The Indo-Greeks

Seraphiel

Banned
Does anyone on this site have more info the Indo-Greek Kingdom than wikipedia has? I myself dont have any real acces to good books so any help would be appreciated.
 
Abit, my fellow co-religionist is very well versed in the area's culture and history. The first link has a select list of hardcopy and internet sourcees.

http://neosalexandria.org/syncretism/alexandrias-of-the-east/
Both these Greek populations got cut off from the Greco-Bactrians by virtue of a deal between Seleuces I Nikator and Chandragupta Maurya where these cities were ceded to his rule.

So while the Greeks in Bactria retain a large chunk of their Hellenic culture, the Greeks in Alexandria of the Caucasus and Taxila whilst retaining a large chunk of their Hellenic culture also began to blend it with a lot of Indian culture.

Buddhism in the time of Chadragupta Maurya and Bindisura were rising religions and the Greeks in these two cities clearly embraced it as from very early on these two cities were notable Buddhist centres. It is often said that Buddhism only got Hellenized at a later period when it was probably Hellenized very early on. Without its earlier Hellenization it is unlikely it would have spread at the rate it did.

Buddhism at this time still saw the Buddha as a man and the religion as being more a philosophy. The Greeks naturally took to this. In the West there were the equivalents in the Stoics and the Epicureans and the Skeptics and Democriteans whose philosophies were already floating around even in Bactria. The Greeks were still able to worship the Gods of the Greeks but practiced Buddhism alongside this without any major contradiction.
http://neosalexandria.org/syncretism/greco-buddhism-a-brief-history/
 
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I'm studying Greco-Indian and Greco-Bactrian culture for my Master's thesis, I can recommend you some books but some are relatively obscure and I only know where to get them from in the UK (pretty sure some have very limited print runs).

Thanks to a particularly good 2001 translation of a 1930-33 French archaeological dig in Afghanistan, I can tell you many things about the Greek/Indian built Buddhist stupas in the village of Hadda (of which there were possibly hundreds), and definitely more than the wikipedia page on Hadda says.
 
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