The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.193

c10.s7.193

We come for a moment to science. Except for mathematics, the bent of the Indian mind was almost entirely towards religion and philosophy, the matters of the spirit; it no more wanted Greek science than it wanted Greek history. The Babylonian astronomer might meet the Greek astronomer on equal terms and put his knowledge at his disposal, but nothing of the sort seems to have happened elsewhere in the world. Nearly everything connected with scientific relationships is of necessity matter for the expert, and I can be very brief. There are said to be some analogies between Greek and Indian medicine which necessitate the conclusion that India took over some Greek medical learning,⁴ in return supplying Greek physicians with some valuable drugs; but it has also been held that no conclusion on the subject is possible.¹ Some Indian astronomers of the Gupta period are generally supposed to have made an attempt, which failed, to introduce Alexandrian astronomy into India;² but even this has been denied,³ and in any case is far outside my period, as is the relationship, if any, between Greek and Indian mathematics, in which science India, by the invention and positioning⁴ of numerals, ultimately made possible advances which could not have been reached by the purely geometric methods of Greece. Certainly India, though she might not want Greek science, knew and admired it, more especially medical science; the Yavanas appear in the Mahābhārata as ‘all-knowing’,⁵ and there is an Indian story that the Greek physicians of Bactra and Taxila were so skilful that they could give sight to the blind,⁶ a story which no doubt grew out of some real operation for cataract, just as the similar story in Greece that the physician Asclepiades once raised a man from the dead is known to have grown out of the fact that he once recognised that a man being carried out to burial was only in a state of catalepsy.⁷ It was therefore natural and inevitable that after Greeks had vanished from India legend should credit them with magic powers, as has happened to other vanished peoples; in the Kashmir poet Ksemendra (eleventh century A.D.) Yavanas can make and fly aeroplanes.⁸ As to the pseudo-science of astrology, Indians had long known something about it, and most of such contacts with Greek knowledge as can be traced are again much later than the Christian Era; but it is now said that one thing did come from Babylon to India during the Hellenistic period, the art of foretelling the future by means of the stars.⁹