Indian Architecture (Buddhist and Hindu Periods) c14.5

c14.5

Yet in spite of subsequent effacement, the records of the Greek occupation, and its association with the Buddhists of India can readily be followed. After maintaining itself as a colony for nearly two hundred years, about 250 B C, Bactria considered it expedient, for political reasons to sever its connection with the Macedonian empire, and accordingly the country assumed independence under a Greek king named Diodotus. From now onward it became self-contained, and more or less isolated as its intercourse with the western world began to be intermittent. Finally in the third century B C. owing to the intervention of the rising power of the Parthians, who occupied a country corresponding to the modern Khorasan, through-communication in that direction practically ceased. Nevertheless although the territorial conditions were unfavourable, an infiltration of culture from the west, through Hither Asia, seems to have persisted, and the flow of art from the fountain head of Hellas still continued. But by this time it was not the untouched productions of the Attic school which found their way to Bactria, for on their journey they became impregnated with some of the aesthetic ideals of the Parthians, and so there developed towards the second century B. C, what has been referred to as a Graeco-Parthian phase. Material records are somewhat meagre as to the character of the art of the Parthians, but it appears basically to have taken the form of a revival of the ancient Persian style, as this existed under the Achaemenids in the sixth century B. C. The Graeco-Parthian phase therefore, while displaying a Hellenistic foundation, contained reminiscences of those monuments associated with the golden age of Cyrus and Darius, and their royal cities of Pasargadae and Persepolis, of which the motif known as the Persepolitan capital is a symbol.