Greco-Bactrian Kingdom

The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom was a Hellenistic state ruled by Greek kings in Bactria, the fertile country on either side of the upper Oxus (Amu Darya) river in what is now northern Afghanistan and its neighbours. It broke away from the Seleucid Empire in the mid-third century BCE, grew rich enough for an ancient writer to call it the realm "of a thousand cities", and pushed into India before nomadic invaders overran it around 120 BCE. Shown on our maps as Bactria, it carried Greek language and art deep into Central and South Asia.

Greeks lived in Bactria well before the Macedonian conquest, some of them communities deported there by the Persian kings Darius I and Xerxes I. Alexander the Great took the region in the late 320s BCE during his campaigns, founding cities and planting garrisons of Greek and Macedonian veterans. After his death Bactria passed to Seleucus I and became a province of the Seleucid Empire.

Diodotus, the Seleucid governor, made himself king. The ancient accounts conflict, and modern historians place his break either around 255 BCE or in the mid-240s, the latter tying it to the Seleucid crisis of the Third Syrian War. At about the same time the rise of the Parthian Empire cut Bactria off by land from the Mediterranean Greek world. Diodotus's son, Diodotus II, made an alliance with the Parthian ruler Arsaces.

Around 230–220 BCE Euthydemus, a Greek from Magnesia according to Polybius, overthrew the Diodotid line. The Seleucid king Antiochus III marched east around 210 BCE, defeated him in battle on the Arius river and besieged Bactra for three years, but finally recognised him as king and promised a daughter to his son Demetrius. Under Demetrius the Bactrian Greeks crossed into north-western India between about 190 and 180 BCE, a few years after the Maurya Empire had fallen. This venture created the separate Indo-Greek kingdoms, which lasted until around 10 CE.

Around 171 or 170 BCE Eucratides seized power in a coup and founded his own dynasty. He fought off a challenge from an Indian Greek king, campaigned in north-western India and minted the largest gold coin of the Hellenistic world. Yet his reign also brought losses: the Parthian king Mithridates I took Bactria's western provinces, and around 145 BCE Eucratides was murdered by his own son on his way back from India. In the same period the city of Ai-Khanoum fell, apparently to Saka nomads, and was largely abandoned.

Pushed west by the Xiongnu and then the Wusun, the Yuezhi reached the Oxus and drove Saka peoples before them. When the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian visited around 126 BCE he found Bactria, which he called Daxia, without a great ruler, its cities governed by petty chiefs under Yuezhi sway, though its markets were busy. Around 120 BCE the Yuezhi moved south into Bactria, and King Heliocles withdrew to the Kabul valley, making him the last Greek king in Bactria.

Excavations at Ai-Khanoum revealed a theatre, a gymnasium, Corinthian columns and an inscription of Delphic maxims. Greco-Bactrian coins are prized for their lifelike royal portraits, and Agathocles issued some of the earliest known coin images of Indian deities. The Yuezhi, who later founded the Kushan Empire, took over the Greek alphabet, which was used to write the Bactrian language until the ninth century CE, and Greek art helped shape the Greco-Buddhist style of Gandhara.

Our 200 BCE map shows the kingdom as Bactria, alongside the Seleucid Kingdom, Parthia, the Maurya Empire, the Yuezhi and the Scythian nomads of the steppe.