Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s12.23

c12.s12.23

The Aryan speech was taken out of India by Indian missionaries or military adventurers who went out of India during the time of the Nandas and Mauryas. In Sin-Kiang, the city of Khotan (*Ku-stana* in Sanskrit) was colonised by Indians from Taxila in the 3rd century B.C., and the Indian community in the Khotan territory became quite numerous and strong, and although they lost their separate existence among the surrounding Iranian and Tibeto-Burmese speaking peoples, the Indian North-Western Prākṛit taken by them continued to be used (in a form much influenced by the local languages) as an official language in all state documents. Indian troops were found in the armies of the Achaemenian emperors and in Xerxes' army there were Indian troops. At the battle of Gaugamela or Arbela where Alexander finally overthrew Darius, the last Achaemenian emperor, Indian troops fought very stubbornly. The Indians came in touch with the Greeks through the Persian empire, and this must have taken place by 500 B.C., when the old form of the word *Iones* (Ionians, the Greeks of Asia Minor who came to be best known in the East) viz., *Iawones* or *Iavones* came to India as *Yavana*. Indian elephants with Indian mahouts were in the army of Pyrrhus when he fought the Romans in the 3rd century B.C. and in the Carthaginian army led by Hasdrubal and Hannibal in Italy, Indian elephant drivers also came into prominence. Indian philosophers and learned men, and later Buddhist missionaries sent by Aśoka, found their way into Greece, and we have mention in Greek records of at least one Indian philosopher who came to Athens and with whom Socrates had a conversation (before 400 B.C.). There was a good deal of intellectual and cultural intermixture both through the Achaemenian empire and the Greek empire of Alexander and his successors, and the Indian languages (including the newly formed literary speech, classical Sanskrit) came to acquire a number of Iranian (Persian) and Greek words (e.g. mudrā, dīpi or lipi, nipista. ‘written’, asavāri, kshatrapa, kārshā in kārshā paṇa, tashta-tast, pusta etc., and dramma from Greek drakhmē, suranga from surinks or syrinx, samidā from semidalis, khalina, and astronomical terms which came in later). The languages of the West, Greek specially, similarly obtained a number of Indian words. Connection with China though commerce may have commenced from the 4th century B.C. by way of Assam and South-West China (Yun-nan), and probably before Christ a few Chinese words came to be admitted into Indian languages (e. g. the name China—China, kīchaka—‘a kind of bamboo’, musāra—‘a kind of precious stone’.) There were persons in India speaking Iranian dialects and Greek, and the Persian official language as in the cuneiform inscriptions appears to have exerted some influence on the style of the inscriptions of Aśoka. The presence of different languages side by side in India, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Austric and the foreign Persian and Greek, gave rise to what I have called ‘Translation compounds’ in Indo-Aryan, in which words of same or similar meaning from two languages are combined to give a single word in Indo-Aryan (e.g. Iranian Karṣa ‘a monetary unit’ and Indo-Aryan paṇa of non-Aryan Austric origin-‘computation on the basis of four’ gave kārshāpaṇa in Sanskrit, kahāpaṇa in Pāli, meaning ‘a coin’; Austric sāta, sāda>śāli ‘horse’ and non-Aryan of unknown origin*ghutra,*hotra whence we have ghoṭa ‘horse’ gave Sanskrit śāli-hōtra ‘horse’ etc.)