The names in parentheses are Sanskrit names from inscriptions of Ashoka (c.274-232), who had unified India and then embraced Buddhism. Ashoka wrote letters (circa 247, the year in which both Antiochus II and Ptolemy II died) to as many Hellenistic monarchs as he knew about to urge them to embrace Buddhism. A letter was also sent to Magas of Cyrene (Maga). The text of the letters is preserved in Ashoka's monumental inscriptions. No Greek historian mentions them. This makes the reign of Ashoka the earliest benchmark for chronology in Indian history.
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This was supposed to have included carrying a bowl of porridge through the marketplace in Athens. Why that would be improper or humiliating is unclear.
Pyrrho may represent a case of direct influence from Indian philosophy. He had traveled to India with his teacher Anaxarchus in the army of Alexander the Great, "with the result that he even associated with the Naked Philosophers (gymnosophistaî) in India and with the Magi" [Diogenes Laertius].
The most striking sign of this possible influence is how Pyrrho expressed himself in the actual form of the Four-Fold Negation, one of the fundamental and most characteristic principles of Buddhism: "...but we should be unopinionated, uncommitted, and unwavering, saying concerning each individual thing that it no more is than is not, or it both is and is not, or it neither is nor is not" [Aristocles].
The entire tradition of Hellenistic skepticism may thus have Buddhist roots.
There is a reference to Theano by Anna Comnena, daughter of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118), in her biography of her father, the Alexiad. Speaking of her mother, the Empress Irene, Anna says:
Whenever she had to appear in public as empress at some important ceremony, she was overcome with modesty and a blush at once suffused her cheeks. The woman philosopher Theano once bared her elbow and someone playfully remarked, 'What a lovely elbow!' 'But not for public show,' she replied. [Penguin Books, 1979, p.375]
It is not clear how Anna is aware of this anecdote. The Penguin edition note says of Theano that "several books were ascribed to her in antiquity." These may well have survived to Anna's day, before the sacking of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade and the other disasters of the Byzantine decline.
Some sense of the material and surprises waiting to be found in Middle Eastern libraries can be derived from the discovery only in 1987 of an unknown treatise by al-Kindî in a collection in Istanbul. Astonishingly, the treatise is about cryptography and proves to be the first known discussion of how a substitution cipher, where the letters of the alphabet are scrambled or replaced with unknown symbols (as in the Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Dancing Men"), can be broken. Kindî correctly understood that letters could be identified, given a large enough sample, by their frequency of occurrence. (Cf. Simon Singh, The Code Book, The Evolution of Secrecy from Mary Queen of Scots to Quantum Cryptogrphy, Doubleday, 1999, p.17.)
A revealing passage in the Qur'ân is Sûra 39, Verse 23:
And whom God leads astray, there is for him no right guide.
[Waman yud.lili llâhu famâ lahu min hâdin.]
"Leads astray" is sometimes now translated "leaves to stray," which doesn't make it sound like God is actually causing people to "stray"; but the form of the verb in Arabic is a causative, and God abridging the free will of people is not only consistent with the rest of the Qur'ân but even with the story of God "hardening the heart of Pharaoh" in the Old Testament.
The Arabic versions of the names of these cities were Qurt.ubah and 'Ishbîliyah; and the river that runs through them, the Guadalquivir, retains a Spanish version of its Arabic name: Wâdîlkabîr, "Big Valley." There are many such names in Spain. Some have even been transferred to Mexico, like Guadalajara, which in Arabic was Wâdîlh.ijâra, "Valley of the Boulders." (Guadalajara in Spain was actually the home of the Jewish mystic Moses ben Shem Tov, the author of the Zohar, the most famous work of Spanish Jewish mysticism.)
Although both were born in Spain, both Maimonides and 'Ibn 'Arabî spent the last part of their lives in Egypt and other central Islamic lands. In Cairo Maimonides was associated with the Ezra Synagogue, which was founded in 882 and still exists today, though most of the former Egyptian Jewish community has moved to Israel.