India

India—Hebrew hoddu, possibly from the Old Persian hindu—is mentioned twice in the Bible, in both cases describing it as part of the Persian empire of Ahasuerus, i.e., Xerxes I, during the 5-4th Cent BC (Est 1:1; 8:9).

The 'India' referred to in Esther would, of course, have only referred to a part of the Indus valley and plains east of the Afghan mountains, and not the entire sub-continent of present-day India. Documentary as well as other archaeological artifacts indicate that trade, if not diplomatic relations, between India and the Ancient Near-East had been going on since the late 3rd Mill BC. Cinnamon, a typically Indo-Asian spice, was one of the ingredients Moses was instructed to use in the sacred anointing oil for the priests (Exo 30:23, later half of the 2nd Mill BC). The first appearance of the name 'India,' however, seems to be an inscription found in Persepolis (in modern Iran), the ancient capital of Darius I. Dated to about 518 BC, the inscription lists among Darius's many domains that of 'Hi(n)du.' Scholars today believe that these parts of north-western India may have been conquered by the Persians some time as early as the mid-6th Cent BC. Alexander's soldiers, of course, refused to go any further soon after they arrived on the western edge of India, but they returned with war-elephants that, Josephus reports, were used by the Seleucids against the Jews in the Maccabean Revolt.

Though noted only in post-biblical but unanimous traditions, the apostle Thomas was supposed to have gone and evangelized India, first in the north in Panjab in the court of King Gudnaphar and, on a second mission to Kerala, where he founded the Syrian Church, and was eventually martyred, and buried, in Mylapore, today a suburb of Madras.

John Keay explains the origin of the name:

The word for a 'river' in Sanskrit is sindhu. Hence sapta-sindhu meant '[the land of] the seven rivers', which was what the Vedic ayra called the Panjab. The Indus, to which most of these seven rivers were tributary, was the sindhu par excellence; and in the language of ancient Persian, a near relative of Sanskrit, the initial 's' of a Sanskrit word was invariably rendered as an aspirate - 'h'. . . . When, from Persian, the word found its way into Greek, the initial aspirate was dropped, and it started to appear as the route 'Ind' (as in 'India', 'Indus', etc). In this form it reached Latin and most other European languages. However, in Arabic and related languages it retained the initial 'h', giving 'Hindustan'as the name by which Turks and Mughals would know India. That word also passed on to Europe to give 'Hindu'as the name of the country's indigenous people and of what, by Muslims and Christians alike, was regarded as their infidel religion.