doi: 10.2143/AWE.16.0.3214939 AWE 16 (2017) 177-208 HeLLeNISaTION OR INDIaNISaTION: A STUDY OF The YaVaNaS* JUPING YANG Abstract ‘Yavanas’ (or ‘Yonas’) in this article refers to the Greeks known by the Indians before the Christian era, particularly the so-called Indo-Greeks. Although hearsay about Greeks in the Mediterranean had been transmitted to India already in the period of the Persian empire, the acquaintance of Indians with Greeks began only with the invasion of ancient India by Alexander the Great. After him some Greeks remained in north-western India. They were called Yonas (from which the Sanskrit ‘Yavanas’ was derived) in the edicts of King Asoka/ Ashoka for the propaganda of Buddhist dharma. From the beginning of the 2nd century BC the Greeks in Bactria extended their realm over parts of north-western India and main- tained their presence as an ethnic group there for almost two centuries. At the height of power they even marched into the valley of the Ganges. Because they were isolated in India, the Yavanas, while trying to preserve their cultural traditions, necessarily became Indianised themselves in order to be able to rule. They issued bilingual coins, respected the Indian gods and religions, especially Buddhism, and finally stimulated the emergence of Gandhara art. The decline and disappearance of the Yavanas in India was not the result of some victory over them by the Indians but the inevitable consequence of the confluence of Greek and Indian civilisations over a long time. The history of the Yavanas is not only a special part of the history of Hellenistic civilisation but belongs also to the ancient history of the subcontinent. ‘Yavanas’ (‘Yonas’)1 is a common name for the Greeks in ancient Indian literature. It originated from the Old Persian form ‘Yauna’ denoting the Ionians in Asia Minor, and ‘Yavana’ is a back-formation of the Prakrit term ‘Yona’, which in turn derived from ‘Yauna’.2 Therefore, for Indians, Yavanas or Yonas at first might refer * This is one of a series of papers for the key project of the National Foundation for Social Sciences in China, ‘Hellenistic Civilisation and the Silk Road’ (15ZDB059), led by me. I am very grateful to Dr Henk W. Singor of Leiden University for his most helpful corrections to the first draft, the contents of which, however, remain my sole responsibility. I also express my heartfelt thanks to Prof. Gocha Tsetskhladze and the anonymous referees for their directions for the modification of this article. 1 Ethnical ‘Yavana’, pl. ‘Yavanas’ is a Sanskrit term. In the Chinese Buddhist Sutras, the transliteration of Yavanas is generally rendered as ‘ 耶婆那’, ‘ 耶盘那’, ‘ 耶槃那’, while Yavana in Prakrit appears as ‘Yona’ and is transliterated in the Chinese Buddhist Sutras as ‘臾那’. 2 Ray 1988, 312. 178 JUpINg YaNg to the Greeks (i.e. the Ionians), then to the Greeks who settled in Bactria in Central Asia, and later to the Greeks who arrived in India since the time of Alexander, in particular the so-called ‘Indo-Greeks’ who entered north-western India from the Bactrian kingdom. Although those Indo-Greeks had merged with the Indians around the beginning of the Christian era, the word ‘Yavanas’ remained in general use in India and simply became the normal name for foreign people from the West,3 who will not be discussed in this article. Research on the Yavanas probably began in 1735, when the first silver coin of the Graeco-Bactrian king Eucratides was found in India.4 Prolonged studies by both Western and Indian scholars, had come to certain conclusions regarding the main problems – but few of these could survive the encounter with new material and with the results of renewed research.5 In view of the increasing amount of material from 3 Regarding the Yavanas mentioned in the 1st century AD and later, Otto Stein had assumed that the ‘original’ Yavanas had by then been absorbed into Indian society, and that there no longer existed a colony of Greeks in India (Stein 1934–35, 356). However, some scholars believe that even at the beginning of the Christian era, the ethnic ‘Yavana’ could still designate three different groups of foreigners: Greeks, Indo-Greeks and the merchants who came from the Roman East and settled in the peninsula (Ray 1988, 315). As for the Yavana and Yonaka donors responsible for the votive inscriptions in the Buddhist cave temples of the western Deccan, they probably came from the city of Dhenukakata near Junnar in the Pune/Poona district or north of Nasik. Yet this is merely a speculation because a number of problems remain, including from where they migrated before settling in this region, the nature of their occupation, and a host of others (see Lerner 1999–2000; Thosar 1991; Ray 1988; Dhavalikar 1981–84; Karttunen 1997, 297–98). 4 This silver coin is a tetradrachm with the Greek inscription: ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΜΕΓΑΛΟΥ ΕΥΚΡAΤΙΔΟΥ (‘of the great king Eucratides’). 5 Theophilus Bayer published his book Historia Regni Graecorum Bactriani in 1738. He used written sources as well as two coins of Graeco-Bactrian kings, and came up with six names of Greek kings in Bactria, which was regarded as innovative research on the Bactrian-Indo-Greeks. Since then, apace with an increasing amount of coins, inscriptions and archaeological material, scholarly interest has changed from collecting antiquities to historical research, whilst the subject of that research came to be divided into Bactrian Greeks and Indo-Greeks. In 1912, H.G. Rawlinson still regarded the activities of the Bactrian Greeks in India as a part of Bactrian history (Bactria: The History of a Forgotten Empire). But in 1938, W.W. Tarn (The Greeks in Bactria and India) consciously distinguished the Greeks of these two countries, a distinction that had already appeared in Tarn 1902, ‘Notes on Hellenism in Bactria and India’. The publication of Narain 1957 introduced the Indo-Greeks as an independent research subject. In view of the scarcity of written sources and inscriptions, any conclusion on the Indo-Greeks was questioned by A.K. Narain, especially the historical role of the Indo-Greeks and their attribution. Tarn’s The Greeks in Bactria and India (second edition 1951) was a systematic monograph on the Bactrian Greeks and the Indo-Greeks, in which he had collected all available written sources, inscriptions and coins, and absorbed the latest research results. It was once widely considered as the peak of research on the Bactrian and Indian Greeks across centuries, and is still valuable today. In 1984, the American scholar Flank Lee Holt edited and published the third edition of this book (Chicago; revised edition 1997) without any modification, but with the addition of an ‘Introduction to Ancient Bactrian Studies’ and a ‘Bibliography of Recent Research’, which included new material and discussion of research after Tarn. The most obvious feature of Narain’s book is his heLLeNISaTION OR INDIaNISaTION: a STUDY OF The YaVaNaS 179 philological studies, numismatics and epigraphy, it is both possible and necessary to review and examine the history of the Yavanas anew, with the special aim of clarifying the processes of mutual understanding, acceptance and integration between Indians and Greeks and between the civilisations they represented. Hel- lenisation or Indianisation is the focus of this article. So the author tries to give answers to the long-disputed question of whether the Indo-Greeks became ‘Indian- ised’ or the Indians became ‘Hellenised’ in the north-west of India during the period between the conquest in India by Alexander the Great and the disappearance of Indo-Greeks as a special ethnic group around the start of the Christian era, and to what extent those Yavanas played their historical roles in the interactions between two civilisations. So Yavanas or Yonas in this article means mainly the Indo-Greeks and does not include those ‘Yavanas’ who lived in the south of India in the period after the Christian era here. The First Appearance of the Yavanas in India The regular presence of Greeks under the name of Yavanas in India began with the invasion of Alexander. Before that, however, some Indians had already been familiar with Greeks from the eastern Mediterranean mainly through their mutual connec- tion with the Persian empire. In the time of Cyrus the Great (559–530 BC), north- western India (to the west of the Indus) and the Greek city-states in Asia Minor had been brought into the Persian empire. Although those places were far apart, there was room for some exchange of information and occasionally individual con- tacts.6 In fact, the word ‘Yavanas’ came just from such contacts (which will be explained in detail below). Then, Alexander invaded India, because north-western India had been a part of the Persian empire. It was as a result of his conquest that the splendid and stirring drama of the Yavanas in India could unfold. opposition to Tarn’s views, even though based on the same material. Tarn considered the history of the Bactrian Greeks, including that of the Indo-Greeks, part of Hellenistic history, and regarded their dynasties as Hellenistic dynasties, on a par with the Seleucids, Ptolemies, Antigonids and Attalids. Narain, however, concluded that ‘Bactria was not “a fifth Hellenistic state”, much less the little Yavana kingdoms in India’. In his view, the history of the Indo-Greeks was a part of Indian history, not Hellenistic history: ‘They came and saw, but India conquered’ (Narain 1957, 11). Because Tarn happened to pass away in 1957, the debate became to some extent one-sided. In 2003, Narain published a new edition of his book (Narian 2003).