Greco-Bactrian Kingdom

The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom was a Hellenistic Greek state in Central Asia and Afghanistan, founded around 256 BC when the Seleucid satrap Diodotus I declared independence in a region Alexander the Great had already settled with Greek and Macedonian colonists after his conquest of Bactria in 327 BC. At its height the kingdom covered present day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, with territory reaching temporarily into Kazakhstan, Pakistan and Iran, and under the Euthydemid dynasty it repelled a Seleucid invasion around 210 BC before Eucratides the Great founded a rival Eucratid dynasty around 171 BC whose rulers pushed into northwestern India and founded the Indo-Greek Kingdom. Parthian pressure and invasions by the nomadic Yuezhi and Saka peoples eroded the kingdom through the second century BC, and the Yuezhi occupied its Bactrian heartland around 120 BC, ending the kingdom there as its last ruler, Heliocles, retreated south of the Hindu Kush.