Indo-Greek Kingdom

The Indo-Greek Kingdom was a Hellenistic state that ruled large parts of the northwestern Indian subcontinent from roughly 180 BCE to around 10 CE, emerging when the Greco-Bactrian king Demetrius I invaded India and Greek rule became established south of the Hindu Kush.

It is conventionally dated from about 180 BCE, when Apollodotus I became the first king to rule solely within the subcontinent rather than from Bactria, marking its separation from the parent Greco-Bactrian realm. At its height under Menander I (reigned c. 155-130 BCE), whose capital was Sagala in the Punjab, the kingdom covered around 1.1 million square kilometres and controlled centres such as Taxila, Pushkalavati, and Bagram. Rather than a single unified state, it functioned as a shifting array of regional polities ruled by some forty Greek kings and queens known largely through their coinage, which pioneered bilingual Greek and Kharosthi legends fusing Hellenistic and Indian religious imagery. Menander is celebrated in the Buddhist text Milindapanha as a convert, and the kingdom is credited with catalysing Greco-Buddhist art and aiding the eastward diffusion of Buddhism. As the longest-lived Hellenistic-Indian state, its cultural synthesis outlasted its political collapse, which came when the last Greek ruler, Strato II (or Strato III), was overrun by Scythian and other incursions around 10 CE.