Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [141]
Extinction of Greek over this vast area was not immediate. In the east, there is the fact that Bactrian, the official language of the Kushāna empire, which lasted from the middle of the first to the end of the second century AD, came to be written in Greek script. This is unique among Iranian languages, and it shows that the Kushāna had a longish period of cultural interaction with the Greeks. In AD 44, 190 years after the fall of the Indo-Greek kings, the sage Apollonius of Tyana is said to have had no difficulty communicating in Greek on a tour that took him all the way across the Hindu Kush to Taxila, where he was entertained (in Greek) by a Parthian king, who expatiated on his own Greek-style education.28 We know from official inscriptions that in the western regions Greek-speaking communities continued for several generations within the Parthian empire. There are Greek inscriptions at Susa, which had been the Greek capital as ‘Seleuceia on the Eulaeus’, one of them from AD 21; and farther west in Mesopotamia, in Seleuceia on the Tigris, there is a bilingual inscription in Greek and Parthian explicitly dated as late as AD 151, recording a Parthian victory over a (presumably) Greek-speaking Mesene, on the Persian Gulf, near modern Basra. (It is tellingly inscribed on the loins of a statue of Hercules, one language on each thigh.29) Mesene was also home to Isidorus of Charax, a Greek who around the time of Christ wrote a book, The Parthian Stations, describing the route across Parthia from south-west to north-east.
The Parthians’ own language policy was to reverse history. They reinstated Aramaic as the lingua franca of their empire, leaving numerous inscriptions in it, and also using its writing system for their own (Iranian) language. The fact that this was possible shows that Greek had never fully replaced it during the two centuries of Seleucid rule.
But the Parthians were not anxious to efface the heritage of Greek rule in Iran. Their coins all bear a legend in Greek:
BASILEOS BASILEON ARSAKOU EUERGETOU DIKAIOU EPIPHANOUS PHILELLENOS
Of the King of Kings, Arsaces, Beneficent, Just, Outstanding, Greek-loving.
And Plutarch recounts the story that when in 53 BC the Parthian king Orodes received the gruesome evidence of the Roman general Crassus’s defeat, his severed head, he was actually attending a performance of Euripides’ Bacchae.*
Perhaps because Greek remained the language of the neighbouring superpower, the Roman empire, its prestige lasted in Parthia long after its use must have actually died out. The Parthian kingdom in Iran lasted for five centuries. In AD 224 the last Parthian yielded to Ardashir, the first king of the next dynasty, the Sassanids, who spoke Persian. And yet when his son Shapur came to have his own achievements inscribed on rock at Naqsh-i Rustam, facing the tombs of the Persian kings at Persepolis, he wrote them up in three languages: Persian, Parthian and Greek.30
Syria, Palestine, Egypt
Iran was never part of the Roman empire, and Mesopotamia only in very small part.† So they never acquired the sense of permanent Greek possessions that came to characterise Syria, Palestine and Egypt. They had been incorporated into the empire of Alexander, hence ‘Hellenised’, in 332 BC; in 64 BC the Roman general Pompey had incorporated Syria and Palestine as a directly governed province of the empire; and in 30 BC Augustus had added Egypt, deposing Cleopatra, last of the Ptolemies. These Roman conquests, as we have seen, had no linguistic