That they did. 400 BCE or so vs the oldest of Hindu scriptures.
Plato was in the same generation as Mahabharata, Bhagavad Gita, and Ramayana, and older than many other influential Hindu texts, but even the most skeptical estimates puts the older texts as older than Plato (minimum 500 BCE) and the oldest, the Rigveda has its ‘newest possible date’ at 1000 BCE.
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That said, I believe there’s likely some cultural crossover in Plato’s generation due to trade routes sharing goods *and* ideas around.
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The style and conceptual connections between the Bhagavad Gita and some of Plato’s works have been known for a long time and I find it likely that either:
a) they independently came up with similar ideas because it was “an idea whose time had come” [you see that a lot in inventions when people will invent the same kind of item or architecture in different parts of the world almost simultaneously”
or
b) Plato was inspired by the Bhagavad Gita
or
c) the author of the Bahagavad Gita was inspired by Plato
There may be more possibilities still. But those come to mind.
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Oh it’s indirect, not direct. The generally agreed upon route is something like this:
India traded with Mesopotamia; Mesopotamia traded with Syria and Anatolia. Both of those places traded with the Mycenaeans and the Greeks.
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Megasthenes was the first documented Greek visitor to India, around 300 BCE and while he (and others before him) allude to much earlier contact with India, it’s more likely it was 2nd hand knowledge through the Syrians, who got it from the Mesopotamians, who got it from India.
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One persistent modern myth is that there was some kind of indivisible wall between civilizations, but the reality is that people have been trading and sharing since antiquity.
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Oh there’s definitely “first times” for civilization contact and the idea I go with regarding the pyramid structures in South America and Egypt being similar likely had to do with a Zeitgeist of some kind : it was the ‘right time’ for a group of humans to start making those kinds of things. [not some cosmic plan but just some natural level of social / intellectual development reached independently]
Still I think there’s far more crossover of culture than independent.
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Linguistic development gives the strongest case for that. Even if one is skeptical of the constructed Proto-Indo-European conceptual language, it’s still a useful pointer that there’s _some_ undocumented trading of goods and cultures that are just otherwise lost to the sands of time.
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