Excavations in the ancient city of Termez (modern-day Uzbekistan) have yielded birch-bark fragments of a bilingual Greek-Bactrian dialogue. Dating to the 3rd century BCE, the text depicts a Socratic-style inquiry between a Hellenistic official and a local sage regarding the equivalence of Greek 'Arete' (virtue) and Vedic 'Dharma.'
The dialogue is notable for its use of syllogistic reasoning to prove that moral excellence is a universal human potential, independent of cultural origin. This find confirms that the Greco-Bactrian kingdoms were centers of profound intellectual synthesis where the philosophical traditions of the Mediterranean and the Indian subcontinent directly converged.