Christian-Buddhist Intercommunication of Late Antiquity

Abstract

The paper is devoted to a historical reconstruction of cultural and commercial contacts which took place between Egypt and India at the peak of the maritime Silk Road to the West in antiquity, i.e. from the first to the fifth century AD, and to how these contacts were reflected by the Roman authors of that time. It is shown that in this context the story of Siddhārtha Gautama can have been transmitted to the West from the first to the fifth century AD. This study is based on the world-systems approach to late antiquity and it has the following two complementary dimensions: (i) reconstructing archeological evidences for the contacts of that time; (ii) cross-cultural textual analysis. As a result, it was detected that almost all the main claims of late antique authors about Buddhism and the ways of its expansion are well confirmed by archeology.