The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c9.4

c9.4

Five of these toilet-trays from Sirkap are here illustrated (figs. 13-17). The oldest specimen was found in the fourth stratum (Early Śaka), but may well have been an heirloom from an earlier period. It is made of fine grey schist. Its style is distinctively Hellenistic and quite different from that of other trays of Śaka and Parthian times. On the rim is a beaded border encircled by a running spiral; in the centre, an erotic scene of a type familiar in Greek art, namely, a standing male figure wearing a hooded mantle of a pattern worn by Greek countrymen and, kneeling at his side, a woman wrapped in a himation or shawl, which her companion is pulling from her. The modelling of the figures, which are in high relief, is characteristic of Hellenistic sculpture and much superior to that of the other toilet-trays. On the back of the tray is a full-blown lotus in low relief.