A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s1.25

c10.s1.25

No trace of the existence of Greek architecture in either India proper or the borderland has ever been found, that is to say, no building yet examined was designed on a Greek plan, or with an elevation exhibiting one or other of the Greek orders, Doric, Ionic, or Corinthian. But the Indo-Hellenic architects freely used certain Greek architectural forms—columns, pilasters, and capitals—for decorative purposes, much in the same way as English architects of a century ago often applied a Greek pediment to the front of an English dwelling-house. The Doric column is found only in the late Kashmīr style, if there, for the matter seems to be open to some doubt (*ante*, p. 48). The Ionic column has been found in two temples on the site of Taxila, associated in one case with coins of Azes I, who is supposed to have reigned between 90 and 40 b. c.³ Growse noted the occurrence of a ‘niche supported by columns with Ionic capitals’ on a fragment of sculpture at Mathurā,⁴ and Simpson found the plaster fragment of a capital with corner volutes of the Romano-Ionic kind in the Ahīnposh *stūpa* near Jalālābād in the valley of the Kābul river.⁵ Those four cases exhaust the list of undoubted Ionic forms known in India. More recently two more quasi-Ionic capitals have been discovered, one at Patna and the other at Sārnāth (Fig. 57), both of Asokan age, and said to resemble the capitals of the temple of Apollo Didymaeus at Miletus.⁶