Indo-Greek Kingdom

The Indo-Greek Kingdom, also called the Yavana kingdom, was a group of Hellenistic states in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent that flourished from about 180 BC to the beginning of the first century AD. It emerged when the Graeco-Bactrian king Demetrius I crossed the Hindu Kush and took over Gandhara and the Punjab, and it was never a single centralised state: kings ruled from regional capitals such as Taxila, Sagala, Pushkalavati and Bagram, and their territories constantly split and recombined. The Indo-Greek kings are known above all from their coinage, which pairs Greek legends and royal portraits with Indian symbols and, on some issues, bilingual inscriptions in Greek and Brahmi or Kharosthi. The most famous of them, Menander, appears in the Buddhist text Milinda Panha as a philosopher-king who questioned the monk Nagasena, and the kingdoms' blending of Greek and Indian religious imagery helped shape Greco-Buddhist art in Gandhara. Pressure from the Indo-Scythians, the Yuezhi and the Parthians, and the rise of Indian powers in the east, gradually reduced the Greek realms; the last known rulers, Strato II and Strato III, held parts of the Punjab until about AD 10.