Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c31.12

c31.12

How far these may represent either cobra heads, or lotus leaves, as in Fig. 148, A, B, from Barāhat, it would be hard to distinguish. The form has probably a double ancestry. Resembling Fig. 148, B, is the armlet of Fig. 149, also from a Barāhat sculpture (Cunningham, Pl. XXII). It is a little surprising to find the form of this armlet or arm decoration so perfectly preserved in modern Sinhalese art, as the Garā-yakshaya costume (Pl. XXXIII., 2 and 3) shows it to have been. The resemblance in form and application amounts almost to identity; a survival of 2000 years. Another example of the same form otherwise applied will be found in the border of a betel-bag, Pl. XXXII., 6; here the chevron decoration of the central element seems like an Assyrian reminiscence. Also of Assyrian kinship are the cross-hatched flower centres (Fig. 59) and ornament of the ‘pine-apple’ type (Fig. 150, A). The ornaments considered above, except the last referred to, belong to the ‘palmette’ and ‘honeysuckle’ types, which are most familiar through their Greek forms, but occur also at Barāhat. They have Egyptian affinities too. The question of the origin of the most striking of these forms, so ‘Early Mediterranean’ in aspect, is one difficult of solution; one may trace them, perhaps, to Northern India, and thence, not to Greece (where they did not so much originate as develope), but to the common sources of all Indo-Aryan decorative art.