ABSTRACT
Fernando Wulff Alonso’s thesis that the Mahabharata owes its essence and numerous details to the Greek epic poet, Homer, is not implausible given other posited cases of transmission through the Indo-Greeks, from arguably the sari through formal logic to the Buddha statue. Indo-Greek rule was established in what is now Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier Province by Alexander the Great. But this was as late as in the fourth century, nearly a millennium after the probable date of the battle that became the centre of India’s major epic. For the Trojan War, most historians now accept that this is not a figment of Homer’s imagination. The narrative elements in common between the Greek and Hindu epics, explained by Wulff Alonso as the effect of transmission, can often be explained as a common origin much older than the Indo-Greeks, logically even older than the authors of the epics. This is the approach developed by Georges Dumezil.
