The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c9.11

c9.11

The small female statuette in the round (fig. 19) comes from the third stratum in Sirkap and is referable to the latter part of the last century B.C. The pose is rigidly frontal, with feet and legs together and hands on hips. The figure is nude except for ornaments, which consist of anklets, girdle, crossed breast-chain, armlets and bangles. The hair which is treated like a wig in front, is taken back from the forehead and falls in a long double plait down the back, with a few curls on each shoulder. On the top of the head is a low polos. Beneath the small base is a tenon, evidently intended to fit into a socket-hole. In ancient times the statuette was broken into two at the knees, and, in order to repair it, two holes were drilled between the legs, one above and one below the fracture. That the statuette may have served as a miniature Caryatid is suggested by the tenon under the base and the polos on the top of the head; and this would explain its unusually stiff, frontal pose, From the peculiar, wig-like treatment of the hair and the wide-open, staring eyes it is evident that this statuette is of the same age as the late Śaka toilet-trays (e.g. fig. 14), in which these features occur.