We are so used
to looking through the eyes of the West that only a few of us are aware that
among the Persians and Indians, the Greeks go under different names.
Ever since the
reign of Darius I, the Greeks were called Yauna
or Yona, as documented in the inscription of Bisutun
from c.520 BC. In the 5th century BC, Herodotus
mentions the Yaunas in his Histories,
linking them mainly to the Ionians, who lived along the coastline of Asia Minor. The historian also specifies that under
Persian rule, the Ionian Greeks constituted one tax district that included the
Pamphylians, Lycians, Magnesians, Aeolians, and Carians.
Yauna may simply be a transliteration of the Greek for ‘Ionians,’ and the
name surprisingly appears in Sanskrit literature and in Sri Lanka’s Mahavamsa (historical chronicle) – a very long way from home!
The name also
has a corrupted form with the Assyrians, who called the Greeks Iawanu,
and the Babylonians used Yaman or Yamanaya.
Nowadays, Turkish, Persian, and Arabic languages use Yunan,
which clearly derives from the ancient Persian Yauna.
The Persians, as
we know, did not stop their conquest of Greece
at the coast of modern Turkey.
They soon mounted an expedition to conquer Macedonia with its rich gold and
silver mines.
An inscription
to that effect can be seen on Darius’ tomb at Naqsh-e Rustam,
where the Macedonians are called the “Greeks with sun hats”
based on their typical headwear.
The same
Macedonians threatened Persia
in 340 BC when Philip II besieged Perinthus,
a vital point on the Hellespont. In the end, Alexander
the Great crossed into Asia and conquered Persia. How
much of this campaign has been recorded in their literature remains vague. It
is impossible that a well-organized civilization like Persia’s has
not kept written records. Could we assume they are either still hidden or have
not yet been deciphered?
Alexander and his Macedonians marched on to Central Asia and even India. Ancient
sources use the word Yonaka when referring to the later
Graeco-Bactrians and Indo-Greeks, who became kingdoms in their own right. They
were the result of those veterans left in the regions by Alexander,
who built a civilization based on Greek principles. They rose to power in the
late 4th century BC and ruled until the first decade of the 1st century AD.
Yavana is the word that lived on in the medieval literature of India. It was
generally used to define foreigners, but until approximately 1000 AD, they
meant the Greeks.
As always, there
is so much more in a word than we assume at first sight. In this case, it ends
up being a story on its own.
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