The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c14.12

c14.12

The Persian occupation continued up to the conquest of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander in 331. It was, therefore, kept up, probably with variations in the extent of subject territories, during approximately 185 years. Over this long period, the India of the North-West had been subjected to the deep influences of Persia, and which has, often been noted. One of the most notable ones was the local adoption of the Aramaic alphabet used in the Achaemenian administration confined in the whole empire to the functionaries of Babylonian culture. This alphabet had been completed with new forms and diacritical signs and adapted to the phonetic transcription of the Indian languages, just as had been the case, at a later date, with regard to these languages of the Arabic and European alphabets. It constituted the script called Kharoṣṭhī which should, for the sake of clarity and exactitude, be called Arameo-Indian.¹ Unfortunately, no document in this script and dating from the period of the Achaemenian domination has reached us. The oldest specimens known are the inscriptions of Aśoka which date from the middle of the IIIrd cent. B.C. and are, in consequence, about eighty years later after the end of the Persian administration. We can, consequently, know nothing of the relations between the learned of India and the functionaries of Irano-Babylon. At least we have the proof, in the existence of the Arameo-Indian script itself, that these relations were effective, because the adaptation of the Aramaic alphabet to Indian languages is the result of a savant effort and supposes the intervention of competent grammarians.