270 
Rajendralala Mitra —The Yavanas of Sanskrit Writers. [No. 3, 
term Yona, but neither Greece nor Egypt. It is not a little remark¬ 
able that, if Yona really meant a Greek and none but a Greek, Alex¬ 
ander, the Greek of Greeks to the Indians, should not have had that epithet 
assigned him. It can hardly be said that the ‘ yona’ in the inscription is 
intended to indicate the nationality of Antiochus, and not the name of his 
acquired dominion, for the word in the sentence qualifies the term raja and not 
the proper name ; besides yavana primarily is the name of a country, and only 
secondarily the designation of the inhabitants thereof. The propriety of the 
second branch of the alternative may be objected to by the query, if the word 
yona be a generic term, why should it not have been applied to all the 
western kings referred to ? It may, however, be said in explanation of this 
objection that the inscription gives prominence to Antiochus, an ally who 
overcame the others, and the latter, therefore, could be allowed to go without 
any epithet. Prinsep, in his translation of the inscription in question, has 
“ the four kings of Egypt,” but there is no word in the text which could be 
taken as equivalent to the name of the land of the Pharaohs, and the kings 
named were certainly not all kings of the same place. In either case, the 
passage in question does not in any way support the assumption of Dr. Kern 
that the word yavana means “ a Greek and a Greek only.” The passage, 
however, is an important one, and calls for a more thorough examination. 
It is, I believe, unquestionable that Alexander called himself a Mace¬ 
donian. Arrian says he belonged to oi Ma/ceSdres or MaKcSores Kat ‘EAA^ves^ 
generally the former : Plutarch always calls him a Macedonian. Now, Chan- 
dragupta waited on Alexander on the other side of the Indus, and was per¬ 
fectly familiar with the history of that sovereign. A few years afterwards, he 
married a Greek bride, the daughter of Seleukos Nikator, and had a Greek am¬ 
bassador, Megasthenes, in his court for several years. We know not whether 
his son Vindusara was born of this Greek lady or not. If we assume that he 
was, he would be half a Greek by birth, and his son As'oka, three-fourth Hin¬ 
du and one-fourth Greek. But denying the consanguinity of Asoka, 
it would be in the last degree inconsistent to suppose that he was other 
than thoroughly cognisant of the proper name of the Greeks and of the 
history of the Macedonian invasion, from which he was so little removed by 
time, and in which his grandfather took a prominent part. And such being 
the case, it is to be expected that he should, when describing persons of the 
race of his grandmother, in a state document of great importance, call 
them by their proper tribal or race name ; but this he does not. On the con¬ 
trary, instead of calling them Macedonians, or Hellenes, he styles 
one of them a yona, and that one is the sovereign of a country which, accor¬ 
ding to the Vishnu Purana, was situated to the west of the Indus, but not 
so far out as Greece. This would naturally suggest the inference that he 
did so with special reference to the country, and not to the nationality of 
