During the reign of the Persian king Nooshirwan, his physician Barzoueh made various journeys into India, one of which was specially for the purpose of obtaining copies of Indian literature, and another to obtain medicaments and herbs.

How to account for the strange fact that all schools of medicine which have risen, flourished, and disappeared, have left some trace in historical records, with the exception of that of India, is most difficult, unless under the hypothesis that the language in which the science and philosophy of India was recorded has been almost a sealed book to the world, and is even now quite unintelligible to the people of India itself, generally speaking, and that thus the only way in which the results of the long ages of philosophic study, which unquestionably have had a place in India, have only been known by this dark reflection from the writings of Greek and Arabic writers, which were scattered broadcast over the ancient world.  The Greeks, we know, borrowed their science largely from the Egyptians, both in respect to theology and philosophy; and we might, with much profit, pursue the examination of our subject amongst the records of that highly civilized amongst the ancient nations.

Many authors have attempted to show that there is a wonderful resemblance between the Egyptians and the Hindoos, the sculptures on the monuments of the former are most wonderfully like those of India, and the features, dress, and arms are all as like as may be.

Both nations had the various arts of weaving, dyeing, embroidering, working in metals, and the manufacture of glass, and practised them with but little difference in their methods.  The fine muslins of India find their counterparts as “woven wind” in the transparent tissues figured on the Egyptian temples.  The style of building, the sciences of astronomy, music, and medicine were assiduously cultivated by both nations, and there was direct intercourse between them, perhaps even before historical time begins.

Rameses the Great (III.), called also Sesostris, fitted out not only war ships but merchant vessels for the purpose of trading with India, in B.C. 1235, and Wilkinson in his book on the Ancient Egyptians, tells us that in 2000 B.C. there were no less than 400 ships trading to the Persian Gulf.  There is, after all, nothing surprising in this when we remember the fact, which is, however, not generally known, I am afraid, that under the reign of Pharoah Necho, a fleet of his ships safely circumnavigated Africa, from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean, this being in advance of the celebrated voyage of Diaz and Vasco da Gama by no less than 2100 years.

No less than seven centuries before Thales went to study in Egypt, astronomical calculations were inscribed on the monuments at Thebes, so that we can see how modern by comparison the Greek philosophy appears.

In a note Wilkinson says that “The science of Medicine was one of the earliest cultivated in Egypt.  Athothes, the successor of Menes of the first dynasty, is said to have written on the subject, and five papyri on the subject have survived.