The Indo-Greek Kingdoms

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When the Macedonian army that had marched to the edge of the known world turned back at the Beas, it left behind no settlement that endured. The Greek presence on the far side of the Hindu Kush is, instead, a second story, told a century and a half later in a different idiom — in drachms struck to an Indian weight, in a moral maxim from Delphi carved on a tomb beside the Oxus, and in a Pali dialogue in which a Yavana king asks a forest monk whether there is any self that is reborn. The Indo-Greek Kingdoms are the polities in which that conversation took institutional form: Greek-descended states ruling Gandhara, the Punjab and the Indus borderlands across roughly two centuries, from about 200 BCE to the disappearance of the last of their kings around 10 CE. They are the place where the Hellenistic period ran out of map and kept going.

From Bactria across the mountains

The kingdoms grew from a breakaway. After the collapse of the eastern Seleucid grip, the satrapy of Bactria — the rich, irrigated country between the Hindu Kush and the Oxus — became an independent Greek realm under Diodotus and then under the Euthydemid house. This was the Greco-Bactria of the lost city at Ai-Khanoum on the Oxus, a wholly Greek foundation excavated by a French mission under Paul Bernard between 1964 and 1978: a city with a gymnasium, a theater seating some five thousand, Corinthian colonnades, and, beside the founder Kineas’s tomb, a stone on which a traveler named Klearchos had copied the Delphic maxims carried all the way from the sanctuary of Apollo in central Greece. The Greek world’s ethical inheritance had reached the rim of Central Asia intact, and from that base it turned south.

Around 200–180 BCE the Bactrian king Demetrius, son of Euthydemus, led troops across the Hindu Kush into the old Mauryan northwest, then in the turbulence following the fall of that empire. This southward push founded the distinct Indo-Greek line. Its geography is the operative distinction from its parent: the Greco-Bactrians held the country north of the mountains; the Indo-Greeks ruled south of them, in Gandhara, the Kabul valley, the Punjab and down the Indus, with their seats at Sagala, Taxila and Pushkalavati. The two realms were dynastically entangled and frequently at war. Around 170 BCE Eucratides seized power and broke the Euthydemid house, driving as far as the Indus; the rivalry between the houses of Euthydemus and Eucratides runs through the whole sequence and is legible chiefly on coins, since the literary record is thin.

The deepest thrust came early. The Yuga Purana, a Sanskrit text of apocalyptic chronology, records the Yavanas — the Indian term for Greeks, derived from Ionian — overrunning Saketa, the Panchala country and Mathura and reaching Kusumadhvaja, the city of the flower-banner, which is Pataliputra on the Ganges, the old Mauryan capital. The grammarian Patanjali, writing about 150 BCE, illustrated a point of Sanskrit tense with the sentence that the Yavana besieged Saketa, and another that he besieged the Madhyamikas — campaigns recent enough to serve as live examples. The advance did not hold; civil war in Bactria pulled the kings back to a frontier near Mathura. But for a moment the descendants of Alexander’s veterans had stood at the gates of Pataliputra, and the memory entered Indian literature as a portent.

Menander, who became Milinda

The greatest of these kings, and the only one to pass fully into the religious memory of the subcontinent, was Menander I, who reigned from his capital at Sagala — modern Sialkot in the eastern Punjab — in the mid-second century BCE, conventionally about 165 to 130 BCE. He is the best-attested Indo-Greek ruler in both Western and Indian sources, and he left the largest coinage of any king of the line; his silver and bronze turn up across an arc from the Kabul valley to the western Gangetic plain, a rough index of the reach of his power.

His coins carry his program in two scripts. The Greek obverse names him Basileōs Sōtēros Menandrou — of King Menander the Saviour — and the Kharoshthi reverse renders the same in the local Prakrit, Maharajasa tratarasa Menamdrasa, of the Great King Menander the Preserver. Sōtēr was a standard Hellenistic royal epithet, but on some of his issues the reverse bears an eight-spoked wheel, the dharmachakra, the wheel that the Buddha set turning at his first sermon. A Greek king advertising himself in two languages as a savior and stamping the wheel of the Dharma on his money is the Indo-Greek settlement in a single object.

Indian Buddhist tradition kept him as Milinda, the Indianized form of his name, and made him the interlocutor of one of its most admired works of doctrinal prose. The Milindapanha — the “Questions of Milinda” — is a Pali dialogue set at Sagala in which the king, a formidable debater who has worsted every teacher in his realm, puts his questions to the monk Nagasena. The exchanges range across the hardest matter of the tradition: rebirth without a transmigrating soul, the working of karma, the continuity of merit, the status of the Buddha after his passing, the difference between the man who is liberated and the man who is not, the meaning of nirvana. The work’s most famous passage is Nagasena’s reply to the king’s opening challenge. The monk asks by what name he is known, then denies that “Nagasena” denotes any permanent person. He asks the king how he came — by chariot — and then dismantles the chariot question by question: the chariot is not the axle, nor the wheels, nor the frame, nor the yoke, nor any one part, nor the mere heap of parts, and yet “chariot” is a serviceable word for the assemblage in dependence on its parts. So too “Nagasena,” and so too the self: a designation laid over the five aggregates, with nothing standing behind it. The dialogue is the classic exposition of anatta, not-self, framed as the answer a monk gives a king.

The text is layered. Its earliest core, paralleled in a Chinese version, very likely goes back to the centuries around the turn of the era; much of the larger Pali recension was elaborated later in Sri Lanka, where the Theravada tradition preserved it and the Burmese canon eventually admitted it to the Khuddaka Nikaya. The historical Menander stands at the head of this tradition rather than inside its every line; the king of the dialogue is a literary figure built on a real one. But the choice of a Greek king as the model questioner is itself the historical datum. A foreign ruler had become, in the imagination of Buddhism, the very type of the intelligent outsider whom the Dharma can satisfy.

The classical record adds a closing image that the Buddhist sources would recognize. Plutarch reports that when Menander died — a just king, by his account, beloved of his subjects — the cities of his realm contended over his ashes, and the dispute was settled only by dividing the remains among them, each to raise a monument over its share. The relic-division of a Greek king reads exactly like the division of the Buddha’s relics among the kingdoms after his cremation and their enshrinement in stupas; whether or not the parallel was intended, it is the shape that Menander’s afterlife took.

The two-faced coin

No body of evidence carries the Indo-Greek world more directly than its money, and nowhere is the syncretism of these states more exactly documented. About forty kings and queens are known, the great majority of them only from their coins; without the dies, most would be names in no list at all. The coinage is bilingual and biscriptal by design — Greek legend on one face, the same titulature in Prakrit in the Kharoshthi script on the other — a deliberate instrument of rule over a population that read, spoke and worshipped otherwise than its rulers. The innovation was early: Pantaleon and Agathocles, around 185–170 BCE, struck the first square Indian-standard issues with Indian inscriptions, and Apollodotus I fixed the bilingual drachm on the Indian weight that became the regional norm.

On the divine iconography the kings were catholic. The obverse portraits, sharply individual in the Hellenistic manner, share the coinage with a pantheon. Zeus enthroned with thunderbolt and scepter, Pallas Athena hurling the spear, Apollo with arrow and tripod, Herakles seated with his club, Nike, Poseidon and Helios all appear in the Greek register. Beside and beneath them runs the Indian: the humped bull, the elephant, the lion, the dharmachakra. Some of the earliest issues are remarkable for what they show. Agathocles struck coins bearing figures identifiable as Vasudeva-Krishna holding the discus and Sankarsana-Balarama with his plough — among the oldest images of these deities anywhere — and others pairing the lion with the goddess Lakshmi. The same mint that praised Zeus could honor Krishna; the same kings whose grandfathers had read the Delphic maxims now ruled subjects who looked to the Buddha, to Vasudeva, and to the older gods of the land.

This was not a private taste of a few rulers but the texture of the polity. The clearest physical proof stands far to the east, at Besnagar near Vidisha in central India: a monolithic sandstone column, nearly seven meters tall, once crowned by a figure of Garuda. Its inscription records that it was set up about 110 BCE by Heliodorus, son of Dion, a man of Taxila who came as the ambassador of the Indo-Greek king Antialcidas to the court of the king Bhagabhadra. Heliodorus calls the pillar a Garuda-standard of Vasudeva, the god of gods, and names himself a Bhagavata — a devotee of Vasudeva. A Greek envoy, sent from one court to another, had taken the vows of an Indian devotional cult and left a stone saying so. The pillar is among the earliest datable testimonies to the worship of Vasudeva-Krishna and one of the most direct to the religious traffic across the Hindu and Greek worlds. The coins say the same thing in metal that the pillar says in stone.

Patrons of the Dharma

The Indo-Greek engagement with Buddhism was the deepest of these affiliations, and it left a mark that outlasted the kings. The clearest object is a small one: a steatite reliquary casket from Shinkot in the Bajaur region of Gandhara, the earliest inscribed Buddhist relic casket yet known from that country. On its lid, in the place of honor, a Kharoshthi inscription records the enshrinement of relics of the Lord Shakyamuni on the fourteenth day of the month Karttika — in the reign of the Maharaja Minadra, Menander. A Greek king’s regnal year dates the deposit of the Buddha’s relics. The casket held a silver and a gold inner reliquary, now lost; what survives is the dating clause, which fixes Menander’s authority over the Swat and Bajaur valleys and shows the local Buddhist community reckoning its sacred calendar by his rule.

The northwest that these kings governed was about to become one of the great hearths of the religion. Gandhara would produce the first sustained tradition of imaging the Buddha in human form and would be a crucible of the Mahayana, the Great Vehicle, with its bodhisattva ideal and its proliferating buddha-fields. The Larger Sukhavativyuha, the foundational scripture of the cult of the Buddha Amitabha and his western paradise, took shape in this Kushan-era northwest, very probably in Gandhara itself, in the generations after the Greek kings. The Indo-Greeks did not author these developments — the Kushan patronage that crested under their successors carried them furthest — but the kings ruled the ground while it was being prepared, sheltered its monasteries, and in Menander gave the tradition the foreign sovereign it would remember as a model of the well-disposed ruler. Whether Menander himself took refuge in the Three Jewels, as later legend has him do, lies beyond the reach of the evidence; that his coins bore the wheel and his reign dated a reliquary lies within it.

The fading of the line

The end came not from within but from the steppe. From about 130 BCE the Sakas — the Scythians of the Iranian-speaking nomad world — and behind them the Yuezhi, displaced westward along a migration that had begun on the borders of China, pressed down into Bactria from the north. The Greco-Bactrian kingdom proper went under first; its last king, Heliocles, likely fell in the nomad onslaught around 125 BCE. South of the mountains the Indo-Greek states held on longer, contracting into the Punjab and the eastern reaches, splitting among ever more numerous and shorter-lived kings whose existence is known only from their increasingly debased silver. The Sakas took Taxila and the western territories; the line narrowed to a few enclaves. The last of the Indo-Greek kings, Strato II, vanishes from the record around 10 CE in the eastern Punjab — the final independent Greek sovereignty anywhere, ended not on the Aegean but on the Ravi. Within a few generations the country passed to the Yuezhi confederation that coalesced into the Kushan Empire, which would inherit the Greek mint-craft, the Gandharan workshops and the role of Buddhist patron on a far larger scale, while to the southeast the Satavahana realm carried its own bridge between Vedic sacrifice and the stupa. Eastward across the Tarim oases, the Buddhism that had been nurtured in the Greek northwest would travel toward the city-states of the Tocharians and on into China.

What the Indo-Greek experiment demonstrates is not that two worlds met and parted but that, for two centuries on the Indus, a single political community held them together without dissolving either. A man could be a Greek by descent and a Bhagavata by devotion; a king could be Sōtēr to his soldiers and Maharaja to his subjects and stamp the Dharma-wheel between the two titles; a forest monk could take a Yavana sovereign as the ideal pupil and a Yavana sovereign could date the relics of the Buddha by his own years. The chariot of the Milindapanha is the apt figure for the kingdoms themselves — no single essence behind the assemblage, Greek and Indian parts fitted into one serviceable thing that rolled while its pieces held, and was a real chariot for as long as it did.

Sources, texts, and the scholarly record

The Indo-Greek kingdoms are reconstructed from three unequal bodies of evidence: the coins, by far the richest; a scatter of inscriptions, of which the Besnagar pillar and the Shinkot casket are the most consequential; and the literary references, Greek and Indian, that frame the rest. The numismatic foundation was laid in the nineteenth century and synthesized by A. K. Narain in The Indo-Greeks (Oxford, 1957), long the standard account; W. W. Tarn’s earlier The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge, 1938) remains a landmark even where superseded, and Osmund Bopearachchi’s Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques (1991) reordered the king-list on the coins. The Encyclopædia Iranica’s survey of the Indo-Greek dynasty is a reliable scholarly point of entry to the chronology and the debates.

The literary heart of the tradition is the Milindapanha, available in T. W. Rhys Davids’s translation as The Questions of King Milinda in volumes XXXV and XXXVI of the Sacred Books of the East (1890, 1894) — the rendering through which the dialogue entered the English-reading world and still freely accessible in full. The early Mahayana scriptures of the northwest are gathered in the same series: F. Max Müller, Bunyiu Nanjio and J. Takakusu’s Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (Sacred Books of the East XLIX, 1894), which contains the Larger and Smaller Sukhavativyuha born of this region’s Buddhism, is held in full here, as is Henry Clarke Warren’s anthology Buddhism in Translations (Harvard Oriental Series III, 1896). For the deep history of the lost cities behind the kingdoms, the publication of the French excavations at Ai-Khanoum under Paul Bernard’s direction (Fouilles d’Aï Khanoum, from 1973) remains the primary record of the Greco-Bactrian world from which the Indo-Greeks descended.

→ In the library: Buddhist Mahâyâna Texts (SBE 49 — incl. the Sukhāvatī-vyūha) · Buddhism in Translations (Warren, 1896)

→ Related: Hellenistic Period · Buddhism · Buddhism Theravada · Mahayana · Syncretism · Zeus · Apollo · Kushan Empire · Satavahana · Tocharians · Hinduism