The Gārgī Samhitā is an astrological work of uncertain date (it has been dated anywhere from the Christian Era to the third century a.d.), one of whose chapters, the Yuga-purāna, contains an historical account of (among other matters) the Greek advance to Pātaliputra, written as usual in the form of a prophecy. The existing texts of the Yuga-purāna are written in Sanscrit with (it is said) traces of Prakritisms; in the opinion of the late Dr Jayaswal, who devoted special attention to this work, the extant account must go back to a historical chronicle, written either in Prakrit or in mixed Sanscrit-Prakrit, which he dates in the latter half of the first century b.c. on the ground that it mentions no dynasties later than the Sacas. Historians of India have usually considered the historical account of the Yavanas in the Yuga-purāna as valuable, an opinion shared by Jayaswal, who regards the work as the earliest known Purāna and as exhibiting an independent tradition; occasionally someone has dissented from this view, but the manner in which the accounts of the Greek Apollodorus and of the Yuga-purāna complement each other (Chap. iv) ought to be conclusive for the Yavana sections, as the two are presumably independent.

The history of the Yuga-purāna in modern times is peculiar. H. Kern in 1865 first brought it to notice in the preface to his edition of the Brihat Samhitā; he possessed a single MS, apparently rather broken, and he gave a translation of the greater part (not all) of what are §§ 5 and 7 in Jayaswal's translation (p. 453). Of §6 he merely said that it contains complaints against heretics, presumably Buddhist monks.