The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s1.362

c10.s1.362

The other thing is the native Bactrians. It used to be pointed out, rightly enough, that as regards art they might not have existed during the period of Greek rule; and we still have no actual *knowledge* to the contrary,¹ for the one Iranian work of art described for us, the statue of Anahita at Bactra (p. 115), has Babylonian affinities and might have been made for Artaxerxes II by a Persian artist. But since Sir A. Stein’s discovery of Kūh-i-Khwāja, the ‘castle of Rustam’ on the sacred Mount Ushidāo on an island in the Hamun lake in Seistan,² with its Hellenistic ornamentation, a theory has been put forward by Professor Herzfeld in a preliminary lecture³ of a Graeco-Bactrian school of mixed art, or rather of an Iranian art coloured with Hellenistic ornaments and motives; it is a sort of parallel to ‘Parthian’ art but is, he thinks, based primarily on painting, and though he indicates other remains, Kūh-i-Khwāja is essentially the expression of this art. The question is in its infancy, and the layman must tread cautiously; Kūh-i-Khwāja is not yet fully published, and ultimately there will have to be considered its relationship to that form of Graeco-Iranian art which Professor Rostovtzeff has called ‘Greco-Sakian’⁴ and of which the earliest examples are connected by him with Bactria.⁵ It seems to be becoming clearer that, in the Parthian period, from the Euphrates to the Indus a considerable revival took place of Iranian art mixed with Hellenistic elements, the relationships and the relative importance of the two components not being always the same but naturally witnessing to the long contact between the Greek and the Iranian which is known to have taken place; but any specific connection of Kūh-i-Khwāja with the Greek kingdom of Bactria must, it seems to me, for the present be very much in the air. Herzfeld dates Kūh-i-Khwāja in the first century A.D.⁶ and compares its (unpublished) painted figures with the portraits on the Kushan coinage, which cannot begin earlier than about 50 A.D. (p. 352) and go on into the second century A.D.; and in this connection one is bound to remember that Seistan was ruled by the Bactrian Greeks for precisely one generation and no more, from 187 B.C. at the very earliest (p. 93) to *c.* 155 B.C. at the very latest (p. 223), and that it is even doubtful if they ever coined there; and those dates are two centuries earlier than Herzfeld’s dating of Kūh-i-Khwāja. It seems certain enough that an art current started by a people or kingdom may go on working long after that people or kingdom has come to an end; but it is hazardous work going backwards and deducing anything about art in a certain kingdom (nothing else being known about it) from an art current two centuries later, however much one would naturally like to believe that Graeco-Bactrian art has been discovered. Connecting links may be found; certainly there will be much more to be said about Graeco-Iranian art before the subject can crystallise. Its interest is great, but it is an interest in and for itself and for the history of art; it seems to me to possess small importance for an attempt, such as is made in this book, to recover the outlines of the political and social story of certain peoples and places, unless we are going to be able to detect in it (as in the Graeco-Indian art of Gandhāra) the working of some definite idea which has happened to find its expression in art but might equally well have found it in some other way, say in literature.