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XII. Goths in Ancient India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 March 2011

Extract

The oldest instances of the use of the word yavana, yona, in India were discussed by the late Professor Weber in his paper on the Greeks in India. He maintained that the Indians adopted this denomination of the Greeks from the Persians. He also remarked that the name was then later on transferred to the Indo-Scythian successors of the Greeks in North-Western India, and, further, to the Parthians, Persians, and Arabs. There can he no doubt that the word was in later times commonly used to denote the Musalmāns, and sometimes also, in a more general way, as synonymous with mleccha. On the other hand its original meaning was certainly ‘a Greek’. That is the case in the Aśoka inscriptions, in the Besnagar column inscription, and in some of the Nasik and Karle epigraphs. In the Nasik inscription of the nineteenth year of Siri-Pulumāyi Vāsiṭhīputa (EI, 8. 60) we find the yavanas mentioned together with sakas and palhavas, and it is just possible that the word here denotes some Indo-Scythian tribe and not exactly the Greeks. In the Junāgaḍh inscription of Rudradāman of the year 72, i.e. probably of a.d. 150, we hear of a yavana ‘king’ (rājan) Tuṣāspha, who was governor of Kāthiāvāḍ under the emperor Aśoka. The name Tuḍāspha cannot be Greek, but must be Iranian. Still he is called a yavana. This shows that in the second century a.d., the name yavana was not restricted to the Greeks.

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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 1912

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References

page 379 note 1 “Die Griechen in Indien”: Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1890, pp. 901 ff.

page 379 note 2 Compare Kielhorn, , Epigraphia Indica, vol. iv, p. 246Google Scholar.

page 379 note 3 Epi. Ind., vol. viii, pp. 36 ff.

page 380 note 1 See Burgess, & Indraji, Bhagwanlal, Inscriptions from the Cavetemples of Western India, Bombay, 1881, pp. 41 ff.Google Scholar

page 380 note 2 List of Brahmi Inscriptions, Epi. Ind., vol. x, appendix, Nos. 1154, 1182.

page 380 note 3 Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency, vol. i, pt. ii, p. 160.

page 381 note 1 See Bugge, Sophus, Noryes Indshrifter med de œldre Runer, [vol. i], pp. 100 ff.Google Scholar, 195 ff.; Kristiania, 1893–1895.

page 381 note 2 See Henning, Rudolf, Die, deutschen Runendenkmäler; Strassburg, 1889, pp. 27 ff.Google Scholar

page 382 note 1 It seems as if the oldest form was an n-base and not an a-base.

page 383 note 1 Die Reste der Germanen am schwarzen Meere, Halle, 1896, pp. 111 ff.Google Scholar