The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c33.17

v1.c33.17

What, then, is the explanation of the gulf which separates these two sculptures—the primitive unifacial image of Pārkham and the richly modelled capital of Sārnāth? The answer to this question is not far to seek, and will readily occur to any one who is familiar with the art of Western Asia. Long ago M. Senart pointed out¹ that the decrees of the Achaemenian monarchs engraved on the rocks of Bahistān and elsewhere furnished the models on which the edicts of Açoka were based. It was in Persia, also, that the bell-shaped capital was evolved. It was from Persian originals, specimens of which are still extant in the plain of the Murghāb at Istakhr, Naksh-i-Rustam, and Persepolis, that the smooth unfluted shafts of the Maurya columns were copied. It was from Persia, again, that the craftsmen of Açoka learnt how to give so lustrous a polish to the stone—a technique of which abundant examples survive at Persepolis and elsewhere. Lastly, it is to Persia, or—to be more precise—to that part of it which was once the satrapy of Bactria and was at this time asserting its independence from the Empire of the Seleucids, that we must look for the Hellenistic influence which alone at that epoch of the world’s history could have been responsible for the modelling of the living forms on the Sārnāth capital. Little more than two generations had passed since Alexander the Great had planted in Bactria a powerful colony of Greeks, who occupying as they did a tract of country on the very threshold of the Maurya dominions, where the great trade routes from India, Irān, and Central Asia converged, and closely in touch as they were with the great centres of civilisation in Western Asia, must have played a dominant part in the transmission of Hellenistic art and culture into India. Every argument, indeed, whether based on geographical considerations or on the political and commercial relations which are known to have been maintained between India and Western Asia, or on the happy fusion of Hellenistic and Irānian art visible in this monument, indicates Bactria as the probable source from which the artist who created it drew his inspiration. At the time of which we speak the Hellenistic spirit then vigorous in Bactria was mastering and vitalising the dull expressionless forms of Irān. At a later date, as the strength of Hellenism weakened and declined, other elements from the neighbouring steppes of Central Asia asserted or re-asserted themselves in the cosmopolitan art of this region, and, in their turn, were borne to India on the stream of influence which, until the fall of the Kushāṇa Empire, flowed ceaselessly over the passes of the Hindu Kush.