Introduction - The Last Anabasis
Introduction - The People of the Heavenly Horses
This is the story of many peoples, but it begins with the Tokhari, one of many Indo-European speaking nomadic groups living on what civilized, settled peoples viewed as the periphery of their great civilizations. Specifically, it begins with a single branch of the numerous Tokhari people - one who the Chinese sources refer to as the Yuezhi and the Greeks called the Iatioi - referring to a particular royal clique or tribal affiliation within the broader group. In the third century BCE they were known to the Chinese to be suppliers of jade and exquisite horses from beyond the Tienshan mountains. Calling themselves the Ywati, they thrived on the commerce of the still embryonic silk road, taking on a role as middlemen between the peoples of the east and the west.
Understanding who the Ywati were is a difficult matter, and requires some assumptions. Although it is difficult to assess with any certainty, it can be said with some confidence that not all Tokhari were Ywati, and not all Ywati were Tokhari. Indeed, many who were part of the Ywati confederation were not Tokhari at all, but were either Qiang, Saka, or of even more remote ethnic origin. However, for all their differences, the Ywati shared a common language and culture, and most importantly, a common history. They represented a royal confederation of the type later exemplified by the Xiongnu and the Xianbei.
But pastoral nomadism is a tenuous existence at the best of times. A single famine, a single drought or sickness among livestock can drive a band to the brink of oblivion. Moreover, there are currents - ebbs and flows of people and tribes. In the second century, a different royal clique, the Xiongnu, were on the ascent and the Ywati were on a precipitous decline. In 178 BCE, Chanyu Modu of the Xiongnu scored a major victory over the Ywati. Recognizing the precariousness of their situation, a few years later the Ywati struck back against the Asiani [Wusun], a confederate of the Xiongnu. The Asiani were fellow Tokhari, but such ethnic identifications mattered little to the Ywati, who crushed them in battle, killed their Yavaghu [King], and made off with a great quantity of livestock.
The son of the slain King fled to the Xiongnu and sought shelter with the current Chanyu, a figure known to history only through Chinese records as Liansheng. Liansheng promised assistance, and adopted the surviving Asiani heir as his own son, gaining a powerful ally among the Asiani, who would come to serve as the western enforcers of Xiongnu rule. The two great rulers bided their time, but ten years later, in 164 BCE, they inflicted a disastrous defeat upon the Ywati, which sent what remained of the Ywati into a headlong flight from their home, first to Gansu, then into the Tarim Basin. There they encountered numerous other peoples, many of whom themselves were in flight - Saka and Tokhari on their own migratory paths into exile.
In the fashion of steppe peoples, these defeats did not weaken their martial spirit, but if anything ensured that further aggression would follow. Continued feuding in Gansu rendered the territory unsafe for the Ywati and their remaining herds, and they fled once more. They suffered blows of attrition near constantly. Moving between the Tarim Basin and the Ili Valley, the Ywati feuded for a time with the Asiani, and lost many of their people in intercommunal violence and to assimilation among the Tokhari living there, such as Arsi and the Kucine. Finally, they were pushed out of the Tarim and consigned to the Ili. Many were left behind, and these people settled around the oases of the Tarim and resumed their former lives as traders, finding comfort and community among those who, even if strangers, spoke familiar languages and had familiar customs.
But after some time, the Asiani, now responsible for the western territory of the Xiongnu, launched further attacks against the Ywati in 132. What ensued was a disastrous series of engagements which sent what remained of the Ywati into headlong flight. However calamitous these attacks might have been for the Ywati, this was perhaps to their benefit. Since the death of their King, Wasokalywe in battle against the Xiongnu in 164 BCE, the Ywati had been notionally led by his posthumous son Asanashka. For most of their time as refugees, the Chanyu of the Ywati had been nothing more than a young child and his mother Katsetsya (who ruled in his stead) were surrounded by a steadily shrinking column of retainers, herdsmen, women, and children. Under constant attack from the Asiani, much of this baggage was stripped away. The child would grow into adulthood surrounded by the warlike survivors of constant catastrophes. This suffering made him crafty and wary, but also taught him much of tactics, warfare, and hardship, traits which would be invaluable in his later career. Much as the child was molded by his circumstances, so too did constant warfare create a battle hardened corps of warriors, less encumbered by livestock and families than their counterparts.
The people that passed into Ferghana in the winter of 132 BCE were nothing more or less than an army. In Ferghana, they faced little resistance, and so moved south across the Pamirs, establishing their dominance as they progressed. They were not alone in their exodus either. The rise of the Xiongnu had stirred up the movement of countless peoples. Ten years previously, hundreds of thousands of Saka had followed the same path southwards that the Tokhari now followed. They moved into a world already well peopled and heavily settled, a world of irrigation canals and stone cities, a world of glittering wealth and stamped silver coins, a world ill-prepared for their military prowess, a world that had not been hardened by decades of lean times on the run.
Not long after their arrival in Bactria, an embassy from now-distant Emperor Wu of Han sought out Asanashka and what remained of the Ywati. The embassy was shocked by how few in number they were, but was nevertheless impressed by the warlike qualities of this surviving Tokhari band. In short, the embassy said that the Han Emperor sought to end the policies of appeasement practiced by his predecessors, and weaken the Xiongnu by developing a coalition of their enemies to make war upon them. The embassy offered to support Asanashka if he wished to retake his ancestral vengeance and drive out the Xiongnu. But by now, the Tokhari were wolves among sheep, moving with impunity through the settled lands they now claimed to rule. The Saka, though far more numerous, yielded to their unexpected ferocity. Besides, only the eldest of the Ywati remembered a time when they were supreme over the whole eastern steppe, and Asanashka certainly did not.
Small wonder that Asanashka declined the offer.
The Last Anabasis
Almost a century before our story starts, in 208 BCE, Antiochus III marched inland on a great anabasis to restore Seleucid royal authority in Central Asia. His primary foe was the Thessalian-born King of Bactria, Euthydemus I, and it was the matter of Bactrian Kingship that was in dispute. Antiochus III saw an independent Bactria, claiming royal prerogatives, as a threat to his own legitimacy and power. Further, he sought to reconquer the eastern satrapies in total, restoring the Seleucid boundaries to their previous extent under his illustrious ancestors. This type of regenerative campaign was part and parcel of the Seleucid imperial ideology. So he marched East, crushing the Bactrian cavalry near the River Arius, and beginning a two-year long siege of Bactra itself.
As the siege wore on and attrition began to take its toll, the two leaders met and began negotiations. Euthydemus I, for his part, attempted to win Kingship by argument where arms had so far not prevailed: He sent an envoy Teleas and his son Demetrius, who denied that Euthydemus I was a rebel against Antiochus III - had not Euthydemus I “eliminated the descendants of rebels” by defeating Diodotus’ ancestors? But Teleas had a more persuasive argument as well: Euthydemus was a critical bulwark against barbarism. Through his embassy, Euthydemus I argued that neither he nor Antiochus III would be safe if the Syrian King did not accept his royal authority. There were great numbers of nomads nearby, just across the Jaxartes. It was Bactria who had the power to hold them at bay. If the two Kings wasted their strength warring against each other, those floodgates would break and a horde of nomads would wash over the civilized lands of the Greeks.
This was, some historians have suggested, more of blackmail than anything else. Euthydemus I was defining himself as a defender of civilization, but moreover he was hinting that he had the power to loose the nomads in a sort of mutually assured destruction. If he couldn’t have his autonomy, he had the power to ensure Central Asia was lost forever. The threat posed by the barbarians was apocalyptic in scope. They were already at the gates, and Euthydemus I and Antiochus III could not imagine the world if they were able to pass in numbers beyond the defensive fortifications their ancestors had built.
Here we can see something unique in the character of these Greek settlers in Central Asia. For the Achaemenids there had been no differentiation between nomadic and settled subjects of their territories. Relations between settled peoples and nomads could be complex and fraught, but were mediated through gift-giving and routine exchanges of trade goods and hostages. But for the Bactrian and Syrian Kingdoms, the relationship was more straightforward. The King, whether Bactrian or Syrian, was a defender of civilization, a custodian of a defined territorial expanse. When nomads transgressed over that territory it did not become theirs. Certainly the Dahae and Pahlava, when they invaded Seleucid territory, were not, and indeed could not, within the bounds of Seleucid imperial ideology, be treated as an equal power or an allied partner.
And so Antiochus III withdrew, accepting a new delimitation of Seleucid authority and power. Before he left, he agreed to marry his daughter to Demetrius. Like Seleucus I before him, who withdrew from the Indus in exchange for war elephants, Antiochus III ceded territory and accepted the fact that Bactria was a permanent “ally.” This ultimately was the story of his reign: territorial delimitations and retractions. The Great King retreated first in the East and then later, after the crushing defeat at Magnesia in 189 BCE, accepted the permanent surrender of the Seleucid Empire’s territorial ambitions in Cistauric Asia Minor in 188 BCE. His second anabasis would be a pale shadow of his first. Antiochus III died fighting in Elymais a year later. The dynasts who followed him were unable to right the ship of state, although they made great efforts. Antiochus IV made some progress restoring royal authority in Armenia and the Persian Gulf before his own untimely death to disease in 164 BCE.
From there, the history of the Seleucid Dynasty would be marked by vicious dynastic disputes and corrosive territorial losses. The system of “renewal by campaign” practiced by the Syrian Kings - the routine wars in Ionia or the Upper Satrapies - broke down and external powers were increasingly able to dictate who would become King. In this new vacuum of royal authority, Greek colonies became prizes to be wooed and trophies to be acquired for the rising powers of a new world order. In Babylonia, Seleucid royal authority nearly vanished, leaving a vacuum to be filled by a mixture of imperial officials, the rising Arsacids, and newly autonomous Elamite and Characenian Kings.
In 141 BCE, the Arsacid King Mithridates I conquered Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, but even still, any sense of renewed political order still did not emerge for a generation at least, during the reign of Mithridates II in the 120s BCE. During this time, the Babylonian and Seleucian mobs appear to have had just as much authority as local priests and officials to dispense justice, and at least the same degree of legitimacy. Apart from several abortive attempts to restore Seleucid authority in 138 and 130 BCE, which were seen off by Phraates II, there were no meaningful threats from the West, and by the death of Antiochus VII Sidetes in 129 BCE, the Syrian Kingdom was on its last legs. It had no resources to draw from. It had been shorn of its major sources of manpower and its most profitable colonies. The rump state in Syria proper was at the mercy of its neighbors, and across the near east, the Arsacids had effectively replaced them, and their grand designs stretched ever further Westward.
Once the Syrian Kings lost their capacity to wage their wars of renewal and embark on their anabases in 164 BCE, the political geography of Central Asia changed. Overnight, Greco-Bactria and indeed all Greek settlement in the East was islanded permanently. While practically speaking, trade, movement, and communications were not severed, for the first time since the death of Alexander the Great, there was no longer a contiguous Greek political world stretching from Epirus to the Indus.
Contemporaneously with the collapse of Seleucid authority in the East, Bactria experienced a political, economic, and artistic flowering of dramatic proportions. Historically, Bactria had been prosperous - the “land of a thousand cities” overflowing with trade goods and silver coins. It had a robust irrigation network and the Greek administrators were generally able to ensure prosperity flowed into both their own hands and the hands of local potentates as well - ensuring the solidarity of their regime, a solidarity attested by the resilience of Bactria in the face of Antiochus III’s invasion.
However, Bactria had always been bounded rather tightly in a geographic sense - perhaps owing to the fact that its political power was maintained by the Greek settler elite over the mass of Iranian speaking peoples, and that it had limited capacity to dominate the steppe. Bactria’s boundaries were thus defensible rivers to the North, the Tarim Basin (into which it lacked the capacity to penetrate) and the Northern Hindu Kush. After the ascension of Demetrius I (circa 200 BCE) the son of Euthydemus I (which may have been contemporaneous with the latter’s own rule), these boundaries would expand dramatically. Arachosia and Drangiana were secured following the shocking collapse of the Seleucid regime in the East. His position secure, Demetrius I launched an invasion across the Hindu Kush into India, where the Mauryan Empire was on its last legs.
Demetrius I remains enigmatic. Certainly, he had major military successes in India, which prompted him to shift the center of his power to India, where he established for a time a strong, centralized, and bureaucratic state. To pay his armies, he issued numerous silver coins with fine artistic detail, depicting his bust on the obverse, crowned with an elephant skull. However, much like Alexander the Great, whose legacy he conspicuously copied, his achievements would not long outlive his death. His younger brother (or perhaps an unrelated ruler), Antimachus, who took power in Bactria after his death was overthrown by Eucratides I, an ambitious court official, in 171 BCE, the same year that Mithridates I ascended the Arsacid throne.
Eucratides I would continue to build on Demetrius’ legacy, campaigning in India off and on for the next thirty years. He was not, however, able to maintain political autonomy. Like many of the post-Seleucid dynasts, he was a feudatory of the Dahae, which limited where he could turn his military attentions. Accordingly, the bulk of his military campaigns consisted of wars against other Greek warlords in India, successful generals and members of the Euthydemid extended family who had managed to develop power bases of their own.
Thus, political control over Bactria and India as a united whole was permanently undone. The Greeks in India were relatively few in numbers, and responsible for maintaining sweeping conquests with miniscule forces. Their rulers increasingly turned to co-rulers and viceroys to maintain royal authority. They began to co-opt local iconography and local elites in service of this mission. Even in Demetrius I’s time, such fracturing had begun. By Demetrius I’s death, Arachosia, Bactria, and India were administered as separate kingdoms.
This fracturing created the perfect vacuum for an unscrupulous and ambitious figure such as Eucratides to climb to the top. A strong monarch might have been able to unify Demetrius I’s state for a time, but legitimacy was solely based on military skill, especially after Eucratides I’s coup laid bare the reality that dynastic succession was an illusion. Demetrius I’s son and namesake, Demetrius II, would later fight Eucratides I and in turn be defeated, and with that defeat the Euthydemid dynasty was wiped out, followed by a succession of nondynastic rulers.
The diversion of military resources towards India and the state of perpetual low-level civil war between rival claimants seeking “spear-won” land led in part to a weakening of control over the northern frontier. Pressed by the Wusun and the Tocharians, and driven from their ancestral lands in no small part by the rise of the Xiongnu, the Saka in their turn pressed increasingly hard on the borders of Bactria, moving across an increasingly porous frontier with ever greater impunity. As Eucratides I struggled with this new threat, he conceded, at least temporarily, control of India to one the greatest of the Indo-Greek Kings - the Buddhist Menander I Soter, who took power in 155 BCE and conquered vast swathes of India, pushing aside the relatively feeble Shunga successor state and taking Pataliputra, the heart of the Maurya dynasty by 149 BCE. Menander would go on to fight Eucratides as well, but even in victory he was not able to reunify the state.
Finally, an old man, he passed away in 130 BCE, a patron of Buddhism beloved by his soldiers and the Indian people alike for his victories over the Shunga. At his death in camp, his wife Agathocleia took power and ruled as a regent for his son Strato, alongside her brother who ruled as Strato Epiphanes Soter. The establishment of a regency at this critical juncture was perhaps the final straw for Greek ambitions in India. What the Kingdom of India needed was an able leader, someone who could build upon the achievements of Menander as Demetrius had built upon the accomplishments of Euthydemus and Alexander had built upon the accomplishments of Phillip. Instead, it had a boy King, whose reign would be wracked by rebellions by his fellow Greeks (since military achievement was the only form of legitimacy) and assaults by a resurgent Shunga dynasty (since the Greeks were too few in number to control the vast territory they had seized).
The north would be of no assistance. By 130 BCE, the Saka were running rampant through Bactria effectively uncontested. The chaotic ascension and decline of kings continued unabated. Although he had lived for a long time and fought tirelessly to maintain his rule for decades, Eucratides I was murdered by his sons, Eucratides II and Heliocles I in 145 BCE. This led to civil war and further instability, and provided an opportunity for the Saka (and various other groups identified by the Greeks as the Asiani, Pasiani, and Tocharians) to pour into Bactria en masse. The arrival of the Saka was initially quite disruptive. Certainly many Hellenistic sites, such as Alexandria-on-the-Oxus, were sacked. It was evident that the Greeks, their military strength drained by constant foreign conquests in India, were unable to resist or wage war against the Saka. However, what emerged after this initial period of apocalyptic anarchy was a system of parallel administration. Greek colonies and settled life more generally were permitted to continue as tributaries to the Saka.
Although Greek monarchs would continue wearing diadems for some time, minting coins and issuing decrees, the real power behind their thrones were the dreaded Saka. The Greek monarchs were nothing more than local rulers and puppets, intended to provide a veneer of legitimacy and nothing more. The Saka found this system to be highly advantageous, because it rid them of the difficulty of having to properly rule the settled peoples they conquered. The parallel administrative model they established maintained law and justice. It guaranteed a sense of continuity and ordinary life that prevented the settled agricultural peoples from feeling existentially threatened, even as their wealth was appropriated. Their walled cities and temples were largely, after the initial wave of destructive violence, unmolested, or at least less molested.
When the Saka eventually pushed further, into the declining Indo-Greek warlord states, they would preserve this same model of conquest. In this new model of “governance,” the barriers between the Greeks and the various settled peoples they ruled were swept away. Where once the Greeks had maintained something of a cultural barrier between ruler and ruled, they were now no different than the Bactrians - a conquered people. Although mutual assimilation was evident long before this time, the destruction of Greek royal institutions rapidly increased this trend. The merger of Iranian, Indian, and Hellenistic styles began in earnest with the arrival of the Saka.
Euthydemus I’s blackmail threat had come to pass. The “civilized world” that he and Antiochus III had promised to guarantee was overrun. Demetrius I’s legacy as a conqueror would be limited by the ultimate failure of his imperial model, and indeed the failure of the Hellenistic imperial model as a whole. The ideology of the state was one of spear-won territory and intensely personal. Antiochus III and Demetrius I, however different the trajectory of their lives, both ruled based upon a clique of aristocratic followers whose loyalty was based on the military prowess of their master. All the rest of the trappings of their regimes - the religious symbolism, the coins marked with the royal visage and the symbols of goddesses and gods, the conspicuous emulation of Alexander the Great, were assertions of royal power, but they were not its basis.
This fragile system persisted and perpetuated itself when it was embodied in the person of a strong ruler. And furthermore, it was remarkably adept at producing such figures, generating a warlike culture that prided itself on creating warlike men who could run it. But the system broke down into anarchy and dissolution with remarkable swiftness in the absence of such a figure.
But as disruptive as the arrival of the Saka was, their preeminence in Bactria was short lived. Within a generation, the Tokhari had crossed over the Pamir Mountains and arrived in Bactria. Hardened by years of fighting and travel, chased from their ancestral homelands just as the Saka had been, the Tokhari would in short order attain preeminence over the Saka and inaugurate a new era of Central Asian history.
It is at the dawn of this new era that our story begins in earnest.
This is the story of many peoples, but it begins with the Tokhari, one of many Indo-European speaking nomadic groups living on what civilized, settled peoples viewed as the periphery of their great civilizations. Specifically, it begins with a single branch of the numerous Tokhari people - one who the Chinese sources refer to as the Yuezhi and the Greeks called the Iatioi - referring to a particular royal clique or tribal affiliation within the broader group. In the third century BCE they were known to the Chinese to be suppliers of jade and exquisite horses from beyond the Tienshan mountains. Calling themselves the Ywati, they thrived on the commerce of the still embryonic silk road, taking on a role as middlemen between the peoples of the east and the west.
Understanding who the Ywati were is a difficult matter, and requires some assumptions. Although it is difficult to assess with any certainty, it can be said with some confidence that not all Tokhari were Ywati, and not all Ywati were Tokhari. Indeed, many who were part of the Ywati confederation were not Tokhari at all, but were either Qiang, Saka, or of even more remote ethnic origin. However, for all their differences, the Ywati shared a common language and culture, and most importantly, a common history. They represented a royal confederation of the type later exemplified by the Xiongnu and the Xianbei.
But pastoral nomadism is a tenuous existence at the best of times. A single famine, a single drought or sickness among livestock can drive a band to the brink of oblivion. Moreover, there are currents - ebbs and flows of people and tribes. In the second century, a different royal clique, the Xiongnu, were on the ascent and the Ywati were on a precipitous decline. In 178 BCE, Chanyu Modu of the Xiongnu scored a major victory over the Ywati. Recognizing the precariousness of their situation, a few years later the Ywati struck back against the Asiani [Wusun], a confederate of the Xiongnu. The Asiani were fellow Tokhari, but such ethnic identifications mattered little to the Ywati, who crushed them in battle, killed their Yavaghu [King], and made off with a great quantity of livestock.
The son of the slain King fled to the Xiongnu and sought shelter with the current Chanyu, a figure known to history only through Chinese records as Liansheng. Liansheng promised assistance, and adopted the surviving Asiani heir as his own son, gaining a powerful ally among the Asiani, who would come to serve as the western enforcers of Xiongnu rule. The two great rulers bided their time, but ten years later, in 164 BCE, they inflicted a disastrous defeat upon the Ywati, which sent what remained of the Ywati into a headlong flight from their home, first to Gansu, then into the Tarim Basin. There they encountered numerous other peoples, many of whom themselves were in flight - Saka and Tokhari on their own migratory paths into exile.
In the fashion of steppe peoples, these defeats did not weaken their martial spirit, but if anything ensured that further aggression would follow. Continued feuding in Gansu rendered the territory unsafe for the Ywati and their remaining herds, and they fled once more. They suffered blows of attrition near constantly. Moving between the Tarim Basin and the Ili Valley, the Ywati feuded for a time with the Asiani, and lost many of their people in intercommunal violence and to assimilation among the Tokhari living there, such as Arsi and the Kucine. Finally, they were pushed out of the Tarim and consigned to the Ili. Many were left behind, and these people settled around the oases of the Tarim and resumed their former lives as traders, finding comfort and community among those who, even if strangers, spoke familiar languages and had familiar customs.
But after some time, the Asiani, now responsible for the western territory of the Xiongnu, launched further attacks against the Ywati in 132. What ensued was a disastrous series of engagements which sent what remained of the Ywati into headlong flight. However calamitous these attacks might have been for the Ywati, this was perhaps to their benefit. Since the death of their King, Wasokalywe in battle against the Xiongnu in 164 BCE, the Ywati had been notionally led by his posthumous son Asanashka. For most of their time as refugees, the Chanyu of the Ywati had been nothing more than a young child and his mother Katsetsya (who ruled in his stead) were surrounded by a steadily shrinking column of retainers, herdsmen, women, and children. Under constant attack from the Asiani, much of this baggage was stripped away. The child would grow into adulthood surrounded by the warlike survivors of constant catastrophes. This suffering made him crafty and wary, but also taught him much of tactics, warfare, and hardship, traits which would be invaluable in his later career. Much as the child was molded by his circumstances, so too did constant warfare create a battle hardened corps of warriors, less encumbered by livestock and families than their counterparts.
The people that passed into Ferghana in the winter of 132 BCE were nothing more or less than an army. In Ferghana, they faced little resistance, and so moved south across the Pamirs, establishing their dominance as they progressed. They were not alone in their exodus either. The rise of the Xiongnu had stirred up the movement of countless peoples. Ten years previously, hundreds of thousands of Saka had followed the same path southwards that the Tokhari now followed. They moved into a world already well peopled and heavily settled, a world of irrigation canals and stone cities, a world of glittering wealth and stamped silver coins, a world ill-prepared for their military prowess, a world that had not been hardened by decades of lean times on the run.
Not long after their arrival in Bactria, an embassy from now-distant Emperor Wu of Han sought out Asanashka and what remained of the Ywati. The embassy was shocked by how few in number they were, but was nevertheless impressed by the warlike qualities of this surviving Tokhari band. In short, the embassy said that the Han Emperor sought to end the policies of appeasement practiced by his predecessors, and weaken the Xiongnu by developing a coalition of their enemies to make war upon them. The embassy offered to support Asanashka if he wished to retake his ancestral vengeance and drive out the Xiongnu. But by now, the Tokhari were wolves among sheep, moving with impunity through the settled lands they now claimed to rule. The Saka, though far more numerous, yielded to their unexpected ferocity. Besides, only the eldest of the Ywati remembered a time when they were supreme over the whole eastern steppe, and Asanashka certainly did not.
Small wonder that Asanashka declined the offer.
The Last Anabasis
Almost a century before our story starts, in 208 BCE, Antiochus III marched inland on a great anabasis to restore Seleucid royal authority in Central Asia. His primary foe was the Thessalian-born King of Bactria, Euthydemus I, and it was the matter of Bactrian Kingship that was in dispute. Antiochus III saw an independent Bactria, claiming royal prerogatives, as a threat to his own legitimacy and power. Further, he sought to reconquer the eastern satrapies in total, restoring the Seleucid boundaries to their previous extent under his illustrious ancestors. This type of regenerative campaign was part and parcel of the Seleucid imperial ideology. So he marched East, crushing the Bactrian cavalry near the River Arius, and beginning a two-year long siege of Bactra itself.
As the siege wore on and attrition began to take its toll, the two leaders met and began negotiations. Euthydemus I, for his part, attempted to win Kingship by argument where arms had so far not prevailed: He sent an envoy Teleas and his son Demetrius, who denied that Euthydemus I was a rebel against Antiochus III - had not Euthydemus I “eliminated the descendants of rebels” by defeating Diodotus’ ancestors? But Teleas had a more persuasive argument as well: Euthydemus was a critical bulwark against barbarism. Through his embassy, Euthydemus I argued that neither he nor Antiochus III would be safe if the Syrian King did not accept his royal authority. There were great numbers of nomads nearby, just across the Jaxartes. It was Bactria who had the power to hold them at bay. If the two Kings wasted their strength warring against each other, those floodgates would break and a horde of nomads would wash over the civilized lands of the Greeks.
This was, some historians have suggested, more of blackmail than anything else. Euthydemus I was defining himself as a defender of civilization, but moreover he was hinting that he had the power to loose the nomads in a sort of mutually assured destruction. If he couldn’t have his autonomy, he had the power to ensure Central Asia was lost forever. The threat posed by the barbarians was apocalyptic in scope. They were already at the gates, and Euthydemus I and Antiochus III could not imagine the world if they were able to pass in numbers beyond the defensive fortifications their ancestors had built.
Here we can see something unique in the character of these Greek settlers in Central Asia. For the Achaemenids there had been no differentiation between nomadic and settled subjects of their territories. Relations between settled peoples and nomads could be complex and fraught, but were mediated through gift-giving and routine exchanges of trade goods and hostages. But for the Bactrian and Syrian Kingdoms, the relationship was more straightforward. The King, whether Bactrian or Syrian, was a defender of civilization, a custodian of a defined territorial expanse. When nomads transgressed over that territory it did not become theirs. Certainly the Dahae and Pahlava, when they invaded Seleucid territory, were not, and indeed could not, within the bounds of Seleucid imperial ideology, be treated as an equal power or an allied partner.
And so Antiochus III withdrew, accepting a new delimitation of Seleucid authority and power. Before he left, he agreed to marry his daughter to Demetrius. Like Seleucus I before him, who withdrew from the Indus in exchange for war elephants, Antiochus III ceded territory and accepted the fact that Bactria was a permanent “ally.” This ultimately was the story of his reign: territorial delimitations and retractions. The Great King retreated first in the East and then later, after the crushing defeat at Magnesia in 189 BCE, accepted the permanent surrender of the Seleucid Empire’s territorial ambitions in Cistauric Asia Minor in 188 BCE. His second anabasis would be a pale shadow of his first. Antiochus III died fighting in Elymais a year later. The dynasts who followed him were unable to right the ship of state, although they made great efforts. Antiochus IV made some progress restoring royal authority in Armenia and the Persian Gulf before his own untimely death to disease in 164 BCE.
From there, the history of the Seleucid Dynasty would be marked by vicious dynastic disputes and corrosive territorial losses. The system of “renewal by campaign” practiced by the Syrian Kings - the routine wars in Ionia or the Upper Satrapies - broke down and external powers were increasingly able to dictate who would become King. In this new vacuum of royal authority, Greek colonies became prizes to be wooed and trophies to be acquired for the rising powers of a new world order. In Babylonia, Seleucid royal authority nearly vanished, leaving a vacuum to be filled by a mixture of imperial officials, the rising Arsacids, and newly autonomous Elamite and Characenian Kings.
In 141 BCE, the Arsacid King Mithridates I conquered Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, but even still, any sense of renewed political order still did not emerge for a generation at least, during the reign of Mithridates II in the 120s BCE. During this time, the Babylonian and Seleucian mobs appear to have had just as much authority as local priests and officials to dispense justice, and at least the same degree of legitimacy. Apart from several abortive attempts to restore Seleucid authority in 138 and 130 BCE, which were seen off by Phraates II, there were no meaningful threats from the West, and by the death of Antiochus VII Sidetes in 129 BCE, the Syrian Kingdom was on its last legs. It had no resources to draw from. It had been shorn of its major sources of manpower and its most profitable colonies. The rump state in Syria proper was at the mercy of its neighbors, and across the near east, the Arsacids had effectively replaced them, and their grand designs stretched ever further Westward.
Once the Syrian Kings lost their capacity to wage their wars of renewal and embark on their anabases in 164 BCE, the political geography of Central Asia changed. Overnight, Greco-Bactria and indeed all Greek settlement in the East was islanded permanently. While practically speaking, trade, movement, and communications were not severed, for the first time since the death of Alexander the Great, there was no longer a contiguous Greek political world stretching from Epirus to the Indus.
Contemporaneously with the collapse of Seleucid authority in the East, Bactria experienced a political, economic, and artistic flowering of dramatic proportions. Historically, Bactria had been prosperous - the “land of a thousand cities” overflowing with trade goods and silver coins. It had a robust irrigation network and the Greek administrators were generally able to ensure prosperity flowed into both their own hands and the hands of local potentates as well - ensuring the solidarity of their regime, a solidarity attested by the resilience of Bactria in the face of Antiochus III’s invasion.
However, Bactria had always been bounded rather tightly in a geographic sense - perhaps owing to the fact that its political power was maintained by the Greek settler elite over the mass of Iranian speaking peoples, and that it had limited capacity to dominate the steppe. Bactria’s boundaries were thus defensible rivers to the North, the Tarim Basin (into which it lacked the capacity to penetrate) and the Northern Hindu Kush. After the ascension of Demetrius I (circa 200 BCE) the son of Euthydemus I (which may have been contemporaneous with the latter’s own rule), these boundaries would expand dramatically. Arachosia and Drangiana were secured following the shocking collapse of the Seleucid regime in the East. His position secure, Demetrius I launched an invasion across the Hindu Kush into India, where the Mauryan Empire was on its last legs.
Demetrius I remains enigmatic. Certainly, he had major military successes in India, which prompted him to shift the center of his power to India, where he established for a time a strong, centralized, and bureaucratic state. To pay his armies, he issued numerous silver coins with fine artistic detail, depicting his bust on the obverse, crowned with an elephant skull. However, much like Alexander the Great, whose legacy he conspicuously copied, his achievements would not long outlive his death. His younger brother (or perhaps an unrelated ruler), Antimachus, who took power in Bactria after his death was overthrown by Eucratides I, an ambitious court official, in 171 BCE, the same year that Mithridates I ascended the Arsacid throne.
Eucratides I would continue to build on Demetrius’ legacy, campaigning in India off and on for the next thirty years. He was not, however, able to maintain political autonomy. Like many of the post-Seleucid dynasts, he was a feudatory of the Dahae, which limited where he could turn his military attentions. Accordingly, the bulk of his military campaigns consisted of wars against other Greek warlords in India, successful generals and members of the Euthydemid extended family who had managed to develop power bases of their own.
Thus, political control over Bactria and India as a united whole was permanently undone. The Greeks in India were relatively few in numbers, and responsible for maintaining sweeping conquests with miniscule forces. Their rulers increasingly turned to co-rulers and viceroys to maintain royal authority. They began to co-opt local iconography and local elites in service of this mission. Even in Demetrius I’s time, such fracturing had begun. By Demetrius I’s death, Arachosia, Bactria, and India were administered as separate kingdoms.
This fracturing created the perfect vacuum for an unscrupulous and ambitious figure such as Eucratides to climb to the top. A strong monarch might have been able to unify Demetrius I’s state for a time, but legitimacy was solely based on military skill, especially after Eucratides I’s coup laid bare the reality that dynastic succession was an illusion. Demetrius I’s son and namesake, Demetrius II, would later fight Eucratides I and in turn be defeated, and with that defeat the Euthydemid dynasty was wiped out, followed by a succession of nondynastic rulers.
The diversion of military resources towards India and the state of perpetual low-level civil war between rival claimants seeking “spear-won” land led in part to a weakening of control over the northern frontier. Pressed by the Wusun and the Tocharians, and driven from their ancestral lands in no small part by the rise of the Xiongnu, the Saka in their turn pressed increasingly hard on the borders of Bactria, moving across an increasingly porous frontier with ever greater impunity. As Eucratides I struggled with this new threat, he conceded, at least temporarily, control of India to one the greatest of the Indo-Greek Kings - the Buddhist Menander I Soter, who took power in 155 BCE and conquered vast swathes of India, pushing aside the relatively feeble Shunga successor state and taking Pataliputra, the heart of the Maurya dynasty by 149 BCE. Menander would go on to fight Eucratides as well, but even in victory he was not able to reunify the state.
Finally, an old man, he passed away in 130 BCE, a patron of Buddhism beloved by his soldiers and the Indian people alike for his victories over the Shunga. At his death in camp, his wife Agathocleia took power and ruled as a regent for his son Strato, alongside her brother who ruled as Strato Epiphanes Soter. The establishment of a regency at this critical juncture was perhaps the final straw for Greek ambitions in India. What the Kingdom of India needed was an able leader, someone who could build upon the achievements of Menander as Demetrius had built upon the accomplishments of Euthydemus and Alexander had built upon the accomplishments of Phillip. Instead, it had a boy King, whose reign would be wracked by rebellions by his fellow Greeks (since military achievement was the only form of legitimacy) and assaults by a resurgent Shunga dynasty (since the Greeks were too few in number to control the vast territory they had seized).
The north would be of no assistance. By 130 BCE, the Saka were running rampant through Bactria effectively uncontested. The chaotic ascension and decline of kings continued unabated. Although he had lived for a long time and fought tirelessly to maintain his rule for decades, Eucratides I was murdered by his sons, Eucratides II and Heliocles I in 145 BCE. This led to civil war and further instability, and provided an opportunity for the Saka (and various other groups identified by the Greeks as the Asiani, Pasiani, and Tocharians) to pour into Bactria en masse. The arrival of the Saka was initially quite disruptive. Certainly many Hellenistic sites, such as Alexandria-on-the-Oxus, were sacked. It was evident that the Greeks, their military strength drained by constant foreign conquests in India, were unable to resist or wage war against the Saka. However, what emerged after this initial period of apocalyptic anarchy was a system of parallel administration. Greek colonies and settled life more generally were permitted to continue as tributaries to the Saka.
Although Greek monarchs would continue wearing diadems for some time, minting coins and issuing decrees, the real power behind their thrones were the dreaded Saka. The Greek monarchs were nothing more than local rulers and puppets, intended to provide a veneer of legitimacy and nothing more. The Saka found this system to be highly advantageous, because it rid them of the difficulty of having to properly rule the settled peoples they conquered. The parallel administrative model they established maintained law and justice. It guaranteed a sense of continuity and ordinary life that prevented the settled agricultural peoples from feeling existentially threatened, even as their wealth was appropriated. Their walled cities and temples were largely, after the initial wave of destructive violence, unmolested, or at least less molested.
When the Saka eventually pushed further, into the declining Indo-Greek warlord states, they would preserve this same model of conquest. In this new model of “governance,” the barriers between the Greeks and the various settled peoples they ruled were swept away. Where once the Greeks had maintained something of a cultural barrier between ruler and ruled, they were now no different than the Bactrians - a conquered people. Although mutual assimilation was evident long before this time, the destruction of Greek royal institutions rapidly increased this trend. The merger of Iranian, Indian, and Hellenistic styles began in earnest with the arrival of the Saka.
Euthydemus I’s blackmail threat had come to pass. The “civilized world” that he and Antiochus III had promised to guarantee was overrun. Demetrius I’s legacy as a conqueror would be limited by the ultimate failure of his imperial model, and indeed the failure of the Hellenistic imperial model as a whole. The ideology of the state was one of spear-won territory and intensely personal. Antiochus III and Demetrius I, however different the trajectory of their lives, both ruled based upon a clique of aristocratic followers whose loyalty was based on the military prowess of their master. All the rest of the trappings of their regimes - the religious symbolism, the coins marked with the royal visage and the symbols of goddesses and gods, the conspicuous emulation of Alexander the Great, were assertions of royal power, but they were not its basis.
This fragile system persisted and perpetuated itself when it was embodied in the person of a strong ruler. And furthermore, it was remarkably adept at producing such figures, generating a warlike culture that prided itself on creating warlike men who could run it. But the system broke down into anarchy and dissolution with remarkable swiftness in the absence of such a figure.
But as disruptive as the arrival of the Saka was, their preeminence in Bactria was short lived. Within a generation, the Tokhari had crossed over the Pamir Mountains and arrived in Bactria. Hardened by years of fighting and travel, chased from their ancestral homelands just as the Saka had been, the Tokhari would in short order attain preeminence over the Saka and inaugurate a new era of Central Asian history.
It is at the dawn of this new era that our story begins in earnest.
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