Greco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek Kingdom

Born around 250 BC when the Greek satrap Diodotus broke Bactria (northern Afghanistan and southern Central Asia) away from the Seleucid Empire, one of the successor states seeded by Alexander's conquests and his Greek and Macedonian colonists.

2nd century BC: a prosperous Hellenistic kingdom of a thousand cities that pushed south over the Hindu Kush into the Indus valley and northwestern India, where under kings like Menander I the Indo-Greek offshoot ruled a wealthy Greek-Indian world.

Territory in the record

Bactria and Sogdia (modern Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan) and, in its Indo-Greek phase, the Kabul valley, Gandhara, and the northwestern Indian subcontinent.

The Bactrian homeland was overrun in the 2nd century BC by nomadic invasions from the steppe (the Yuezhi/Scythians), who later coalesced into the Kushan Empire. The Indo-Greek kingdoms south of the mountains lingered until roughly the start of the 1st century AD before being absorbed.

The far-eastern edge of the Hellenistic world, a Greek civilization surviving for two centuries on the frontier of the steppe and India. Its lasting mark is cultural fusion: Greco-Buddhist art, above all the Gandhara school that first depicted the Buddha in human form using Greek sculptural style, and the transmission of Greek artistic and possibly philosophical ideas eastward. The Milinda Panha records a dialogue between the Greek king Menander and a Buddhist sage.