Intercourse between India and the Western World from the Earliest Times to the Fall of Rome c13.22

c13.22

With the Kushāns we come upon different ground. These great rulers, about whom we know only too little, built up a vast Empire, comprising a variety of nationalities. In the Panjāb were semi-Asiatic Greeks, Parthians, Scythians, Hindus. In Afghanistan and Baktria, besides the remnants of the older Scythian and Iranian settlers, were Greeks, Parthians, and their own countrymen from Central Asia. Besides this, the Kushān monarchs were in intimate touch with the Roman power in Asia Minor. With the establishment of the Roman Empire, traders began to come to Western India in great numbers, both by land and sea. The Roman Emperors pursued a forward policy in Asia, and Trajan pushed forward to within six hundred miles of the Kushān frontiers. It was probably in his time that intercourse between India and the Roman power in Asia Minor reached its height. More than one embassy had been sent to the Roman Emperors from the Kushān monarchs. One which reached Rome in the days of Trajan was treated by him with the utmost courtesy and distinction. The cosmopolitan nature of the Empire of the Kushān kings is shewn by their coins. Kadphises I imitates the bronze and copper coinage of Augustus¹. Kadphises II strikes an *aureus* in imitation of the Roman coin,—probably re-striking the actual Roman *aureus*². Some of the coins of Kanishka represent a most curious blending of nationalities and creeds: the king appears in Turki dress, standing by a fire-altar, and the coin bears a polyglot inscription in Greek letters *shaonanoshao Kaneshki Koshano*, “Kanishka the Kushān, King of Kings³.” The use of the Persian phrase *Shahan Shah*, Βασιλεὺς βασιλέων, is very curious. So is the employment of þ to represent *sh*, a sound which finds no expression in the Greek alphabet. These coins were, no doubt, like those bearing the image of NANAIA⁴ (Anaitis, the tutelary goddess of Balkh), and other Iranian deities, struck for use in the Iranian parts of the Kushān Empire. Another typical coin of the time bears a male figure of the moon and the superscription ΣΑΛΗΝΗ¹. The most important achievement of the Kushāns, however, from our present point of view, was the importation of a large number of Greek sculptors from Asia Minor, to decorate the Buddhist monasteries, stūpas, and other religious buildings which were erected all over the Peshāwar district after the conversion of Kanishka². These sculptors appear to have settled down in the Panjāb, and their work, at first purely Greek, becomes much more tinged, as time goes on, with Indian ideas, particularly those of the indigenous Buddhist school of Sānchi and Barhut. Remains of this school have been found extensively in the Gandhāra district, from which they have received their name. The remarkable casket, containing relics of the Buddha, found at Peshāwar in 1908, bears an inscription to the effect that it is the work of "Agesilaus, overseer of works at Kanishka's vihāra." In itself, this curious reliquary is of little merit. It is shaped like a Greek lady's jewel-casket, and the figures are roughly and clumsily executed³. About the fourth century A.D., the Kushān power waned and disappeared. The sceptre now returned to the great indigenous dynasty of the Guptas. Under the Gupta monarchs, a splendid literary and artistic renaissance set in, strongly nationalistic in character, and except perhaps in some coin-issues, Greco-Roman influence entirely disappears. The rise of the Sassanian Empire also placed a barrier which cut off all direct communication between Roman Asia and the East. Intercourse between the Roman world and the East was now almost entirely confined to the great port of Alexandria, to which Indians flocked in ever-increasing numbers. The Roman traders who resorted to Southern India at this time, and even settled at Madura and other places, came for mercantile purposes only, and had apparently no effect whatever upon literature or art.