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Comment by tgflynn | Hacker News Reader

What I found surprising from this article is the implication that Alexander the Great and the kingdoms that arose from his empire were considered Ionian. I thought that Ionian referred specifically to people of Greek culture who lived in Western Anatolia and some of the nearby islands, rather than something like every Greek speaker in the Hellenistic age.

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To Asians, the Greeks were all called Ionian, likely because that was the oldest term associated with people from the far west.

The article touches on this, but when Chinese explorers arrived in Bactria (roughly modern Afghanistan), they were expecting to run into "ioanians", due to earlier texts that had described these people (大宛 - Da Yuan, meaning "great ioanians").

This is the early history of the silk road, and also the first appearance of Buddhism in the West[0], which must have been absolutely fascinating to Stoics.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism

Wouldn't this contact have been a fact already before Stoicism was a thing, given Alexander was the pupil of Aristotle, and Zeno of Citium is about a generation later than Aristotle.

I seem to remember anecdotes of the greek expedition bringing Cynics along, who seemed to really see eye to eye with the hindu "gymnosophists".

I think Arabic, Persian and Indian civilizations of the time referred to all Greeks as Unani or Yunani (Ionian).

The Sanskrit word is Yavana but yeah etymologically it is from Ionian.

I find the question of possible influences of Buddhism and perhaps other Indian traditions on Classical Greek, Hellenistic and maybe even early Christian thought to be a fascinating subject, but as far as I know only the sparsest documented evidence of such influences exists.

You'd think though that the people who actually lived in Bactria and had direct contact with the Greeks would have called them by names closer to those they used for themselves.

Nah I think nationality would be almost implicitly obvious (e.g. due to clothing), the relationships would be much more on a personal level, first name basis and such, or the historically appropriate equivalent of, well, "habibi" or "buddy".

But I'd expect that two interacting merchants would definitely know of each other's names, as semi-contractual epistles of orders and corresponding shipping invoices were very much a thing (actually already since Sumer).

Not to mention that when you met someone back then, from what I understand, the idea would be that you would update each other on the stuff you knew about the world at large, sort of like a Fidonet where you got to walk to the next node: the time you spend with each other is precious, and ends up constructing a global grid of relationships and information.

It's mindblowing to consider these past ages, and how all those people who just went on with the business of living and learning even without GPS or Wikipedia, and did pretty well regardless.

> It's mindblowing to consider these past ages, and how all those people who just went on with the business of living and learning even without GPS or Wikipedia, and did pretty well regardless.

They definitely had GPS back then, which has just barely survived into the 21st century: https://www.mongolianexperiment.com/mongolia/navigating-by-m...

Haha, surprising point taken! I was expecting some Antikythera link :)

> To Asians, the Greeks were all called Ionian

Not picking nits, just an interesting fact. At that time, Asia was the name of the province on the eastern shore of the Aegean, where the Ionian Greeks were also located, so in a sense the sentence is absolutely true.

However the name "Ionian" still survives to this day throughout (modern-day) Asia: from the old Greek "Mikra Asia" in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) all the way to India, Greeks are "Ionians": "Yunani".

Ah, and I just remembered another curious little thing:

The western island complex of Greece (you know, Corfu-Zante-woohoo! etc., plus Odysseus' Ithaca, whichever among the candidates it may be) are also called "Ionian", but traditionally were inhabited by Doric, rather than Ionian, Greeks.

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