Why it's hard for me to read books

So, tonight I open Empires of the Word, and there we learn that

By 260 BC the Indo-Greeks in Bactria, first led by Diodotus, had declared themselves independent.

Wait, wait, where the hell is Bactria...and who was Diodotus?  Oh crap...

Ok, it looks bad, but after some quick checks I think we can go with Diodotus I here.

At just about the same time (and possibly caused by this rebellion) the Iranian-speaking Parthians thrust south from the eastern shores of the Caspian into the plateau of Iran. A century later, in 146 BC, Mithradata I of Parthia completed the job, and drove the Seleucids out of the rest of Iran, taking Mesopotamia for good measure. 

Yeah, the Parthians were tough - underrated players in those days.  The Seleucids, of course, were the Greek kings of Central Asia of that time.  Ok, I think I got it.

Ten years later, as it happened, the Indo-Greek kings of Bactria were overwhelmed by a Scythian (Saka) invasion from the north, shortly followed by the Kushāna (also known as Tocharians or Yuezhi) from the north-east. Extinction of Greek over this vast area was not immediate. In the east, there is the fact that Bactrian, the official language of the Kushāna empire,

The wait what now?  I thought Kush was in Northern Sudan?  Oh...

Wait, is that Kanishka the guy who detained Xuanzang? No, but Xuanzang did encounter him indirectly.  Kanishka was a regional sponsor of Buddhism and put on a council that Xuanzang wrote about (this is the one where they decide to go from Prakrit to Sanskrit.  The "experts" at Wikipedia say "this change was probably effected without significant loss of integrity to the canon," but of course they would say that because Wikipedia is totally in the bag for Sanskrit).

...which lasted from the middle of the first to the end of the second century AD, came to be written in Greek script. This is unique among Iranian languages, and it shows that the Kushāna had a longish period of cultural interaction with the Greeks. In AD 44, 190 years after the fall of the Indo-Greek kings, the sage Apollonius of Tyana...

Wait, who?  Wikipedia:  "With the exception of the Adana Inscription, little can be derived [about Apollonius of Tyana] from sources other than Philostratus."

8^/

Not that I care but...who was Philostratus?

There is a footnote:  "The source is an Athenian sophist, Philostratus, whose Life of Apollonius of Tyana was commissioned at the end of the second century AD by the wife of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus. This is a work of devotional literature, and so its accuracy has been questioned; but Woodcock (1966: 130) argues that archaeology shows the author was in fact well informed about details of this land so remote from contemporary Rome and the Mediterranean."

...is said to have had no difficulty communicating in Greek on a tour that took him all the way across the Hindu Kush to Taxila, where he was entertained (in Greek) by a Parthian king, who expatiated on his own Greek-style education.

Taxila, as every schoolchild knows, is in modern Pakistan.  This epic journey, which would make him sort of a western Xuanzang, traveling to the subcontinent in the footsteps of Pythagoras (?) in search of authentic knowledge is not, I should emphasize, NOT generally accepted as authentic by the consensus modern scholarly view, which is to fall down laughing and slapping the knee at the gullibility of anyone who thinks Appolonius ever got as far as the Cappadocian border.

But a fair-minded reader must allow some credence of the testimony of Philostratus, and the existence of deceptive 19th century forgeries does not change the possibility that the journey might have occurred, and that the anecdote is therefore accurate, although we can only speculate on the motivations of the forgers.

The larger point is clear enough.  All we really need is to track down some corroborating evidence that Parthian kings were speaking Greek in the first century AD.  How hard can that be?  Let's just take a quick look at a list of Parthian kings...oh no, ha ha...NO.  We'll study the "king-a-week kingdom" another time.  Good-night.

Let's see...640 pages in the book, and I'm getting through about a page a day. Look for the Eisengeiste review of Empires of the Word sometime in 2019.