Concept · term for Greeks & westerners
Yavana / Yona
India’s word for the Greeks, and then for anyone arriving from the west. It is Ionian, travelling through Old Persian Yauna into Prakrit as Yona and Sanskrit as Yavana, and Ashoka uses it in his own edicts to name the kings he says he sent envoys to. Later it stretches to cover Romans, West Asians and eventually any foreigner off a ship.
- Function
- Cosmology & sacred geography
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
Worth knowing
The direction of naming is the interesting part. Meluḫḫa and Tenjiku are India named from outside; Suvarṇabhūmi and Yavana are India naming other people, and it used the same instrument — a trade route — to do it. The Greeks who settled in the north-west then used the word about themselves, in Prakrit, on their own coins.
Connections (2)
- Epigraphic record atHeliodorus of Taxila
Heliodorus put up a Garuda pillar at Vidisha and described himself on it, in Prakrit, as a Yona — a Greek ambassador from Taxila calling himself a Bhāgavata. The word India used for foreigners is there being used by the foreigner about himself, in an Indian language, on an Indian religious monument, which is about as complete a case of the name being accepted as the record allows.
- AnalogueSuvarṇabhūmi (the Golden Land)
India naming the world in two directions. Yavana is the west — Ionians, then Greeks, then Romans, then anyone off a ship — and Suvarṇabhūmi is the east, the gold-country beyond the bay. Both were coined by people who knew the place through a trade route rather than a journey, and both outlived the accuracy they started with, stretching to cover whatever later arrived from that direction.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Yona”, “Indo-Greek Kingdom” and “Edicts of Ashoka”.
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