ABSTRACT
The binary of ‘Greek’ and ‘non-Greek’ has dominated the discourse about the spread of Hellenism to regions across the Hindukush. The Greeks who ruled in Bactria are thought to have come across a non-Greek or Indian cultural sphere upon their eventual trans-Hindukush appearance. It is often said that this prompted visible numismatic articulations like incorporating inscriptions into Indian scripts and languages on their coinage. Chronologically, this is adjudged to have taken place sometime during the late second century BCE, under the reigns of Greek rulers like Pantaleon, Agathokles and Eucratides. The finds of the non-Greek coins in the excavations at Taxila gave a further boost to this ‘narrative of the conquest’ as articulated in the interpretative writing of John Marshall, who adjudged Taxila to have become a ‘Greek’ city. Implicit in this was the observation that it had once been a non-Greek city where non-Greek coins circulated, and it only became Greek after the Bactrian Greeks advanced and established themselves there. But there was an Orientalist undercurrent at work here, too – Marshall was reflecting twentieth-century imperial interpretations and aptitudes on a past that was nearly 2,000 years old, by creating the divisions of Greek and non-Greek numismatics and weaving a Hellenising narrative around it. This chapter will try to re-examine this interpretative trope with new numismatic data that shed important light on the chronology of the so-called non-Greek or Indian coinage of Gandhara.
