Bactra

Bāxδī is the Avestan name of Bactra, listed in the first chapter of the Vidēvdād among the sixteen good lands created by Ahura Mazda, with the epithet “the beautiful, with uplifted banners.” The land-list does not separate city from country, and Bāxδī names the oasis settlement and its territory as one thing, in the oldest Iranian form of the name; the Avestan-script spelling is a Sasanian-era fixing of a much older oral text. On the Bactria page this entry stands for the land; it stands here because later Zoroastrian tradition read the Vidēvdād’s Bāxδī as the holy city itself, the seat of Vishtaspa, first royal patron of the prophet.

Within this page’s family the Avestan form is the headwater: its -xδ- is the cluster that Old Persian rendered -xt- (Bāxtriš), Greek heard as -kt- (Báktra), and Middle Persian wore down to the -x- of Baxl. The banners of the formula have been read as the standards of a prosperous fortified place, which is to say that the oldest attestation of the name already describes a city worth defending; the epithet and the etymology have been argued over for two centuries, and the entry keeps the traditional reading with that caution on record.

Báktra is the Greek name of the city, a neuter plural distinguished in Greek usage from Baktrianḗ, the land; Herodotus already uses it in the fifth century BCE, when Masistes flees the Persian court by the road to Bactra, and for him the city is simply where the eastern empire’s power sits. Strabo, drawing on the historians of Alexander and the Greek kingdom that followed, lists Bactra first among the Bactrian cities and records its other name, Zariaspa, a doublet that has exercised geographers since. Under the Greek kings of Bactria the city on Greek lips was a capital of their own.

The form’s interest lies in that shift of standpoint. Most Greek names for eastern places in this atlas are horizon-words for somewhere Greeks had heard of; Báktra began that way in Herodotus and then, uniquely among them, became the seat of a Greek throne for two centuries, a name Greeks wrote home from rather than about. The city-form also anchored the whole family in the West: Latin took it over unchanged, and it is the reason the modern language of scholarship says Bactria at all.

Bactra is the Latin form of the Greek city-name, taken over with its neuter plural intact. Its most famous attestation is poetic: on the shield of Aeneas, Vergil sets Antony coming to Actium with the strength of the Orient, from “farthest Bactra,” ultima Bactra, the city standing as the eastern limit of the world a Roman fleet might have to face. The geographers use the name soberly for the Bactrian capital, but it is the poets’ Bactra, remote and ominous, that Latin literature remembered.

The entry shows what Rome did with a name it inherited but never approached: it made the city a measure of distance. No Roman army saw Bactra; the name served instead as the far end of imaginable empire, paired with Indus and Ganges in the rhetoric of boundless ambition. Where the Greek entry on this page records a capital Greeks actually ruled, the Latin one records a symbol, the same four letters doing entirely different work one language to the west.

Baxl is the Middle Persian name of the city, the ancient Bāxδī/Bāxtri- worn down by a millennium of sound change to a single heavy syllable. The Sasanian catalogue of provincial capitals, the Šahrestānīhā ī Ērānšahr, names Baxl ī bāmīg, “Baxl the radiant,” as the place where the šahrestān of Nawāzag was founded, the epithet the Zoroastrian books give the city as a matter of course; in Sasanian usage the name is squarely the city’s, the old ambiguity between town and land having resolved toward the town. The spelling here is the Inscriptional Pahlavi rendering used for Middle Persian in this atlas.

The form is the family’s bridge into the living present: Arabic took Baxl over as Balkh with a flip of the liquid, and every later map descends from that. It is also a study in compression, five steps of the same name running Bāxδī, Bāxtriš, Báktra, Baxl, Balkh, in which only the initial consonant survives the whole journey untouched. The radiant epithet outlived the empire that coined it; “Balkh the radiant” was still the city’s honorific when Arabic geographers called it the mother of cities.

Balkh is the Arabic name of the city, the Middle Persian Baxl taken into Arabic with the liquid and fricative exchanged, a metathesis of the kind border names often undergo. From the Arab conquest of Khurasan in the later seventh century the name is constant in Arabic historiography and geography; Yāqūt’s great geographical dictionary gives the city a long entry under Balkh and transmits its proudest title, Umm al-bilād, “mother of cities.” The form is a continuity case at this atlas’s edge, carried past Late Antiquity because it is the living end of the ancient name.

On this page Balkh is the terminus: the only form still in daily use, the name of the modern Afghan town and province that sit where Bāxδī was praised in the Avesta. The family thus runs unbroken from the oldest stratum of Iranian religious poetry to a present-day address, some three thousand years on one oasis, and the Arabic entry is the link that got it across the medieval divide. Few names in the atlas connect their first attestation to a working post office by so short a chain.