XII. Goths in Ancient India

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.