A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s3.8

c10.s3.8

No doubt, Hellenistic work adapted to Indian requirements had been done on the frontier in earlier times. The execution of such work during the reign of Azes I at some time in the first century B.C. is established by the Bīmarān casket (*post*, Chap. X, Sec. 4), the Ionic temples of Taxila (*ante*, p. 101), and the Pallas Athene statuette (*ante*, p. 116, Fig. 66). Although, so far as I know, it is not possible at present to refer any given work in the Gandhāra style to an earlier period, there is no apparent reason why Indo-Hellenistic sculpture should not have been produced from at least the age of Demetrius, 'King of the Indians', at the beginning of the second century B.C.,² and it is possible that certain extant examples may be as early. But the admission of the probable existence of Indo-Hellenistic sculpture from about 200 B.C. does not involve an admission that the origin of the Gandhāra school long preceded the Christian era. The earlier Hellenistic works differed from it in style. The Ionic temples of Taxila apparently had no successors, and the Bīmarān casket, while agreeing with the Gandhāra sculptures in the arrangement of the figures in compartments separated by pilasters with sunken panels, differs in the form of the arches and the absence of Corinthian capitals. The Pallas Athene, too, is more distinctly Greek than the true Gandhāra work. The characteristic of that work is the modified Corinthian capital, similar in style to the capitals fashionable throughout the Roman empire in the early centuries of the Christian era.