The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.150

c10.s7.150

I have said ‘very rarely’, for there may have been one Indian writer who borrowed more than form. The bit of chronicle in the Yuga-purāṇa which narrates the Yavana conquest (App. 4) is unlike anything Indian, for no Indian wrote or understood history; their minds did not work that way, and they left the historical sense and the independent discovery of historical writing to be among the great possessions of China. I have no doubt that Dr Jayaswal was right¹ in seeing behind these sections of the Yuga-purāṇa a chronicle written soon after the events described, written by an Indian, and written in Prakrit, for the Sanscrit still has the form Dharmamita for Demetrius instead of Dharmamitra.² If this be so, the original Indian author wrote under the influence of Greek historical writing, whether it was the mere knowledge that there was such a thing or whether there was once a Greek account of the conquest, perhaps used later by Apollodorus also.