The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c11.15

c11.15

Fig. 50, which is now in the Kābul Museum, originally carried two groups separated by a Persepolitan pilaster, but it has been broken and only one figure of the right-hand group has survived. The other closely resembles the family group of fig. 49, but there are some slight differences. Thus, both couples are engaged in drinking, but their positions are reversed, the younger couple being on the left, the child in the middle, and the elder couple on the right. Instead of a tunic, the younger man has a *himation*, which his wife is holding open so as to leave his body exposed to view. There is a difference, too, in the dress of his wife, who is wearing a long double tunic instead of a tunic and *himation*. The hair of both men and women is treated in the same way as on the other relief, and the wine-bowls in the hands of the women are similar to the one held by the elder man in the other group. In point of style, design and execution the two reliefs are as characteristically Hellenistic as they are in their subject matter.