Lands of Asia layouts (Eng) 26.11.21

3.1
Dalverzintepa.
Coins from the same group, which date from a later time (1st–3rd century AD)
have legends that are only in Sogdian script. The legends on the coins of Southern
Sogdia and Samarkand Sogdia, depicting an archer and Heracles and Zeus, first
minted in the 1st century AD, were also written solely in Sogdian.
Around the same time, a similar process of replacing Greek legends took place in
Khorezm. The earliest coins from this area are imitations of Eucratides tetradrachms
with a partially distorted Greek legend from Group A, and date from the second half
of the 2nd to the 1st century BC. Only Group B coins have a short Khorezmian or
even Aramaic legend, and these probably began to be issued in the 1st century BC
– 1st century AD, or according to B.I. Vainberg, in the mid-1st and beginning of the
second half of the 1st century AD. The letters of these legends are not very different
from the original Aramaic letters. Moreover, the titles in the inscriptions on these
coins are only the Aramaic MR’Y (mrai) for ‘ruler’ and MLK’ (mlka) for ‘king’.
Thus, legends on coins suggest that Greek and Aramaic writing was replaced in
Sogdia and Khorezm by local writing systems (based on the Aramaic alphabet) in
the 1st century AD. The same was true of Parthia, where, with the rise of the Junior
Arsacids in the middle of the 1st century AD, Greek legends on coins were replaced by
Parthian. This process took place in Bactria somewhat later, where Greek inscriptions
on coins were replaced by those of Bactrian language and script only in the first half
of the 2nd century AD.
However, we can assume that the process of the substitution of Aramaic script
and language with local writing systems occurred over a long period and probably
began in the last centuries BC. It is difficult to establish exactly when these changes
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