Aristotle On The Origin of The Jews in India

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Aristotle on the Origin of the Jews in India
Subhash Kak
Published 28th March 2017 - 4 Comments
Articles
This article is to try to make sense of a puzzling statement of Aristotle (384-322

BCE) that links Jews with India. This statement is recalled in a fragment by
Aristotle’s pupil Clearchus who traveled widely and whose inscription on a
tomb of a friend is preserved in the Afghan city of Ai-Khanoum.
The Jewish scholar Flavius Josephus (37 – 100 CE) quotes from Clearchus’s fragment
in his Contra Apionem [Against Apion], which has Aristotle say: “Jews are derived
from the Indian philosophers; they are named by the Indians Calami, and by the
Syrians Judaei, and took their name from the country they inhabit, which is called
Judea.” (Book I:22) [1]
I can think of two places that might have been the Calami of Aristotle. The rst
candidate is the famous port city of Kollam, in Kerala, which was well known to the
Phoenicians and Romans, and the second is the ancient city of Kalyani or Kalyan, in
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Karnataka, which was to later become the capital of one branch of the Chalukya
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Empire. The second city, which has recently been renamed Basavakalyan, appears to
be the older of the two.
The interaction between India and the West during the rst millennium BCE is well
known as in the mention in Old Testament of trade for ivory, apes and peacocks (1
Kings 10:22). There was thriving bilateral trade between India and Rome both
through the overland caravan route and the southern sea route. By the time of
Augustus 120 ships set sail every year from Myos Hormos to India. Pliny complains
in Historia Naturae 12.41.84, “India, China and the Arabian Peninsula take one
hundred million sesterces from our empire per annum at a conservative estimate:
that is what our luxuries and women cost us.”
Silk Route in the Ancient World circ. 120 BCE-1450s CE.
India and the West had rich interaction in the second millennium BCE also. This was
the time of the Mitanni of Syria, who worshiped Vedic gods. The Mitanni ruled
northern Mesopotamia (including Syria) for about 300 years, starting 1600 BCE, out
of their capital of Vasukhani. In a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni, Indic
deities Mitra, Varuṇa, Indra, and Nāsatya (Aśvins) are invoked. Their chief festival was
the celebration of viṣuva (solstice) very much like in India. It is not only the kings who
had Sanskrit names; a large number of other Sanskrit names have also been
unearthed in the records from the area.
Mitanni territory circ. 1400BCE.
The list of the Sanskrit names used in Syria and elsewhere was published by P. E.
Dumont of the Johns Hopkins University, in the Journal of American Oriental Society
in 1947, and one may see a summary of that in my own book chapter on Akhenaten,
Sūrya, and the Ṛgveda, which is available here
here. [2]
. [2] The names of the main kings are
(with the standard Sanskrit form or meaning inside brackets): The rst Mitanni king
was Sutarna I (good Sun). He was followed by Baratarna I (Paratarṇa, great Sun);
Paraśukṣatra (ruler with axe); Saustatar (Saukṣatra, son of Sukṣatra, the good ruler);
Paratarṇa II; Artadama (Ṛtadhāman, abiding in cosmic law); Sutarṇa II; Tushratta
(Daśaratha or Tveṣaratha, having ten or fast chariots); and nally Matiwazza
(Mativāja, whose wealth is thought), during whose lifetime the Mitanni state became
a vassal to Assyria.
It is most interesting that the Mitannis were connected by marriage across several
generations to the Egyptian 18th dynasty to which Pharaoh Akhenaten (ruled 1352-
1336 BCE according to the mainstream view) belonged. Akhenaten’s second wife was
Tadukhipa (“khipa” from the Sanskrit “kṣipā,” night) and she became famous as the
queen Kiya (short for Khipa). His rst wife was the beautiful Nefertiti, whose bust is
available in a museum in Berlin.
Replica bust of Nertiti in the Berlin Museum. CC BY-SA 3.0
Akhenaten (“glory of the Aten”) changed his name to honour Aten (“One god”
represented as the solar disk) in his sixth year of rule. Many see Akhenaten as the
originator of monotheism by his banishment of all deities except for his chosen one.
He has been seen as a precursor to the Old Testament prophets, and thus to the
Abrahamic religions. Some Biblical scholars see his Hymn to Aten as the
original Psalm
original Psalm 104 of the Old Testament [3].
‘Amehotep IV’ (Akhenaten), found in N. de G. Davies, The Rock Tombs of El Amarna, part VI, ‘The
Egypt Exploration Fund’ (London, 1908).
The other possibility is that Akhenaten’s worship of Aten is derived from the Vedic
system through the three generations of queens in his family that were from the
Mitanni. There are parallels between his hymn and the Sūrya hymns of the Ṛgveda.
For example, in both the Sun has absolute power over the lives of animals and men
and it provides natural bounties while also residing in the heart of the poet. Note
also that Agni is praised as Yahvah in the Ṛgveda 21 times, and Yahweh is the name
of the highest divinity in the Old Testament.
If the Vedic element was important, as is perhaps re ected in the mysticism of the
Egyptian Book of the Dead, the cult of the dead and resurrection remained the most
important element of the Egyptian religion. This cult continues to form the
cornerstone of the three Abrahamic faiths.
The Vedic presence via the Mitanni in Egypt and the Near East occurs several
centuries before the exodus of the Jews. This presence is sure to have left its mark in
various customs, traditions, and beliefs. It may be that this encounter explains
uncanny similarities in mythology and ritual, such as circumambulation around a
rock, the use of a rosary of 108 beads, (or the idea of 33 gods in pre-Abrahamic
traditions). These practices are easily understandable within the Vedic system,
whereas they are remembered as commandments to be believed without
understanding in the Western faiths. [4]
This site Moses

Sigmund Freud in his essay, uses cookies.and Monotheism
By using this site you accept our(1937) proposes that Moses
use of cookies.
was an Egyptian linked to the courtAgree of and

Akhenaten.
hide this messageIn defence of this proposal he
argued that the Hebrew word for “Lord,” “Adonai,” becomes “Aten” when the letters
are written in Egyptian. [5]
The memory of India’s interaction with Egypt persisted within the Indo-Iranian world.
The Iranian scholar Al-Biruni (973-1048), speaking of chariots of war in his book
Tarikh Al-Hind, mentions the Greek claim that they were the rst to use them and
insists they are wrong because the chariots were already invented by Aphrodisios
the Hindu, when he ruled over Egypt, about 900 years after the deluge. [6] This
reference, which cannot be literally true because of the sheer distance between the
two regions, is signi cant for it preserves the memory of a “Hindu” (Indic-inspired)
king of Egypt prior to the Greek state. The reference to the chariots of war of this
king (Akhenaten) seems to remember the foreigner warlords Hyksos (literally, ruler
of the foreign countries) who ruled Egypt during the Second Intermediate Period just
before the New Kingdom to which Akhenaten belonged.
It is not surprising then that the iconic Shiva-Shakti Yantra of the Indian spiritual
tradition is identical to the Star of David of the Jews. A picture of the Star of David
from the Leningrad Codex with a date of 1008 in its colophon is presented for
comparison.
Leningrad Codex: the oldest complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible in Hebrew, 1008 CE.
But how could the Indic element be so far from India, in Syria and Egypt? Scholars
have suggested that after catastrophic earthquakes, or a long drought that dried up
the Sarasvati River around 1900 BCE, there was the abandonment of Harappan cities
and great migrations away in all directions [7]. Within India, we see the focus of the
Sindhu-Sarasvati culture shift eastwards. To the west, we see the Kassites, a
somewhat shadowy aristocracy with Indic names and worshiping Surya and the
Maruts, in Western Iran about 1800 BCE. They captured power in Babylon in 1600
BCE, which they were to rule for over 500 years. And then, of course, we have the
long line of the Sanskritic Mitanni aristocracy of Syria that we have already spoken
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Megasthenes (350-290 BCE), the ambassador of Seleucus I to the court of

Chandragupta Maurya in Pataliputra appears to have been aware of the connections
between the Indians and the Jews. In the third book of Indica, as available to the
Church Father Clement of Alexandria (200 CE), he writes: “All that has been said
regarding nature by the ancients is asserted also by philosophers out of Greece, on
the one part in India by the Brachmanes, and on the other in Syria by the people
called the Jews.” [8]
A thousand years later, the memory of a special link between the Jews and India
persisted. Al-Biruni mentions on page 206, vol. 1 of Alberuni’s India by Edward
Sachau, that no foreigners excepting the Jews were permitted to enter Kashmir
during the period it was under attack by Muslims.
India has its own Jewish communities that are found principally in South India; the
oldest of these is that of the Cochin Jews. They believe they are the descendants of
traders from Judea who arrived in 562 BCE, with others coming as exiles in 70 CE
after the destruction of the Second Temple [9]. It appears that there was migration
of communities in both directions.
Cochin Jews, c. 1900. From the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia.
Bibliography
1. Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, Project

Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2849
Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2849
2. Subhash Kak, ‘Akhenaten, Surya, and the Rgveda’, In G.C. Pande (ed.), A Golden
Chain of Civilizations: Indic, Iranic, Semitic, and Hellenic up to C. 600
BCE, Munshiram Manoharlal, 2007. http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/akhena.pdf
3. Dominic Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt, Routledge,
2002.
4. Subhash Kak, The Wishing Tree, Aditya Prakashan, New Delhi, 2015.
5. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, The Hogarth Press, 1939.
6. Al-Biruni, Tarikh Al-Hind, E.C. Sachau trans., Alberuni’s India, Kegan Paul,
London, 1910.
7. G. Feuerstein, S. Kak, and D. Frawley, In Search of the Cradle of
Civilization, Quest Books, 2001.
8. J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India As Described By Megasthenes And Arrian, Trübner
& Co, London, 1877.
9. Peter Schäfer, The History of the Jews in Antiquity, Routledge, 1995.
YouTube video on ai-Khanoum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tka9TFyWIw
Subhash Kak is Regents Professor and a previous Head of the Computer Science
Department at Oklahoma State University, who has made contributions to
cryptography, arti cial neural networks, and quantum information.
Kak is also notable for his Indological publications on the history of science, the
philosophy of science, ancient astronomy, and the history of mathematics. Alan
Sokal labeled Kak “one of the leading intellectual luminaries of the Hindu-nationalist
diaspora”.
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4 thoughts on “Aristotle on the Origin of the Jews in India”
B Thomas says:
Thank you. Wonderful information and a lively perspective.
Thomas from Cochin, South of India.
1st April 2017 at 7:30 am
Asheton says:
That was a very intriguing article
4th April 2017 at 7:39 pm
Gene Pelka says:

Dr. Kak – Thank you for a most interesting article relating the Jews to the Indus Valley civilizations. I am very much looking
forward to your book. I do have a question. Hopefully you can clear this up for me. Your article states that many see
Pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled 1352-1336 BCE according to the mainstream view, as the originator of monotheism, and a
precursor to the Old Testament prophets and thus to the Abrahamic religions. However, in his book “A Test of Time”, David
M. Rohl (Century Ltd, London) 1995, places the exodus at approximately 1447 B.C., more than a full century prior to
Akhenaten’s rein. If Moses did in This
factsite
receive the 10
uses cookies. Commandments
By using this site you acceptduring
our use the 40 years of desert wandering one would
of cookies.
have to recognize that monotheism preceded the rein of Akhenaten. Can you help me with this puzzle. Thank you.
kikz says:
what strange physical countenance that grouping has… extremely short appendages.. squatmonsteresque.
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2019-09-29 Aristotle on the Origin of the Jews in India - Graham Hancock Official Website

Published 28th March 2017 - 4 Comments

This article is to try to make sense of a puzzling statement of Aristotle (384-322

Silk Route in the Ancient World circ. 120 BCE-1450s CE.

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Mitanni territory circ. 1400BCE.

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Replica bust of Nertiti in the Berlin Museum. CC BY-SA 3.0

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This site Moses

was an Egyptian linked to the courtAgree of and

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Megasthenes (350-290 BCE), the ambassador of Seleucus I to the court of

Cochin Jews, c. 1900. From the 1901-1906 Jewish Encyclopedia.

1. Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, Project

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YouTube video on ai-Khanoum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tka9TFyWIw

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4 thoughts on “Aristotle on the Origin of the Jews in India”

Thomas from Cochin, South of India.

1st April 2017 at 7:30 am

4th April 2017 at 7:39 pm

Gene Pelka says:

30th April 2017 at 5:08 pm

Comments are closed.

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