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During the last ten years the corpus of Bactrian texts has increased dramatically. The dates of the Bactrian documents range from 342 to 781 a.d., a span of more than four centuries extending through the Kushano-Sasanian, Kidarite, Hephthalite, and Turkish periods, well into Islamic times. Apart from a few unidentifiable fragments and texts of uncertain type, the new Bactrian documents may be divided into four groups: (i) legal documents such as contracts and receipts; (ii) lists and accounts; (iii) letters; and (iv) Buddhist texts. As a result of these new finds, the corpus of Bactrian available for study is now much larger-perhaps as much as a hundred times larger—than it was ten years ago. Our knowledge of the Bactrian lexicon has increased correspondingly, perhaps by three or four times. This chapter examines this enlarged Bactrian vocabulary for linguistic data in the form of names and titles, loanwords and calques, in which one may hope to identify traces of the languages of the many peoples who held sway in Bactria during the course of its long and turbulent history.

The Oxus had a potent influence on the imaginations of men in the nineteenth century. It was rumored that rich deposits of gold lay unmolested along its banks, and that the actual descendants of Alexander the Great lived near its upper reaches. Russian archaeologists argue that the Oxus Treasure was buried in ancient times by the priests of a Zoroastrian temple located nearby at a place now called Takht-i Sangin (“The Throne of Stone”). It is shown that Franks indeed purchased the medallion during the buying frenzy set off by the Oxus Treasure, and that it was reported (or assumed) by him to have come from the hoard. In precisely the period when the Oxus Treasure came to light, a Bactrian coin was found that proved that one of Eucratides' contemporaries—the rival king Agathocles—had paid homage to Alexander by putting the hero's portrait on silver coins.

This chapter concentrates on Coptic as a documentary language, arguing that the comparisons among Syriac, Bactrian, and Coptic uncover more differences than similarities, and that these differences are, unsurprisingly, revealing of the distinctive situations in the individual societies. It begins by looking at the case of Coptic because, despite recent discoveries in both Syriac and Bactrian, the Egyptian papyri provided for Coptic a depth of documentation unavailable elsewhere. The chapter notes that the quantity of documentary Coptic published so far, measured in raw numbers of texts, is a fraction—about and eighth—of that of Greek.

This chapter focuses primarily on the dialects of Aramaic, especially Syriac, in a part of the ancient Near East for which it has much less surviving written material than it has from Egypt. It adduces the remarkable discoveries of documents in Bactrian in the last fifteen years, which help to provide an unexpected and revealing eastern perspective on the situation in western Asia. The chapter notes that the Aramaic zone differed from the Egyptian in some ways: One is that Aramaic had been, under the Persian empire and even afterward, an official language in which the empire's business and that of individuals was conducted over a vast geographic span, from the first cataract of the Nile to at least Bactria; second is that there was probably no period at which Aramaic was not used in some written form for everyday purposes.

Traditional historical approaches to the collapse of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom in the mid-second century BC look to nomadic invasions from Central Asia as the main cause. Archaeological evidence for long-term and peaceful nomadic-settled coexistence in Bactria suggests instead a symbiotic relationship, albeit one with periods of tension. The testimony of Greek and Chinese historians, analysed in this light, also presents a more complex picture, in which the fall of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom was due to a multiplicity of factors.

This chapter details events that occurred from 323 to 135 BCE. It shows that between the arrival of the Greeks and their departure, India became a literate culture. This does not mean that literacy was very widespread in society: it does not have to penetrate to every level to be an important technological innovation. Some Indians discovered that this new technology of the invaders was useful, and employed it for their own purposes. Not least, it represented the beginning of an Indian “coinage tradition.” The Bactrian kings issued a coinage resembling the Seleucid (though the artistic quality of the portraits on them is startlingly high, and Bactrian coins may be, in the opinion of many, the most beautiful coins ever produced). They are entirely Greek in conception.