The History of Indian Literature c9.125

c9.125

∗ Lassen (*I. AK.*, i. 729) asserts that the most ancient meaning of the word *yavana* was probably ‘Arabia,’ because incense, which came from Arabia, was termed *yávana*; but this assertion is distinctly erroneous. So far as we know at present, this latter term first occurs in the Amara-kosha, and there along with *turushka*, which can scarcely be a very ancient word. It may consequently either date from the time of the commercial intercourse of the Indians with Arabia shortly before Muhammad, or even with the Muhammadan Arabs; or else—like *yavaneshṭa*, ‘tin’ [Hemach., 1041, according to Böhtlingk-Rieu, ‘lead,’ not ‘tin’], and *yavana-priya*, ‘pepper,’ the chief articles of traffic with the Greeks of Alexandria—it may possibly have been named, not from the Arabs, but from the Greeks, who brought incense as well as tin and pepper from India (Lassen, *I. AK.*, 286 n.)! Wherever we find the Yavanas mentioned in the epic, or other similar ancient writings, only the Greeks can be meant. [The almost constant association of them with the Kambojas, Śakas, &c., is conclusive as to this; see *I. Str.*, ii. 321; *I. St.*, xiii. 371. The name Yavana was then in course of time transferred to the political successors of the Greeks in the empire of Western India, that is, to the Indo-Scythians themselves, to the Persians (Párasíkas, whose women, for example, are termed *Yavanís* by Kálidása in Raghuv., iv. 61), and, lastly, to the Arabs or Moslems; see *I. St.*, xiii. 308. Recently, it is true, Rájendra Lála Mitra, in the *Journ. As. Soc. Beng.*, 1874, p. 246 ff., has pronounced against the view that the Greeks were originally meant by the Yavanas; but his arguments are in great part of a very curious kind. Cf. further on this point my letter in the *Ind. Antiq.*, iv. 244 ff. (1875), where, in particular, I point out that the name Yavana first became popularised in India through Alexander, *i.e.*, through his Persian interpreters, although it may possibly have been known previously through the medium of the Indian auxiliaries who served in the army of Darius.]—There is a remarkable legend in the Puráṇas and the twelfth book of the Mahá - Bhárata, of the fight of Kṛishṇa with Kála-Yavana, ‘the Black Yavana,’ so called, it would appear, in contradistinction to the (White) Yavanas? Ought we here to understand African or dark Semitic races that had come into collision with the Indians? At the time of the Daśa-kumára, the name Kála-Yavana (as well as Yavana itself) does, in point of fact, expressly designate a seafaring people—supposed by Wilson to be the Arabs. In the legend in the Puráṇas and the Mahá-Bhárata, on the contrary, no reference to the sea is traceable; and Wilson therefore (Vishṇu-Pur., 565, 566) refers it to the Greeks, that is, those of Bactria. This view is perhaps confirmed by the circumstance that this Kála-Yavana is associated with a *Gárgya*; since it is to *Garga*, at least, who uniformly appears as one of the earliest Indian astronomers, that a verse is ascribed, in which the Yavanas (here unquestionably the Greeks) are highly extolled. Possibly this is the very reason why Gárgya is here associated with Kála-Yavana.