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How Ancient Contacts between Greece and
India Supplied the Common Stuff of Western
and Eastern Religious Thought
By Christopher Smith
Review of Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian
Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2002).
Introduction
The rituals, deities, and sacred texts of Eastern religions appear superficially quite foreign to
the Western eye, but below the surface there are also intriguing similarities. Both traditions anciently
inherited primeval systems of ritual taboo, pollution, and purity, which were subsequently challenged
by more philosophical systems of ethics. Both traditions place some emphasis on ascetic practice,
with hermits and communities of monks serving as religious specialists. Both traditions have been
preoccupied with theorizing about the underlying unity of reality, with a similar range of opinions
emerging about what that unity is and whether and how it can be known. There seem clear Christian
parallels to the “Hindu Trinity,” the mediator figure Lakshmi, and Hindu theologians careful parsing of
the roles of human effort and divine grace in the process of liberation.
1
Similar resonances between
Buddhism and the Western skeptical tradition have made Buddhism the religion of choice for many a
Western philosophe.
2
Yet the meanings of such similarities remain elusive. Shall we pin them on
coincidence? Universal human archetypes? A common cultural stock? Or direct cultural cross-
fertilization?
This is the question asked in Thomas McEvilley's sweeping study The Shape of Ancient
Thought. McEvilley traces in incredible detail the parallel development of Greek and Indian
philosophies until the Christianization of the Roman Empire. While acknowledging the genuine
political grievances underlying “autonomist” methodologies that would study each cultural tradition
without reference to foreign contacts, McEvilley is determined to leave such political baggage
behind.
3
He tries to “start over again” by looking at the conceptual linkages between Greek and Indian
thought in their “philological and archaeological context.” By this method, he advances a three-stage
1
Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge University Press, 1996), 151, 164; David Kinsley, Tantric Visions of
the Divine Feminine: The Ten Mahavidyas (Berkeley, Ca.: University of California Press, 1997), 227-228.
2
Mark Vernon, “The New Buddhist Atheism,” The Guardian, March 10, 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/mar/10/buddhism-atheism-hitchens.
3
Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York:
Allworth Press, 2002), xxix.

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diffusionist hypothesis involving: (1) common intellectual inputs from Egypt and Mesopotamia, (2)
“significant intrusions first from India to Greece in the pre-Socratic period,” then (3) a reversal of the
flow of ideas “from Greece back to India in the Hellenistic period.”
4
The two traditions' common
Egyptian and Mesopotamian inheritance includes a mathematics of cosmic order, a cyclical model of
time, and monism; the diffusion from India to Greece included the ideas of reincarnation, atoms, and
the elements; and the diffusion from Greece to India included the structures of formal dialectic and
Aristotelian analysis. Collectively, this stock of shared ideas gave rise to similar philosophical
syntheses in both West and East, which in turn fed into modern Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and
the Enlightenment. Thus despite their very different symbolic funds, the Western and Eastern
traditions would seem to share certain basic structures of thought developed in an ancient context of
reciprocal intellectual exchange.
Stage 1: A Common Near Eastern Inheritance
Scholars generally agree that India and Greece share a common Indo-European heritage,
though their estimates of its date and point of origin are wide-ranging. In any case, this primeval
heritage includes common mythic motifs and a common linguistic structure (emphasizing nouns and
“being verbs”) which may have lent itself to an incipient interest in ontology. Overlaid on this
primordial heritage is a layer of common influences from Mesopotamia and Egypt. Greece and India
were each trading with Mesopotamia and Egypt by the third millennium BC, and by 1500 BC there
was full-fledged East-West trade via Phoenician ships and an early version of the Silk Road. Akkadian
cylinder seals are found in early India, and Akkadian loan words are found in the Vedas themselves.
Greece, meanwhile, had a great “Orientalizing Period” in the seventh century BC when many
Phoenicians settled there. Greek merchants, artisans, and mercenaries of this period also served and
settled throughout the Near East, including Egypt, Judea, and Babylon. They imported lots of Semitic
loan words and artistic and mythic motifs, along with Babylonian astronomy, mathematics,
numerology, and musical instruments.
5
Of particular note are an early mathematics of astronomy and
acoustics, developed in Bronze Age priestly circles perhaps even before the advent of writing. Such
math used a sexagesimal Sumerian system of counting, clearly non-native to the Greek and Indian
contexts. It implied an underlying cosmic order and thus encouraged abstract thought about that
order. Significantly, the mathematics of both astronomy and tuning theory are marked by cyclical
periodicity. Thus, perhaps, the ancient obsession with geometric circularity and temporal cycles.
6
“Both Greek and Indian philosophers, when they spoke of the cyclicity of the cosmos and its eternal
recurrence, were passing on a piece of an archaic worldwide [numerological] construction already
thousands of years old.”
7
Another common import to both Greece and India was monism. As the first great empires
emerged in the third millennium BC, the disparate deities of subjected peoples were often subsumed
as aspects of a single deity, symbolizing the unity of the state. Monistic mythology found its fullest
4
Ibid., xxxi.
5
Ibid., 1-6.
6
Ibid., 74-92.
7
Ibid., 88.

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How Ancient Contacts between Greece and India Supplied the Common Stuff of Western and Eastern Religious Thought By Christopher Smith Review of Thomas McEvilley, The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies (New York: Allworth Press, 2002). Introduction The rituals, deities, and sacred texts of Eastern religions appear superficially quite foreign to the Western eye, but below the surface there are also intriguing similarities. Both traditions anciently inherited primeval systems of ritual taboo, pollution, and purity, which were subsequently challenged by more philosophical systems of ethics. Both traditions place some emphasis on ascetic practice, with hermits and communities of monks serving as religious specialists. Both traditions have been preoccupied with theorizing about the underlying unity of reality, with a similar range of opinions emerging about what that unity is and whether and how it can be known. There seem clear Christian parallels to the “Hindu Trinity,” the mediator figure Lakshmi, and Hindu theologians’ careful parsing of the roles of human effort and divine grace in the process of liberation.1 Similar resonances between Buddhism and the Western skeptical tradition have made Buddhism the religion of choice for many a Western philosophe.2 Yet the meanings of such similarities remain elusive. Shall we pin them on coincidence? Universal human archetypes? A common cultural stock? Or direct cultural cross-fertiliza ...
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