The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c7.s2.103

c7.s2.103

It will, therefore, be imprudent to base ourselves definitely with too much of confidence on the data of the Sassanian tradition and on those of Neryosengh to claim that the ancient Iranians had already felt the ideas of the Indian doctors concerning the rôle of the waters in the economy of the human body. It remains, nevertheless, true that the Avestan notions regarding the waters are related to those of the Veda. In the Avesta, according to the text which has just been discussed, the waters are the Mothers, as in the Veda and, if they are compared to the cows, the same comparison is found quite ordinarily in the Veda.² Elsewhere, as we have seen, the waters have, in the two texts, the same relationships with the plants and with the haoma and the soma respectively. Speculations concerning them, therefore, manifestly go back for their essential part to the Indo-Iranian period and right from that period, they held, in the explanation of Nature, a first place, which predestined them to receive later on a similar one in the system of physiology.