Joe Shearer
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It was in fact not originated in this area but elsewhere. The culture spread here, in a manner of speaking.
Those interested might like to read either A. K. Narain, who wrote an excellent book called The Indo-Greeks sometime in the 50s, or, since some of us don't like Indian authors, W. W. Tarn's The Greeks in Bactria and India, written before the war, but subsequently revised and updated, again in the 50s, on the subject.
Very briefly, in the aftermath of the sudden and untimely death of Alexander III in Babylon, his successors, the Diadochoi, divided his kingdom into four parts, with Seleucus getting the massive part in the east (the others got Egypt, Syria and Macedon respectively). The territory was so vast that the fringes of it broke away into an independent Greek settlement at Balkh. These kings, under several dynasties, ruled as far east as Kanauj, but distance weakened them as much as it had weakened Seleucus earlier. Their kingdom divided, in its own turn, and the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom became the Graeco-Bactrian and the Indo-Greek (correctly, the Graeco-Indians) kingdoms.
The Indo-Greeks ruled from Kabul, from Peshawar, from Taxila, and from Charsadda. The term Gandhara comes from Vedic references, but it became prominent only under the Indo-Greek breakaways from the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. It is interesting that the Mahabharata was being expanded and added to just about around this time, and the character of Gandhari, the princess from Gandhar, who married the blind king Dhritarashtra and bore Duryodhana and his ninetynine brothers and a sister, has a prominent part to play. As also her brother, now a byword for unscrupulous cunning and courtier politics, Shakuni, the master of gambling.
The fusion of Indian and Greek culture continued; the region was known for its religious philosophy, as Buddhism spread there, and several of the kings may actually have been Buddhist themselves (there are references to the Sramanas among the Bactrians in Greek writing, at a time when 'Bactrian' meant oriental Greek).
The Indo-Greek part was much weaker than its parent kingdom, but extended from Jalalabad to Mathura. It was overthrown, or succeeded, by one of its Scythian generals. Gandhar the region, as distinct from Gandhar the culture, continued to exist through Indo-Scythian, Indo-Parthian and finally Kushanas, with the Ephthalites providing an unpleasant coda, until the Shahi kings took over, lasting until Mahmud of Ghazni's massive raids. This border kingdom was one of the first to fall, and it was ever afterwards ruled from Kabul or Lahore. Internally, the power of the Ephthalites was broken by the later Guptas, and they ruled the interior, and gave the sub-continent administrative systems and conventions that lasted well into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, the borderland was traditionally the stronghold of the Shahi kings well into the period when the Rajputs ruled north India.
I realise the temptation for such-minded commentators to slip in the allusion that in the separation between the Shahi kings on the borders and the Guptas, and their successors, culminating in the Rajputs finally in the interiors, there is already the beginning of a segregation between the land of the Indus and the land of the Ganges. The absurdity of this kind of dualism which appears as a fixed fact in the historical imagination of some of us is worth a separate essay.
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