The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c10.4

c10.4

The next example, fig. 30, is a bronze statuette of the Egyptian child-god Harpocrates, offspring of Isis and Osiris. Cast solid, probably in a piece-mould, the child-god stands with heels almost together, wearing a long sleeveless tunic, which reaches to his ankles and leaves his left shoulder bare. His right forefinger is raised towards his lips—a gesture which the Greeks and Romans interpreted as enjoining silence upon his votaries, who were forbidden to speak of the mysteries revealed to them, but which seems rather to have been a natural gesture of childhood. In his left hand he held some object which has disappeared—possibly a lotus, symbol of resurrection, or a cornucopia, symbol of the fruitfulness of nature which he personified. His hair, which is waved from the centre, falls in a long tress on his right shoulder. On his head he wears the Egyptian crowns of the North and South. The statuette is a typical piece of Graeco-Roman bronze-work, which may well have come from Alexandria, where the cult of Harpocrates was centred, though such statuettes appear to have been made in many parts of the Graeco-Roman world. As a work of art, it is not on a high level. The statuette was unearthed beneath the floor of a room in Block E, Stratum II, of Sirkap. Just below it was found an earthenware pot containing a valuable hoard of jewellery and other objects.