From Bactria to Taprobane: Selected Works of Osmund Bopearachchi- Central Asian and Indian Numismatics - Volume- I (An Old and Rare Book)

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The suggestion to publish my selected works was made by my good friend Prof. Tansen Sen, then Head and Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Nalanda Sriwijaya Centre in Singapore. If it were not for his enthusiasm and for the unfailing cooperation of Mr. Ramesh Jain of Manohar Publishers & Distributors, this project would never have become a reality. I am also most grateful to my dear friend Prof. B.D, Chattopadhyaya, an eminent scholar of early Indian history who has inspired me immensely in my research in numismatics and historiography, for writing the ‘Prelude’ to these two volumes.

I wish to express my sincere thanks to Ms Katharine Wallerstein and very particularly to Dr. Alexandros Tzamalis for translating some selected articles from French into English, a project financed by the Margot and Tom Pritzker Family Foundation, to whom I express my profound gratitude. Special thanks for their unfailing help and encouragement to Prof. Robert H. Sharf, D.H. Chen Distinguished Professor of Buddhist Studies, and Dr. Sanjyot Mehendale, Chair and Vice Chair, respectively, of the Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Finally, I would like to express my appreciation to all the editors of the respective journals and proceedings of the colloquia who have generously given us permission to publish the articles selected for these two volumes.

From Bactria to Taprobane is divided into two major volumes, the first on ‘Central Asian and Indian Numismatics’ and the second on ‘Art History and Maritime Trade’. The first volume is grouped into four sections: ‘Pre-Bactrian Numismatics’ (chapters 1-6); ‘Bactrian and Indo-Greek Numismatics’ (chapters 8-28); ‘Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian and Kushan Numismatics’ (chapters 29- 36); and Cultural Heritage of Afghanistan’ (chapters 37-39). This choice was made deliberately to isolate the Central Asian and Indian numismatic studies which constitute the main corpus of my studies. Within the thematic sections the articles are arranged in a chronological sequence.

I have to confess that these studies cannot be fully understood without prior knowledge of the major books that I have published in between and, for this reason, have given the complete bibliography of my publications at the end of this volume.

My formation as a numismatist 1] owe to my dear esteemed teachers. During the last thirty-four years, Professor Paul Bernard has been my guide, both as a teacher and critical adviser. None of my major publications reached the printer without his prior approval. Professor George Le Rider and Mr. Raoul Curiel who are no longer with us today, shared their vast knowledge with me and served as great examples of the kind of rigour of thought and critical spirit that must be applied to the study of historical documents. It is with immense pleasure that I dedicate this volume to Paul Bernard and to the loving memory of George Le Rider and Raoul Curie.

This volume narrates the story of my life as a numismatist. The reconstruction of the history of the Greeks in Bactria and India and their nomadic successors (Scythians, Parthians, and Kushans) depends mainly on coins as ancient texts dealing with the early history of these kingdoms are rare, only a few short passages from Greek and Latin authors, and some Indian and Chinese texts. It is thanks to the coins that we know about the existence of forty-five Greek kings who ruled in Bactria and India, when the written sources mention only seven. The coins are crucial in understanding the role of these kings: their stylistic features suggest broad chronological periods; overstrikes of one king on the coins of another indicate the succession of reigns; and minting techniques, metrology, iconography, and monograms associated with find spots aid the evaluation of the geographical localization of different kingdoms. When finished my Ph.D. thesis under the supervision of Paul Bernard, the number of Bactrian and Indo-Greek coins, including all the published ones and the unpublished specimens conserved in public and private collections that I] was able to examine were limited to approximately thirty thousand. This picture drastically changed in 1992, just one year after my first major publication Monnaies gréco-bactriennes et indo-grecques, Catalogue raisonné (Bibliothéque Nationale, Paris, 1991). As a result of accidental finds and illegal excavations which followed the political instability in Afghanistan, a large number of hoards, some colossal, of Graeco-Bactrian, Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, Indo- Parthian and Kushan coins were discovered in Central Asia and Pakistan.

Apart from coin hoards, inscriptions surfaced during the last twenty years have provided new insights into the economic activities, modes of production, and artistic tastes of these regions, as have the discovery of thousands of artefacts, sculptures, and ceramics.

As for the expansion of the Scythians and Yuezhi in Sogdiana, we rely mostly on their material culture, since Scythians did not start minting coins until they settled in the North-West Frontier. Their kurgans (funerary mounds) punctuate the long march toward India. Discoveries of their artefacts at Pasirik in the Altai, Orlat, Khalchayan in Sogdiana, and Tilla Tepe and, more recently, in Jelalabad, Mes Aynak and Vardak in Afghanistan are of great importance in understanding the customs and warfare of the Scythians and Yuezhi.

The discovery of an unprecedented number of inscriptions in Greek, Bactrian, and Gandhari enables us to tackle fundamental questions regarding the relative chronology of the Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, and Kushans who reigned in Central Asia and India.

These are the new discoveries of thousands of coins that I have attempted to record and analyse to the best of my ability. When reading my publications, one is actually aware of how often I have changed my own opinion regarding the chronology and geographical attribution of certain rulers. In the course of my research | realized that the history of Greeks and their successors in central Asia and India, can no longer be written solely on the basis of numismatics. Coins are no doubt essential in this exercise as a primary source of information, but other forms of human activity such as architecture, sculpture, epigraphy, ceramics and artefacts cannot be neglected any more. A general vision of their history cannot be obtained simply by reshuffling the chronological order of these kings every time we come across a new overstrike or a new monogram, by attempting to establish a genealogy without literary evidence, or by conveniently assessing royal marriage alliances. Given the now ocean of data, the primary task of a good historian has become more and more complex.

All good historians since the time of Theodore Bayer have attempted to propose a reliable account of the history of the Greeks and their successors in Bactria and India. Today we have four tons of coins at our disposal. Without the immense contributions of our scholarly predecessors we would not have reached today’s level of scholarship. I am sure the next generation of historians will feel the same when they review our contributions. We may never know the absolute truth about the history of these enigmatic rulers, yet what is important is to come as close to it as possible. This is what I have attempted to demonstrate in my publications, based on my own investigations and the contributions of eminent archaeologists, historians, numismatists, epigraphists and art historians of Central Asia and India. The latest developments of these researches will be surmised in my forthcoming book: Indo-Greek Kingdoms Revisited.

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