Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c14.17

c14.17

Kāpiśī seems to have been the place where the east and the west mingled in a cultural session of great beauty, for we have found here a number of glass vases, painted and cut, representing the best art of the Roman world, goblets, one of them showing the combat between Achilles and Hector (Hackin II, fig. 261), big and small wine-jars (ibid. figs. 250-251), pots, bowls, jars, a conical goblet, with painted scenes of Ganymede being carried by the Eagle of Zeus and also Europa being lifted by a bull (ibid, figs. 264-265), phials, fish-shaped flasks, cups and saucer, all in very fine glass; a number of circular medallions in plaster showing beautiful Roman heads of male and female figures and Bacchanalian scenes (ibid, figs. 274, 378), bronze plaques, plates, discs, a mask of Silenus (ibid., fig. 329), mirrors, chests and statuettes; figures of porphyry, gold, iron and pottery, etc. In them we are face to face with the rich art creations of Roman workshops that were brought to Kāpiśī to serve the purpose mostly of wine-trade from where the flavoury drinks known as Kāpiśāyana-madhu were imported in to India even so early as the Mauryan times. For about five hundred years Kāpiśī maintained its reputations as an emporium of trade supplied with the best articles of art and beauty from India and from Rome. The artistic inspiration of Mathura on the Begram ivories is so patent that their Indian fabrication cannot be doubted, as Goloubew concluded.