The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c30.s1.32

v1.c30.s1.32

In the first place it is evident that some members of both royal houses ruled both to the north and to the south of the Hindu Kush. Their coins belong to two distinct and unmistakable classes. The coins struck in Bactria are purely Greek in style, in language, and in weight. They are the most noble examples of Greek art as applied to portraiture. No rivals to the lifelike portraits of Euthydemus and Demetrius appeared in the world until after the lapse of sixteen centuries, when the Greek spirit was again kindled at the renaissance and manifested itself in the medals of the great Italian artists. Contrasted with these, the coin-portraits executed to the south of the Hindu Kush are lifeless and conventional. Between the two styles of art there is a gulf fixed. Neither can be brought into relation with the other. They are the work of different regions and the outcome of different types of civilisation. In Bactria the Greeks ruled supreme amid peoples of a lower culture. On the south of the mountain barrier, in the Kābul valley and in India, they were brought into contact with a civilisation which was in many respects as advanced as their own and even more ancient—a civilisation in which, as in that of Ancient Egypt, religious and social institutions had long ago been stereotyped, and in which individual effort in literature and art was no longer free but bound by centuries of tradition. With this deeply-rooted civilisation the Greeks were forced to make a compromise; and the results are seen in their bilingual coin-legends, and in their adoption of the Indian (or Persian) weight-standard.