Great - all of us are after all descendants of the highly esteemed Western Greek Civilization, not some of accursed Eastern barbarians. I always suspected that.
Read on:The Indo-Scythian Taxila copper plate uses the Macedonian month of "Panemos" for calendrical purposes (British Museum).[172]From the 1st century AD, the Greek communities of central Asia and northwestern India lived under the control of the Kushan branch of the Yuezhi, apart from a short-lived invasion of the Indo-Parthian Kingdom.[173] The Kushans founded the Kushan Empire, which was to prosper for several centuries. In the south, the Greeks were under the rule of the Western Kshatrapas.It is unclear how much longer the Greeks managed to maintain a distinct presence in the Indian sub-continent. The legacy of the Indo-Greeks was felt however for several centuries, from the usage of the Greek language and calendrical methods,[174] to the influences on the numismatics of the Indian subcontinent, tracable down to the period of the Gupta Empire in the 4th century.[175]
The Indo-Greeks may also have had some influence on the religious plan as well, especially in relation to the developing Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism has been described as "the form of Buddhism which (regardless of how Hinduized its later forms became) seems to have originated in the Greco-Buddhist communities of India, through a conflation of the Greek Democritean-Sophistic-Skeptical tradition with the rudimentary and unformalized empirical and skeptical elements already present in early Buddhism".[176]
My next post will be about Nisa and the Parthians
The Bookroom
2 months ago
8 comments:
Nah. History is almost random mate. Nobody is better than the other, it is almost always a question of being at the right place in the right time.
feet
I saw Riri's comment and wanted to respond immediately, but then I saw yours (I quote, "feet") and fell into confusion. I suppose you're going to tell me it's all the Greeks' fault that Azeris don't talk sense. Or is this a synecdoche (Greeky and geeky, this reference) for dancing. Which is your quite reasonable reaction to Riri's inadequate excuse for cultural failure? Or is it the intriguing opening to long novel about love, hate, war, peace and passion that comes down, after 1,000 pages, to ... feet. And the smell of them after they've walked 1,000 miles to be in the right place at the right time only to discover that it's moved back to where they set out from? It's poetry - huge mounds of meaning distilled into a single word! I am awestruck.
No Noola, I wouldn't trust that reprobate further than I can throw 'im. He is trying to chat me up because my comment demolished his apologetic post. Don't take no nonsense me - everything is random. Next!
Nothing is random, i always doggedly pursue my goals. You know very well why i mention certain phrases at a certain time. Nothing is random in history either.
If all this diversity in life is at least partly due to a succession of random mutations how can you claim that history isn't so too?
Are you saying History is created?
You two are creating a false dichotomy. History is neither all random nor all created; it is both. Unfortunately, it is impossible to say where the dividing line is because the interaction is so 'intimate'.
Even in nature, the randomness comes in the mutations that are thrown up, but the fact that some of them work and are propagated is not random. For human cultures, this is complicated further by human awareness, which can decide and plan. This means that the 'mutations' in culture can be chosen because they are beneficial. So the Arab mathematician who came across the Indian 'mutation' of zero took it up and used it, as did the Florentine who came across it several centuries later. The benefits that accrued from that mutation were not random.
I'll stop now because I have the feeling that you two are talking about something else entirely and I'm just butting in randomly, as it were.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to say where the dividing line is because the interaction is so 'intimate'.
In other words, it is random for all practical purposes.
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