Many of us – especially those in India – may have come across the word ‘yavana’. (This author thinks it should be spelt and pronounced as yavan; this corresponds precisely with the Sanskrit form).
It is a word that originated in ancient India, in the fourth century BC. Or earlier.
It denoted a person of Greek extraction, and later on came to mean roughly any person of foreign origin – with the connotation of being from lands to the north and west of India.
Today we shall take a look at the etymology of this word.. at the little story behind it.
In 327 BC, Alexander of Macedonia led a military expedition into India. On his way to India from his native Greece, he had of course conquered most of Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Persia. (In this age, the regions which the Indians called Bahlik desh, Kapisha, Gandhar.. and the Greeks called Bactria, Arachosia, Ariana and so on, were a part of India – socio-culturally and in people’s consciousness – if not geo-politically. At present, of course, they are parts of the countries of Afghanistan or Pakistan).
By the time Alexander had arrived in India, most of his troops were actually non-Greek, though the core of the army, and the leadership, must have been composed of ethnic Greeks – his compatriots from the time when he had set off.
Now there were four major phyle (or ethnic branches) which made up the ancient Greek people. Namely, Achaean, Aeolian, Dorian and Ionian. All Hellenic people – whether of the Greek mainland or the islands or the various colonies – are said to have come originally from one of these four.
The Ionians were not the oldest, but over the course of their history, they counted Athens as one of their cities. They even had a settlement on the west coast of Anatolia, which was called Ionia. Unlike the austere Dorians (a division of whom built Sparta), Ionians were renowned for their appreciation of philosophy, poetry and the arts.
Either because Ionians were preponderant in Alexander’s army, or by a quirk of history, people in the lands through which it passed, identified its men as ‘Ionian’.
It is this word from which the Indian word yavan is derived.
There are records from ancient India, which tell us that people of India at the time – including Chandragupta who fought and defeated the advance of Seleucus, and his preceptor Chanakya -referred to them by this name. (Seleucus was a general of Alexander and after his demise, went on to become the emperor of a vast tract of land including much of north-western India).
Actually, with further reading I found that the earliest known occurrence of the word ‘yavan‘ in an Indian language, is in Panini’s Ashtadhyayi. (-A text on linguistics). He in all probability predated Alexander considerably. Unless his work as we know it today, contains later additions, it seems established that people in the North of India – even if not through direct contact – knew of Greeks long before Alexander’s arrival.
For one, Greek merchants frequented ports on the west coast of India from times immemorial.
There is also a theory that the Persian emperors who invaded Greek settlements in Asia Minor – starting from the mid-sixth century – and made it a part of their Empire, in a bid to dissipate the power of the Ionians (who were a majority of the Hellenic people there), had a number of them forcibly settled in far-flung corners of the Empire. -One of which was north-western India. Cyrus the Great may have started this, but Darius the Great may have engaged in it even more. Darius even appointed Scylax of Caryanda, a native of Ionia, to explore the course of the Indus river, in about 515 BC. Scylax left an account of his travels in India, which constitutes the first ever such work by a Westerner. (This book itself does not survive, except for a few quotations in other texts).
In view of these historical phenomena, it is more than likely that Indians knew of Greeks from long before Alexander. And the term yavan (or yona in the commonly spoken Pali) may have had as its immediate source a similar-sounding Parsi or Arabic word.
Yavanas find mention in many of the Indian texts of antiquity including the Parishisht-parv of the Atharva Veda, the Shanti Parv of Mahabharat, multiple Purans and the Yavanjatak. (Although, one must be aware that different parts of the Mahabharat were composed and incorporated into the main body, in different periods of history, through many generations). The Yug Puran of the Gargiy Samhita describes the activities of the Indo-Greeks in particular detail.
The Urdu word Yunani or Unani, which is a system of traditional medicine in the Muslim population of the Indian sub-continent – and which supposedly arose from the Greek system – is also a variation of this word.
If Indians encountered ‘Ionians’, then one would expect the nations in between these two lands to also have words in their languages, which mean the same. And indeed, inscribed clay tablets from Persepolis and the Behistun Inscriptions both contain the Old Persian word ‘yauna‘ of identical meaning. These artefacts belong to the period of 450 BC to 522 BC. The Persians were clashing with Greeks and employing some of them in their imperial armies, more than a hundred and fifty years before Alexander. The word Yauna must have signified a Greek person in general from these earlier times.
Hebrew records of old also have the word Yavana – which means ‘Greece’, and also – Yevani and Yevania, for a Greek man and woman.
Equivalent words are found in Assyrian and Armenian.
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Today, the only people in the Indian sub-continent who can be said to be the remnant of the yavans who settled in India, are probably the Kalash and the Hunza tribes of the mountainous regions of Chitral and Gilgit-Baltistan.
The Kalash are happily aware of their (supposed) Greek origin. They believe they are descended from the soldiers of the army of Alexander, a few of whom detached themselves from the tumult of the larger world and settled down in these pristine valleys.
Although a chief of the Hunza has said the immediate location from which his people migrated to India is Iran.
The Kalash have their own language and follow their own religion and culture, which are related to the Vedic one.
There is an interesting sidenote here – in 2001, a Greek schoolteacher and volunteer, Mr. Athanasios Lerounis started living among the people of this tribe. He had come upon them while on a climbing trip to these mountains in the mid-1980s, and was fascinated by the prevalent lore about their ancestry.
With assistance from a Greek NGO and funds from the government body Hellenic Aid, he set up an establishment in a Kalash village – which included a school for Kalash children, a museum, a centre for creating awareness about and maintaining the culture, and a hospital. Then in 2009, he was kidnapped by militants and finally released after about a year. Soon after, he had to return to Greece. Members of the tribe have faced persecution and several targeted crimes and threats in the recent years.
Today, their culture is increasingly marginalized within the larger milieu. A few of the members are marrying outside the community and others are letting go of the culture, a slow attrition.
It is to be hoped that this wonderful society keep on living as a distinct entity.
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There must be a not insubstantial number of people in Afghanistan and the Punjab who have some ancient Greek ancestry, but any Hellenic culture which they could have had initially, and even the memory of that, is now lost. The Indo-Greeks of these regions probably freely intermarried with the local populace.
Below are a few pictures and maps –
Footnotes :
- ‘Alexander the Great’ was actually Alexander the Third, son of King Philip the Second of Macedonia.
This Macedonia is a geographical and historical region of Greece, a part of the larger geographical region of the same name in the Balkan Peninsula. The latter extends over six countries. The country called Macedonia (with its capital at Skopje), which came into existence in 1991, and changed its official name to North Macedonia in 2018, is separate from Greece and largely a country of South Slavic people (with a sizeable Albanian minority).
2. Regions like Bactria, Arachosia, Kapisa and Gandhar, in some respects, may be considered ethnically a transition area between India and Iran. From historical times, their people and cultures have shared characteristics of both. Not least because people from both countries immigrated and settled here.
3. The vowels in ‘yavan‘ are to be pronounced the same as in ‘come‘. And in ‘Gandhar‘, as in ‘far‘.
4. The Ashtadhyayi refers to the yavanas as having short hair.