The Development of Hindu Iconography c11.32.2

c11.32.2

the word Brahmasthāna in the passage, Tato gaccheta rājendra Brahmasthānamanuttamam, Mahābhārata III, 84, 103) and the inscriptions (cf. the word mahāsthāna in the Mathura inscription discussed before) in the sense of ‘a sanctuary,’ ‘a shrine.’ The evidence of contemporary coins, as we have seen above, as well as the observations of foreign writers like Hesychius and Stobaeus fully prove that Śiva was the great object of worship among the people of north-western India. Śiva in his animal (bull) form was known to the Greeks as the god of Gandhāra; Hesychius writes, ‘Gandaros o Taurokrates par Indois.’ Now as regards Vāsudeva-Viṣṇu, we could expect to find his figures on the coins which were discovered from Besnagar and Mathura, because both these localities, as we have shown, contained shrines of the god. But on the earliest monetary issues of Besnagar we do not find any such figure which can be described to represent him; the die-struck coins issued by the early Hindu kings and the Śaka satraps of Mathura bear a standing figure with right hand upraised and left hand on hip which was described as Vāsudeva-Kṛṣṇa by some numismatists due to the close association of this place with the Kṛṣṇa tradition. But now this view has rightly been rejected, and Śrī-Lakṣmī has been recognised in the particular device. On one interesting coin, however, in the so-called Pañcāla Mitra series, we find the figure of Vāsudeva-Viṣṇu.