Yavanas (Non-Greeks; People of Ionia and NOT Macedonia)!

[Guest guest]

Dear All, I happend to read a good write-up from our Kishor Patnaik ji's group by Koenraad Elst as follows - ====the very choice of the word Ionian/Yona/Yavana toindicate Greeks pars pro toto may indeed stem from a situation wherethe Greeks whom Indians encountered were all Ionians, notMacedonians. Ionia was a part of the Achaemenid empire, the rest ofGreece was not, so any Greeks resetlled to the eats of the empirewould have been Ionians. That makes it likely the word dates frombefore Alexander.(http://tech.IndiaArchaeology/message/7520)==== That is really interesting! * We know that it was Macedonian king Alexander who conquered much of east including Afghanistan and some part of India around BC 300. * We also know that the word 'Yavana' as per indian astrological sources dates back even to BC 1400! How come indian people know about Ionia and Ionians much prior to Greeks?! If not to the Alexandrian Greeks to whom this word refer to? Which culture and cultural heritage is referred to?! The answer lies in identifying the true meaning of the word 'Ionian'; in knowing were Ionia is and also in knowing why even BC 1400 records refer to these people which the Greeks has a history from mere BC 800 onwards. The following links and info may give you a good start.

 

Ionia was an ancient region of central coastal Anatolia in present-day Turkey, the region nearest Ýzmir, which was historically Smyrna. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionia

The region was settled as of the beginning of the third millennium BCE. It is said to have been a city of the autochthonous Leleges before the Greek colonists started to settle in the coast of Asia Minor as of the beginning of the first millennia BCE. Throughout antiquity Smyrna was a leading city-state of Ionia, with influence over the Aegean shores and islands. Smyrna was also among the cities that claimed Homer as a resident. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smyrna

The Ionians were one of the three populations into which the ancient Greeks considered the population of Hellenes to have been divided. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionians

They spoke the Anatolian languages are a group of extinct Indo-European languages, which were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language. The Anatolian branch is generally considered the earliest to split off the Proto-Indo-European language, from a stage referred to either as Indo-Hittite or "Middle PIE", typically a date in the mid-4th millennium BC is assumed. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatolian_languages

Unlike "Aeolians" and "Dorians", "Ionians" appears in the languages of different civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean and as Far East as the Indian subcontinent. They are not the earliest Greeks to appear in the records; that distinction belongs to the Danaans and the Achaeans. The trail of the Ionians begins in the Mycenaean Greek records of Crete. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionians

So in short the Yavanas are NOT Greeks, but the ancient people lived in Smyrna BEFORE the barbarian Alexandrian/Macedonian Greeks destroyed their culture! Their golden period is the same as that of Crete (The home town of Homer. Crete is another ancient culture that the barbarian Greeks destroyed). Ionians appear in Indic literature and documents as Yavana and Yona. Prior to then, the Yavanas appear in the Vedas with reference to the Vedic period, which could be as early as the 2nd or 3rd millennium BC. But in the Vedas the Yavanas are a kingdom of Mlechhas. But please note that Mlechhas are the people of Meluhha. (It has been speculated[who?] that the term is related to Meluhha, the name of a trading partner of Bronze Age Sumer, tentatively identified with the Indus Valley civilization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mlechhas ) . Meluhha is nothing but sindhu-sarasvati city of Harappa!! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meluhha)

 

So in short the conclusion would be that the word `Yavana' (People of Ionia) refers the ancient people centered around `Smyrna' city (a place currently in Turkey) while `Mlechha' (people of Meluhha) refers to the Harappan people of Sindhu-Sarasvati civilization – possibly both of them being the extention of one and the same culture dating as back as BC 3000 to BC 1800.L0ve and regards,Sreenadh