Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s18.12

c12.s18.12

Two male heads and three small fragments of head, of the same material and similarly polished, all from Sārnāth, have usually been assigned to the Maurya period for no other reason than that they are carved out of Chunar sandstone and have the so-called Mauryan polish on them. It is very likely as Coomaraswamy surmises on the ground of their ‘extraordinary actuality’ and ‘marked individuality’ that these are ‘parts of portrait-figures, and presumably portraits of donors’. Their head-dress consisting of either a fillet with a laurel wreath or a mural crown is certainly reminiscent of Hellenistic motifs. Similar fragments of stone heads with identical head-dresses hail also from Bhita and Mathurā which along with the Sārnāth examples constitute a ‘well-marked stylistic group’, but there is nothing to connect them definitely with Mauryan art. All that they—together with some terracotta heads and figures from Mathurā, Sārnāth, Basarh, Bulandibagh, Kumrahar, and other places with Greek motifs on their head-dress and sometimes even foreign facial types—prove is that Greek motifs and types along with Hellenistic provincial art had migrated as far east as the Ganges valley¹. Since Hellenistic contacts were potent and effective even after the fall of the Mauryas, migration and adoption of Hellenistic art forms and motifs at later periods of history cannot be ruled altogether out of consideration.