Bardaisan’s Account of Indian Religious Practices and the Identification of the Described Phenomena on the Basis of Textual and Archaeological Sources

This article is an analysis of the two preserved passages of the work Ἰνδικά by Bardesanes, a Syrian historian, philosopher, poet, and astrologer who lived in the years 154-222 AD. These passages are the account from the meeting of the members of an Indian embassy with the emperor Elegabalus and can be significant for our understanding of contacts between ancient Syria and India, as well as of ancient Indian religious practices. Therefore the purpose of this article is to reconsider a realistic interpretation of these passages by finding a possible identification of the described phenomena (namely, the ordeal of water, the ordeal of door, and a cave in the first passage handed over by Porphyry and Stobaeus, and two groups of Indian ascetics, the Βραχμᾶνες and the Σαμαναῖοι, in the second passage handed over by Porphyry) based on archaeological and textual evidence.