ABSTRACT

When in the early second century BCE Greek settlers in Bactria began to exert political control over Gandhāra, they entered a complex cultural landscape that included local Indianized principalities and an expanding network of Buddhist monastic centres. The first Greek rulers in Gandhāra adapted to this environment by issuing a new bilingual coinage incorporating the local language and local cultural motifs and by lending support to Buddhist institutions. By the end of the first century BCE, we observe a reversal of the direction of cultural borrowing, as local rulers and new invaders increasingly appropriate Greek cultural forms in their sponsorship of Buddhism, culminating in the classicism of the Kuṣāṇa period that is reflected in mature Gandhāran art and in literary works such as the Questions of Menander. Yet another type of evidence – here fully utilized for the first time – are the onomastic and family patterns in the corpus of Gāndhārī inscriptions, providing grounds for a re-evaluation of the Questions of Menander.