Ancient Greece–Ancient India relations

For the Ancient Greeks, “India" (Greek: Ινδία) meant only the upper Indus till the time of Alexander the Great. Afterwards, “India" meant most of the northern half of the Indian subcontinent (including present-day India and Pakistan) to the Greeks. The Greeks referred to the Indians as "Indói" (Greek: Ἰνδοί), literally meaning "the people of the Indus River". Indians called the Greeks Yonas and “Yavanas” from Ionians.

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
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A

• Much of the narrative heritage of India and Greece goes back to shared ancestral narratives told in early IE times – to ‘protonarratives’. (…) the Greek tradition quite often fuses or amalgamates traditions that were separate in the protonarrative and remain separate in the Sanskrit.
  • N. Allen (2015) 2015: “Cyavana helps Aśvins, Prometheus helps humans: a myth about sacrifice”, Comparative Mythology 1, Harvard, Cambridge. quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2018). Still no trace of an Aryan invasion: A collection on Indo-European origins.

• In parts of their careers, Arjuna and Odysseus show similarities so numerous and detailed that they must be cognate figures, sharing an origin in the proto-hero of an oral proto-narrative.
  • N. Allen, 1998, quoted in: Elst K. in Udayanath Sahoo (editor), Shobha Rani Dash (editor) - Great Indian Epics, International Perspectives-Routledge (2021) 55-6

K

• There are reports by writers of the Hellenistic and Roman periods that Greeks had visited India in much earlier times... In fact Plutarch, Diodoros Sikeliotes and Diogenes Laertios manage between them to send just about every Greek sage into the East (including Pythagoras and Democritos, but notably not Socrates and Aristotle).
  • Kazanas, N. (2015). Vedic and IndoEuropean studies. Aditya Prakashan. , chapter: Archaic Greece and the Veda, also in : Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. 82, No. 1/4 (2001), pp. 1-42

L

• Plato, through the Pythagoreans and also the Orphics, was subjected to the influence of Hindu thought but he may not have been aware of it as coming from India.
• Lomperis T 1984, Hindu influence on Greek Philosophy, Calcutta; quoted in Kak S. 2000 ‘Indic Ideas in the Graeco-Roman World’ in Indian Historical Review in press. quoted from Kazanas, N. (2015). Vedic and IndoEuropean studies. Aditya Prakashan. , chapter Archaic Greece and the Veda, also in : Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. 82, No. 1/4 (2001), pp. 1-42

P

• The West spoke fairly enough, talking of honor, the sanctity of the given word, and of promises; of freedom and enlightenment. It vaunted its poets, its philosophers, Its scientists, Its classical inheritance from that beautiful, far off Greece, whose greatest philosophers, it forgot to mention, had been inspired through Egypt and Persia, by India.
  • Michael Pym, The Power of India, quoted in S. Londhe, A Tribute to Hinduism (2008)

W

• I like to think that someone will trace how the deepest thinking of India made its way to Greece and from there to the philosophy of our times.
  • John Archibald Wheeler, in a foreword to Swami Jitatmananda, Modern Physics and Vedanta (Mumbai: Paras Prints, 1986), quoted in R. Malhotra, Being Different (2018)

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Ancient Greece–Ancient India relations on Wikipedia