana Chronology,” pp. 99–149 in M. Alram and D. Klimburg-Salter, eds., Coins, Art, and Chronology: Essays on the Pre-Islamic History of the Indo-Iranian Borderlands (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), pp. 110–11.

70. P. Bernard, “Campagne de fouilles 1978 à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1980: 435–59, esp. p. 442.

71. The archaeologists all stress the Greek abandonment of Ai Khanoum, whereas the local population apparently remained and pillaged the site. On these events, see Rapin, Indian Art from Afghanistan, pp. 10–11.

72. Rapin, Indian Art from Afghanistan, pp. 105–21, provides an ambitious narrative.

73. Pierre Leriche, “Bactria, Land of a Thousand Cities,” pp. 121–53 in J. Cribb and G. Herrmann, eds., After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 142 n. 47. Either the population had declined to dangerous levels or a Bactrian army had suffered a huge defeat somewhere in the field. This problem will be raised below, in chters 8 and 9.

74. Bernard, “The Greek Colony at Ai Khanoum and Hellenism in Central Asia,” p. 104.

75. V. Sarianidi, The Temple and Tombs at Tillya Tepe (Moscow: Nauka, 1989), in Russian with a good analysis of the pottery. For a lavishly illustrated account of the discovery, see Sarianidi, The Golden Hoard of Bactria (New York: Abrams, 1985).

76. For example, the 1985 History Channel film The Mystery of the Afghan Gold (director: David Keane) insinuates that this treasure (like King Tut's) actually carried an ancient curse.

77. Eugene Schuyler, Turkistan: Notes of a Journey in Russian Turkistan, Khokand, Bukhara, and Kuldja (New York: Scribner, Armstrong, and Company, 1876), p. 236 n. 1, reports on the kinds of unsystematic excavations undertaken at Afrasiab back in 1875.

78. On the background of Soviet work in the region, see B. A. Litvinsky, “Archaeology in Tadzikistan under Soviet Rule,” East and West 18 (1968): 125–46.

79. Paul Bernard et al., “Fouilles de la mission franco-soviétique à l'ancienne Samarcand (Afrasiab): Première campagne,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1990: 356–80; Paul Bernard et al., “Fouilles de la mission franco-ouzbèque à l'ancienne Samarcand (Afrasiab): Deuxième et troisième campagnes,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1992: 275–311.

80. See, e.g., P. Leriche and C. Pidaev, Termez sur Oxus: Cité-capitale d'Asie centrale (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 2008); J. Gurt et al., Preliminary Report of the First Season Work of the International Pluridisciplinary Archaeological Expedition in Bactria (Barcelona: ERAUB, 2008); and N. A. Beregovaia, U. Islamov, and A. N. Kalandadze, Contributions to the Archaeology of the Soviet Union, with Special Emphasis on Central Asia, the Caucasus and Armenia (Cambridge, Mass.: Peabody Museum, 1966).

81. E. Rtveladze, Kampyr Tepe, 4 vols. (Tashkent: San'at, 2000–2006), and Makedoniyalik Aleksandr i Baqtria va So'g'diyonada (Tashkent: Academy of Fine Arts of the Republic of Uzbekistan, 2002). This site, like Ai Khanoum, has been identified as Alexandria Oxiana, and also as Pandokheion: P. Leriche, “Bactria, Land of a Thousand Cities,” p. 133. (The reference not given by Leriche is V. Minorsky, “A Greek Crossing on the Oxus,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 30.1 [1967]: 45–53.)

82. V. Nikonorov and S. Savchuk, “New Data on Ancient Bactrian Body-Armour (in the Light of Finds from Kampyr Tepe),” Iran 30 (1992): 49–54.

83. B. Litvinsky and I. Pichikyan, Ellinisticheskiy khram Oksa v Baktrii (Iuzhnyi Tadzikistan), 3 vols. (Moscow: Vostoknaya Literatura, 2000–2010), vol. II. For additional work, see Angelina Drujinina, “Die Ausgrabungen in Taxt-i Sangin im Oxos-Tempelbereich,” Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 33 (2001): 257–92; and Drujinina and N. Boroffka, “First Preliminary Report on the Excavations in Takht-i Sangin 2004,” Bulletin of the Miho Museum 6 (2006): 57–69. On the important inscription found at this site, see below, chter 6.

84. Summarized by G. A. Koshelenko, “The Fortifications at Gobekly-depe,” and by V. A. Zavylov, “The Fortifications of the City of Gyaur Kala, Merv,” pp. 269–83 and 313–29, respectively, in J. Cribb and G. Herrmann, eds., After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

85. Natalia Smirnova, “On Finds of Hellenistic Coins in Turkmenistan,” Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 3 (1996): 260–85.

86. Sebastian Stride, “Regions and Territories in Southern Central Asia: What the Surkhan Darya Province Tells Us about Bactria,” pp. 99–117 in J. Cribb and G. Herrmann, eds., After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

87. P. Leriche, “Bactria, Land of a Thousand Cities,” pp. 132–33 and 136–37.

88. Bertille Lyonnet, “Les Grecs, les nomades et l'indépendance de la Sogdiane, d'après l'occupation comparée d'Ai Khanoum et de Marakanda au cours des derniers siècles avant notre ère,” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 12 (1998): 141–59. Lyonnet's chronology has recently been challenged, with potential repercussions for Ai Khanoum, Kurganzol Fortress, and other sites: Jeffrey Lerner, “Revising the Chronologies of the Hellenistic Colonies of Samarkand-Marakanda (Afrasiab II–III) and Ai Khanoum (Northeastern Afghanistan),” Anabasis 1 (2010): 58–79. Another article by Lerner, “A Reappraisal of the Economic Inscriptions and Coin Finds from Ai Khanoum,” Anabasis 2 (2011): 103–47, has just appeared, too late for anything more than an acknowledgment of it here. It proposes a very controversial argument on the coin-based chronology of the site that must be analyzed elsewhere.

89. Osmund Bopearachchi, “The Euthydemus Imitations and the Date of Sogdian Independence,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 2 (1991–92): 1–21.

90. Leonid Sverchkov, “The Kurganzol Fortress (On the History of Central Asia in the Hellenistic Era),” Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 14 (2008): 123–91.

91. F. Holt, Into the Land of Bones (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 145–48. The Buddhas were bombed on March 11, 2001.

92. O. Massoudi, “The National Museum of Afghanistan,” and C. Grissmann and F. Hiebert, “Saving Afghanistan's Heritage,” pp. 35–41 and 45–53, respectively, in F. Hiebert and P. Cambon, eds., Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2008). See also Frank Holt, “The Tragedies and Treasures of Afghanistan,” American Scientist 97.3 (2009): 248–49.

93. On the recovery of the museum, see Carla Grissmann, “The Inventory of the Kabul Museum: Attempts at Restoring Order,” Museum International 55.3–4 (2003): 71–76; Francine Tissot, Catalogue of the National Museum of Afghanistan 1931–1985 (Paris: UNESCO, 2006). A group of ivories from the Begram treasure has recently been returned to the museum: St. John Simpson, “Ancient Afghanistan Revealed,” World Archaeology Magazine 46.4 (2011): 16–24.

94. P. Bernard, J.-F. Jarrige, and R. Besenval, “Carnet de route en images d'un voyage sur les sites archéologiques de la Bactriane afghan,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2002: 1385–1428.

95. Petrie, Seventy Years in Archaeology, p. 20

96. Schlumberger, “La prospection,” pp. 186–87. The portrait cannot be attributed, but it resembles closely the coinages of the early second century B.C.E. and, based on the diadem and cloak, could be anyone from Demetrius I to Heliocles I.

97. Ibid., pp. 189–90.

98. For the latest results, see R. Besenval and P. Marquis, “Les travaux de la Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan (DAFA),” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2008: 973–95. On Chesm-e Shafa, see Andrew Lawler, “Edge of an Empire,” Archaeology 64.5 (2011): 42–47.

99. Bernard, “Ai Khanoum on the Oxus,” p. 75.

100. Bernard, “Ai Khanoum en Afghanistan hier (1964–1978) et aujourd'hui (2001),” pp. 991–1029.

101. Most of this material remains unpublished and in private hands. I thank Osmund Bopearachchi and others for bringing it to my attention. (See ch. 7, below.)

102. Anna Badkhen, “War Gives Cover to Antiquities Looter,” San Francisco Chronicle (Nov. 3, 2001): p. AI.

103. Abdul Wasay Najimi, “Built Heritage in Afghanistan: Threats, Challenges and Conservation,” International Journal of Environmental Studies 68 (2011): 343–61. Since 2002, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture has been supporting some conservation projects and training in Afghanistan. For an indispensable assessment of the ongoing cultural heritage crisis, see Juliette van Krieken–Pieters, ed., Art and Archaeology of Afghanistan: Its Fall and Survival (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

104. See, for example, David Thomas et al., “The Archaeological Sites of Afghanistan in Google Earth,” Aerial Archaeology Research Group Newsletter 37 (2008): 22–30.

105. For example, Director Daniel Schlumberger declared in 1946 that, in spite of its many commitments to Afghan history and archaeology in general, it was “pour trouver des sites grecs que la Délégation Archéologique a été constituée.” See Schlumberger, “Rapport sur une mission en Afghanistan,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1946: 174.

106. Bernard's phrase “the Greek language as the cement for national identity” is a striking example: see p. 95 in F. Hiebert and P. Cambon, eds., Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2008).

6. LETTERS HERE AND THERE

1. A Babylonian cuneiform text mentions an anonymous satrap from Seleucid Bactria who sent elephants to Antiochus I in about 275 b.c.e., for which see Sidney Smith, ed., Babylonian Historical Texts (London: Methuen, 1924), pp. 150–59.

2. Félix Durrbach, ed., Inscriptions de Délos (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1929), nos. 442 B, l. 109, and 443 Bb, l. 33; F. Durrbach and P. Roussel, eds., Inscriptions de Délos (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1935), no. 1432 Aa II, ll. 26–27. These dedications were made between 178 and about 166 b.c.e.

3. Monika Schuol, Die Charakene: Ein mesopotamisches Königreich in hellenistisch-parthischer Zeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000). On the name, see Rüdiger Schmitt, “Der Name Hyspasines (samt Varianten),” Bulletin of the Asia Institute 4 (1990): 245–49.

4. Alfred Bellinger, “Hyspaosines of Charax,” Yale Classical Studies 8 (1942): 52–67. Bellinger guessed that this Hyspaosines was a grandson of King Euthydemus, a view disputed by Paul Bernard, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. IV, Les monnaies hors trésors (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1985), pp. 135–36.

5. Reported by Daniel Schlumberger in Edmond Faral, “Séance du 14 Mars,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1947: 241–42; see also Mortimer Wheeler, “Archaeology in Afghanistan,” Antiquity 21 (1947): 63.

6. The most useful reference works on Greek inscriptions from Central Asia are now Filippo Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni dello estremo oriente greco (Bonn: Rudolf Habelt, 2004); and Reinhold Merkelbach and Josef Stauber, eds., Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften (Munich: K. G. Saur, 2005). For the Tepe Nimlik fragment, see Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 195 (no. 303).

7. B. Litvinsky and I. Pichikyan, Ellinisticheskiy khram Oksa v Baktrii (Iuzhnyi Tadzikistan), 3 vols. (Moscow: Vostoknaya Literatura, 2000– 2010).

8. Ibid., vol. I, pp. 305–7; B. Litvinsky, I. Pichikyan, and Y. G. Vinogradov, “The Votive Offering of Atrosokes, from the Temple of the Oxus in Northern Bactria” (in Russian with English summary), Vestnik Drevnej Istorii (1985): 84–110. See also Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 198 (no. 311); Merkelbach and Stauber, eds., Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften, p. 16 (no. 104).

9. An inscribed vessel from Takht-i Sangin records in Greek another votive offering to the Oxus: Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 199 (no. 312); Angelina Drujinina, “Die Ausgrabungen in Taxt-i Sangin im Oxos-Tempelbereich,” Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 33 (2001): 257–92.

10. Shaul Shaked, Le satrape de Bactriane et son gouverneur: Documents araméens du IVe s. avant notre ère (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 2004), pp. 24 and 47–48, identifies several Bactrians with theophoric names indicating veneration of Vakshu (Greek Oxus). This form of devotion preceded the arrival of the Greeks and continued unabated.

11. G. Pugliesi-Carratelli, “Greek Inscriptions of the Middle East,” East and West 16 (1966): 35–36, who takes this to be a Greek name (Nous); Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 193 (no. 297).

12. Aurel Stein, On Alexander's Track to the Indus: Personal Narrative of Explorations on the North-West Frontier of India (1929; reprint, Edison, N.J.: Castle Books, 2004), pp. 53–61. Stein began his scholarly career writing about coins: Jeannette Mirsky, Sir Aurel Stein: Archaeological Explorer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), p. 31.

13. Stein, On Alexander's Track to the Indus, pp. 30–48; Pierfranceso Callieri, “A Potsherd with a Greek Inscription from Bir-Kot (Swat),” Journal of Central Asia 7.1 (1984): 49–53.

14. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 192 (no. 295); cf. no. 296.

15. Irina Kruglikova and Shahibye Mustamandi, “Résultats preliminaries des travaux de l'expédition archéologique afghano-soviétique en 1969,” Afghanistan 23 (1970): 84–97; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 195 (no. 302).

16. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 228 (no. 388).

17. Irina Kruglikova, “Les fouilles de la mission archéologique soviet-afghane sur le site gréco-kushan de Dilberdjin en Bactriane (Afghanistan),” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1977: 425–26; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 196 (no. 304).

18. P. Leriche and C. Pidaev, Termez sur Oxus: Cité-capitale d'Asie centrale (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 2008), p. 32.

19. B. A. Litvinsky, “Archaeological Work in Tajikistan in 1962–1970” Archeologiceskie Raboty v Tadzikistane 10 (1973): 5–41 (in Russian), esp. 17; see also E. Zeymal, ed., Ancient Tadjikistan (Dushanbe: Akademii Nauk, 1985), pp. 136–37 (in Russian); Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 199 (no. 313). This name has been erroneously reported as Socrates by P. Leriche, “Bactria, Land of a Thousand Cities,” pp. 121–53 in J. Cribb and G. Herrmann, eds., After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 132 n. 29.

20. Edvard Rtveladze, “Découvertes en numismatique et épigraphie gréco-bactriennes à Kampyr-Tepe (Bactriane du nord),” Revue Numismatique 6 (1995): 20–24, and “Kampyr Tepe–Pandokheïon: Les Grecs ont traversé l'Oxus,” Dossiers d'Archéologie 247 (1999): 56–57.

21. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 197 (no. 309).

22. Ibid., nos. 307 and 308.

23. Pugliesi-Carratelli, “Greek Inscriptions of the Middle East,” pp. 34–35; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 183–84 (nos. 285–89).

24. Of course, jewelry from the region often bears inscriptions in Kharoshthi or Brahmi: Rai Chandra, Indo-Greek Jewellery (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1979).

25. P. Bernard and O. Bopearachchi, “Deux bracelets grecs avec inscriptions grecques trouvés dans l'Asie centrale hellénisée,” Journal des Savants, 2002: 237–78; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, pp. 259–60 (nos. 446–48).

26. The Trojan Horse appears in at least two Gandharan artworks, signaling the popularity of the Greek saga in the East: Nazir Khan, “A New Relief from Gandhara Depicting the Trojan Horse,” East and West 40 (1990): 315–19.

27. E. Errington and J. Cribb, eds., The Crossroads of Asia: Transformation in Image and Symbol in the Art of Ancient Afghanistan and Pakistan (Cambridge: The Ancient India and Iran Trust, 1992), pp. 138–40.

28. V. Sarianidi, The Golden Hoard of Bactria (Leningrad: Aurora, 1985); Fredrik Hiebert and Pierre Cambon, eds., Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2008), items 55, 88, and 105.

29. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 229–30 (no. 390).

30. O. Bopearachchi et al., eds., De l'Indus à l'Oxus: Archéologie de l'Asie centrale (Lattes: Imago, 2003), item 137, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

31. In general, see Michael Pfrommer, Metalwork from the Hellenized East: Catalogue of the Collections (Malibu: Getty Museum, 1993).

32. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 259 (no. 445).

33. J. Marshall, Taxila, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), vol. I, pp. 40–41 (“Theodorus the Meridarch”).

34. See, for example, Himanshu Ray, “The Yavana Presence in Ancient India,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 31 (1988): 311–25.

35. Helmut Humbach, “Eine griechische Inschrift aus Pakistan,” Gutenberg Jahrbuch (1976): 15–17; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 193 (no. 298).

36. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 228 (no. 387), but misleadingly listed as KTHC. The eta should be a theta: KTΘC.

37. Ibid., pp. 228–29 (no. 389).

38. Ibid., p. 198 (no. 310).

39. Ashmolean accession number EA 1994.79. See J. R. Rea, R. C. Senior, and A. S. Hollis, “A Tax Receipt from Hellenistic Bactria,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 104 (1994): 261–80; P. Bernard and C. Rapin, “Un parchemin gréco-bactrien d'une collection privée,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1994: 261–94.

40. G. G. Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy: The Finances and Financial Administration of the Seleukid Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2004), pp. 282–83.

41. Bernard and Rapin, “Un parchemin,” p. 270.

42. The word also appears in the Ashoka edict found in 1963 at Kandahar, for which see below.

43. Claude Rapin, “Nouvelles observations sur le parchemin gréco-bactrien d'Asangôrna,” Topoi 6 (1996): 458–69.

44. This document answers once and for all the doubts expressed by Alberto Simonetta about subkings or joint kings in Bactria and India: “A New Essay on the Indo-Greeks, the Sakas and the Pahlavas,” East and West 9 (1958): 157.

45. Frantz Grenet, SANGCHARAK,” Topoi 6 (1996): 470–73.

46. W. Clarysse and D.J. Thompson, “Two Greek Texts on Skin from Hellenistic Bactria,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 159 (2007): 273–79.

47. Ibid., p. 276: “We are still not entirely happy with the name Antimachos.”

48. Ibid., p. 278.

49. P. M. Fraser, Cities of Alexander the Great (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 132–40. Kandahar lay within the old Persian satrapy of Arachosia.

50. Richard Salomon, Indian Epigraphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), provides an essential reference.

51. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, pp. 185–87 (no. 290); Merkelbach and Stauber, Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften, pp. 35–36 (no. 202). The publication of this inscription by the Italians created some tensions between Giuseppe Tucci and Daniel Schlumberger of the DAFA, which had long monopolized Afghan archaeology: S. Gorshenina and C. Rapin, De Kaboul à Samarcande: Les archéologues en Asie centrale (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), pp. 60–61.

52. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, pp. 187–91 (nos. 291 and 292); Merkelbach and Stauber, Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften, pp. 25–35 (no. 201). A third Ashokan inscription from Kandahar is fragmentary, but it has both Aramaic and Prakrit lettering: E. Beneviste and A. Dupont-Sommer, “Une inscription indo-araméene d'Asoka provenant de Kandahar (Afghanistan),” Journal Asiatique 254 (1966): 437–65.

53. It was apparently a challenge for the scribes to translate some words and concepts into Greek: K. R. Norman, “Notes on the Greek Version of Ashoka's Twelfth and Thirteenth Rock Edicts,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 2 (1972): 111–18; Émile Beneviste, “Édits d'Asoka en traduction grecque,” Journal Asiatique (1964): 137–57.

54. Consult F. R. Allchin and K. R. Norman, “Guide to the Ashokan Inscriptions,” South Asian Studies 1 (1985): 43–50 (Major Rock Edict XIII). The suggestion has been made that Antiochus I (not II) is referred to in this inscription: Jarl Charpentier, “Antiochus, King of the Yavanas,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 6.2 (1931): 303–21.

55. Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae 14.652f–653a. Antiochus replied that figs and sweets could be obtained, but sophists were not for sale.

56. For philosophical and ethical crosscurrents, see Valeri Yailenko, “Les maximes delphiques d'Ai Khanoum et la formation de la doctrine du Dhamma d'Asoka,” Dialogues d'Histoire Ancienne 16 (1990): 239–56; and David Sick, “When Socrates Met the Buddha: Greek and Indian Dialectic in Hellenistic Bactria and India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 17.3 (2007): 253–78. For linguistic interplay, see also Alain Christol, “Les édits grecs d'Ashoka: Étude linguistique,” Journal Asiatique 271 (1983): 25–42; and Carlo Gallavotti, “The Greek Version of the Kandahar Bilingual Inscription of Ashoka,” East and West 10 (1959): 185–92.

57. The inscription is dated 300–250 b.c.e. by P. M. Fraser, “The Son of Aristonax at Kandahar,” Afghan Studies 2 (1979): 9–21; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, pp. 191–92 (no. 293); Merkelbach and Stauber, Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften, p. 19 (no. 106). The translation of this text, as for all other Greek metrical inscriptions discussed below, has been rhymed in order to convey its intended poetic form.

58. P. Bernard, G.-J. Pinault, and G. Rougemont, “Deux nouvelles inscriptions grecques de l'Asie central,” Journal des Savants, 2004: 227– 356; Merkelbach and Stauber, Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften, pp. 17–19 (no. 105).

59. An interesting brief commentary is now provided by Adrian Hollis, “Greek Letters from Hellenistic Bactria,” pp. 104–18 in Dirk Obbink and Richard Rutherford, eds., Culture in Pieces: Essays on Ancient Texts in Honour of Peter Parsons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 112–16.

60. It was believed at one point that the inscription mentions China as the place where Sophytos made his fortune: P. Bernard and G. Rougemont, “Les secrets de la stèle de Kandahar,” L'Histoire 280 (2003): 27–28.

61. For various potsherd inscriptions, see Svend Helms, Excavations at Old Kandahar in Afghanistan 1976–1978 (Oxford: Archaeopress, 1997), pp. 101–2.

62. Bernard et al., “Deux nouvelles inscriptions,” pp. 333–56; Merkelbach and Stauber, Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften, p. 4 (no. 101).

63. See also Hollis, “Greek Letters,” pp. 110–12.

64. On the coin, see Osmund Bopearachchi, “Trésors monétaires découvertes et pillage,” p. 104 in Afghanistan, patrimoine en péril: Actes d'une journée d'étude (Paris: CEREDAF, 2001).

65. Louis Robert, “De Delphes à l'Oxus,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1968: 416–57; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, pp. 224–27 (nos. 382–84); Merkelbach and Stauber, Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften, pp. 8–15 (no. 103 A and B).

66. Wolfgang Leschhorn, Gründer der Stadt: Studien zu einen politischreligiösen Phänomen der griechischen Geschichte (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1984), pp. 314–17. Whether Cineas founded (or refounded) the settlement under the aegis of Alexander or Seleucus is not certain, and A. K. Narain argues for a much later date, under Diodotus I or II: The Indo-Greeks, Revisited and Supplemented (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 2003), p. 406.

67. Merkelbach and Stauber, Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften, pp. 13–15, accept Robert's thesis; Jeffrey Lerner, “Correcting the Early History of Ay Kanom,” Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 35–36 (2003–4): 391–95, does not.

68. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 223 (no. 381); Merkelbach and Stauber, Jenseits des Euphrat: Griechische Inschriften, pp. 7–8 (no. 102).

69. See, e.g., Lerner, “Correcting the Early History of Ay Kanom,” 390–91, with bibliography.

70. P. Bernard, “Campagne de fouilles à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1972: 605–32; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, pp. 218–19 (nos. 360–62).

71. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 227 (nos. 385–86).

72. Claude Rapin, “Les inscriptions économiques de la trésorerie hellénistique d'Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 107 (1983): 315–81.

73. Ibid., pp. 319–20; C. Rapin, Indian Art from Afghanistan: The Legend of Sakuntala and the Indian Treasure of Eucratides at Ai Khanoum (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1996), pp. 15–16; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 210 (no. 329). The text is written on a broken pot that served as the lid of the container of oil, which adds the workers' names.

74. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, pp. 207–9 and 211 (nos. 324, 325, and 330); Rapin, “Les inscriptions économiques de la trésorerie,” pp. 326–29. The jar was pillaged from the treasury and its fragments found in the main temple.

75. Rémy Audouin and Paul Bernard, “Trésor de monnaies indiennes et indo-grecques d'Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Revue Numismatique 15 (1973): 238–89 and 16 (1974): 6–41.

76. P. Bernard, “Campagne de fouilles 1978 à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1980: 435–59, esp. p. 442; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, pp. 210–11 (no. 329). For a different view, see A. K. Narain, “Notes on Some Inscriptions from Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 69 (1987): 272–82.

77. Claude Rapin, “La trésorerie hellénistique d'Ai Khanoum,” Revue Archéologique (1987): 56.

78. Claude Rapin, “Les texts littéraires grecs de la trésorerie d'Ai Khanoum,” Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 111 (1987): 225–66; Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, pp. 269–72 (nos. 457 and 458).

79. Jeffrey Lerner, “The Ai Khanoum Philosophical Papyrus,” Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 142 (2003): 45–51.

80. Canali de Rossi, ed., Iscrizioni, p. 221 (no. 372).

81. P. Bernard, “Campagne de fouilles à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1972: 631–32. For the use of Aramaic in pre-Hellenistic Bactria, see Shaked, Le satrape de Bactriane.

82. Rachel Mairs, “The ‘Temple with Indented Niches’ at Ai Khanoum: Ethnic and Civic Identity in Hellenistic Bactria,” in Richard Alston and Onno van Nijf, eds., Cults, Creeds and Contests in the Post-Classical City (Louvain: Peeters, forthcoming).

83. François Widemann, “Un monnayage inconnu de type gréco-bactrien à legende araméenne,” Studia Iranica 18 (1989): 193–97; O. Bopearachchi, “The Euthydemus Imitations and the Date of Sogdian Independence,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 2 (1991–92): 1–21.

84. Some inscriptions mentioning Greeks have been declared false. On the Bajaur casket inscription, see H. Falk, “The introduction of Stupa-Worship in Bajaur,” pp. 347–58 in O. Bopearachchi and M.-F. Boussac, eds., Afghanistan: Ancien carrefour entre l'est et l'ouest (Turnhout, 2005). Also condemned are the texts claimed by the Sri Lankan expert Senarat Paranavitana in The Greeks and the Mauryas (Colombo: Lake House Investments, 1971).

85. G. R. Sharma, Reh Inscription of Menander and the Indo-Greek Invasion of the Ganga Valley (Allahabad: Abinash, 1980).

86. See, for example, Gyula Wojtilla, “Did the Indo-Greeks Occupy Pataliputra?” Acta Archaeologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 40 (2000): 497–98.

87. D. C. Sircar, ed., Select Inscriptions Bearing on Indian History and Civilization, 2nd ed. (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1965), vol. I, no. 2; see also Salomon, Indian Epigraphy, pp. 265–66.

88. Adapted from S. Burstein, ed., The Hellenistic Age from the Battle of Ipsos to the Death of Kleopatra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 72.

89. S. Godbole, “Mathura Clay Sealing of Appolodotus [sic],” vol. I, pp. 311–12 in Tony Hackens and Ghilaine Moucharte, eds., Actes du XIe Congrès International de Numismatique, Bruxelles 1991 (Louvain: Association Marcel Hoc, 1993).

90. G. Fussman, “Nouvelles inscriptions Saka: Ère d'Eucratide, Ère d'Azes, Ère Vikrama, Ère de Kanishka,” Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient 67 (1980): 15.

91. See Walter Posch, Baktrien zwischen Griechen und Kuschan (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995), pp. 129–33.

92. D. Schlumberger, M. LeBerre, and G. Fussman, Surkh Kotal en Bactriane, vol. I, Les temples (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1983); Fussman and O. Guillaume, Surkh Kotal en Bactriane, vol. II, Les monnaies et petits objets (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1990); and R. Curiel, “Inscriptions de Surkh Kotal,” Journal Asiatique 242 (1954): 189–97.

93. G. Fussman, “Documents épigraphiques kouchans,” Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient 61 (1974): 1–77.

94. N. Sims-Williams and J. Cribb, “A New Bactrian Inscription of Kanishka the Great,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 4 (1995–96): 75–142; G. Fussman, “L'inscription de Rabatak, la Bactriane et les Kouchans,” pp. 251–91 in Pierre Leriche et al., eds., La Bactriane au carrefour des routes et des civilizations de l'Asie centrale (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 2001). The site has since been bulldozed by looters.

95. David Graf, “Aramaic on the Periphery of the Achaemenid Realm,” Archäologische Mitteilungen aus Iran und Turan 32 (2000): 75–92, esp. 80–82.

96. C. Rapin, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. VIII, La trésorerie du palais hellénistique d'Ai Khanoum (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1992), pp. 139–42, on the silver ingot with a runic inscription.

97. Frantz Grenet, “L'onomastique iranienne à Ai Khanoum,” Bulletin de Correspondance Hellénique 107 (1983): 373–81.

98. W. W. Tarn, “Notes on Hellenism,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 22 (1902): 292, and Alfred Foucher, La vieille route de l'Inde de Bactres à Taxila (Paris: de Nobele, 1942–47), vol. I, p. 385, were both struck at the time by the total lack of epigraphic evidence found in Afghanistan.

7. A PERFECT STORM

1. The author's own tally has lately been confirmed independently by the research of Olivier Bordeaux, “Restitution des trésors monétaires d'Afghanistan et du Pakistan de 1990 à 2008,” Mémoire de Master 1 (Sorbonne, 2011). This study covers the Graeco-Bactrian coins sold by 154 different vendors but does not include internet auctions; his second Mémoire covers the Indo-Greek coins.

2. F. Holt, “The So-Called ‘Pedigree Coins’ of the Bactrian Greeks,” pp. 69–91 in W. Heckel and R. Sullivan, eds., Ancient Coins of the Graeco-Roman World: The Nickle Numismatic Papers (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1984).

3. Statistics have been compiled from these standard inventories of coin hoards, taking care not to duplicate data from hoards listed more than once: Margaret Thompson, Otto Mørkholm, and Colin Kraay, eds., Inventory of Greek Coin Hoards (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1973), and the ten volumes of Coin Hoards published so far as addenda (1975–2010). Some finds listed in IGCH are not true hoards, such as no. 1827.

4. Raoul Curiel and Gérard Fussman, Le trésor monétaire de Qunduz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1965). One drachm of the original 628 coins was lost en route to the museum.

5. Olivier Guillaume, ed., Graeco-Bactrian and Indian Coins from Afghanistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).

6. A small percentage of the thirty thousand coins stored in the National Museum were secretly transferred to a secure vault elsewhere in Kabul prior to the bombing and looting of the museum in 1993.

7. See F. Holt, Into the Land of Bones: Alexander the Great in Afghanistan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005), p. 146. To date, more than seventy-five coins from the Qunduz Hoard have appeared for sale in auction catalogues or on eBay.

8. See, for example, Peter Berghaus, “Coin Hoards: Methodology and Evidence,” pp. 16–19 in P. L. Gupta and A. K. Jha, eds., Numismatics and Archaeology (Anjaneri: Indian Institute of Research in Numismatic Studies, 1987). For the principal inventories of Greek hoards, see n. 3, above.

9. F. Holt, “Alexander the Great and the Spoils of War,” Ancient Macedonia 6.1 (1999): 499–506.

10. For what follows, see F. Holt, “The Euthydemid Coinage of Bactria: Further Hoard Evidence from Ai Khanoum,” Revue Numismatique 23 (1981): 7–44.

11. C.-Y. Petitot-Biehler, “Trésor de monnaies grecques et gréco-bactriennes trouvé à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Revue Numismatique 17 (1975): 23–57, esp. 54–55.

12. The problems arose from misinformation supplied to Martin Price of the British Museum, one of the editors for Coin Hoards (personal communication).

13. Holt, “The Euthydemid Coinage of Bactria,” pp. 10–11. Intrusions are coins added to a hoard in order to sell extraneous material or introduced by mistake as groups of coins pass through various hands.

14. H.-P. Francfort, “Deux nouveaux tétradrachmes commémoratifs d'Agathocle,” Revue Numismatique 17 (1975): 19–22. Ironically, the very next article in this journal was Petitot-Biehler's (see n. 11, above) that first announced the third Ai Khanoum hoard without any connection yet being made with these important Agathocles specimens.

15. P. L. Gupta, “Three Commemorative Tetradrachms of Agathocles,” Journal of the Numismatic Society of India 38.2 (1976): 92–94. The unidentified auction was Bank Leu 15 (May 1976), items 357–59. All three specimens in the Bank Leu auction were purchased by William Wahler of California (personal communication) and were later auctioned off again after his death. One of them was acquired by the British Museum in 1993.

16. Ibid., p. 94.

17. Coin Hoards II (1976), p. 27 (fig. 10). The Leu coin is number 4.

18. O. Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991); Catalogue of Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian and Indo-Parthian Coins of the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1993); Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum: The Collection of the American Numismatic Society, part 9, Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Coins (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1998); and with A. ur Rahman, Pre-Kushana Coins in Pakistan (Karachi: Iftikhar Rasul, 1995).

19. The first deposit (MZ 1) was found and partially recovered in 1947–48: Raoul Curiel and Daniel Schlumberger, Trésors monétaires d'Afghanistan (Paris: Klincksieck, 1953), pp. 65–100. The approximately thirteen thousand coins in this deposit were dispersed into various collections; those that ended up in the Kabul Museum have subsequently been looted.

20. My own notes of conversations (April–July 1993) with academics, curators, and dealers in New York, California, Italy, Pakistan, and Switzerland bear this out. Some informants believed there was a single great hoard, whereas others suspected that two or three separate finds had been mingled on the market.

21. For his personal account, see O. Bopearachchi, “A Joy and a Curse,” pp. 33–73 in F. Holt and O. Bopearachchi, eds., The Alexander Medallion: Exploring the Origins of a Unique Artefact (Lacapelle-Mirival: Imago Lattara, 2011).

22. Osmund Bopearachchi was cleverly able to track some of these coins, as well as others from MZ I, by virtue of the distinctive patina caused by conditions inside the ancient well at Mir Zakah.

23. For example, O. Bopearachchi, “Two More Unique Coins from the Second Mir Zakah Deposit,” Oriental Numismatic Society Newsletter 169 (2001): 21–22.

24. For examples, “Grands trésors de monnaies pré-sassanides trouvés en Afghanistan et au Pakistan,” International Numismatic Newsletter 24 (1994): 2–3; “Récentes découvertes de trésors de monnaies pré-sassanides trouvés en Afghanistan et au Pakistan,” Cahiers Numismatiques, Sept. 1994: 7–14; “Recent Discoveries: Hoards and Finds of Ancient Coins from Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Yavanika 4 (1994): 3–30; “Découvertes récentes de trésors indo-grecs: Nouvelles données historiques,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1995: 609–27; and “Nouvelles trouvailles archéologiques en Afghanistan et au Pakistan et la destruction du patrimoine,” La Timuride 24 (2002): 10–20.

25. O. Bopearachchi, “Recent Coin Hoard Evidence on Pre-Kushana Chronology,” pp. 99–149 in Michael Alram and Deborah Klimburg-Salter, eds., Coins, Art, and Chronology: Essays on the Pre-Islamic History of the Indo-Iranian Borderlands (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), pp. iio–ii.

26. O. Bopearachchi, “La circulation et la production monétaires en Asie centrale et dans l'Inde du nord-ouest (avant et après la conquête d'Alexandre),” Indologica Taurinensia 35 (1999–2000): 15–121.

27. Ibid., p. 60.

28. Edvard Rtveladze, “La circulation monétaire au nord de l'Oxus à l'époque gréco-bactrienne,” Revue Numismatique 26 (1984): 61–76, report augmented by G. Kurbanov and M. Niyazova, Katalog greko-baktriskikh monet iz fondov Bukharskogo muzeia (Bukhara: Bukhara Museum, 1989).

29. Rtveladze, “La circulation monétaire,” p. 64. Naturally, this material entered the antiquities market and occasionally attracted professional looters to these areas.

30. On these discoveries, see the works cited above in nn. 24–26.

31. O. Bopearachchi and Klaus Grigo, “Thundering Zeus Revisited,” Oriental Numismatic Society Newsletter 169 (autumn 2001): 22–24.

32. See, for example, Elizabeth Errington, “Rediscovering the Collections of Charles Masson,” pp. 207–37 in Michael Alram and Deborah Klimburg-Salter, eds., Coins, Art, and Chronology: Essays on the Pre-Islamic History of the Indo-Iranian Borderlands (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999).

33. Elizabeth Errington, “Charles Masson and Begram,” Topoi 11 (2001): 357–409.

34. Elizabeth Errington, “Rediscovering the Coin Collection of General Claude-Auguste Court: A Preliminary Report,” Topoi 5 (1995): 409–24.

35. Updated summaries of this progress may be found in the volumes of A Survey of Numismatic Research, published periodically by the International Numismatic Commission. See also Duncan Hook, “The Application of Science to Coins and Coin Hoards at the British Museum,” in Barrie Cook, ed., The British Museum and the Future of UK Numismatics (London: British Museum Press, 2011), pp. 28–33.

36. See n. 18, above. The older catalogues include: A. N. Lahiri, Corpus of Indo-Greek Coins (Calcutta: Poddar Publications, 1965); and Michael Mitchiner, Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage, 9 vols. (London: Hawkins, 1975).

37. F. Holt, Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999); Brian Kritt, Dynastic Transitions in the Coinage of Bactria: Antiochus-Diodotus-Euthydemus (Lancaster, Pa.: Classical Numismatic Group, 2001); and Jens Jakobsson, “Antiochus Nicator,” Numismatic Chronicle 170 (2010): 17–33.

38. As demonstrated in Holt, “The So-Called ‘Pedigree Coins.’ ” Yet, the shadow of Tarn cannot always be banished by new light: M. C.J. Miller, “Antimachus (II) Nikephoros: A New Alexander?” Ancient World 39.1 (2008): 55–62, esp. 55.

39. For example, Jens Jakobsson, “Who Founded the Indo-Greek Era of 186/5 B.C.E.?” Classical Quarterly 59.2 (2009): 505–10.

40. See, for example, Robert Senior, “Menander versus Zoilos, Another Overstrike,” Oriental Numismatic Society Newsletter 150 (1996): 12.

41. This latest surge has been noted by Peter Mittag, “Bactria and Parthia,” pp. III–16 in Michel Amandry and Donal Bateson, eds., A Survey of Numismatic Research 2002–2007 (Glasgow: International Numismatic Commission, 2009), p. III. See also the earlier surveys in F. Holt, “Discovering the Lost History of Ancient Afghanistan: Hellenistic Bactria in Light of Recent Archaeological and Historical Research,” Ancient World 9 (1984): 3–28, and “Hellenistic Bactria: Beyond the Mirage,” Ancient World 14 (1986): 3–15.

42. O. Bopearachchi, “A New Approach to the History of the Greeks in India,” Yavanika 1 (1992): 6–20.

43. Similarly, while rejecting the ambitious system devised earlier by Alexander Cunningham (see ch. 2, above), A. D. H. Bivar sought to establish the geographical significance of the monograms: “Monogram Counts from the Kabul Collection,” pp. 225–33 in Paul Bernard and Frantz Grenet, eds., Histoire et cultes de l'Asie centrale préislamique: Sources écrites et documents archéologiques (Paris: CNRS, 1991).

44. See also O. Bopearachchi, “Monnaies indo-grecques surfrappées,” Revue Numismatique 31 (1989): 49–79, and “L'apport des surfrappes à la reconstruction de l'histoire des Indo-Grecs,” Revue Numismatique (2008): 245–68.

45. On the range of techniques employed, see O. Bopearachchi, “Les royaumes grecs d'Asie centrale: L'apport de la numismatique à leur histoire,” Les Nouvelles de l'Archéologie 39 (1990): 21–26.

46. P. Mittag, “Methodologische Überlegungen zur Geschichte Baktriens: Könige und Münzen,” Schweizerische Numismatische Rundschau 85 (2006): 27–46.

47. Ibid., p. 44.

48. O. Guillaume, Analysis of Reasonings in Archaeology: The Case of Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Numismatics, trans. Osmund Bopearachchi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990).

49. Ibid., p. 1. The great failing of Olivier Guillaume's work is that he, like those he criticizes, does not make explicit his own intermediate propositions, in his case linking the catalogues to the histories allegedly derived from them. How do catalogues published after the selected works of Tarn and A. K. Narain possibly influence them?

50. Ibid., p. 9. Jean-Claude Gardin wrote the foreword for the book.

51. As shown in chter 4, above, it may be debated whether A. K. Narain should be classified as an historian or a numismatist. In fact, Narain produced a coin catalogue of his own that has been published several times, most recently as part of The Indo-Greeks, Revisited and Supplemented (Delhi: B. R. Publishing, 2003), pp. 299–349. See also n. 56, below.

52. The other variables are number of coins (correlated to importance or length of reign), royal and nonroyal portraiture (including the problems of personality and kinship), languages, monograms, paleography, provenance, and style.

53. Guillaume, Analysis of Reasonings in Archaeology, pp. 70–71.

54. Ibid., pp. 72–73.

55. Ibid., pp. 96–98.

56. Ibid., pp. III–18. To this, A. K. Narain has thrown down a challenge in The Indo-Greeks, Revisited and Supplemented, pp. 484–501 (from an updated version of his 1991 presidential address for the Indian Society of Greek and Roman Studies). Narain insists that he is no nationalist and that he is a scientific numismatist (and archaeologist) rather than a subjective historian like Tarn.

57. Guillaume, Analysis of Reasonings in Archaeology, p. 115.

58. Ibid., p. 114.

59. Olivier Guillaume praises Bopearachchi's Monnaiesgréco-bactri-ennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné as both a catalogue and an historical reconstruction: Studies in History 9.2 (1993): 292–94. In this review, Guillaume presses for more use of computerized databases and expanded analysis of monograms and die links. See also Guillaume, “How Can the Computer Help the Numismatist and the Historian of the Indo-Greek Period?” Journal of the Numismatic Society of India 47 (1985): 152–60.

60. Homayun Sidky, The Greek Kingdom of Bactria: From Alexander to Eucratides the Great (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000), p. ix. This is in some ways an admirable endeavor, but one fatally flawed by sloppy preparation, terrible printing, and total absence of basic proofreading. Even the table of contents is wrong. These careless errors continue right through the text, notes, bibliography, and index. The republication of excerpts from this book under another title offers little improvement: The Rise and Fall of the Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom (Jaipur: ABD Publishers, 2004).

61. Sidky, The Greek Kingdom of Bactria, pp. xiv–xv and 229 n. 23.

62. Ibid., pp. 214–15.

63. A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks, Revisited and Supplemented, p. 52.

64. Sidky, The Greek Kingdom of Bactria, p. 214.

65. Jens Jakobsson, “The Greeks of Afghanistan Revisited,” Nomismatika Khronika 26 (2007): 51–88.

66. Ibid., p. 52. This is essentially Tarn's complaint some seventy years earlier, although Jakobsson stresses for some reason philologists as well: “This criticism is directed against the general chasm between philologists and numismatists.” Jakobsson himself is not a philologist.

67. Ibid., p. 53. The author rightly expresses these ideas with utmost caution.

68. Ibid., p. 59. Emphasis added.

69. Ibid., pp. 67 and 69.

70. Ibid., pp. 69 and 51. Many of the author's so-called facts may certainly be contested. For example, the author declares (p. 56) that young rulers were rare in Bactria but then describes many of them as, in fact, being young (e.g., Demetrius I, Euthydemus II, Menander, Demetrius II, Antimachus II). He calls the dated potsherd from Ai Khanoum a stele (p. 63) and reprises the old notion (p. 59) that Poseidon on the coins of Antimachus suggests a kingdom near the coast or along the Indus (but not in India).

71. Stanislaw Kalita, Grecy w Baktrii i w Indiach: Wybrane problem ich historii (Kraków: Historia Iagellonica, 2005).

72. Ibid., p. 248.

73. In the series Studi Ellenistici, volume 21 (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2009). Omar Coloru also studied in France with Osmund Bopearachchi and the noted specialist on Persia Pierre Briant.

74. For example, Omar Coloru, Da Alessandro a Menandro (Pisa: Fabrizio Serra Editore, 2009), pp. 198–206, uses the parchment documents (discussed above, ch. 6) to work out a speculative chronology for Antimachus's reign that is tied to coins and dynastic politics. He presumes that Euthydemus II was a son of Demetrius by his (promised) Seleucid wife, and that the Eumenes and Antimachus (II) in the tax document were the brother and nephew of Antimachus I.

75. François Widemann, Les successeurs d'Alexandre en Asie centrale et leur héritage culturel (Paris: Riveneuve, 2009). A preliminary (but often word-for-word) version was published as “Phases et contradictions de la colonization grecque en Asie centrale et en Inde du nord-ouest,” Indologica Taurinensia 27 (2001): 215–62.

76. The phrase is Widemann's: Les successeurs d'Alexandre, p. 9.

77. Widemann seems to have missed only M. A. R. Khan, “The Probably Meteoritic Origin of Certain Specimens of Nickel Coins Struck in Bactria before 200 B.C.,” Meteoritics and Planetary Science 1 (1953): 60, a view challenged in the same issue by John Buddhue, “A Possible Explanation of the Nickel in Ancient Asiatic Coins,” pp. 60–61.

78. See also F. Widemann, “Scarcity of Precious Metals and Relative Chronology of Indo-Greek and Related Coinages (1st Century B.C.–1st Century A.D.),” East and West 50 (2000): 227–58; cf. W. W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Ares Press, 1984), pp. 103–4.

79. For examples: Widemann, Les successeurs d'Alexandre, p. 71 (on Demetrius I and Euthydemus II) and p. 161 (on Eucratides as grandson of Antiochus III of Syria).

80. Ibid., p. 74.

81. Ibid., pp. 49–50, 180, and 446–47.

82. Ibid., pp. 447–48.

83. For example, the almost universally accepted siege of Bactra by Antiochus the Great: Stanislav Kalita, “Oblezenie, którego nie bylo? Uwagi na marginesie historii wojny Antiocha III z Eutydemosem królem Baktrii,” pp. 47–55 in Marciej Salamon and Zdzislaw Kapera, eds., Studia Classica et Byzantina Alexandro Krawczuk Oblata (Kraków: Jagiellonian University Press, 1996).

84. Reprised in Boccaccio and other Renaissance authors, along with Chaucer's “Emetreus King of India,” for which see above, chter 1.

85. On the various supposed references to Demetrius I in Indian sources, see A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks, Revisited and Supplemented, pp. 47–50, contra Tarn.

86. This list of numismatic facts could easily be extended by considering imitations of Demetrius's coins, etc.

87. A filial connection might be surmised on the basis of the shared Hercules motif on the coins.

88. The possibility that Demetrius II is really young Demetrius I (cf. N6 in the list above), or that Euthydemus II is actually Demetrius I, has been suggested as well. See the discussion in F. Holt, “Did King Euthydemus II Really Exist?” Numismatic Chronicle 160 (2000): 81–91.

89. As shown above, Tarn and A. K. Narain took opposite positions. See also Michael Kordosis, 20.1 (1991): 217–24; L. M. Wilson, “King Demetrios of India and Eukratides of Bactria,” Oriental Numismatic Society Newsletter 174 (2003): 17–23.

90. On the Circumnavigation of the Red Sea, 47. See chter 1, above.

91. John Deyell, “Indo-Greek and Ksaharata Coins from the Gujarat Seacoast,” Numismatic Chronicle 144 (1984): 115–27.

92. Tarn, Greeks in Bactria and India, p. 149. Tarn would rather believe (p. 527) that if no Apollodotus coins were known from Bharuch, then this was not the same place as Barygaza than that the ancient writer could be wrong.

93. A. K. Narain, The Indo-Greeks, Revisited and Supplemented, pp. 86– 87, recanted pp. 268–69. See also D. W. MacDowall and N. G. Wilson, “Apollodoti Reges Indorum,” Numismatic Chronicle (1960): 221–28.

94. A similar assessment was reached in Erik Seldeschlachts's judicious survey of Greek and Indian evidence: “The End of the Road for the Indo-Greeks?” Iranica Antiqua 39 (2004): 249–96.

8. A NEW BEGINNING

1. Published posthumously in American Historical Review 47.2 (1942): 225–44. It should be noted that Thompson nevertheless anticipated some of the New History in his studies of literacy, espionage, and animal husbandry.

2. On these developments, consult Matthew Johnson, Archaeological Theory: An introduction (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1999).

3. Examples include Rachel Mairs, “Greek Identity and the Settler Community in Hellenistic Bactria and Arachosia,” Migrations and Identities 1.1 (2008): 19–43; Mairs, “Ethnicity and Funarary [sic] Practice in Hellenistic Bactria,” pp. 111–24 in Hannes Schroeder, P. Gardner, and Peter Bray, eds., Crossing Frontiers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Grant Parker, “Hellenism in an Afghan Context,” pp. 170–91 in Himanshu Ray and Daniel Potts, eds., Memory as History: The Legacy of Alexander in Asia (New Delhi: Aryan Books, 2007). It should be noted that the situation is considerably brighter in Roman numismatics; see, for example, Hans-Markus von Kaenal and Fleur Kemmers, eds., Coins in Context, vol. I, New Perspectives for the Interpretation of Coin Finds (Mainz am Rhein: Philipp von Zabern, 2009).

4. Jens Jakobsson, “The Greeks of Afghanistan Revisited,” Nomismatika Khronika 26 (2007): 51 (emphasis added).

5. A debt is owed to works such as the following: Colin Renfrew and Ezra Zubrow, eds., The Ancient Mind: Elements of Cognitive Archaeology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Michael O'Brien, Lee Lyman, and Michael Schiffer, Archaeology as a Process: Processualism and Its Progeny (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2005). Not seen before the writing of this book, but sharing some of the approaches advocated here and in a lecture introducing cognitive numismatics at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (9/10/2009), is Fleur Kemmers and Nanouschka Myrberg, “Rethinking Numismatics: The Archaeology of Coins,” Archaeological Dialogues 18 (2011): 87–108.

6. J. R. Melville Jones, Testimonia Numaria: Greek and Latin Texts Concerning Ancient Greek Coinage, vol. I (London: Spink, 1993), p. 349.

7. Sometimes called cultural formation process, with stages labeled as C-transforms. Phenomena such as corrosion are called natural formation processes (N-transforms). These are useful ways of understanding how the archaeological (and numismatic) record has been shaped.

8. It is not easy to determine which coins derive from which sources on the basis of present evidence and analysis. For instance, the treasury at Ai Khanoum contained jars of karshapana coins that may represent trade or war with India and may or may not have been intended for reuse as bullion to strike Bactrian issues.

9. The treatment of this topic is highly speculative in F. Widemann, Les successeurs d'Alexandre en Asie centrale et leur héritage culturel (Paris: Riveneuve, 2009). He believes that Bactria suffered chronic shortages of precious metals, and that control of Sogdia in particular was essential for access to gold.

10. On the metals and metalworking of Afghanistan and Pakistan, see Elizabeth Errington and Joe Cribb, eds., The Crossroads of Asia: Transformation in Image and Symbol in the Art of Ancient Afghanistan and Pakistan (Cambridge: The Ancient India and Iran Trust, 1992), pp. 241–59. Open-pit mining at Ainak threatens a sprawling ancient Buddhist monastery site.

11. Diodorus Siculus 3.12–14 describes the gold mines of Egypt.

12. Claude Rapin, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. VIII, La trésorerie du palais hellénistique d'Ai Khanoum (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1992), pp. 70–71, 146–47, 288–94, and 318.

13. A cognitive map is an interpretive scheme for understanding the world, often existing as a communal mind-set on how a certain task should be done. A good look into an ancient mint may be found in John Camp II and John Kroll, “The Agora Mint and Athenian Bronze Coinage,” Hesperia 70 (2001): 127–62.

14. An introduction to this process may be found in Philip Grierson, Numismatics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 100–111.

15. As noted above, in chter 5, ten unstruck bronze flans were excavated at Ai Khanoum. These cast flans show the form of the mold tree. The resulting sprue will sometimes be evident on the finished coin: for example, Osmund Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991), plate 3, coin 22 (Euthydemus I).

16. Osmund Bopearachchi, “L'apport des surfrappes à la reconstruction de l'histoire des Indo-Grecs,” Revue Numismatique (2008): 259–60. This proves the existence of a second King Heliocles distinct from Eucratides' immediate successor.

17. For the working conditions in a well-attested medieval mint, see Peter Spufford, “Mint Organisation in the Burgundian Netherlands in the Fifteenth Century,” pp. 239–61 in C. N. L. Brooke et al., eds., Studies in Numismatic Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

18. Leonard Gorelick and John Gwinnett, “Close Work without Magnifying Lenses?” Expedition (winter 1981): 27–34; Dimitris Plantzos, “Crystals and Lenses in the Graeco-Roman World,” American Journal of Archaeology 101 (1997): 451–64; Jay Enoch, “Early Lens Use: Lenses Found in Context with Their Original Objects,” Optical History 73.11 (1996): 707–13.

19. Pliny, Historia Naturalis 37.16, mentions the problems faced by gem cutters.

20. I thank Osmund Bopearachchi for kindly sharing this information.

21. Raoul Curiel and Gérard Fussman, Le trésor monétaire de Qunduz (Paris: Klincksieck, 1965), pp. 49–54.

22. Analysis done by Maryse Blet-Lemarquand using scanning electron microscopy energy-dispersive X-ray analysis.

23. Whenever the dies shifted slightly between blows, a doublestruck image could appear on the coin: e.g., Curiel and Fussman, Le trésor monétaire de Qunduz, no. 346 (obverse).

24. Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 397. Note that the issues listed in the name of Diodotus were minted by a later king.

25. P. Bernard, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. IV, Les monnaies hors trésors (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1985), p. 16.

26. Notice the similar guide dots and letter forms on, e.g., the Athena signet ring from Tillya Tepe: V. Sarianidi, The Golden Hoard of Bactria (New York: Harry Abrams, 1985), p. 168. Note also the curious steatite engraving of Eucratides' coin type listed in Baldwin's auction 2008, lot 570.

27. An unpublished signet ring found recently in Shaikhan Dheri is set with a brilliant gemstone carving of young Hercules with his lion pelt.

28. Classical Numismatic Group auction 72 (June 2006), no. 1034; see also Gorny and Mosch auction 155 (Mar. 2007), no. 171.

29. Some silver coins of Euthydemus II do this, for example, with the hand and crown of Hercules: Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 55.

30. There is no indication that die cutters used a method known to stone cutters whereby the text was first chalked or inked and then cut, perhaps by a different and even illiterate subordinate.

31. Bactrian die cutters desired that parallel inscriptions begin (and if possible, end) in alignment, as is evident on many dies, including those of Apollodotus I. The rare tetradrachms with his name carved with letters of the same size cannot achieve this balance, because is so much longer than Yet, by shrinking the omicrons and tucking them among the other letters, this alignment became possible. Compare Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, plate II A, to Triton auction 8 (Jan. 2005), no. 642.

32. See, for example, Classical Numismatic Group auction 39 (Sept. 1996), no. 859.

33. Osmund Bopearachchi, “Some Interesting Coins from the Pandayale Hoard,” Oriental Numismatic Society Newsletter 169 (2001): 19–21.

34. E. T. Newell, The Coinage of the Eastern Seleucid Mints from Seleucus I to Antiochus III (1938; reprint, New York: American Numismatic Society, 1978), nos. 669 and 670 (Bactra); P. Bernard and O. Guillaume, “Monnaies inédites de la Bactriane grecque à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Revue Numismatique 22 (1980): 21–23. For further discussion of blundered legends, see below.

35. Osmund Bopearachchi and Klaus Grigo, “To Err Is Human,” Oriental Numismatic Society Newsletter 172 (2002): 14–15.

36. J. C. McKeown, A Cabinet of Roman Curiosities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 6. Emphasis added.

37. Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, plates 8 and 9.

38. It is interesting that both supercoins are multiples of twenty (drachms and staters), which may indicate that they served a similar economic function.

39. Curiel and Fussman, Le trésor monétaire de Qunduz, nos. 619–23.

40. This interpretation differs from the one offered in Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 102, because on closer inspection of photographs from the Kabul Museum the dots do appear in the exergue of coin 619.

41. Discussed at length above, in chter 3.

42. On many early issues of Eucratides (without the epithet), the back portions of the spears do not appear at all.

43. Coin types that were essentially horizontal, like the Dioscuri, dictated parallel horizontal legends, whereas the vertical types common before Eucratides required parallel vertical legends.

44. For example, Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indogrecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 69; see also O. Bopearachchi, “Recent Coin Hoard Evidence on Pre-Kushana Chronology,” pp. 99–149 in Michael Alram and Deborah Klimburg-Salter, eds., Coins, Art, and Chronology: Essays on the Pre-Islamic History of the Indo-Iranian Borderlands (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), p. 119.

45. O. Bopearachchi, “Découvertes récentes de trésors indo-grecs: Nouvelles données historiques,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1995: 619–20.

46. Curiel and Fussman, Le trésor monétaire de Qunduz, p. 18.

47. C. Kraay, “Demetrius in Bactria and India,” Numismatic Digest 9 (1985): 17–18.

48. F. Holt, “Mimesis in Metal: The Fate of Greek Culture on Bactrian Coins,” pp. 93–104 in F. Titchener and R. Moorton, eds., The Eye Expanded: Life and the Arts in Greco-Roman Antiquity (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

49. O. Bopearachchi and A. ur Rahman, Pre-Kushana Coins in Pakistan (Karachi: Iftikhar Rasul, 1995), pp. 218–19 (no. 1068); and cf. no. 1071.

50. For a discussion of linguistic clues to the ethnicity of scribes in Achaemenid Bactria, see Shaul Shaked, Le satrape de Bactriane et son gouverneur: Documents araméens du IVe s. avant notre ère (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 2004), pp. 23–27.

51. For example, Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indogrecques: Catalogue raisonné, pp. 281–82.

52. Holt, “Mimesis in Metal,” pp. 94–98. The sample includes only coins (and therefore the dies that made them) from secure contexts, not market specimens or known imitations of the interesting type found in Mariusz Mielczarek, “Two Imitations of Eucratides' Obols from the Museum Collection in Lodz,” Wiadomosci Numizmatyczne 31 (1987): 48–51.

53. One coin attributable to Eucratides II appears in the compromised Hoard III from Ai Khanoum: F. Holt, “The Euthydemid Coinage of Bactria: Further Hoard Evidence from Ai Khanoum,” Revue Numismatique 23 (1981): no. 129; the one bronze coin (no. 166) from Ai Khanoum identified by Paul Bernard as an issue of Demetrius II should probably be attributed to Demetrius I: Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 167 (series 5 C).

54. There are Antimachus coins outside this controlled sample that have more complex errors. These occur on his square issues: see, e.g., Bopearachchi and ur Rahman, Pre-Kushana Coins, pp. 100–101 (nos. 189 and 190).

55. I take this opportunity to thank Professor Charles Peters of the University of Houston Mathematics Department for kindly reviewing these data.

56. As proposed by Bernard and Guillaume, “Monnaies inédites,” p. 22, to explain some coinage errors at Ai Khanoum; cf. Holt, “Mimesis in Metal,” pp. 99–100.

57. P. Bernard, “The Greek Colony at Ai Khanoum and Hellenism in Central Asia,” pp. 81–105 in F. Hiebert and P. Cambon, eds., Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2008), p. 95.

58. Strabo 15.2.9 cites the agreement made by Seleucus I, reportedly renewed by Antiochus III according to Polybius 11.39.11–12. See F. Holt, Alexander the Great and Bactria: The Formation of a Greek Frontier in Central Asia (Leiden: Brill, 1988), p. 101.

59. Quintus Curtius 7.5.29.

60. H. Sidky, The Greek Kingdom of Bactria: From Alexander to Eucratides the Great (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000), pp. 131 and xvi. Similarly, D. W. MacDowall and M. Taddei, “The Early Historic Period: Achaemenids and Greeks,” pp. 187–232 in F. R. Allchin and N. Hammond, eds., The Archaeology of Afghanistan from Earliest Times to the Timurid Period (London: Academic Press, 1978), p. 198: “the pure Greek character of the city in its language, culture and system of education in Bactria.”

61. W. W. Tarn, The Greeks in Bactria and India, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 301. Tarn then goes on, contrary to Sidky, to discuss some survivals of the Hellenic population and their culture.

62. Bopearachchi and ur Rahman, Pre-Kushana Coins, pp. 56–58 and 88–89 (no. 120), accepted as genuine.

63. Rapin, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. VIII, La trésorerie, p. 292: “La ville grecque d'Ai Khanoum fut abandonée soudainement et sans avoir connu une période de décadence préalable.”

64. Curiel and Fussman, Le trésor monétaire de Qunduz, nos. 39–48, show the development of an obvious crack at 11:00 on the obverse die.

65. Ibid., no. 39, which—given the size of the crack in the obverse—was probably not the first in this series.

66. Ibid., nos. 47 and 48.

67. Based on the monograms for lifetime issues as enumerated in Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, pp. 199–214.

68. See below, chter 9, for further discussion.

9. COINS AND THE COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION

1. Mariusz Mielczarek, Ancient Greek Coins Found in Central, Eastern and Northern Europe (Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1989), p. 146 (no. 25). The artifact is now in the Archaeological and Ethnographical Museum, Lodz.

2. The coin bears the monogram which Mielczarek (above, n. 1, citing A. D. H. Bivar) identified with the Pushkalavati mint but has since been attributed to Begram by Osmund Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1991), pp. 84–85.

3. Mielczarek, Ancient Greek Coins, pp. 93–100, offers some speculations.

4. The Daily Telegraph, April 3, 1969, reported this incident at Sudbury, Suffolk.

5. On the nature of bronze coinages, see F. Holt, Thundering Zeus: The Making of Hellenistic Bactria (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 107–25.

6. Ibid., p. 121: the assimilation of Artemis and Anahita.

7. M. M. Austin, “Hellenistic Kings, War, and the Economy,” Classical Quarterly 36.3 (1986): 450–66.

8. Using the data derived by Alain Davesne and Georges Le Rider, Gülnar, vol. II, Le trésor de Meydancikkale (Paris: Recherche sur les Civilisations, 1989), pp. 256–58.

9. Excavated in 1973: Paul Bernard, “Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan), Campagnes de 1972 et 1973,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1974: 280–308.

10. Alexandria Eschate: Curtius 7.6.25. Marakanda: Curtius 7.6.10. Antiochia Margiana: Pliny, Historia Naturalis 6.18 (47). The latter two sites reportedly served as regional capitals; Arrian 3.30.6 calls Maracanda a royal residence.

11. P. Bernard, “Ai Khanoum en Afghanistan hier (1964–1978) et aujourd'hui (2001): Un site en péril,” Comptes-Rendus de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 2001: 1016–17.

12. Claude Rapin, Indian Art from Afghanistan: The Legend of Sakuntala and the Indian Treasure of Eucratides at Ai Khanoum (New Delhi: Manohar Publishers, 1996), pp. 104–5.

13. Frantz Grenet, Jean-Claude Liger, and Régis de Valence, “L'arsenal,” Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient 68 (1980): 51–63.

14. Paul Bernard, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. IV, Les monnaies hors trésors (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1985), nos. 11, 58, 159, 184, and 210.

15. Ibid., nos. 191, 193, and 212.

16. Olivier Guillaume, ed., Graeco-Bactrian and Indian Coins from Afghanistan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 25–116. The treasury inscriptions listing such coins are discussed above, in chter 6.

17. Bernard, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. IV, p. 76. The distinctions between trade, tribute, and plunder in the archaeological record are not easy to make, as the equivocations of some scholars show: Rapin, Indian Art from Afghanistan, pp. 107, 111, and 118.

18. Only a few Bactrian coins reached Central and Eastern Europe, all of them silver: Mielczarek, Ancient Greek Coins, nos. 25 (Menander), 153 (Eucratides II), and 125 (Euthydemus imitation).

19. For example, the parable of the lost coin (Luke 15:8): “Either what woman having ten pieces [drachms] of silver, if she lose one piece, doth not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently till she find it?” (KJV ).

20. Bernard, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. IV, p. 5.

21. P.J. Casey, Understanding Ancient Coins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), pp. 69–74. Casey also includes political and economic factors.

22. C.-Y. Petitot-Biehler, “Trésor de monnaies grecques et gréco-bactriennes trouvé à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Revue Numismatique 17 (1975): 23–57; and P. Bernard, “Trésor de monnaies grecques et gréco-bactriennes trouvé à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan): Note sur la signification historique de la trouvaille,” Revue Numismatique 17 (1975): 58–69 (both reprinted and translated in Guillaume, ed., Graeco-Bactrian and Indian Coins, pp. 117–64).

23. There is a vast literature on hoard studies, but a good place to start is Casey, Understanding Ancient Coins, pp. 51–67. The classification of hoards began in antiquity: Justinian, Digest 41.1.

24. The latest coin in the hoard (Eucratides) seems to have rested near the top of the pile, based on photographs of the concreted mass before cleaning: Bernard, “Trésor de monnaies grecques et gréco-bactriennes,” fig. 4.

25. G. G. Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy: The Finances and Financial Administration of the Seleukid Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 202–5, with appropriate cautions.

26. See Holt, Thundering Zeus, pp. 34–35. Other kinds of hoards may have been deliberately abandoned as useless currency, grave offerings, etc.

27. On such problems in the archaeological record, see Catherine Cameron and Steve Tomka, eds., Abandonment of Settlements and Regions: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Approaches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

28. See François Widemann, Les successeurs d'Alexandre en Asie centrale et leur héritage culturel (Paris: Riveneuve, 2009), p. 186.

29. Systems theory in archaeology began as part of the New Archaeology: see Kent Flannery, “Archaeological Systems Theory and Early Mesopotamia,” pp. 67–87 in Betty J. Meggers, ed., Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas (Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington, 1968).

30. Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Penguin, 2005).

31. Most notably by Gregory Brunk, “Understanding Self-Organized Criticality as a Statistical Process,” Complexity 5.3 (2000): 26–33, and “Why Do Societies Collapse? A Theory Based on Self-Organized Criticality,” Journal of Theoretical Politics 14.2 (2002): 195–230.

32. Roman Frigg, “Self-Organized Criticality—What It Is and What It Isn't,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34 (2003): 613–32.

33. Ibid., pp. 625–30.

34. As Tainter, Collapse of Complex Societies, points out (p. 64): “But the fundamental problem with intruder theories is that they do not clarify much. The overthrow of a dominant state by a weaker, tribally-organized people is an event greatly in need of explanation. It is, standing alone, an acceptable explanation of nothing.”

35. Paul Bernard et al., “Campagne de fouille 1978 à Ai Khanoum (Afghanistan),” Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extrême-Orient 68 (1980): 7.

36. The latter group includes Demetrius I, Euthydemus II, Antimachus I (and his co-rulers Antimachus and Eumenes), Agathocles, Pantaleon, Apollodotus I, Demetrius II, Eucratides I and a co-ruler, and Menander. Claude Rapin notes that the Bactrian and Indo-Greek king list doubles that of the Seleucids over a similar time span: Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. VIII, La trésorerie du palais hellénistique d'Ai Khanoum (Paris: Diffusion de Boccard, 1992), p. 281.

37. For these useful typologies, see Chris Gosden, Archaeology and Colonialism: Cultural Contact from 5000 BC to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

38. The chief global polluter in this period was Roman Spain, but the local impact of Bactrian mining operations should be considered. See Kevin J. R. Rosman et al., “Lead from Carthaginian and Roman Spanish Mines Isotopically Identified in Greenland Ice Dated from 600 B.C. to 300 A.D.” Environmental Science and Technology 31.12 (1997): 3413–16; F. B. Pyatt and J. P. Grattan, “Some Consequences of Ancient Mining Activities on the Health of Ancient and Modern Human Populations,” Journal of Public Health Medicine 23.3 (2001): 235–36.

39. Pierre Leriche, “Bactria, Land of a Thousand Cities,” pp. 121–53 in J. Cribb and G. Herrmann, eds., After Alexander: Central Asia before Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 143.

40. Ibid., p. 138.

41. V. Sarianidi, The Golden Hoard of Bactria (New York: Abrams, 1985), p. 34. See also Karen Rubinson, “Tillya Tepe: Aspects of Gender and Cultural Identity,” pp. 51–64 in K. M. Linduff and K. S. Rubinson, eds., Are All Warriors Male? Gender Roles on the Ancient Eurasian Steppe (Plymouth: AltaMira Press, 2008).

42. This specimen was minted by Mithridates II.

43. Sarianidi, The Golden Hoard of Bactria, p. 47; R. C. Senior, Indo-Scythian Coins and History (London: Classical Numismatic Group, 2001), vol. I, pp. 105–6, and vol. II, pp. 145–46.

44. Sarianidi, The Golden Hoard of Bactria, p. 52.

45. Susan Stevens, “Charon's Obol and Other Coins in Ancient Funerary Practice,” Phoenix 45.3 (1991): 215–29.

46. Ibid., p. 226.

47. Ibid., p. 227.

48. Bertille Lyonnet, “Les nomades et la chute du royaume gréco-bactrien: Quelques nouveaux indices en provenance de l'Asie centrale—Vers l'identification des Tokhares–Yueh-Chi?” pp. 153–64 in Paul Bernard and Frantz Grenet, eds., Histoire et cultes de l'Asie centrale préislamique: Sources écrites et documents archéologiques (Paris: CNRS, 1991).

49. William Simpson, “Buddhist Remains in the Jalalabad Valley,” Indian Antiquary 8 (1879): 227–30.

50. F. R. Hoernle, “Gold Coins from Jalalabad,” Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 48 (1879): 122–38.

51. This behavior also pertains to Hellenistic Bactria: Holt, Thundering Zeus, p. 115. See also the “Phar” countermark on some issues of Demetrius I: Michael Mitchiner, Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage (London: Hawkins, 1975), vol. I, p. 64 (type 122).

52. Senior, Indo-Scythian Coins and History, vol. I, p. 106, and vol. II, p. 146 (no. 199.1D).

53. Ibid., no. 199.2D.

54. See, for instance, John Creighton, Coins and Power in Late Iron Age Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 27.

55. These mintages are variously identified as barbarian imitations, barbarous imitations, Scythian imitations, posthumous issues, or simply unofficial issues.

56. Senior, Indo-Scythian Coins and History, vol. II, pp. 217–19. An important pioneer in these studies was E. V. Zeymal, whose works include Drevniye moneti Tadzhikistana (Dushanbe: Akademii Nauk, 1983) and “Problèmes de circulation monétaire dans la Bactriane hellénistique,” pp. 273–79 in Jean-Claude Gardin, ed., L'archéologie de la Bactriane ancienne: Actes du colloque franco-soviétique (Paris: CNRS, 1985).

57. This issue is treated well by David Smith, “Will the Real Eukratides Please Stand Up?” Numismatics International Bulletin 40.4 (2005): 74–83, although he deems any coin with a corrupted legend to be ipso facto an imitation.

58. Osmund Bopearachchi, “The Euthydemus Imitations and the Date of Sogdian Independence,” Silk Road Art and Archaeology 2 (1991– 92): 1–21.

59. Ibid., p. 9.

60. Polybius, Histories 11.34, where the Bactrian king points out the dangerous presence of nomads to the north.

61. For what it is worth, one of these Euthydemus imitations was found in Ukraine: Mielczarek, Ancient Greek Coins, p. 178 (no. 125). See also Mielczarek, “Two Bronze Imitations of Heliocles's Coins in the Numismatic Collection of the Archaeological and Ethnographical Museum in Lodz,” Prace i Materialy Muzeum Archeologicznego i Etnograficznego w Lodzi 7 (1987): 5–9 (in Polish with English summary); Mielczarek, “Two Imitations of Eucratides' Obols from the Museum Collection in Lodz,” Wiadomosci Numizmatyczne 31 (1987): 48–51 (in English with Polish summary).

62. Grenet et al., “L'arsenal”; cf. Valerii Nikonorov and Serge Savchuk, “New Data on Ancient Bactrian Body-Armour (in Light of Finds from Kampyr Tepe),” Iran 30 (1992): 49–54.

63. Some imitations of Demetrius I also appear in the archaeological record, but at places like Kampyr Tepe issues and imitations in the name of Heliocles predominate: Edvard Rtveladze, “Découvertes en numismatique et épigraphie gréco-bactriennes à Kampyr-Tepe (Bactriane du nord),” Revue Numismatique 6 (1995): 23–24.

64. Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 204 (no. 33); cf. D. Smith, “Will the Real Eukratides Please Stand Up?” no. 15, and Triton auction 11 (Jan. 2008), no. 364.

65. F. Holt, “The Euthydemid Coinage of Bactria: Further Hoard Evidence from Ai Khanoum,” Revue Numismatique 23 (1981): no. 133.

66. Numismatic Fine Arts auction (Dec. 1989), no. 767.

67. For example, Classical Numismatic Group mail bid sale 75 (May 2007), no. 666. Note that this same practice appears on a lifetime issue of Plato, where the horses' legs seem unattached to the animals: Classical Numismatic Group mail bid sale 75 (May 2007), no. 651.

68. Heritage World auction 458 (Jan. 2008), no. 50045 (inscribed

69. Osmund Bopearachchi, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum: The Collection of the American Numismatic Society, part 9, Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Coins (New York: American Numismatic Society, 1998), nos. 666–81.

70. Widemann, Les successeurs d'Alexandre, p. 196.

71. For an altogether different purpose, some coins have been mutilated, probably in modern times, to obliterate the human form. An otherwise fine tetradrachm of Euthydemus II in the trays of the Hermitage Museum has the standing figure of Hercules on the reverse deliberately slashed numerous times from head to waist.

72. Joe Cribb, ed., Money from Cowrie Shells to Credit Cards (London: British Museum, 1986), p. 152; Cornelius Vermeule, “Numismatics in Antiquity,” Schweizerische Numismatische Rundschau 54 (1975): 5–32. See also Jutta-Annette Bruhn, Coins and Costume in Late Antiquity (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993), for examples of coins set into jewelry without damaging the coins.

73. E. Errington and J. Cribb, eds., The Crossroads of Asia: Transformation in Image and Symbol in the Art of Ancient Afghanistan and Pakistan (Cambridge: The Ancient India and Iran Trust, 1992), p. 146.

74. Percy Gardner, The Coins of the Greek and Scythic Kings of Bactria and India in the British Museum (1886; reprint, Chicago: Argonaut, 1966), p. 19 (no. 1); Robert Bracey, “Alexander's Lost Kingdom: From Diodotus to Strato III,” p. 145 (ill. 11.3) in Himanshu Ray and Daniel Potts, eds., Memory as History: The Legacy of Alexander in Asia (New Delhi: Aryan Books, 2007).

75. Diodotus: Holt, Thundering Zeus, p. 152 (series B, group 2, no. 4); Euthydemus I: Fitzwilliam Museum; Agathocles: private collection of Lloyd Taylor, with part of the iron pin still in place. The removal of the metal attachments usually causes further damage, as is obvious on these coins; see also F. Holt, “The Autobiography of a Coin,” Aramco World 48.5 (Sept.–Oct. 1997): 10–15, which takes up the case of a damaged gold stater of Eucratides now in the American Numismatic Society collection. It was once worn as a ring.

76. H. H. Wilson, Ariana Antiqua: A Descriptive Account of the Antiquities and Coins of Afghanistan (1841; reprint, Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1971), p. 267 and plate XXI, no. 7.

77. Bracey, “Alexander's Lost Kingdom,” p. 143 (ill. 11.1); Mitchiner, Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage, vol. II, p. 123; Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 244 (no. 185) and p. 218 (no. 10). Vermeule, “Numismatics in Antiquity,” lists as no. 5 an Agathocles tetradrachm commemorating Alexander that has two loops attached; this coin, however, is suspect: F. Holt, “The So-Called ‘Pedigree Coins’ of the Bactrian Greeks,” pp. 69–91 in W. Heckel and R. Sullivan, eds., Ancient Coins of the Graeco-Roman World: The Nickle Numismatic Papers (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1984), p. 74.

78. A curious, and perhaps spurious, example of a coin fixed in a suspension setting may be found illustrated in A. N. Oikonomides, “The Gold Coinage of the Indo-Greek King Eucratides I (171–155 B.C.),” North American Journal of Numismatics 7.6 (1968): 181.

79. Also an imitation Eucratides obol from Baluchistan, whence have come a high percentage of holed coins, was pierced at the 5:00 position: Edward J. Rapson, “Ancient Silver Coins from Baluchistan,” Numismatic Chronicle 4 (1904): 321.

80. Demetrius I bronzes: Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 167 (no. 14); Bopearachchi, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, no. 211. Euthydemus II cupronickels: O. Bopearachchi and A. ur Rahman, Pre-Kushana Coins in Pakistan (Karachi: Iftikhar Rasul, 1995), pp. 92–93 (no. 145); Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 170 (no. 10). Agathocles cupronickel: private collection (square hole cut cleanly). Heliocles I imitation(?) tetradrachm, considerably trimmed: Mitchiner, Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage, vol. II, p. 160 (type 108).

81. Robert Graves describes such a coin in his poem “The Clipped Stater.” He imagines Alexander the Great, living in obscurity as a frontier guard in China, accepting his pay, with some surprise, in the form of one of his own gold staters: “The coin is bored, to string with the country's bronze on a cord.”

82. Mitchiner, Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage, vol. I, p. 60 (type 108).

83. For example, Demetrius I obol: Mitchiner, Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage, vol. I, p. 58 (type 105); Eucratides obol: ibid., p. 94 (type 181); and a tetradrachm: Bopearachchi and ur Rahman, Pre-Kushana Coins, pp. 106–7 (no. 240).

84. Euthydemus II: Bopearachchi, Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indogrecques: Catalogue raisonné, p. 178 (no. 6); Eucratides I: Timothy Gantz and Frances Van Keuren, The Richard E. Paulson Collection of Ancient Coins (Athens, Ga.: Georgia Museum of Art, 1981), p. 7; Agathocles: Mitchiner, Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage, vol. I, p. 77 (type 137); Antialcidas: ibid., vol. II, p. 147 (type 269, with two holes).

85. Eucratides I bilingual square imitation: Bopearachchi, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, no. 573; Eucratides I obol: Mitchiner, Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian Coinage, vol. 1, p. 94 (type 180); Apollodotus II drachm: Bopearachchi, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, no. 1559.

86. The only holed coin excavated at Ai Khanoum, for example, was an Islamic piece dated 1918–19: Bernard, Fouilles d'Ai Khanoum, vol. IV, p. 80 (no. 224).

87. See, for example, Errington and Cribb, eds., The Crossroads of Asia, p. 147.

88. Rapin, Indian Art from Afghanistan, p. 124 (item O3).

89. Edvard Rtveladze, “La circulation monétaire au nord de l'Oxus a l'époque gréco-bactrienne,” Revue Numismatique 26 (1984): 61–76, esp. 66.

90. For example, an unusual Bactrian tetradrachm: Bopearachchi, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, no. 180 (Euthydemus I, listed as a Sogdian imitation); a Demetrius I tetradrachm: Bopearachchi, Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum, no. 192 (on which the cut was made into the edge); and a Eucratides tetradrachm at Samarkand: Natalia Smirnova, “Coins of Eucratides in Museum Collections,” East and West 42.1 (1992): 10 (coin 66).

91. See, for example, some tetradrachms of Demetrius I: Bopearachchi and ur Rahman, Pre-Kushana Coins, pp. 90–91 (no. 124) and 208–9 (no. 1013).

92. See O. Bopearachchi, “A Joy and a Curse,” pp. 33–73 in F. Holt and O. Bopearachchi, eds., The Alexander Medallion: Exploring the Origins of a Unique Artefact (Lacapelle-Mirival: Imago Lattara, 2011), pp. 42–47.

93. Two die-linked staters, if they are genuine, provide exceptions that have deep wedge-shaped cuts across the face of the king: Ponterio mail bid auction 140 (Nov. 2006), no. 7, and Triton 8 auction (Jan. 2005) no. 615b.

94. Osmund Bopearachchi, “L'apport des surfrappes à la reconstruction de l'histoire des Indo-Grecs,” Revue Numismatique (2008): 246 and 255.

95. Holt, Thundering Zeus, pp. 156 and 160. The gaps in the cut coins show that the gold there was not all simply mashed aside, but some metal had to be removed.

96. O. Bopearachchi and Klaus Grigo, “Thundering Zeus Revisited,” Oriental Numismatic Society Newsletter 169 (autumn 2001): 22–24.

97. On the problems (and profits) of plated coins, see F. Reiff et al., “Investigation of Contemporary Gilded Forgeries of Ancient Coins,” Fresenius' Journal of Analytical Chemistry 171.8 (2001): 1146–53.

98. The process of cutting a coin in this rather precise way required sharp (and perhaps heated) tools and some muscle. The pressure that needed to be applied to the obverse can be gauged by the frequent mashing of the reverse type. See, e.g., Classical Numismatic Group auction 66 (May 2004), no. 939.

99. Bopearachchi, “A Joy and a Curse,” pp. 44–47.

100. Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy, pp. 218–19.

101. For one possible exception, see Holt, Thundering Zeus, pp. 121–23.

102. Xinru Liu, “Hellenistic Residue in Central Asia under Islamic Regimes,” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in History and Archaeology 1.2 (2004): 79–86.

103. Stanley Burstein, “New Light on the Fate of Greek in Ancient Central and South Asia,” Ancient West and East 9 (2010): 181–92.

104. Michael Cosmopoulos, “The Greek Tradition in India and the Formation of Gandharan Sculpture: Coinage and Classical Iconography,” Ancient World 36 (2005): 44–53.