The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c30.s1.13

v1.c30.s1.13

The Yavanas are the Iaunā of the Old Persian inscriptions of Darius, which show that the Persians applied to all Greeks without distinction the name of the Ionians of Asia Minor who were conquered by Cyrus in 545 B.C. Greek soldiers and officials formed no unimportant element in the administration of the empire of the Achaemenids; and it is not surprising therefore to find that the Greeks were known in India at a time when a large portion of the North-West was still under Persian rule. The occurrence of the word Yavana in a grammatical rule of Pāṇini (IV, 1, 49) is a certain indication that it had been adopted into Sanskrit before the middle of the fourth century B.C. Its Prākrit equivalent, Yona, is used in the inscriptions of Açoka to describe the Hellenic sovereigns of Egypt, Cyrene, Macedonia, Epirus, and Syria; and there can be little doubt that, in all Indian documents earlier than the third century A.D., the term denotes a person of Greek descent, in spite of the fact that, like other foreign settlers in India, many of the Yavanas had become Hinduised and had adopted Indian names. At a later date, foreigners generally are classed as Yavanas.