Bactria

Bessus, now in Bactria and ruling as Artaxerxes V with the usurped title of Great King, attempts to continue guerilla resistance against Alexander by raising a national revolt in the eastern satrapies.

Outflanked by Alexander, Bessus flees beyond the Oxus (modern Amu Darya).

Alexander, marching west to Bactra-Zariaspa (modern Balkh [Wazirabad] in Afghanistan), appoints loyal satraps in Bactria and Aria.

Crossing the Oxus, he sends Ptolemy in pursuit of Bessus, who has meanwhile been overthrown by the Sogdian Spitamenes.

Bessus is captured, flogged, and sent to Bactra, where he is later mutilated after the Persian manner (losing his nose and ears); in due course, he is publicly executed, by crucifixion, at Ecbatana.

Meanwhile, Alexander threatens to severely punish the Daylamites (an Iranian people of northern Iran) for kidnapping his beloved war-horse Bucephalus, which they promptly return to him.

Alexander attempts at Bactra to impose the Persian court ceremonial, involving prostration (proskynesis), on the Greeks and Macedonians too; but to them this custom, habitual for Persians entering the king's presence, implies an act of worship and is intolerable before a man.

Even Callisthenes, whose ostentatious flattery has perhaps encouraged Alexander to see himself in the role of a god, refuses to abase himself.

(It is known that Callisthenes alluded to the story of Alexander's divine birth and may have been the first to do so.)

Macedonian laughter causes the experiment to founder, and Alexander abandons it.

Late in 328, Alexander attacks Oxyartes and the remaining barons who hold out in the hills of Paraetacene (modern Tadzhikistan); volunteers seize the crag on which Oxyartes has his stronghold, and among the captives is his daughter, Roxana.

In reconciliation, Alexander marries her, and the rest of his opponents are either won over or crushed.

Callisthenes, held shortly afterward to be privy to a conspiracy against Alexander among the royal pages, is thrown into prison, where he dies in 327; resentment of this action alienates sympathy from Alexander within the Peripatetic school of philosophers, with which Callisthenes, as the nephew of Aristotle, has close connections.

His death is commemorated by his friend Theophrastus in Callisthenes, or a Treatise on Grief.

Alexander leaves Bactria in early summer with a reinforced army under a reorganized command.

If Plutarch's figure of one hundred and twenty thousand men has any reality, however, it must include all kinds of auxiliary services, together with muleteers, camel drivers, medical corps, peddlers, entertainers, women, and children; the fighting strength perhaps stands at about thirty-five thousand.

The governors of Alexander’s empire crush an uprising by Greek mercenaries who have settled in Bactria but now want to return to Greece.

Stasanor the Solian, in the division of the westernmost parts of Alexander’s empire, is to rule Bactria and Sogdia; and ...

…Sybirtius, the Arachosians.

The once-mighty Seleucid kingdom had in the beginning of the third century BCE begun to lose control over large territories.

Parthia, Bactria, and Sogdiana have by the middle of this century gained their independence.

Antiochus III's Eastern Reconquests

Following decades of territorial losses to the rising Parthian and Bactrian kingdoms after 238 BCE, Antiochus III the Great, driven by the ambition to reunite Alexander the Great’s former empire, initiates a decisive campaign eastward in 209 BCE. At this time, the Seleucid realm had significantly diminished, with regions east of Persia and Media largely lost due to earlier distractions in wars with Ptolemaic Egypt.

Antiochus achieves remarkable military success against the Parthians, forcing them to acknowledge Seleucid authority and restricting their domain back to the historical boundaries of the province of Parthia itself. However, this vassalage remains largely symbolic and enforced primarily by the presence of Seleucid military power.

For these significant achievements, Antiochus earns the title ‘Great’ from his nobles. Despite his military prowess, he ultimately recognizes the independence of the Parthian kingdom and the Greco-Bactrian ruler Euthydemus, stabilizing the region through a pragmatic system of vassal states and client kingdoms.

With the eastern provinces secured, Antiochus III soon redirects his ambitions westward, compelled by ongoing rivalries with Ptolemaic Egypt and the emerging power of the Roman Republic, setting the stage for future confrontations and further reshaping the geopolitical landscape of the ancient Near East.

The Yuezhi are visited by a Chinese mission, led by Zhang Qian in 126 BCE, that is seeking an offensive alliance with the Yuezhi to counter the Xiongnu threat to the north.

Although the request for an alliance is denied by the son of the slain Yuezhi king, who prefers to maintain peace in Transoxiana rather than to seek revenge, Zhang Qian makes a detailed account, reported in the Shiji, that gives considerable insight into the situation in Central Asia at this time.

Zhang Qian, who spends a year with the Yuezhi and in Bactria, relates that "the Great Yuezhi live two thousand or three thousand li (832-1,247 kilometers) west of Dayuan (Ferghana), north of the Gui (Oxus) river.

They are bordered on the south by Daxia (Bactria), on the west by Anxi (Parthia), and on the north by Kangju (beyond the middle Jaxartes).

They are a nation of nomads, moving from place to place with their herds, and their customs are like those of the Xiongnu.

They have some 100,000 or 200,000 archer warriors."

Although the Yuezhi had remained north of the Oxus for a while, they have apparently obtained the submission of the Greco-Bactrian kingdom to the south of the Oxus.

The Yuezhi are organized into five major tribes, each led by a yabgu, or tribal chief, and known to the Chinese as Xiūmì in Western Wakhān and Zibak, Guishuang in Badakhshan and the adjoining territories north of the Oxus, Shuangmi in the region of Shughnan, Xidun in the region of Balkh, and Dūmì in the region of Termez.