The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c11.11

c11.11

Another relief appertaining to the same group which shows no apparent connexion with Buddhism is the well-known one in the British Museum (fig. 47) of the Sea or River deities. There are six of them posed in a row between Corinthian pilasters: all splendidly athletic looking figures, wearing high boots and girt round the middle with acanthus leaves, which appear as if growing out of the body itself. All six are moustached and bearded and have long hair taken back from the forehead, with a small V-shaped device in front. To symbolize their connexion with the waters, each carries a broad-bladed boat paddle such as one can still see in use in Kashmīr, five holding it aloft on the left shoulder and the sixth leaning on it under his right arm. While the above features are common to all six deities, there is one point in which they show a very significant difference. For one only of the six has a normal male body from the hips upwards; the other five are provided with eight female breasts arranged in two lines above the navel, and the navel itself is much exaggerated in size. Other noteworthy points are that three of the figures have their right hands raised with two fingers extended in the gesture of Good Luck, and that one of the figures is holding what has been described as a dolphin—yet another symbol of the waters. That the six figures are sea or river deities can hardly be questioned. The multiple breasts, symbolical of their fertilizing power, though an unusual attribute, are not without parallels. They are found on statues of the Ephesian Artemis and on one of Zeus Stratios of Labranda (see P. Foucart in *Mon. Piot*, XVIII, pp. 145-75), and Mme Bazin-Foucher has ingeniously suggested that the name ‘Thamimasadas’ by which Herodotus tells us the Scythian Poseidon was known, was a compound formed of θαμά, meaning numerous or frequent, and a Scythian equivalent of the Greek μαζός, a breast (see E. Bazin-Foucher, ‘Le nom scythique de Poseidon’, *B.E.F.E.O.*, XLIV, fasc. 1, pp. 13-20). Thus it is possible, and indeed likely, that the five many-breasted figures on this relief present us with the Scythian conception of this god—a conception that must have been familiar to the Śaka peoples in Gandhāra. But why, it may be asked, are five only of the six portrayed as many-breasted? The answer, I suggest, is that the five were meant to represent the five rivers of the Panjāb, with emphasis thus laid on the all-important part they played in fertilizing its wide plains from the Himalayas to the sea. The sixth figure may represent the sea itself to which they are tributary but which does not have the same fertilizing power, though it brings abounding wealth in other ways to the Land of the Five Rivers.