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The interactions between the Indian and Greek civilizations during the fourth century BCE and later have been quite well studied, and what the article describes is not surprising.
For some context, the emperor Ashoka, scion of the Maurya empire, consolidated various smaller republics into an empire that covered most of Afghanistan and North-West Pakistan of today. These areas bordered the regions that were controlled by the Greeks at the time. Ashoka's time was one of consolidation and relative peace, people were more mobile, trade and cultural exchange flourished.
This article [1] sheds a little more light on the story. In fact, the visual image & depictions of the Buddha had significant Greek influence, the first images of the Buddha apparently surfaced outside India centuries after his death. The common depiction with curly hair was most probably not what the historical Buddha looked like [2].
[2] https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/05/15/what-did-the-bu...
The article you linked is full of inaccuracies
> Most modern scholars believe he was most likely born sometime around 480 BC or thereabouts in Śākya Gaṇarājya, an oligarchic state in the northern Indian subcontinent and he most likely died sometime around 400 BC or thereabouts.
Siddhartha Gautama was born in present day Nepal, in the city of Kapilvastu in the Lumbini region. There are archaeological remains of the palace where he was born along with scriptures explicitly matching the origins and design.
The article also goes to great lengths to emphasize a lot of details are nebulous, however they are documented well since the Buddha was a royal prince. For that reason not sure where the idea that the depiction of Chinese Buddha should be accurate is insinuated either.
Śākya Gaṇarājya translates to English as Shakya Republic and that is actually correct. Kapilavastu was the capital of the Republic/Oligarchy of the Shakya clan. Buddha's father was the elected chief at the time of his birth. This is why one of his epithets is Shakyamuni ("muni" means sage so sage of the Shakyas.)
Strictly speaking Buddha was not a royal price but scion of an aristocratic family. As a comparison think of someone born in a patrician family of Rome when his father is a Consul of Rome. The Wikipedia article has good details about the Shakyas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakya
additionally this history is supported by the Ashoka stamba erected at the historical birth site of the Buddha in Kapilvastu, Nepal as well. you will find though a recently inaugurated Kapilvastu city in India, and one can speculate around why :)
The Maurya empire covered all of modern day India/Pakistan except the southern most part (Kerala and Tamil Nadu).
Ashoka was anything but peace-loving before the Kalinga war, the bloodiest war fought on the subcontinent. It was because of this war, Ashoka converted to Buddhism.
He was Buddhist before Kalinga war. His conversion to Buddhism is after Kalinga war is later invention to promote Buddhism.
For anyone wondering, there’s no connection between the Roman Garum (a sort of fish sauce that was very common in Roman cuisine) and Garam Masala—-I believe Garam simply means ‘hot’ (as in ‘hot spice’) in Hindi, and so bears no etymological history with Rome.
Garam masala is a blend of spices that are lightly roasted. The "garam"/hot refers to this roasting.
> Garam masala is a blend of spices that are lightly roasted. The "garam"/hot refers to this roasting.
That is incorrect. Garam does indeed mean hot, but individual spices in garama masala don't need to be roasted, in fact I believe most, if not all, of them are not roasted, rather simply ground together.
The garam refers to the taseer (in Ayurvedic terms) of the spice blend, as in is it cooling (such as fennel is cooling), or is it warm (such as black pepper is warm/hot) to the body.
Almost all, if not all, of the ingredients of garam masala are warming to the body.
Surely this is intended as a pun.
> so bears no etymological history with Rome
It still appears to be, ultimately, Indo-European and cognate with English 'warm', among others: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
Garam Masala isn't hot as in spicy hot though.
Thanks, and yes, the title caught me off guard until I realized it was fish sauce as opposed to the hot spice (garam masala).
So interesting to see William Dalyrumple pop up on HN. He has been writing fascinating history books for decades, particularly about India. He’s currently hosting a podcast called Empire[1] (season 1: British Empire, season 2: Ottoman Empire). This podcast is one of my favorite things
1. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/empire/id1639561921
Yup, that podcast is incredible and, although it’s hard to pick his best book, ‘Return of a King’ is astonishing.
Amazing. This is fantastic. I like reflecting on the fact that an ancient Greek kingdom used to border ancient India — and that a Greek king became Buddhist before Ashoka—and that Ashokan pillars had Greek written on them.
As long as there have been distinct human cultures, there has been cultural syncretism.
What a lot of people imagine as separable cultures along borders were really cultural gradients or mixtures (this village here is mostly X, the villages north and south of here are Y, but the village even further south is also X, and we all speak each others’ language).
A lot of our discourse and views on culture are still poisoned by jingoistic nationalism from the 19th and 20th centuries (a cover for othering political foes and motivating the masses to fight and die for political goals), as well as concepts like imperialism and the couple centuries of European political hegemony, plus the elimination of non-prestige dialects/local languages and cultures via mass media.
It’s hard for us to imagine, but in a time before modern concepts of race/organized religion/nationalism the world was quite a dynamic cultural melting pot that wasn’t organized along these more recent distinctions. Greeks traded from Britain to India, pagan religions often saw other cultures’ pantheons as the same religion with different names and traditions, people noticed physical differences between groups of people but weren’t applying racist concepts to them. In a way, people of antiquity were often more tolerant and accepting than many contemporary people. But they could also just decide to kill and invade their neighbors with no pretext beyond wanting their stuff.
It's one of my favorite topics too, I just love the imaginative mixture of ancient Greek and Indian cultures.
Some tasty bits:
Ancient Greece–Ancient India relations - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece%E2%80%93Ancient...
_Shape of Ancient Thought: Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies_ by Thomas McEvilley - https://archive.org/details/shapeofancientthoughtstudiesingr...
Have a look at some of the Gandhara (sp?) Buddhist statues. I think that sculpture tradition is from the Swat Valley, which is now Moslem and in Pakistan. They look like Greek sculpture to me.
The sad thing is that there is almost zero support for the preservation of manuscripts in India. There are still so many documents rotting in temple basements throughout the country. It is likely to be a source of major discovery—but it needs private money.
Edit: if you want to help, consider funding a PhD student in Sanskrit. It’s about $8k per year, matched by government support. While a Sanskrit PhD it might seem like a route to poverty, a modern approach would be highly technical — ie, about image processing, AI etc.
I would love to support and sponsor this personally. How do one go about funding this?
Where do I sign up?
India, Greece, and Rome share a common history, as Hinduism is the closest thing we have to a continuation of the Greco-Roman religion (syncretized with the indigenous religions over many years). This is seen in the resemblance between the Greek and Roman Gods and the lesser known Indian ones. For example, the Rigvedic god Dyaus-pita is a direct relation to Jupiter. The names of the days in Sanskrit correspond to the same gods the latin names are after (and also the german ones, but they become harder to suss out).
Rigveda was composed some 1600-1700 years ago before greek invasion.
Surprisingly unmentioned from what I've seen here is the Periplus of the Erythrean Sea, a circa 1st century Greco-Roman sea travel log detailing a trading route from Red Sea ports to the Indian and East African coasts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Periplus_of_the_Erythraean_Sea
I love history like this. History books are so full of battles and conflict and always imply cultures were divided by huge chasms. I love to see the connections and wish we highlighted it more.
<Super Ignorant Take Ahead...> I remember being taught in American History class that Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson studied and admired Native American systems of government when drafting the Constitution but my kids weren't taught this (though to be fair American History was removed as a separate subject and no longer covered in depth in their schooling). Most 'mericans would say it comes out of enlightened Europe when John Adams cited the Mohawks, who he argued enjoyed “complete individual independence,” while tribal leaders brought major decisions like declarations of war to “a national assembly.” and Thomas Jefferson said “the only condition on earth to be compared with ours is that of the Indians, where they still have less law than we. The Europeans are governments of kites over pidgeons [sic].”
To me it seems today Persian history is so artificially removed from Greek popular history, but when my son and I explored Alexander the Great's history it lead to us exploring Persian history and feeling the popular narrative was manipulated from the reality with so much missing connections.
I responded negatively to a previous post on here about 'Islamic Golden Age History' because it artificially divides us when huge portions of that golden age thought was coming from Christians and recently conquered lands only tangentially 'Islamic' and again popular history Pigeon holing and artificially separating us all.
'Islamic Golden Age' thought is also much Christian mindset thought (though not Germanic western European post Roman Christian thought which somehow becomes all Christian according to historians). Persia IS one of the progenitors of Western thought alongside Greece (Alexander the Great adopted much from Persia along with lots and lots of other cross pollination). But we sure aren't given that impression from popular history.
Now today I learned Indian spices were influential in Roman food. But I was taught Europeans didn't covet Indian spices until way later. Why? What use does that narrative have? Over eighty percent of the 478 recipes in the fifth century Roman cookbook of Apicius included pepper and that cookbook was widely known about since the 1800s apparently.
OK too many words, and hopefully I didn't offend with my Islamic Golden Age stuff. I'm not trying to lesson the Importance of the Islamic world, but expand it. I just hate that today we self isolate and apply that isolating viewpoint to the past when it doesn't appear to have been the case.
> Now today I learned Indian spices were influential in Roman food.
They also loved Chinese silk.
I'm kind of surprised you hadn't run into this yet. It seems like every Roman author is bemoaning the popular love of food drenched in pepper and transparent silk clothes. Try reading Juvenal, it's quite funny to see what he decries and what he considers normal.
Europeans never stopped importing spice, from ancient times to the present day. To my knowledge there was never a complete interruption.
> But I was taught Europeans didn't covet Indian spices until way later. Why?
No idea why this was taught, but it was untrue. However it is somewhat true that most Europeans couldn't afford many spices until the 1600s, in this is a case where being supply constrained probably kept a cap on demand too.
The rise of Venice in the medieval era was due in large part to their carefully constructed trade monopoly for spices.
> Medieval high society had an insatiable appetite for spiced sauces, sweets, wine, and ale... In Mairano’s era, Venetian traders in London sold a pound of pepper for a sum equivalent to a week’s work for an unskilled laborer.[1]
Venice had agreements with the Ottoman empire for access to spices coming via the Spice Road as well as the rulers of Egypt (sometimes also Ottoman) for spices coming via the Red Sea.
It's true that Portuguese and Spanish exploration was partially fueled by a desire to avoid the Venetian monopoly on spices though:
> Bad news came in 1501, however, when word reached Venetian merchants that the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama had sailed around Africa to India, bypassing the Mediterranean and—so it was feared—diverting the flow of pepper away from Venice.
But the demand was always there - it was supply that was constrained.
[1] https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-133/controller-confus...
It may not surprise you to learn that early Jesuits in Canada had ongoing debates and dialogues with Algonquian sachems and recorded some of the exchanges. And these works were widely circulated in Europe as the enlightenment was taking shape. There was an interesting thing happening there that’s a bit too complicated and nuanced to type out on my phone, but you can probably find more from here. There’s a good section in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity about it.
> But I was taught Europeans didn't covet Indian spices until way later. Why? What use does that narrative have?
Because spices were a major driver for European colonialism in Asia from the 1600s onwards (East India Company, VOC, etc), but they did not significantly influence British, Dutch, etc history before that.
> Even the name of the island itself derives from Sanskrit: dvipa-sakhadara means the “Island of Bliss.”
Foreign Sailors on Socotra: The Inscriptions and Drawings from the Cave Hoq (a book mentioned in the article) refers to this as an “academic myth” and suggests that the island’s name is of South Arabian origin.
The Kushan Empire (of the Yuezhi) that had Greek language administration and a Saivite ruler fascinate me. Perhaps syncretic kingdoms were common in those days. Crazy to imagine, I can't say I expected that.
Past thalassocracies and syncretic empires just really challenge my default worldview.
Can recommend author Dalrymple's books about the East India Company and the first Anglo-Afghan war.
He also has a podcast called Empire.
The trade with Rome and Greece was naiky with Tamil Nadu in South India.Not the northern part of India.
That's an odd spelling. Garam Masala is the usual term.
It's a pun (a wordplay).
Garum is fish sauce widely associated with ancient Rome and Greece.
Why are these books so pricey?
Probably a small publishing run meant for libraries and a few academics.
Clever name!
It's hilarious watching Americans discuss curry spices.
I expect a few of you have got beyond beige goop with raisins in.
@dang for the love of all things spicy, please change the title to Garam Masala
Not sure why this is downvoted, garam is how it’s commonly written. (It is pronounced similar to carrom.)
for the love of all things sanity, please read the article before commenting!