The Key Role of Greek Bactria in West-East Contact

[Eleatic Guest]

I noticed a while ago that many things of ancient Greek provenance appeared with a time lag of some centuries in China (for example watermills, gears, automaton, history). I suspect that, if there a transmission occurred, Greek Bactria must have played a key role. Direct contact between the "Dayuan" of the Ferghana Valley and Han China was established around 100 BC when several Chinese armies invaded the region to get hold of their superior horse breed.

WP flat out equates Dayuan with the Greek settlers. Although I know the editor to be overenthusiastic about intercultural contacts, I would not dismiss his identification easily. Bactria was the most Hellenized region east of Mesopotamia and the Greco-Bactrian empire centered around the region had succumbed to nomadic pressure only some decades before. So there is every chance of a strong Greek or Hellenized element still present when the Chinese expedition corps arrived.

My questions are these:
1. What is the best recent scholarly work on Greek Bactria, the inluences it received and exerted?
2. Can we rightly identify the Dayuan with the Greek settlers?
3. Do you think it possible that a) the Greek soldier and settlers took with them advanced technology such as the above as far as the Bactrian periphery of the empire and b) that it made its way from there to China some time later?

[ScipioAsina]

1) Frank L. Holt's Thundering Zeus (1999) masterfully pieces together the early history of Hellenistic Bactria, but it doesn't really address your question. However, his more recent work, Into the Land of Bones, does discuss the legacy of the Greeks, and near the end of his work he cites A. K. Narain: "The strongest response [to Tarn] came from A. K. Narain, a fine Indian scholar whose book The Indo-Greeks first appeared in 1957, the year of Tarn's death. Narain's counterblast emphasized the other side of the coins--namely, the obvious Indian influences in language, religion, and philosophy that transformed the Graeco-Bactrians into Indo-Greeks. Narain downplayed the effect of benevolent Hellenism in the East, soberly assessing the legacy of Alexander and his settlers from a different perspective: 'Their history is part of the history of India and not of the Hellenistic states: they came, they saw, but India conquered.'" (152-153) Holt himself concludes that "the first European attempt to transform Afghanistan had ultimately failed." (164) Thus, to answer your question, modern scholarship generally de-emphasizes the influence of the Greeks in Bactria; they were mostly on the receiving-end of cultural exchange, finally being enveloped by the native cultures.

2. One thing to consider is that a large number of Greeks likely made it to Bactria long before Alexander's arrival, many of them sent as exiles by the Achaemenids. These Greeks ultimately intermingled with native elements and, to quote Narain, "probably to some extent identified themselves with the local Iranians in social and political life." If these non-Hellenized individuals represented the colonists that went further east, it's unlikely they would have exhibited much "Greek" influence on their neighbors.

As for the Dayuan, it seems they were more closely related to the Yuezhi than the Greeks. Recall that the Yuezhi helped topple the Greco-Bactrian kingdom.

3. A quick glance at Wikipedia will reveal that the Chinese independently developed most of their technology. Just think that the Greeks developed a crossbow without Chinese influence.

[bachmat66]

Salve,
there is this fairly recent work by Polish historian Kalita - Grecy w Baktrii i w Indiach (Greeks in Bactria and India) published 2005...and in 2009, where author puts forth the idea that Hellenoi were: Ionian, Alexander's (Thracians, Greek and Macedonians) and Seleucid Greek colonists; that they effectively merged with the local Iranian populations, adopting many elements of the local cultures (awfully ancient one may say), interesting element here is the adoption of the Greek alphabet to write down Bactrian language etc.
There is also a set of volumes published by UNESCO where various scholars produced chapters on the history of Central Asia.
It is worth noting that the true archeological knowledge of the region is compromised by the wars that have been conducted there, that most of northwestern Pakistan is a wild area where looting of archeological sites is a norm (well, thanks to the Western buyers), Tajikistan is rather poor and intersted in current self-preservation etc; findings at Kunduz, Ai-Khanoum, temple complex at Oxus http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=1147531 offer us just a glimpse into the world of Bactrian cultural an economic crossroads (possibly the Silk Road started in full swing during the Irano-Greek Bactrian heyday...
As per Holt assertion that "the first European attempt to transform Afghanistan had ultimately failed," I think we have to take it with a grain of salt. Namely, we got to look at Irano-Greek Bactria as the middle ground (borrowing the phrase from M. White who wrote the seminal work on the American Indian-white relations history in the Ohio River country). The so called art of Gandhara (called on Wikipedia Greco-Buddhist art [sic!]) is a prime example of such European-Asian fusion, a very successful one I daresay...

[Eleatic Guest]

Narain downplayed the effect of benevolent Hellenism in the East, soberly assessing the legacy of Alexander and his settlers from a different perspective: 'Their history is part of the history of India and not of the Hellenistic states: they came, they saw, but India conquered.'"

Nice counter-discourse from Narain in the national(istic) Indian post-1947 vein which, sensing that Ancient India found itself militarily almost always on the receiving end, stressed the idea of "cultural conquest". I've even read Hindu authors who argue that India also "culturally conquered" China through the Buddhist mission and all the Indian knowledge and technologies which were transmitted along with it on the Silk Road.

2. One thing to consider is that a large number of Greeks likely made it to Bactria long before Alexander's arrival, many of them sent as exiles by the Achaemenids.

Honestly, I don't think this assertion holds water, at least I have not seen real evidence for it. The only Greek colony in inner Asia I am aware of was the resettlement of the people of Milet which Herodot describes but this colony was much farther west in Mesopotamia or the Elymais. The pre-Alexander Greeks settled north, south and west of proper Greece, but not east of Cyprus where Phoenicians and powerful empires such as Assyria, Babylonia and then also Persia would have made life extremely unpleasant (and short).

[Eleatic Guest]

As per Holt assertion that "the first European attempt to transform Afghanistan had ultimately failed," I think we have to take it with a grain of salt. Namely, we got to look at Irano-Greek Bactria as the middle ground.

Measuring the success of the Greek colonists seems ultimately, as everything, a matter of your criteria. I wonder under what circumstances Holt would have qualified the Greek settlement in Central Asia as a success.

[ScipioAsina]

Honestly, I don't think this assertion holds water, at least I have not seen real evidence for it. The only Greek colony in inner Asia I am aware of was the resettlement of the people of Milet which Herodot describes but this colony was much farther west in Mesopotamia or the Elymais. The pre-Alexander Greeks settled north, south and west of proper Greece, but not east of Cyprus where Phoenicians and powerful empires such as Assyria, Babylonia and then also Persia would have made life extremely unpleasant (and short).

To quote Herodotus: "...we [the Persians] shall lead [the Ionians] into captivity as slaves, and we shall turn their sons into eunuchs and drag their virgin daughters away to Baktria and give over their land to others." (6.9)

And Curtius Rufus: "In pursuit of Bessus the Macedonians had arrived at a small town inhabited by Branchidae who, on the orders of Xerxes, when he was returning from Greece, had emigrated from Miletus and settled in this spot... The culture of their forebears had not yet disappeared, though they were by now bilingual and the foreign tongue was gradually eroding their own." (7.5.28-29)

So Narain's argument holds some water. It's ultimately a matter of opinion, given the abysmal amount of evidence.

Measuring the success of the Greek colonists seems ultimately, as everything, a matter of your criteria. I wonder under what circumstances Holt would have qualified the Greek settlement in Central Asia as a success.

To give you some context, Holt writes (and I apologize for these massive quotes): "As one Greek author complained when he later read of the Devourer dogs, Alexander's compatriots 'tell us nothing but the worst' about the native peoples they met in central Asia. Their biased accounts left out the extraordinary local achievements revealed to us today through the great efforts of archaeologists. The region was certainly urbanized, wealthy, and well irrigated. We must therefore be wary of the ancient propaganda that the conquering Greeks first brought civilization, high art, and economic prosperity to the backward Bactrians. In fact, the land was enjoying one of its periodic golden ages. Thus, Alexander's army did not find the region in quite the ruined condition that exists today, although the invaders soon did their part to level its towns and cities, burn its croplands, and scatter its population. For a time, the Greeks and Macedonians themselves turned Bactria into a tempestuous wasteland that had to be rebuilt in order to regain something of its former (unacknowledged) glory. That cycle would continue down through the ages, with repeated invasions and periods of rehabilitation..." (26-27)

And his conclusion: "Not in the palace, but in the theater, there appeared the most significant sign that the first European attempt to transform Afghanistan had ultimately failed. Where once Alexander's and Seleucus's settlers had assembled by the thousands to keep alive their ancestral arts, where practiced actors had donned their masks and recited the lines of classical poets, a new kind of tragedy now unfolded on a state littered with the human wreckage of an awakened population. The natives needed no Greek theater, so they piled upon its stage and front row seats the scattered remains of their unburied dead, whose bodies were otherwise in the way. As if the Greeks had never come, the Devourer dogs were growling again over the bones of the Bactrians."

While I certainly find their history and accomplishments fascinating, it would be a stretch to claim that the Greeks significantly changed the social/cultural/political environments of these regions and that they constitute some sort of success story.

I noticed a while ago that many things of ancient Greek provenance appeared with a time lag of some centuries in China (for example watermills, gears, automaton, history).

I forgot to mention this, but Chinese annalists were evidently writing histories around the same time as Herodotus. Of course, in terms of historiography, we owe far more to the likes of Herodotus and Thucydides.

[Eleatic Guest]

Thanks for the quotes. As Curtius Rufus refers to the colony in the context of the chase of Bessus, it must have been located, as you say, on the Iranian plateau or Bactria proper.

Holt, though, seems to me the type of ancient historian who thinks he can balance out the ancient Greek monopoly on historiography by an extreme bias of his own. This, however, can never work and only creates another biased account.

In fact, Alexander was a rather benevolent conqueror, who would spare land and people if they succumbed to his rule upon his arrival. Much of his conquest east of Mesopotamia came by the way of an elegant switch of allegiance of the Persian satraps, not through bloody and destructive warfare. And where this happened, in Sogdiana, he coopted the local populace by marrying into their aristocracy.

This all was in stark contrast to the genocidal sword and fire campaigns in Central Asia, which were typical of Muslim and Mongol steppe Stalins like Mahmud of Ghazni, Genghis Khan or Tamerlane.

I forgot to mention this, but Chinese annalists were evidently writing histories around the same time as Herodotus. Of course, in terms of historiography, we owe far more to the likes of Herodotus and Thucydides.

I am aware of the Bamboo annals etc. but this annalist tradition was sharply discontinued by the burning of books by the first emperor around 200 BC. It strikes as odd that less than two decades after the Chinese made contact with Greek Bactria, Sima Qian, who described these very expeditions, suddenly took to the pen and invented historiography, a whole new literary genre in China...

[ScipioAsina]

Holt, though, seems to me the type of ancient historian who thinks he can balance out the ancient Greek monopoly on historiography by an extreme bias of his own. This, however, can never work and only creates another biased account

In fact, Alexander was a rather benevolent conqueror, who would spare land and people if they succumbed to his rule upon his arrival. Much of his conquest east of Mesopotamia came by the way of an elegant switch of allegiance of the Persian satraps, not through bloody and destructive warfare. And where this happened, in Sogdiana, he coopted the local populace by marrying into their aristocracy.

That's a rather generous assessment of Alexander's conquests (Ernst Badian certainly wouldn't call the king's actions "benevolent"). Even Arrian, who generally maintains a positive attitude toward his subject, criticizes Alexander for his brutality (especially in Bactria). Moreover, at least one surviving Persian source from the post-Alexander period (the so-called Dynastic Prophecy) denounces Alexander's reign and foresees a restoration of Achaemenid power. As Sherwin-White and Kuhrt point out in From Samarkhand to Sardis, the "primarily hellenocentric focus of the surviving literary sources has hidden the true scale of opposition and disruption," (9) citing native revolts in Bactria, rebellions in India, and secessionists and dynasts all around. Greek historiography obviously has its limitations, and scholars like Holt are simply trying to develop a more well-rounded understanding of their subjects. But like I've said before, it's ultimately a matter of opinion.

I am aware of the Bamboo annals etc. but this annalist tradition was sharply discontinued by the burning of books by the first emperor around 200 BC. It strikes as odd that less than two decades after the Chinese made contact with Greek Bactria, Sima Qian, who described these very expeditions, suddenly took to the pen and invented historiography, a whole new literary genre in China...

This presupposes that the Greco-Bactrians, who were in a period of decline and under the sway of the Yuezhi, even possessed histories to share, and that Zhang Qian (the Chinese envoy) would have conveyed this information back to the Han Court. Also consider that our main textual sources (Justin, Strabo) for Parthian-Bactrian history ultimately stem from Apollodorus of Artemita, who probably lived in Iran around the 1st century B.C. (well after Zhang Qian's travels). Finally, a brief look at the Shiji's contents will reveal something distinctly Chinese and far different from any Western history at the time.

I grew up listening to Sima Qian and other Chinese historians, and I've traveled around China. I'm somewhat biased.