ndia. 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;
at the same time the native language came into use by the side of the
Greek. On the coins struck in India, the well-known Indian alphabet (called
Brahmi by the Indians, the older form of the Devanagari) is used; on the
coins struck in Afghanistan and in the Punjab the Kharosh[t.]hi alphabet,
which is derived directly from the Aramaic and was in common use in the
western parts of India, as is shown by one of the inscriptions of Asoka and
by the recent discovery of many fragments of Indian manuscripts, written in
Kharosh[t.]hi, in eastern Turkestan (formerly this alphabet has been called
Arianic or Bactrian Pali; the true name is derived from Indian sources).

The weakness of the Graeco-Bactrian kingdoms was shown by their sudden and
complete overthrow. In the west the Arsacid empire had risen, and
Mithradates I. and Phraates II. began to conquer some of their western
districts, especially Areia (Herat). But in the north a new race appeared,
Mongolian tribes, called [v.03 p.0181] Scythians by the Greeks, amongst
which the Tochari, identical with the Yue-chi (_q.v._) of the Chinese, were
the most important. In 159 B.C., according to Chinese sources, they entered
Sogdiana, in 139 they conquered Bactria, and during the next generation
they had made an end to the Greek rule in eastern Iran. Only in India the
Greek conquerors (Menander, Apollodotus) maintained themselves some time
longer. But in the middle of the 1st century B.C. the whole of eastern Iran
and western India belonged to the great "Indo-Scythian" empire. The ruling
dynasty had the name Kushan (Kushana), by which they are called on their
coins and in the Persian sources. The most famous of these kings is
Kanishka (ca. 123-153), the great protector of Buddhism. The principal seat
of the Tochari and the Kushan dynasty seems to have been Bactria; but they
always maintained the eastern parts of modern Afghanistan and Baluchistan,
while the western regions (Areia, _i.e._ Herat, Seistan and part of the
Helmund valley) were conquered by the Arsacids. In the 3rd century the
Kushan dynasty began to decay; about A.D. 320 the Gupta empire was founded
in India. Thus the Kushanas were reduced to eastern Iran, where they had to
fight agai