Bactria

The Avestan name of the land, Bāxδī, listed in the first chapter of the Vendidad among the sixteen good lands that Ahura Mazda created, where it is called “the beautiful, with uplifted banners,” a phrase taken to evoke a prosperous country of forts and standards. It is the easternmost-rooted form of the name and the oldest, belonging to the sacred geography of Zoroastrianism, in which Bactria figures as one of the holy Aryan countries. The Avestan-script form follows the standard transliteration letter for letter, the script itself being a later Sasanian invention for the orally transmitted liturgy.

Bāxδī is the first Avestan form in this atlas, and it announces what the language is here for: the Vendidad’s roll of the sixteen lands preserves the names of the eastern Iranian world, Sogdiana, Margiana, the Helmand, the Seven Rivers, at a depth no other source reaches. Bactria’s name in that list, with its δ where Old Persian has xt, shows the eastern Iranian shape of the word beside the southwestern Achaemenid one, the same land named by two branches of Iranian as it would later be by Greek, Indian, and Chinese.

The Akkadian name of the province, Baḫtar, the form Bactria takes in the Babylonian version of the Behistun inscription, written in the classical Mesopotamian cuneiform that the Achaemenid chancellery kept as the third of its languages. The Babylonian scribes rendered Old Persian Bāxtriš as ba-aḫ-tar, dropping the difficult final cluster and giving the name a plain Akkadian shape.

Baḫtar completes the trilingual at Behistun, the third witness beside Old Persian Bāxtriš and Elamite Bākšiš. The three forms are not borrowings one from another but parallel official renderings of the same satrapy name, each cut in its own script for its own reading public; together they show a single Persian word refracted through the three great writing traditions the empire inherited. It is the same imperial machinery that names Egypt and the Ionians thrice over: to be a province of Darius was, among other things, to have one’s name set down in three tongues at once.

The Elamite name of the province, Bākšiš, the form in which Bactria appears in the Elamite version of Darius the Great’s great trilingual inscription at Behistun, among the lands the king lists as his. Elamite, lacking the consonant cluster of Old Persian Bāxtriš, rendered the name with its own syllabary as ba-ak-ši-iš, smoothing the -xtr- to -kš-; a second, more learned Elamite spelling, ba-ik-tur-ri-iš, keeps closer to the Persian.

Bākšiš is one of the three chancellery faces of a single imperial name. The Achaemenids governed in three written languages, and at Behistun, Naqsh-e Rustam, and Persepolis the same satrapy is named in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian Akkadian together; Bactria’s Bāxtriš, Bākšiš, and Baḫtar are that trilingual set. The Elamite form is the one most reshaped by the receiving language, the Persian name caught in the act of being respelled by the scribes of an older Iranian bureaucracy that had no sound for its middle.

The Old Persian name of the satrapy, Bāxtriš, in the roll of lands at Behistun, where Bactria sits among the easternmost provinces of Darius’s empire beside Aria, Chorasmia, Sogdiana, and Gandara. The Achaemenids prized it as a wealthy and strategic frontier, governed often by a royal prince, and it appears in the trilingual inscription in the Elamite and Akkadian versions as well as the Old Persian, in the customary three chancellery languages.

Bāxtriš is the southwestern Iranian form beside the Avestan Bāxδī, the two differing where eastern Iranian δ answers to the xt of the Persian court language. It is also the form the Greeks heard and made into Baktría: standing in the same Behistun satrapy list as Parθava, it took the same road westward, through Greek and Latin, to become the Bactria of the modern map, while the eastern Bāxδī stayed in the liturgy and the hl-form went east to India.

The Greek name of the land, Baktrianḗ (the region) beside Báktra (its chief city), taken from the Iranian Bāxtriš. Bactria entered Greek horizons with Alexander, who took it with difficulty, and it became the seat of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, a Hellenistic state so remote that Greek authors called it the land “of the thousand cities”; its kings, known largely from their superb coinage, carried Greek rule to the edge of India.

Baktrianḗ is the form through which the West received the name, ancestor of the Latin Bactria and the English. It preserves the Iranian xt that the Persian court form had, frozen in Greek at the moment of borrowing, just as Parthía froze the rth of Parθava. The Greeks who ruled Bactria for a century and more left their version of its name to the modern world, even as the land itself passed back to Iranian and then Turkic and Mongol hands and kept, on the ground, the quite different name Balkh.

The Sanskrit name for Bactria and its people, Bāhlika, used in the epics, the Puranas, and the geographical and medical literature for the land beyond the northwestern passes, famous in India for its horses and its asafoetida. The form reflects the Iranian Bāxl with the xl/hl shape rather than the Old Persian xt, marking it, like the Sanskrit Pahlava for Parthia, as a borrowing of the softened eastern Iranian pronunciation.

Bāhlika is the Indian face of the name, and its hl is a quiet piece of evidence. Where Greek and Latin froze the older Bāxt-, India took the name in the later Bāxl- form that also gives Middle Persian Baxl and the modern Balkh; the same sound-change that turns Parthian Parθaw into Pahlaw stands behind the difference between Bactria and Bāhlika. India and the West thus name one land at two stages of a single Iranian word, the West early and India late.

The Classical Chinese name for Bactria, Dàxià, recorded in the Shiji from the report of the Han envoy Zhang Qian, who reached the region around 129 BCE and described a settled country of walled towns and markets, lately overrun by nomads. Whether Dàxià is a transcription of a native name (perhaps of the Tukhāra, the people who gave Bactria its later name Tokharistan) or an older Chinese geographical term reapplied to the western land is debated, which is why it is marked disputed here.

Dàxià is the page’s outlier, the one name not clearly descended from the Iranian Bāxtriš/Bāxδī. It belongs to the same entity by reference rather than by sound: like the Chinese Ānxī for Parthia, it is a name given from the far side of Asia by observers to whom the land’s own name may have come secondhand, through the nomads of the steppe. To the Han historians, the first great civilization of the west was simply Dàxià, and through Zhang Qian’s account it entered Chinese geography as the gateway to the lands beyond the Pamirs.

The Latin name of the land, Bactria (also Bactriana), taken from the Greek. Rome knew Bactria mainly through the histories of Alexander and as a byword for the remote and fabulous East; Curtius Rufus describes its rugged wealth, and Pliny places it on the Oxus at the edge of the known world. The form passed through Latin into the European languages as the standard name of the region.

Bactria is the western terminus of the Iranian name, the form modern atlases use. It completes a familiar pattern: the Iranian Bāxtriš, taken into Greek and then Latin, reaches the modern West with its ancient ct intact, while the same name in the East had long since become Bāhlika in India and Balkh in Persian. The land of a hundred cities is known to the West by the Greeks’ and Romans’ word for it, and to its own country by a name they would scarcely recognize.

The Middle Persian name of the land, Baxl, the Sasanian-era form of the old Iranian name, written in the Pahlavi script. By the regular change that turned Old Iranian -xt- and -θr- into -hl- and -xl- in the later language, Bāxtriš became Baxl, the same softening that turned Parthian Parθaw into Pahlaw; the Bactrian inhabitants’ own late form, βαχλο, shows the identical outcome.

Baxl is the living end of the name, the form that did not stay on a monument but went on being spoken. From it comes the Arabic Balḫ and the modern Balkh, the city’s name in Afghanistan to this day, so that the Achaemenid Bāxtriš of the Behistun rock and the dusty northern town are the same word a thousand years apart. Of all the names of Bactria, this is the one that the ground still answers to.