The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c7.9

c7.9

As to the material culture of the Greeks in this region, the available evidence goes to show that it was on the same general level as that of the Hellenistic world of the West. Thus, the Greek city of Sirkap at Taxila was laid out on the same chessboard pattern and fortified with the same kind of bastioned stone-walls as were then in vogue among Hellenistic town-planners elsewhere. And the Greek temple at Jaṇḍiāl outside the north gate of the Sirkap city exhibits a surprisingly pure type of Ionic capital, which in the second century B.C. would have done credit to an Athenian architect. But the stability and continuity of Greek art in Gandhāra and the North-West is best illustrated by the striking series of coins issued in those areas. These coins were not, be it said, up to the standard of the magnificent Greek coins of Bactria, unsurpassed by any in the ancient world, but they were well up to the average standard of contemporary Hellenistic coins in Western Asia, and they show that there were local coin engravers of ability capable of carrying on the art from generation to generation. That there were equally capable experts in other spheres of art need not be questioned.