Bactria is the ancient name of a historical region located south of the Amu Darya and
west of Gandhara, one of the ancient civilizations of Iranian peoples, covering the modern-day
flat region that straddles Afghanistan and Tajikistan.
Ancient Bactria was in present-day northern Afghanistan, between the Hindu Kush mountain
range and the Amu Darya.
The region was the birthplace of Zoroastrianism, and later also hosted Buddhism before becoming
Muslim after the arrival of the Rashiduns and Umayyads in the 7th century.
Bactria was also sometimes referred to by the Greeks as Bactriana.
Geography According to P. Leriche:
Bactria, the territory of which Bactra was the capital, originally consisted of the area
south of the Āmū Daryā with its string of agricultural oases dependent on water taken
from the rivers of Balḵ, Tashkurgan, Kondūz, Sar-e Pol, and Šīrīn Tagāō.
This region played a major role in Central Asian history.
At certain times the political limits of Bactria stretched far beyond the geographic frame
of the Bactrian plain.
History Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex
The Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex is the modern archaeological designation for
a Bronze Age culture of Central Asia, dated to ca.
2200–1700 BC, located in present day Turkmenistan, northern Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan
and western Tajikistan, centered on the upper Amu Darya, in area covering ancient Bactria.
Its sites were discovered and named by the Soviet archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi.
Bactria was the Greek name for Old Persian Bāxtriš, in what is now northern Afghanistan,
and Margiana was the Greek name for the Persian satrapy of Margu, the capital of which was
Merv, in today's Turkmenistan.
The early Greek historian Ctesias, c. 400 BC, alleged that the legendary Assyrian king
Ninus had defeated a Bactrian king named Oxyartes in ca.
2140 BC, or some 1000 years before the Trojan War.
Since the decipherment of cuneiform in the 19th century, however, which enabled actual
Assyrian records to be read, historians have ascribed little value to the Greek account.
According to some writers, Bactria was the homeland of Indo-European tribes who moved
south-west into Iran and into north-western India around 2500–2000 BC.
Later, it became the north province of the Persian Empire in Central Asia.
It was in these regions, where the fertile soil of the mountainous country is surrounded
by the Turanian desert, that the prophet Zoroaster was said to have been born and gained his
first adherents.
Avestan, the language of the oldest portions of the Zoroastrian Avesta, was one of the
old Iranian languages, and is the oldest attested member of the Eastern Iranian branch of the
Iranian language family.
Cyrus the Great
It is suggested by E. Herzfeld that, prior to its annexation to the Persian Empire by
Cyrus the Great in 6th century BCE, Bactria belonged to the Median empire and together
with Margiana formed the twelfth satrapy of Persia.
After Darius III had been defeated by Alexander the Great, the satrap of Bactria, Bessus attempted
to organize a national resistance but was captured by other warlords and delivered to
Alexander.
He was then tortured and killed.
Alexander the Great Alexander conquered Sogdiana and Iran.
However, in the south, beyond the Oxus, he met strong resistance.
After two years of war and a strong insurgency campaign, Alexander managed to establish little
control over Bactria.
After Alexander's death, Diodorus Siculus tells us that Philip received dominion over
Bactria, but Justin names Amyntas to that role.
At the Treaty of Triparadisus, both Diodorus Siculus and Arrian agree that the satrap Stasanor
gained control over Bactria.
Eventually, Alexander's empire was divided up between the generals in Alexander's army.
Bactria became a part of the Seleucid Empire, named after its founder, Seleucus I.
Seleucid Empire The Macedonians, especially Seleucus I and
his son Antiochus I, established the Seleucid Empire and founded a great many Greek towns.
The Greek language became dominant for some time there.
The paradox that Greek presence was more prominent in Bactria than in areas far closer to Greece
can possibly be explained by past deportations of Greeks to Bactria.
For instance, during the reign of Darius I, the inhabitants of the Greek city of Barca,
in Cyrenaica, were deported to Bactria for refusing to surrender assassins.
In addition, Xerxes also settled the "Branchidae" in Bactria; they were the descendants of Greek
priests who had once lived near Didyma and betrayed the temple to him.
Herodotus also records a Persian commander threatening to enslave daughters of the revolting
Ionians and send them to Bactria.
However, these few examples are not indicative of massive deportations of Greeks to central
Asia.
Greco-Bactrian Kingdom
"That extremely wealthy Bactrian empire of 1000 cities"
Considerable difficulties faced by the Seleucid kings and the attacks of Ptolemy II of Egypt
gave Diodotus, satrap of Bactria, the opportunity to declare independence and conquer Sogdiana.
He was the founder of the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom.
Diodotus and his successors were able to maintain themselves against the attacks of the Seleucids—particularly
from Antiochus III the Great, who was ultimately defeated by the Romans.
The Greco-Bactrians were so powerful that they were able to expand their territory as
far as India: "As for Bactria, a part of it lies alongside
Aria towards the north, though most of it lies above Aria and to the east of it.
And much of it produces everything except oil.
The Greeks who caused Bactria to revolt grew so powerful on account of the fertility of
the country that they became masters, not only of Bactria and beyond, but also of India,
as Apollodorus of Artemita says: and more tribes were subdued by them than by Alexander...."
The Greco-Bactrians used the Greek language for administrative purposes, and the local
Bactrian language was also Hellenized, as suggested by its adoption of the Greek alphabet
and Greek loanwords.
In turn, some of these words were also borrowed by modern Pashto.
Indo-Greek Kingdom
The Bactrian king Euthydemus I and his son Demetrius I crossed the Hindu Kush mountains
and began the conquest of the Indus valley.
For a short time, they wielded great power: a great Greek empire seemed to have arisen
far in the East.
But this empire was torn by internal dissensions and continual usurpations.
When Demetrius advanced far into India one of his generals, Eucratides, made himself
king of Bactria, and soon in every province there arose new usurpers, who proclaimed themselves
kings and fought against each other.
Most of them we know only by their coins, a great many of which are found in Afghanistan.
By these wars, the dominant position of the Greeks was undermined even more quickly than
would otherwise have been the case.
After Demetrius and Eucratides, the kings abandoned the Attic standard of coinage and
introduced a native standard, no doubt to gain support from outside the Greek minority.
In India, this went even further.
The Indo-Greek king Menander I, recognized as a great conqueror, converted to Buddhism.
His successors managed to cling to power until the last known Indo-Greek ruler, a king named
Strato II, who ruled in the Punjab region until around 55 BC.
Other sources, however, place the end of Strato II's reign as late as 10 AD.
Sakas, Yuezhi and Sassanids
The weakness of the Greco-Bactrian empire was shown by its sudden and complete overthrow,
first by the Sakas, and then by the Yuezhi, who had conquered Bactria by the time of the
visit of the Chinese envoy Zhang Qian, who had been sent by the Han emperor to investigate
lands to the west of China.
Kujula Kadphises, the Guishuang xihou of the Da Yuezhi, united the region in the early
1st century and laid the foundations for the powerful, but short-lived, Kushan Empire,
which was then overcome by the Sasanians from Persia.
Contacts with China
The name Daxia appears in Chinese from the 3rd century BC to designate a mythical kingdom
to the West, possibly a consequence of the first contacts with the expansion of the Greco-Bactrian
Kingdom, and then is used by the explorer Zhang Qian in 126 BC to designate Bactria.
The reports of Zhang Qian were put in writing in the Shiji by Sima Qian in the 1st century
BC.
They describe an important urban civilization of about one million people, living in walled
cities under small city kings or magistrates.
Daxia was an affluent country with rich markets, trading in an incredible variety of objects,
coming from as far as Southern China.
By the time Zhang Qian visited Daxia, there was no longer a major king, and the Bactrian
were suzerains to the nomadic Yuezhi, who were settled to the north of their territory
beyond the Oxus.
Overall Zhang Qian depicted a rather sophisticated but demoralized people who were afraid of
war.
Following these reports, the Chinese emperor Wu Di was informed of the level of sophistication
of the urban civilizations of Ferghana, Bactria and Parthia, and became interested in developing
commercial relationship with them: "The Son of Heaven on hearing all this reasoned
thus: Ferghana and the possessions of Bactria and Parthia are large countries, full of rare
things, with a population living in fixed abodes and given to occupations somewhat identical
with those of the Chinese people, but with weak armies, and placing great value on the
rich produce of China".
These contacts immediately led to the dispatch of multiple embassies from the Chinese, which
helped to develop the Silk Road.
Tokharistan
Following the settlement of the Yuezhi, the general area of Bactria came to be called
Tokharistan.
The territory of Tokharistan was identical with Kushan Bactria, including the areas of
Surkhandarya, Southern Tajikistan and Northern Afghanistan.
The first literary mentions of Tokharistan appear at the end of the 4th century in Chinese
Buddhist sources.
However, the first mention of the Tókharoi appear much earlier, in the 1st century BC,
when Strabo mentions that "the Tókharoi, together with the Assianis, Passianis and
Sakaraulis, took part in the destruction of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom" in the second
half of the 2nd century BC.
Ptolemy also mentions a large Tokharian tribe in Bactria, describing the central role of
the Tokharians among other tribes in Bactria.
From the 1st century AD to the 3rd century AD, Tokharistan was under the rule of the
Kushans.
They were followed by the Sassanids.
Later, in the 5th century, it was controlled by the Xionites and the Hephthalites but was
reconquered by the Sassanids, it was later conquered by the Arabs and then the Mongols.
Onset of Islam Thirty years after the death of the Prophet
Muhammad, the Arabs defeated the Persian Sassanids during the Rashidun Caliphate.
The Muslim Umayyad Caliphate, which was founded in 661, ruled over Iran and much of the Middle
East, including Bactrian lands.
Advancing further the Muslims faced off with the Turk Shahis ruling in Bactria and defeated
them.
In 663, they attacked Bactria, which the Turki Shahis had taken from the Western Turks by
this time.
The Umayyad forces captured the area around Balkh, including Nava Vihara Monastery, causing
the Turki Shahis to retreat to the Kabul Valley.
Bactrian people The Bactrians were the inhabitants of Bactria.
Several important trade routes from India and China passed through Bactria and, as early
as the Bronze Age, this had allowed the accumulation of vast amounts of wealth by the mostly nomadic
population.
The first proto-urban civilization in the area arose during the 2nd millennium BC.
Control of these lucrative trade routes, however, attracted foreign interest, and in the 6th
century BC the Bactrians were conquered by the Persians, and in the 4th century BC by
the Ancient Macedonians.
These conquests marked the end of the Bactrian independence.
From around 304 BC the area formed part of the Seleucid Empire, and from around 250 BC
it was the centre of a Greco-Bactrian kingdom, ruled by the descendants of Greeks who had
settled there following the conquest of Alexander the Great.
These people, also known in Sanskrit as Yavanas, worked in cooperation with the native Bactrian
aristocracy.
By the early 2nd century BC the Greco-Bactrians had created an impressive empire that stretched
southwards to include northwest India.
By about 135 BC, however, this kingdom had been overrun by invading Yuezhi tribes, an
invasion that later brought about the rise of the powerful Kushan Empire.
From this point the Bactrians tend to disappear from the historical record, a disappearance
made final by the Arab invasion of the 8th century AD.
The Bactrians spoke Bactrian, a northeastern Iranian language, descended from Avestan,
and most closely related to extinct Khwarezmian, modern Yaghnobi, and Ossetian.
Bactrian went extinct, replaced by southeastern Iranian languages such as Pashto, Yidgha,
Munji, and Ishkashmi.
The Encyclopaedia Iranica states:
Bactrian thus occupies an intermediary position between Pashto and Yidgha-Munji on the one
hand, Sogdian, Choresmian, and Parthian on the other: it is thus in its natural and rightful
place in Bactria.
The principal religions of the area before Islam were Zoroastrianism and Buddhism.
The Bactrian people are primarily the ancestors of modern-day Tajiks as well as Pashtuns.
Regarding Tajiks, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:
The Tajiks are the direct descendants of the Iranian peoples whose continuous presence
in Central Asia and northern Afghanistan is attested from the middle of the 1st millennium
bc.
The ancestors of the Tajiks constituted the core of the ancient population of Khwārezm
and Bactria, which formed part of Transoxania.
They were included in the empires of Persia and Alexander the Great, and they intermingled
with such later invaders as the Kushāns and Hepthalites in the 1st–6th centuries ad.
Over the course of time, the eastern Iranian dialect that was used by the ancient Tajiks
eventually gave way to Farsi, a western dialect spoken in Iran and Afghanistan.
See also Bakhtiari people
Dard people Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex
Tillya Tepe Bactrian camel
Bahlika people Greater Khorasan
Dalverzin Tepe Balkh
References
Notes
External links Bactrian Coins
Bactrian Gold Livius.org: Bactria
Batriane du nord—about the Termez region, an archeological site
Art of the Bronze Age: Southeastern Iran, Western Central Asia, and the Indus Valley,
an exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on
Bactria