It is only after the Christian era that we find Apollonius and Plotinus looking towards India as the home of wisdom.  In earlier periods the definite instances of connection with India are few.  Indian figures found at Memphis perhaps indicate the existence there of an Indian colony,[1103] and a Ptolemaic grave-stone has been discovered bearing the signs of the wheel and trident.[1104] The infant deity Horus is represented in Indian attitudes and as sitting on a lotus.  Some fragments of the Kanarese language have been found on a papyrus, but it appears not to be earlier than the second century A.D.[1105] In 21 A.D.  Augustus while at Athens received an embassy from India which came via Antioch.

It was accompanied by a person described as Zarmanochegas, an Indian from Bargosa who astonished the Athenians by publicly burning himself alive.[1106] We also hear of the movement of an Indian tribe from the Panjab to Parthia and thence to Armenia (149-127 B.C.),[1107] and of an Indian colony at Alexandria in the time of Trajan.  Doubtless there were other tribal movements and other mercantile colonies which have left no record, but they were all on a small scale and there was no general outpouring of India westwards.

The early relations of India were with Babylon rather than with Egypt, but if Indian ideas reached Babylon they may easily have spread further.  Communication between Egypt and Babylon existed from an early period and the tablets of Tel-el-Amarna testify to the antiquity and intimacy of this intercourse.  At a later date Necho invaded Babylonia but was repulsed.  The Jews returned from the Babylonian captivity (538 B.C.) with their religious horizon enlarged and modified.  They were chiefly affected by Zoroastrian ideas but they may have become acquainted with any views and practices then known in Babylon, and not necessarily with those identified with the state worship, for the exiles may have been led to associate with other strangers.  After about 535 B.C. the Persian empire extended from the valley of the Indus to the valley of the Nile and from Macedonia to Babylon.  We hear that in the army which Xerxes led against Greece there were Indian soldiers, which is interesting as showing how the Persians transported subject races from one end of their empire to the other.  After the career of Alexander, Hellenistic kingdoms took the place of this empire and, apart from inroads on the north-west frontier of India, maintained friendly relations with her.  Seleucus Nicator sent Megasthenes as envoy about 300 B.C. and Ptolemy Philadelphus (285-247 B.C.) a representative named Dionysius.  Bindusara, the father of Asoka, exchanged missions with Antiochus, and, according to a well-known anecdote,[1108] expressed a wish to buy a professor ([Greek:  sophisthen]).  But Antiochus replied that Greek professors were not for sale.

Egyptologists consider that metempsychosis is not part of the earlier strata of Egyptian religion but appears first about 500 B.C., and Flinders Petrie refers to this period the originals of the earliest Hermetic literature.  But other authorities regard these works as being both in substance and language considerably posterior to the Christian era and as presenting a jumble of Christianity, Neoplatonism and Egyptian ideas.