History of Indian and Eastern Architecture v1.c16.4

v1.c16.4

As mentioned above, it is from their coins, and from them only, that the names of most of the kings of Baktria and their successors have been recovered; but we have not yet found a vestige of a building that can be said to have been erected by them or in their age, nor one piece of sculpture that, so far as we now know, could have been executed before their downfall, about B.C. 130. This, however, may be owing to the fact that Baktria proper has long been inhabited by fanatic Moslims, who destroy any representations of the human form they meet with, and no excavations for hidden examples have yet been undertaken in their country; while it is still uncertain how far the influence of the true Baktrians extended eastward, and whether, in fact, they ever really possessed the valley of Peshâwar, where so many of the sculptures have been found. No one, in fact, suspected their existence in our own territory till Lieutenants Lumsden and Stokes, in 1852, partially explored the half-buried monastery at Jamâlgarhî, which had been discovered by General Cunningham in 1848. It is situated about 36 miles north-east from Peshâwar, and from it these officers excavated a considerable number of sculptures, which afterwards came into the possession of the Hon. E. Clive Bayley. He published a short account of them in the ‘Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society,’ in 1853, and brought the collection itself to this country. Unfortunately, they were utterly destroyed in the disastrous fire that occurred in December 1866 at the Crystal Palace, where they were being exhibited, and this before they had been photographed, or any serious attempt made to compare them with other sculptures.