BETWEEN HIND AND HELLAS : THE BACTRIAN BRIDGEHEAD ~ FREE PDF

 

The author is  Burzine Waghmar . Edited by Radhika Seshan

The K R Cama Oriental Institute ~Mumbai 

Click to read Here  https://soas-repository.worktribe.com/output/358685/between-hind-and-hellas-the-bactrian-bridgehead-with-an-appendix-on-indo-hellenic-interactions 

or  Here https://www.academia.edu/44911769/Between_Hind_and_Hellas_the_Bactrian_Bridgehead_with_an_Appendix_on_Indo_Hellenic_Interactions_In_Indo_Hellenic_Cultural_Transactions_ed_Radhika_Seshan_Mumbai_K_R_Cama_Oriental_Institute_2020_2021_

DEMETRIUS OF BACTRIA AS DEVA GOBUJO ~ FREE PDF

 

A very interesting research by Lucas Christopoulos . For those who wish to read it, it's available below in pdf form for free.

Click on this link https://www.sino-platonic.org/complete/spp368_demetrios_of_bactria_deva_gobujo.pdf  

ARABIA , GREECE AND BYZANTIUM ~ FREE BOOK PDF

A book about the cultural contacts tthroughout ancient and medieval times, available in PDF. Click on the following link.

https://www.mfa.gr/missionsabroad/images/stories/missions/saudi-arabia/docs/Arabia_Greece_and_Byzantium_en.pdf

HEBREW IS GREEK ~ PDF

 

Paleo Hebrew is Greek.

What you call Hebrew today is modern Hebrew using the Babylonia Aramaic Alphabet.

For about 30 years, the genius Jewish researcher Joseph Ezekiel Yahuda compared 3 languages: Jewish, Arabic and Ancient Greek Homeric. Finally, in the year 1982, in London UK, he published a 680-page book titled ’’ Hebrew is Greek’’.

For those who wish to read it, it's available here in pdf form for free.

Click on this  https://fr.scribd.com/.../Joseph-Yahuda-Hebrew-is-Greek-pdf

or  this https://ia801600.us.archive.org/13/items/Hebrew.is.Greek/Hebrew_is_Greek_lite_text.pdf

or  this https://archive.org/details/Hebrew.is.Greek/page/n17/mode/2up

SEMTHAN ~ A HELLENISTIC OUTPOST IN KASHMIR HIMALAYA ~ PDF

A research paper on the archaeologiacal site of Semthan. 

For those who wish to read it, it's available here in pdf form for free.

 Click on this link https://www.academia.edu/73922838/Semthan_A_Hellenistic_Outpost_in_Kashmir_Himalaya

A STUDY OF HELLENISTIC INFLUENCE IN ANCIENT SRI LANKAN ARCHITECTURE ~ FREE PDF

    This PDF is the MA Dissertation of Weerasinghe, Savin P. It was done in the National  and Kapodistrian University of Athens and it gives us a very interesting aspect on the topic of Greek influence in ancient Sri Lankan architecture.

The PDF is available here https://pergamos.lib.uoa.gr/uoa/dl/object/2972403/file.pdf

All credit goes to the author.

 

MANETHO ~ AEGYPTIAKA ~ FREE PDF

Manetho  ~ Greek: Μανέθων is believed to have been an Egyptian priest from Sebennytos (Coptic: Ϫⲉⲙⲛⲟⲩϯ) who lived in the Ptolemaic Kingdom in the early third century BCE, during the Hellenistic period.

He authored the Aegyptiaca (History of Egypt) in Greek, a major chronological source for the reigns of the kings of ancient Egypt. It is unclear whether he wrote his history and king list during the reign of Ptolemy I Soter or Ptolemy II Philadelphos, but it was completed no later than that of Ptolemy III Euergetes.

A very interesting book about the history of Egypt in free PDF.

https://ia800408.us.archive.org/14/items/Manetho/Manetho.pdf

THE HELLENISTIC GULF ~ GREEK NAVAL PRESENCE IN MESOPOTAMIA AND THE GULF ~ FREE BOOK PDF

A book on the history of  Greeks  in the Gulf

For those who wish to read it, it's available here in pdf form for free.

 Click on this link  https://www.academia.edu/28384661/The_Hellenistic_Gulf

THE GREEK KINGDOMS OF CENTRAL ASIA ~ FREE PDF

 

Greek rulers became involved in the power struggle for Central Asia from the mid-third century BCE. There remain few written records from this time, but archaeological excavations have revealed a fascinating legacy of Hellenistic artistic culture in Central Asia from this era.  Sites such as Taxila were ancient centers of international cultural exchange from the times of the earliest Greek conquests, when the great east-west trade routes were controlled by the Greeks.   

An article of 31 pages, written by P.Bernard, on the history of  Greeks  in the Central Asia. All credit goes to the author.

For those who wish to read it, it's available in pdf form for free , in the link below.

https://en.unesco.org/silkroad/knowledge-bank/greek-kingdoms-central-asia

THE GREEKS IN THE HISTORY OF BLACK BLACK SEA ~ PDF BOOK

     

A book on the history of  Greeks  in the Black Sea. 

For those who wish to read it, it's available here in pdf form for free.

 Click on this link https://rm.coe.int/1680492a66

THE COINS OF THE GREEK AND SCYTHIAN KINGS IN BACTRIA AND INDIA FULL BOOK PDF

A book of the British Museum about the royal coinage of the Greek and Scythian Kings in Bactria and India .
For those who wish to read it, it's available below, in pdf form for free. We should point out that this is a quite old edition; therefore the some names,  are written in a different manner- for example, the name of Kanishka is written as 'Kanirkes'. This is probably because the pronunciation of the letter ϸ (sometimes called sho or san), which was a letter added to the Greek alphabet which was used in the writing of the Bactrian language, was still not clear during the time when this book was written.

Click here:  THE COINS OF THE GREEK AND SCYTHIANS  KINGS IN BACTRIA AND INDIA 

DIONYSIACA OF NONNUS ~ THE TRIUMPH OF DIONYSOS IN INDIA ( FREE BOOK ) PDF

The Dionysiaca (Greek: Διονυσιακά ) is an ancient Greek epic poem and the principal work of Nonnus. It is an epic in 48 books, the longest surviving poem from antiquity at 20,426 lines, divided in 48 books-as many as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Dionysiaca was composed in Homeric dialect and dactylic hexameters and its main subject is the life of Greek God Dionysos, His expedition to India, and His triumphant return to the West.

 Below there are 3 links to the books of the epic poem. The text is in both English and Ancient Greek.



"Dionysos was, in my opinion . . . the first to invade India, and the first to bridge the river Euphrates. Zeugma (Bridge) was the name given to that part of the country where the Euphrates was bridged, and at the present day the cable is still preserved with which he spanned the river; it is plaited with branches of the vine and ivy. Both the Greeks and the Egyptians have many legends about Dionysos."

Pausanias, Description of Greece


Books  1-15 : https://archive.org/details/dionysiaca01nonnuoft

Books 16-35 :  https://archive.org/details/dionysiaca02nonnuoft

Books 36- 48 : https://archive.org/details/dionysiaca03nonnuoft/page/n1

Source : https://catalog.perseus.org/catalog/urn:cts:greekLit:tlg2045.tlg001.opp-eng1dio

THE PERIPLUS OF THE ERYTHRAEAN SEA ~ THE GREEK TRAVEL AND TRADE GUIDE IN THE INDIAN OCEAN ~ FREE BOOK

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, also known by its Latin name as the 'Periplus Maris Erythraei', is a Greco-Roman periplus written in the Koine Greek ( Common Greek) language,which describes navigation and trading opportunities from Roman Egyptian ports like Berenice Troglodytica along the coast of the Red Sea, and others along Horn of Africa, the Sindh region of Pakistan, along with southwestern regions of India. The text has been ascribed to different dates between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE.

The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea primarily focuses on two trade routes originating at Egyptian ports: the first one is on the East African coast as far as Tanzania, and the other via the Arabian peninsula and Persian Gulf to western India. The author writes about numerous cities in detail, ports and harbours on these routes. However, the place which accounts for nearly half the narrative is India’s western coast, from Karachi down to Kanyakumari on the southernmost tip.
The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, tells us of three vital but overlooked aspects of the ancient Indian Ocean trade.The ports, harbours, and metropolises located on the Indian Ocean coasts and are mentioned in the Periplus may not be well-known today- yet,during that time they were some of the most vibrant trading centres of the world.
 The text mentions nearly 20 Indian ports, markets, and towns painting a picture of a buzzing world of trade, production, and social exchange at around 50 CE. Over the centuries that followed, Indian ports, urban, and commercial centres rose to prominence as some of biggest cities of the medieval world.

Early Chera, Pandyan, and Chola kingdoms

The Periplus shows how merchants had to deal with restrictive rulers and their officials, face the threat of pirates and negotiate with vendors who drove hard bargains. Trade was conducted through barter as well as with money. Maritime ports were linked, particularly in India, to webs of internal riverine routes and inland trading and production centres.

The lost port city of Muziris (near present-day Cochin) in the Chera kingdom, as well as the Early Pandyan Kingdom are mentioned in the Periplus as major centers of trade, between Damirica and the Roman Empire.The goods included pepper and other spices, metal work and semiprecious stones.

According to the Periplus, numerous Greek seamen managed an intense trade with Muziris:

"Then come Naura (Kannur) and Tyndis, the first markets of Damirica or Limyrike, and then Muziris and Nelcynda, which are now of leading importance. Tyndis is of the Kingdom of Cerobothra; it is a village in plain sight by the sea. Muziris, of the same kingdom, abounds in ships sent there with cargoes from Arabia, and by the Greeks; it is located on a river (River Periyar), distant from Tyndis by river and sea about five hundred stadia, and up the river from the shore twenty stadia. Nelcynda is distant from Muziris by river and sea about five hundred stadia, and is of another Kingdom, the Pandian. This place also is situated on a river, about one hundred and twenty stadia from the sea."

Damirica or Limyrike is Tamilagam (Tamil தமிழகம்) – the "Tamil country". Further, this area served as a hub for trade with the interior, in the Gangetic plain:

The Periplus also describes the annual fair in present-day Northeast India, on the border with Tibet.

"Every year there turns up at the border of Thina a certain tribe, short in body and very flat-faced ... called Sêsatai ... They come with their wives and children bearing great packs resembling mats of green leaves and then remain at some spot on the border between them and those on the Thina side, and they hold a festival for several days, spreading out the mats under them, and then take off for their own homes in the interior."

Indo-Greek kingdom

The Periplus explains that coins of the Indo-Greek king Menander I were current in Barigaza.Also, the text mentions that Greek buildings and wells exist in Barigaza (Bharuch). 

The metropolis of this country is Minnagara, from which much cotton cloth is brought down to Barygaza. In these places there remain even to the present time signs of the expedition of Alexander, such as ancient shrines, walls of forts and great wells.

The Periplus further claims to the circulation of Indo-Greek coinage in the region of  Barygaza, coming from this country, bearing inscriptions in Greek letters, and the devices of those who reigned after Alexander, Apollodorus and Menander.

Read all the book in English here: Periplus of the Erythraean Sea

ROYAL COINAGE IN HELLENISTIC BACTRIA ~ FREE PDF BOOK

A book on royal coinage for some Greek Kings in Bactria, from Euthydemus I to Antimachus I.

For those who wish to read it, it's available here in pdf form for free.

Click here ROYAL COINAGE IN HELLENISTIC BACTRIA 

LAFCADIO HEARN'S ANCIENT GREEK JAPAN

Patrick Lafcadio Hearn (/hɜːrn/; Greek: Πατρίκιος Λευκάδιος Χερν; 27 June 1850 – 26 September 1904), known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo (小泉 八雲), was a writer, known best for his books about Japan, especially his collections of Japanese legends and ghost stories, such as Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things.

 He was born in 1850 on the Ionian island of Lefkada to a Greek mother and a British father, and raised in Ireland and in England by his great-aunt. Eventually, aged 19 and facing poverty, he was sent away to the United States. He managed to make it in the thriving Cincinnati of the mid-nineteenth century. Eventually, he became a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, where he made a name for himself with sensational crime stories and social reportage. When he married an African-American woman in violation of Ohio anti-miscegenation laws,he got fired from the Enquirer. He started working for a rival paper, the Commercial, where he was a star reporter. Hearn tired of Cincinnati and moved to New Orleans in 1877. After some years in New Orleans, where again he was a star reporter, and in the Caribbean, in 1890 Hearn decided to take up a teaching position in Meiji Japan (thanks in part to another famous Ohioan, Commander Perry Japan had been opened to the outside world in the 1850s).

 It was there that Hearn found his calling – explaining a Japan that he loved to Western audiences. Despite not having good spoken Japanese and no literacy in the language, he fervently adopted the manners of his new country, including a new name, Koizumi Yakumo, and a Japanese wife, Koizumi Setsu- he had been divorced from his first wife some years earlier. Hearn became a Japanese nationalist, convinced of the superiority of traditional Japanese culture and determined to demonstrate that superiority to Western audiences. He also became an avid collector of Japanese folklore and his fame in Japan rests on his collections of traditional stories.



 It turns out that his major work Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, published in the year of his death, 1904, is particularly worthwhile for the historian of ancient religion (you can read it online here, it’s also downloadable on google books). The work is a substantial book on the history of Japanese religion, but throughout, Hearn makes constant reference to classical religion as a yardstick and model for understanding the Japanese case. Hearn inscribes the 19th century scholarly view of Greek and Roman religion into his history of Japanese religion. In particular, he was heavily influenced by the evolutionist thought of Fustel de Coulanges, which explained ancient religion as an outgrowth of ancestor cult, until it was fractured by Christianity. Right from the beginning, the relationship between Greek and Japanese culture is raised:

Some of us, at least, have often wished that it were possible to live for a season in the beautiful vanished world of Greek culture. Inspired by our first acquaintance with the charm of Greek art and thought, this wish comes to us even before we are capable of imagining the true conditions of the antique civilization. If the wish could be realized, we should certainly find it impossible to accommodate ourselves to those conditions,–not so much because of the difficulty of learning the environment, as because of the much greater difficulty of feeling just as people used to feel some thirty centuries ago. In spite of all that has been done for Greek studies since the Renaissance, we are still unable to understand many aspects of the old Greek life … We could no more mingle with the old Greek life, if it were resurrected for us,–no more become a part of it,–than we could change our mental identities. But how much would we not give for the delight of beholding it,–for the joy of attending one festival in Corinth, or of witnessing the Pan-Hellenic games? . . .

And yet, to witness the revival of some perished Greek civilization,–to walk about the very Crotona of Pythagoras,–to wander through the Syracuse of Theocritus,–were not any more of a privilege than is the opportunity actually afforded us to study Japanese life. Indeed, from the evolutional point of view, It were less of a privilege,–since Japan offers us the living spectacle of conditions older, and psychologically much farther away from us, than those of any Greek period with which art and literature have made us closely acquainted.

The reader scarcely needs to be reminded that a civilization less evolved than our own, and intellectually remote from us, is not on that account to be regarded as necessarily inferior in all respects. Hellenic civilization at its best represented an early stage of sociological evolution; yet the arts which it developed still furnish our supreme and unapproachable ideals of beauty. So, too, this much more archaic civilization of Old Japan attained an average of æsthetic and moral culture well worthy of our wonder and praise. (pp. 15-17)

Bust of Lafcadio Hearn in Tokyo, Japan

Despite the marking of difference here, Hearn’s strategy throughout the work depends on the implied parallel between Greek (and sometimes Roman) culture and Japanese religious life. In parallel with the theories of Fustel de Coulanges, he sees Japanese religion as the gradual development from a primitive ancestor cult to an organized system of deities to a breakdown in the face of outside influences.  For example, the Roman di manes and the ancestral spirits of Japanese families are strictly parallel – even Cicero speaks with the same voice as Hirata:


The ghosts of the departed were thought of as constant presences, needing propitiation, and able in some way to share the pleasures and the pains of the living. They required food and drink and light; and in return for these; they could confer benefits. Their bodies had melted into earth; but their spirit-power still lingered in the upper world, thrilled its substance, moved in its winds and waters. By death they had acquired mysterious force;–they had become “superior ones,” Kami, gods.

That is to say, gods in the oldest Greek and Roman sense. Be it observed that there were no moral distinctions, East or West, in this deification. “All the dead become gods,” wrote the great Shintô commentator, Hirata. So likewise, in the thought of the early Greeks and even of the late Romans, all the dead became gods. M. de Coulanges observes, in La Cité Antique: “This kind of apotheosis was not the privilege of the great alone. no distinction was made. . . . It was not even necessary to have been a virtuous man: the wicked man became a god as well as the good man,–only that in this after-existence, he retained the evil inclinations of his former life.” The Latins called the maleficent ghosts of the dead, Larvae, and called the beneficent or harmless ghosts, Lares, or Manes, or Genii, according to Apuleius. But all alike were gods,–dii-manes; and Cicero admonished his readers to render to all dii-manes the rightful worship: “They are men,” he declared, “who have departed from this life;-consider them divine beings. . . .” (pp. 27-28)



So too, Japanese communal cult could be compared to Greek religion. Hearn suggests that a Shinto procession recalls Dionysiac worship and the young male dancers recall the fauns of Greek vase painting:

Before the procession a band of young men advance, leaping and wildly dancing in circles: these young men clear the way; and it is unsafe to pass near them, for they whirl about as if moved by frenzy. . . . When I first saw such a band of dancers, I could imagine myself watching some old Dionysiac revel;–their furious gyrations certainly realized Greek accounts of the antique sacred frenzy. There were, indeed, no Greek heads; but the bronzed lithe figures, naked save for loin-cloth and sandals, and most sculpturesquely muscled, might well have inspired some vase-design of dancing fauns. After these god-possessed dancers–whose passage swept the streets clear, scattering the crowd to right and left–came the virgin priestess, white-robed and veiled, riding upon a horse, and followed by several mounted priests in white garments and high black caps of ceremony. (p. 103)

Even the arrival of Jesuits in the sixteenth century – a disaster from the perspective of Hearn – prompts a comparison with the situation of the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries AD facing a new missionary religion.

What is striking about Hearn’s project,  is how the interpretatio graeca/romana is not deployed in the service of conquest, but to make the case for Japanese superiority. In the final pages of the book, Hearn calls on the Japanese to resist Russian imperialism and Anglo-American capitalism. In other words, he suggests that they not follow the West down the path of evolution traced by Fustel de Coulanges.


 Edited from : SOURCE 

MEGASTHENES THE FATHER OF INDIAN HISTORY ~ INDICA BOOK PDF

Megasthenes (Μεγασθένης, ca. 350 – 290 BCE) was the first foreign Ambassador to India and recorded his ethnographic observations in a volume known as INDIKA. For his pioneering work, he is regarded as the Father of Indian History.

The term “Indika” (Greek Ινδικά) was used in ancient Greece to mean various India-related things, including the historical and ethnographic accounts of Ctesias, Megasthenes, Arrian and others.

Greek Ambassador Megasthenes presents credentials to Chandragupta Maurya, who seats with Helena, the daughter of Seleucus Nikator, and the philosopher and royal advisor Chanakya in his court in Pataliputra (modern-day Patna)

The Indo-Hellenic Society for Culture and Development following the ancient tradition has chosen this title for its online forums that aim to the advancement of the Indian and Indo-Greek Studies in the Hellenic world.

Download Megasthenes’ Indika in  English HERE

MILINDA PANHA/ QUESTIONS OF MILINDA~ MENANDER I

The Milinda Panha (Pali trans. "Questions of Milinda") is a Buddhist text, which dates from approximately 100 BCE. It is included in the Burmese edition of the Pāli Canon of Theravada Buddhism as a book of the Khuddaka Nikaya; however, it does not appear in the Thai or Sri Lankan versions.






A shorter version of it is featured in Chinese Mahayana translations. It purports to record a dialogue in which the Indo-Greek king Menander I (Pali Milinda) of Bactria, who reigned in the 2nd century BCE, poses questions on Buddhism to the sage Nāgasena.

Learn more : Contents of the Milindapañha