Alexander in India: Did the Greeks Worship Hindu Gods? Ancient Civilizations

It is well known that the campaigns of Alexander the Great reached as far east as India, a distant region whose cultures and religions would likely have been utterly alien to his Greek soldiers. And yet, when Alexander was marching through Gantara, in what is now northern Pakistan, he is said to have come across a city called Nisa, or Dionysopolis. According to the Greek historian Arian, the people of this city told Alexander that they were worshipping Dionysus, the Greek god of wine. Alexander and the Greeks knew that in their folklore Dionysus had been a great god-general who had conquered the Orient, but allegedly, they were surprised to also find one of their heroes, Heracles, being worshipped in the region. Did the people of Gantara really worship Heracles and Dionysus, or did the Greeks see the native Indian gods and conflate them with their own? Answering this question leads us onto an even grander path. How did the Greeks and Indians of the time perceive each other, and how did the religions of these two great civilizations mix and affect each other? Welcome to our video on Heracles, Dionysus, and Alexander in India, as well as the interplay of Greek, Iranian, and Indian religions in the Hellenistic Far East. Every week we release three new exclusive videos for our members and patrons. The Pacific War, the Eastern Front of World War II Prelude, and many other series, including the War of Spanish Succession, Punic Wars, Iberian Reconquista, Russian Revolution and Civil War, North African and Italian Campaigns of World War II, and much more. It has been long overdue, but we have finally created a YouTube channel exclusively for our Kings and Generals Podcasts. Please, go and check out Kings and Generals Podcast, Home to the Pacific War Week by Week Podcast, and the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, link in the description and pinned comment. To see those, as well as get access to our exclusive discord, see our schedule, and get early access to all videos, join the ranks of our patrons and youtube members via the links in the description and pinned comment. Thanks to our supporters for allowing us to continue doing our dream job. We will begin our video with a basic introduction to ancient Greek and Indian perceptions of one another, with a focus on their intersection in the land of Gandhara. Gandhara is a region in modern-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, and consists of many hills and fertile valleys. Lying between prosperous trading hubs like Merv in Central Asia and the Maurya capital of Bataliputra, many merchants and travelers pass through Gandhara, making the cities of the region very rich. Many empires mention Gandhara in their records, such as the Achaemenids, Seleucids, Mauryas, Indo-Greeks, and Greco-Bactrians, as well as the Indo-Scythian and Indo-Parthian empires. Gandhara was thus very religiously and culturally diverse. The city of Taxila, perhaps the richest and most famous of Gandharan cities, had many Buddhist temples, as well as possibly many houses of worship for those of Zoroastrian, Jaina, and Iranian or Greek polytheistic allegiance. We can thus see that the region of Gandhara was a hotspot of cultural interaction. To understand why, when the Greeks arrived in Gandhara and the Indian subcontinent as a whole, they assumed that Heracles and Dionysus were being worshipped in the region, we must understand Interpretatio Graeca and Alexander's personal religious persuasions. Interpretatio Graeca is a term used to describe how Greeks would understand foreign gods with their familiar names. For example, Herodotus the historian described both Egyptian and Scythian deities with Greek deity names, only occasionally using local names. This means of understanding served as a form of analogy for Greeks to understand which foreign gods corresponded to their own, which helps explain why, upon reaching Gandhara, the Greeks witnessed local Indian gods and conflated them with Dionysus and Heracles. In addition, Alexander himself had a special relationship to both Dionysus and Heracles. Heracles was said to be Alexander's ancestor on Philip's side, and was notorious for his campaigns and heroic deeds throughout the world, something Alexander naturally wanted to emulate. Dionysus, meanwhile, was the god of madness and wine, things that Alexander was fond of. He was also a patron to Alexander and, as stated earlier, a conqueror of the vast Orient in the deeds attributed to him in his mythologies, so Alexander inevitably had a vested interest in following in his divine footsteps. On a broader scale, the ancient Greeks and their Indian contemporaries had long been aware of each other's lands and had forged interpretations of each other's cultures. For the Greeks, India was a faraway land, rich and full of wonders, like races of one-legged people. Many Hellenistic authors often mentioned India as a place where utopian communities existed, a way for them to discuss their own radical political ideas. Indians, for their part, called the Greeks Yavanas, depicting them in either a derogatory manner, as they were foreigners from outside of the caste system, or as people to be respected due to their knowledge. Venerable pieces from the corpus of Indian literature, such as epic plays and astronomical treatises, mentioned the Greeks as people who interacted and lived in India. These were the perceptions of the two peoples that will help us understand religious interactions. With this context in mind, we have to ask the question, who were the Indian gods which Alexander identified as Heracles and Dionysus? It should be noted that it is not Alexander alone who asserted these two Greek gods were worshipped in Gandhara. Other Greek sources, like Megasthenes, the Seleucid ambassador to the Maurya court, mention that Heracles conquered India and split the subcontinent amongst his children, while Dionysus was still worshipped by the Indians. This is a hard task, especially after Alexander's death, when the lines between Greek and Indian mythology became deeply blurred. Among the Far Eastern Greeks, Greco-Bactrians used only Greek deities on their coins, but Indo-Greeks started utilizing Indian gods and scripts on theirs. A practice which was continued by the Indo-Scythians, Indo-Parthians, and Kushans, who eventually conquered them. Some Indo-Greek kings used bilingual coins in Greek and the local Kharoshvi language. The Kushans were the most creative, using Greek, as well as Hindu, Buddhist, and Zoroastrian deities on their coinage, alongside Wesho, Mau, and Adoksho, Iranian deities of the respectively. Moreover, Buddha Gautama and Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, both appear as well. These deities show the diversity and cultural cross-pollination of Gandhara, problematizing our attempts to draw direct parallels between Heracles and Dionysus and local Indian gods. With that said, we will do our best anyways. Let us begin with Heracles, the god of strength. Heracles appears on the coinage of post-Alexander Greek kings in India. His statues appear in Buddhist temples in the region, as well as in central India, in Mathura, where he is seen fighting the Namaean lion. According to Richard Stoneman, Heracles probably was linked to a local Vedic deity called Vasudeva Krishna. This god, who also appears on coins of Indo-Greek king Heliocles I, is part of the quintuplet of Vrishi heroes. These heroes were the gods of the clans of central India and symbolized martial strength and power. Vasudeva Krishna had his own cult, which emerged after the decline of Vedic Brahmanism in the age of the Mahajanapadas. This cult appears to have had some influence in Indo-Greek lands, as the Indo-Greek king Antyalkidas commissioned a pillar in Sanchi to the god's vehicle Garuda through his ambassador Heliodorus. The god's favoured bird shows that he was a sort of precursor to Vishnu, the preserver deity in classical Hinduism. Specifically, he most likely became Krishna, perhaps one of the most important avatars of Vishnu alongside Rama. Heracles also appears to have influenced the Zoroastrian yazata of victory called Berithragna. These three deities were known for their strength and might, hence their identification with each other. There is however another deity that Heracles was associated with. To find out who, we must go to the site of Tapashotor in Afghanistan. Within the site, we see many samples of the so-called Gandhara School of Art. This school, which combined Greek, Indian, and Iranian styles in the service of Buddhism, was incredibly popular with the Scythian and Kushan rulers of the region. Within Tapashotor, we see the Buddha in meditation surrounded by two mighty figures. One appears like Taiki, the Greek goddess of luck and the protector of many Hellenistic cities, holding a cornucopia. In reality, the woman is Hariti, a cannibal demon and smallpox deity from eastern India, who according to legend, became a Buddhist and a guardian of children after the Buddha hid her beloved son under his begging bowl. Over time, Hariti became a popular deity and followed the across India in many temples. The other figure looks like Heracles, with his mighty physique and beard. However, he also seems to hold a Vajra, or a diamond thunderbolt weapon in Indian mythologies, usually associated with Indra. This figure is not actually Heracles, but a Bodhisattva who guards the Buddha called Vajrapani, or thunderbolt bearer. Vajrapani rarely appears in early Buddhist sources, but appears to have had a bloom in depictions in Gandhara. This is because Heracles, with his association with Zeus, or the Indra of the Greeks, and a mighty hero, could have filled this role easily as a guard of the Buddha. According to Jason Neelis, Buddhists tended to localize the Buddha's life wherever they went, to make it more familiar. They also tended to subdue or convert local deities to Buddhism to show Buddhist strength and power. Heracles' image is here used to show a Buddhist deity, a testament to the diversity of Gandharan art. Dionysus in India is a bit of a trickier figure to pin down. Local wine cults did exist in the region, as Anna Filigenzi has discussed the presence of wine pressing holes in Gandharan caves. However, we do not know much about these cults, and they likely date back to before Alexander and the Hellenes had a huge impact on the region. With that said, wine-related religious rituals are commonly represented in the Gandharan art of the era, when Greek kings ruled the region. It usually appears in the form of imagery depicting parties and wine, revelries present on Buddhist stupas. Buddhist monasteries were likely involved in wine cultivation, possibly using it for medical purposes. Thus, we can see that the existence of local wine cults in India may have led the Greeks to believe Dionysus was worshipped in the region. However, the Greeks weren't the only ones with a god of wine and revelry. Gandhara is one of the regions where Shaivism, the worship of Shiva, took hold. Shiva has many avatars, one of which is Rudra, who shares many similarities with Dionysus. Skanda, Shiva's son and the god of war, also has similarities to Dionysus in his martial and mystical qualities. We can thus see a combination of influences in the region manifesting themselves into what the Greeks would ultimately perceive as the worship of Dionysus. Like Heracles, some analogies can be made to multiple deities, both Indian and Iranian. More importantly, this Greek perception of the other, as well as the cultural vibrancy of Gandhara, allowed for new understandings of mythologies in both art and folklore. Dionysus and Heracles were not the only deities who had parallels drawn between themselves and various Indian and Iranian gods. We have mentioned before how different kingdoms used different deities on coinage. These deities, whether Greek, Indian, Iranian, or Central Asian, often influenced the image of each other as well as their cults. For instance, the goddess Artemis, being a moon goddess as well as a hunting goddess, was associated with the goddess Nana, who was worshipped in Bactria. Nana herself was an import from Mesopotamia and was mixed in with an Iranian goddess called Anahita. Lakshmi, Hindu goddess of prosperity and wife of Vishnu the preserver, also appears in some coins from the period. Many of her visual representations have some similarities to Tyche, Greek goddess of luck. Surya, the sun god of the Vedas, often appears with a solar halo after this period, and this too suggests cultural mixture with Greece and Persia. Solar halos usually were associated with Apollo and Mithras, sun gods of the Greeks and Persians respectively. Mithras was popular amongst Eastern Iranians, while Apollo was a patron of the Seleucids. It is possible that later art from the Gupta Empire, featuring royals with halos around their heads, was inspired by Gandharan art of this variety. Even Shiva the destroyer shows some similarities to a Central Asian god called Wesho, who like Shiva's Rudra avatar, could control storms. We can see, therefore, that one god could easily become another in the Indo-Iranian borderlands of Gandhara and its outer environs, where Greek, Indian and Persian worldviews were in constant interplay. Perhaps the most intriguing examples of cultural cross-pollination in this region and time are the ones present within the region's Buddhist practitioners. As we have mentioned, Mahayana Buddhism found an early stronghold in Gandhara, and one of its unique features is the presence of Bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas are practically enlightened, but have forsaken nirvana, eternal reward, in order to help the rest of the world achieve theirs. Some Bodhisattvas, like Maitreya and Avalokitesvara, appear often in Gandharan art. Many of these Bodhisattvas may have had artistic influences from Greek and Persian gods. For instance, the Buddha Maitreya, a future Buddha who is meant to spread the dharma once more, could have been influenced by the Shaoshyant, a Zoroastrian messianic figure that influenced Judaism as well. Hariti, whom we have discussed previously, often appears with her husband Pansikha in statues in the form of the Central Asian prosperity gods Pharoah and Adoksho. Moreover, they also frequently appear in Gandharan art in stupas linked to wine cultivation, possibly as beneficiaries of good health and merit. Buddhist stupas from the period also show small forms of the god Eros, or nymphs, tritons, and atlases. These can be seen as Yakshis or Nagas, or Indian mythological sea creatures that were To root back to where we began this video and summarize, the Herakles and Dionysus that Alexander found in India most likely were reflections of the local Indian gods Vasudeva and Rudra. The conflation of Indian and Greek gods with similar traits in Gandhara was the result of the region being a melting pot of Greek, Indian, Iranian, and Central Asian peoples, all of whom exchanged ideas and religions with one another. These exchanges happened throughout the Hellenistic period and produced some of the most culturally vibrant art of the time. These exchanges, whether philosophical, religious, or social, provide us with glimpses into a period when one god could become another depending on the audience. While many will focus on how one side of the world enlightened the other, we can see that both Greece and India, as well as their Iranian and Central Asian intermediaries, were equally capable of appreciating and expanding upon each other's cultures. Perhaps the most important thing to gain from this overview is that when great civilizations meet, even greater achievements follow. 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