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THE DISCOVERY OF INDIA BY THE GREEKS
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ble materials. The existence of Greek cities near the Indian frontier and in territories which during certain periods were under Indian rule have resulted in the presence of Greek coins. The oldest have only a Greek text, later ones are bilingual: Greek and Indian. The word spaxun is used in India : dramma (drakhma) 58. The coins which were distributed over a large area were perhaps the greatest propagandists for Greek art as reflected in the images on the coins. Greek coins must have been used already before Alexander by the Greeks settled to the North-West of India by the Achaemenid emperors 59. In art and architecture the influence of the Greeks is undeniable. The famous Buddha statues from Gandhāra immediately remind one of the statues of Apollo. In the first centuries after the death of the Buddha, he was never represented as a human figure. About the beginning of the Christian era the first images of the Buddha appear in the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhāra. Many scholars have tried to prove that the first image of the Buddha is due to Greek influence 60. At present there is considerable doubt because pure Indian representations of the Buddha appear about the same time in Mathurā. Even if the idea of representing the Buddha as a human figure is not exclusively due to Greek inspiration, it remains a fact that the Gandhāra images of the Buddha show in many points a very great infl ence of Greek art. In its turn, the art of Gandhāra influenced medieval Chinese Buddhist art and Japanese Buddhist art.
It is not known when the Indians started to write. The oldest inscriptions date from the middle of the third century. One of the two oldest Indian scripts derives from the Aramaic script, i.e. the Kharoşthi script. Some scholars believed that Alexander's invasion introduced and propagated writing in India 61. However, it is possible that long be
58. Cf. Sten Konow, Acta Orientalia, vol. 6, p. 255; H.W. Bailey, Irano-Indica II, BSOAS, XIII, 1949, p. 129; L. Renou, Jakob Wackernagel, Altindische Grammatik, Introduction générale, Göttingen, 1957, p. 108.
59. Cf. Narain, op.cit., pp. 3-5. 60. CF. Lamotte, op.cit., pp. 480-481. 61. Memorial Sylvain Lévi, p. 200.