The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c9.35

c9.35

Such is the testimony of the monuments. What does it prove? Let us hasten to say, nothing very new : for certainly no one will venture to imagine direct influences between Gaul and India. Moreover, the connection, as far at least as the goddess is concerned, is already established in the memory of instructed readers by a number of intermediary figures : at need it would soon be discovered among those tiny mercantile and travelling folk, the Mediterranean terracottas. We shall be excused for holding in this case also to prudent generalities and confining ourselves to the introduction of our Indian replicas into the discussion. If it were not sufficient to indicate this new fact, and if we ought further to essay an interpretation of it, that which we should propose is a very simple one. It has long been ascertained that the art of Gandhâra borrowed its technique from Hellenistic art : it is impossible then that it should not have features in common with Greco-Roman, and consequently with the Gallo-Roman art. This kind of relationship, however distant the degree may be, is justified principally, in archæology as well as in linguistics, by the same construction of the forms and the employment of the same grammar, verbal or decorative: and in this particular case no specialist could turn over the leaves of M. Espérandieu’s collection without noticing, in support of the cousinship of these distant schools, a number of details of composition and the constant return of the same ornamental subjects, amorini, griffons or tritons, garlands, acanthuses or flowers. But, after all, nothing is more striking and more persuasive for the public than a comparison bearing on vocabulary, especially if it is a question of a common significant word. This is just the kind of contribution that we believed we could supply here by noting the suggestive correspondence of the oriental and occidental expressions of the same ideas, or, better, of the same religious needs. In truth, these works, however complex they may be, only transcribe quite rudimentary notions; but notions only the more deeply grounded in human nature. Such as they are, these groups — which, besides, are nearly contemporaneous — seem to us to furnish for the moment one of the most palpable verifications of the fact that in the first centuries of our era the sculptors of the Gauls and those of Ariana had each learned at the school of the Greeks, and spoke from one end of the ancient world to the other the same common language, the same artistic « koinê ».