THE BACTRIAN LANGUAGE AND ITS GREEK SCRIPT

Bactrian was a language which was spoken in the Central Asian region of Bactria (in present-day Afghanistan,Pakistan and Tajikistan) and used as the official language of the Kushan and the Hephthalite empires.


Bactrian was written predominantly in an alphabet which is essentially the Greek Alphabet, apart from some minor changes. The script was known natively  as Greco-Bactrian, Kushan or Kushano-Bactrian.The Bactrian language and its script are known from inscriptions, coins, seals, manuscripts, and other documents.

The Bactrian alphabet was a lightly modified version of the Greek alphabet used for the  Bactrian language. It seems that this writing system was in use from about 120-900 AD.

The Bactrian alphabet was very similar to Greek, containing 22 Greek-based letters and one additional letter. It was written left to right. I was considering not giving this script a post and lumping it in with the Greek scripts, but I had such a hard time recognizing it on the following coins that I think it's different enough to be called its own writing system.

Following the conquest of Bactria by Alexander the Great in 323 BCE, Greek was the administrative language of his Hellenistic successors for about two centuries- meaning the Seleucid and the Greco-Bactrian Kingdoms. Eastern Scythian tribes (the Saka, or Sacaraucae of Greek sources) invaded the territory around 140 BCE, and at some time after 124 BCE, Bactria was overrun by a confederation of tribes belonging to the Great Yuezhi and Tokhari. In the 1st century CE, the Kushana – one of the Yuezhi tribes – founded the ruling dynasty of the Kushan Empire.Under Kushan rule, Bactria became known as Tukhara or Tokhara, and later as Tokharistan. 

The Kushan Empire initially retained the Greek language for administrative purposes, but soon began to use Bactrian. The Bactrian Rabatak inscription (discovered in 1993 and deciphered in 2000) records that the Kushan king Kanishka (c. 127 CE)
discarded Greek (Ionian) as the language of administration and adopted Bactrian .

 The Greek language accordingly vanished from official use and only Bactrian was later attested. The Greek script, however, remained and was used to write Bactrian.The Bactrian language and its Greek Alphabet was also used by the Xionites, a Chinese tribe, who transmitted it to China.

The Rabatak Inscription

The territorial expansion of the Kushans helped propagate Bactrian in other parts of Central Asia and North India.

In the 3rd century, the Kushan territories west of the Indus river fell to the Sasanians, and Bactrian began to be influenced by Middle Persian. Next to Pahlavi script and (occasionally) Brahmi script, some coinage of this period is still in Greco-Bactrian script. Beginning in the mid-4th century, Bactria and northwestern India yielded to the Hephthalite tribes. The Hephthalite period is marked by linguistic diversity. The Hephthalites ruled their territories until the 7th century when they were overrun by the Arabs, after which the official use of Bactrian ceased. Although Bactrian briefly survived in other usage, that too eventually ceased, and the latest known examples of the Bactrian script, found in the Tochi Valley in Pakistan, date to the end of the 9th century.

Letter (ink on leather) in the Bactrian language from "Meyam, King of the people of Kadag, the governor of the famous and prosperous King of Kings Peroz". (© Nicolas Sims-Williams)The letter is dated to the year 461/62 CE and comes from the archive of the kingdom of Rob in Bactria (North Afghanistan). Meyam calls himself the King of Kadagstan (located in Bactria, northeast of Rob, in the region Baghlan) and is subordinate to the Sasanian king Peroz (457–484 CE).

 The use of the Greek script is unique to Bactrian. Although ambiguities remain, some of the disadvantages were overcome by using heta (Ͱ, ͱ) for /h/ and by introducing sho (Ϸ, ϸ) to represent /ʃ/. Xi (Ξ, ξ) and psi (Ψ, ψ) were not used for writing Bactrian as the ks and ps sequences do not occur in Bactrian. They were however probably used to represent numbers (just as other Greek letters were).

 Bactrian document,which relates to Mir son of Bek (Mir ibn Bek) and his brother Bab, both of whom are mentioned in a number of the Arabic documents from Khurasan in the Khalili Collection.

Sites at which Bactrian language inscriptions have been found are (in North-South order) Afrasiyab in Uzbekistan; Kara-Tepe, Airtam, Delbarjin, Balkh, Kunduz, Baglan, Ratabak/Surkh Kotal, Oruzgan, Kabul, Dasht-e Navur, Ghazni, Jagatu in Afghanistan; and Islamabad, Shatial Bridge and Tochi Valley in Pakistan.  Of eight known manuscript fragments in Greco-Bactrian script, one is from Lou-lan and seven from Toyoq, where they were discovered by the second and third Turpan expeditions under Albert von Le Coq. One of these may be a Buddhist text. One other manuscript, in Manichaean script, was found at Qočo by Mary Boyce in 1958.

Sources: Wikipedia, The Schoyen Collection ,The Countenance of the Other , The Khalili Collections