Aristotle on the Jews and India
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 descended from the Indian philosophers. The philosophers, they say, are in India called Kalanians [followers of Kalanos], and in Syria by the territorial name of Judeans, for the district which they inhabit is known as Judea.” (Book I:22) [1]
Kalanos, (Greek: Καλανός), was an Indian sadhu or swami from Taxila, who was born around 396 BCE and died in 323 BCE. In most likelihood, his name was Kalyāṇa, meaning “good” or “auspicious”. When invited to meet Alexander, he refused Alexander’s lavish gifts, stating they could not satisfy true desire. but he eventually accompanied the king on his homeward journey. After falling ill in Persia from an intestinal disorder, he chose self-immolation.
This is what Plutarch says of his death: “[He] asked that a funeral pyre might be prepared for him. To this he came on horseback. After offering prayers, sprinkling himself, and casting some of his hair upon the pyre, he ascended it. He greeted the Macedonians who were present and called on them to make that day one of pleasure and revelry with the king, whom, he declared, he should soon see in Babylon.” [2] The last remark was later interpreted as foretelling Alexander’s death there.
Philo on Kalanos and the Essenes
Philo of Alexandria (c. 20 BCE — c. 50 CE), also called Philō Judæus, was a Judean (Jewish) philosopher who wrote on his understanding of Judean customs in relation to Greek philosophy. In this passage of his work on the nature of true freedom, Philo speaks of examples of “barbarian” peoples living in accordance with philosophy and freedom. In this group he includes Indian gymnosophists as well as Judean Essenes, so clearly he is using the term “barbarian” as “outsider” to city life since he is himself a Judean.
Philo presents Kalanos as possessing the highest devotion to freedom and wisdom in the spirit of Vedanta in a letter he wrote to Alexander [3]:
Your friends urge you to apply violence and compulsion to the philosophers of India. These friends, however, have never even in their dreams seen what we do. Bodies you will transport from place to place, but souls you will not compel to do what they will not do, any more than force bricks or sticks to talk. Fire causes the greatest trouble and ruin to living bodies. We are superior to this; we burn ourselves alive. There is no king, no ruler, who will compel us to do what we do not freely wish to do. We are not like those philosophers of the Greeks, who practice words for a festal assembly. With us, actions match words and words match actions. Actions pass swiftly and words have short-lived power. Virtues secure to us blessedness and freedom.
Philo’s remarks on the Judean Essenes in Hypothetica (as preserved by Eusebius’ Preparation for the Gospel) [3] are in similar laudatory language:
Syria, too, has not failed to produce high moral excellence. This is where a considerable part of the very populous people (ethnos) of the Judeans live, including (it is said) certain persons called Essenes, numbering more than four thousand. They are given this name — which is, I think, a variation of hosiotēs (holiness), although the form of the Greek is inexact — because they have shown themselves especially devout in the service of God, not by offering sacrifices of animals but by resolving to sanctify their minds. The first thing about these people is that they live in villages and avoid the cities because of the lawlessness which has become customary among city dwellers. For the Essenes know that associating with people in the city would have a deadly effect upon their own souls, like a disease brought by a pestilential atmosphere.
India and the West
The interaction between India and the West during the first 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.”
India’s engagement with the West continued in the second millennium BCE. 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; many other Sanskrit names have also been unearthed in the records from the area.
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 [4]. The names of the main kings are (with the standard Sanskrit form or meaning inside brackets): The first 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 finally 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 first wife was the beautiful Nefertiti, whose bust is available in a museum in Berlin.
Akhenaten (“glory of the Aten”) changed his name to honor 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 104 of the Old Testament [5].
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, the highest God, in the Ṛgveda 21 times, and YHWH (י-ה-ו-ה), Yahweh, is the name of the highest divinity in the Torah.
If the Vedic element was important, as is perhaps reflected 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. [6]
Sigmund Freud in his essay, Moses and Monotheism proposes that Moses was an Egyptian linked to the court of Akhenaten. In defense of this proposal he argued that the Hebrew word for “Lord,” “Adonai,” becomes “Aten” when the letters are written in Egyptian. [7]
Persistence of Memory
The memory of India’s interaction with Egypt persisted within the Indo-Iranian world. The Iranian scholar Al-Bīrūnī (973–1048), speaking of chariots of war in his book Tarikh Al-Hind, mentions the Greek claim that they were the first 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 [8]. This reference, which cannot be literally true because of the sheer distance between the two regions, is significant 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.
Given the deep links between the Jews and India, it is not surprising 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 at the beginning of the essay.
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 [9][10]. 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 about.
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 [Brahmins], and on the other in Syria by the people called the Jews.” [11] It is significant that Megasthenes, who was contemporaneous with Aristotle, paired the Brahmins of India and the Jews as philosophers.
A thousand years later, the memory of a special link between the Jews and India persisted. Al-Bīrūnī 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.
To return to Aristotle’s claim that the Jews were originally from the part of India from where Kalanos came (northwest India close to Kashmir) one may wish also to look at recent genetic evidence. There is no definitive proof of a direct and substantial Southern Mediterranean contribution to Kashmiri DNA, but there are genetic links suggesting connections and interactions between populations from these regions over time, which is reflected in the presence of shared Western Eurasian haplogroups. These links likely arose from ancient migrations and gene flow throughout Eurasia (see also [12] on new linguistics evidence).
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 [13]. It appears that there was migration of communities in both directions.
Notes
This is a revised and corrected version of an essay that first appeared in Swarajya Magazine (November 2015) and later on the Graham Hancock Website (March 2017)
1. F. Josephus, Against Apion, Project Gutenberg. H.S.J. Thackeray and R. Marcus, Josephus, volumes 1–7; LCL, HUP, 1926–43.
2. B. Perrin, Plutarch’s Lives, 11 volumes. LCL, HUP, 1926–43.
3. F.H. Colson, G. Whitaker, and R. Marcus, Philo, 12 volumes. LCL, HUP, 1929–41.
4. S. Kak, Akhenaten, Surya, and the Rgveda. In G.C. Pande (ed.), A Golden Chain of Civilizations. Munshiram Manoharlal, 2007. https://www.academia.edu/45095239/Akhenaten_Surya_and_the_Rgveda
5. D. Montserrat, Akhenaten: History, Fantasy and Ancient Egypt. Routledge, 2002.
6. S. Kak, The Wishing Tree. Aditya Prakashan, 2015.
7. S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism. The Hogarth Press, 1939.
8. Al-Biruni, Tarikh Al-Hind (E.C. Sachau trans.) Alberuni’s India. Kegan Paul, , 1910.
9. G. Feuerstein, S. Kak, and D. Frawley, In Search of the Cradle of Civilization. Quest Books, 2001.
10. S. Kak, The Vedic Tradition: Cosmos, Connections and Consciousness. Motilal Banarsidass, 2025.
11. J.W. McCrindle, Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arrian. Trübner & Co, 1877.
12. S. Kak, The Saka Language and Sanskrit. Aditya, 2025.
13. P. Schäfer, The History of the Jews in Antiquity. Routledge, 1995.
