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More amazing to me is the 6th century bronze Buddha statue found in a pre-Viking era trading centre in Helgö, Sweden: http://irisharchaeology.ie/2013/12/the-he

• pjungwir 12y ago
  Wow, that is amazing. There is also the very old saint's life Barlaam and Josaphat that is basically a Christianized Buddha story. I think we underestimate how much contact there was between East and West long ago. I recall hearing about communities found in Afghanistan still speaking Greek, probably from Alexander the Great. And before that, Herodotus has many stories of intercourse between Greeks and Persians.
  • huxley 12y ago
    Yeah, I was blown away by Barlaam and Josaphat. If you're interested in the intersections between Greece and Asia, you should find these articles pretty amazing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Bactrian_Kingdom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~bhhankes/bamiyanhistory.html https://www.mtholyoke.edu/~bhhankes/bamiyanhistory.html
  • nl 12y ago
    I think we underestimate how much contact there was between East and West long ago. One contributing factor to this was that the Ottomans closed the silk road to Europeans. "Contact" between Europe and Asia was already a fairly tenuous link, where very few people actually made the journey or even talked to people who had (ignoring for the moment wars). The closing of the silk road made it seem even more remote. This led to European nations seeking sea-routes to Asia, which ironically led to greater knowledge of the East (as people in Western Europe started hearing stories first hand, instead of third hand via traders who traded with caravan traders).