On 10/30/2010 11:53 AM, Pavithra wrote:
> I wonder whether Greeks philosophers were influenced by India's great
> Ancient knowledge since western philosophy evolved rapidly around that
> period ?? ( no offense to westerner or followers of western
> philosophy..)! (01)
I'm sure that's true. In fact, the Silk Road from China to Europe had
carried merchants, soldiers, scholars, missionaries, and story tellers
in both directions since about 1500 BC. (02)
The historical record has abundant evidence of huge movements of
soldiers and ordinary people all around the region from the Egyptians,
the Hittites, the Babylonians, the Persians, etc., for thousands of
years BC. The Hebrew Bible, for example, talks about those events
from their perspective. The Indian literature talks about similar
events from a different perspective. But they're all interrelated. (03)
Archaeologists have found Roman coins in Vietnam and Indian artifacts
in Sweden. There are many parallels between the Greek myths and
various myths in the Near East. But many of them may have had
a common origin, since Hittite, Greek, Sanskrit, and Persian are
all Indo-European languages. (04)
500 BC was a time of important philosophical development, and scholars
have found interesting similarities and parallels in the writings of
Heraclitus in Greece, Gautama Buddha in India, and Lao Tse in China.
In fact, Heraclitus lived in a Greek colony in Anatolia, close to
the Silk Road. Only fragments of his writings survive, but he had
a strong influence on later Greek philosophers, including Plato
and Aristotle. (05)
Pythagoras was a little older than Heraclitus, and he spent many
years in Egypt, where he was inducted into the Egyptian priesthood
and learned Egyptian mathematics and methods of surveying the land
after each year's flood of the Nile. He then visited the Babylonian
mathematicians before returning to Greece and later founding his
school in the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy. (06)
I live in Croton on Hudson, which was named by Italian stonemasons
who built a dam on the Croton River, which supplied the water
for New York City. (07)
So there are a lot of interconnections. (08)
John (09)
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