1889.] on the Civilization of Ancient India. *W 



other cults, in India, and the figure of the god, armed with his trident, 

 and standing beside his sacred bull, is, perhaps, the commonest mytho- 

 logical device of the Indo-Scythian coins. But ho is not exactly 

 the S'iva of the medireval Puranas, a Hinduized aboriginal demon. 

 Sometimes he is hardly to be distinguished from the Greek Posoidon, 

 and the Greek writers on India themselves perceived that he was akin 

 to Dionysus. Dr. Windisch shows that all the Sanskrit plays are 

 associated with the worship either of Siva or his consort Gauri, and 

 that they were generally performed, like the Greek dramas, at the 

 spring festival. It seems probable that the Hellenistic settlers in India 

 transferred to Siva some of the honour due to Dionysus, and the idea 

 of the Indian deity must have been influenced by the Greek conception 

 of those gods in the Olympic pantheon who most nearly resembled him. 



Some rare coins of the groat Indo-Scythian emperor, Kanishka, 

 bear the name of Buddha, BOVAO in Greek characters, and afford us 

 the earliest known examples of the conventional effigy of the teacher. 



Other Indo-Scythian coins, again, present figures of the personified 

 Sun and Moon, as Greek deities, with their Greek names Helios and 

 Selene, while many others represent a pantheon of Iranian deities, bear- 

 ing such strange names as Oksho (Okro), Ardethro, and so forth, the 

 meaning of which is only now beginning to bo understood. I cannot 

 here pursue this topic further, and only allude to it for the purpose of 

 indicating that both a little before, and a little after, the Christian era 

 Hellenic and Asiatie forms of religion were interacting, and that both 

 Buddhism and Hinduism must have been modified by the contact with 

 other modes of religious belief. 



Even so late as A. D. 400 the devices of tho Gupta coins show 

 that the conceptions of Hindi divinities were partly based on Grseco- 

 Roman ideas. Lakshmi, the goddess of plenty and good fortune, is 

 invested with attributes plainly borrowed from the ™ X r/, Abundantia, 

 and other personifications of abstract ideas current in tho west. The 

 conception of Lakshmi, the consort of Vishnu, glides imperceptibly into 

 that of Parvati, Durga, or Gauri, the consort of S'iva, and is related to 

 some of the forms both of Venus and Cybele * 



The apparent resemblances between the Puranic legend of Krishna 

 and tho Gospel accounts of Christ arc well known, and have formed 

 the subject of much discussion. I am inclined to believe that the 

 Krishna myth is really indebted to tho Gospels for some of its incidents' 



* For the Indo-Seythian coins sec Gardner's Catalogue, and articles by Stein, 

 Cunningham, West, and EapSOIl in the Babylonian and Oriental Record for 1888 and 

 1889, and Indian Antiquary for April 1888. For tho Gupta coinage see Journal 

 It, As. Soc. for 1889, p. 25, etc. 



