A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c16.s2.1

c16.s2.1

The allied art of engraving gems and seals with artistic designs equally failed to attract Indian taste, although the lapidaries of India were unsurpassed in manual skill and had models of the highest class before their eyes in the numerous Greek gems imported.² Gems and seals of Hindu origin are sufficiently common, but very few can claim any considerable degree of artistic excellence. From the British Museum collection I was able to select only three trifling examples, of slight merit, as reproduced in Plate LXXIII. Fig. 10 represents in chalcedony a lion, with the symbols of Taxila, as seen on the coins of that city. Fig. 11 exhibits on a seal of green schist the device of a king on an elephant receiving a wreath from a Victory; and Fig. 12, with a conventional lion, is photographed from an ancient clay impression of a seal presumably bronze, like two closely related seals also in the British Museum. The legend is *Śrī Sūrya-mitrasya*, '[the seal] of Śrī Sūrya-mitra.'³