The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.241

c10.s7.241

With that school, considered as art,³ I am not concerned; I only want the chronological history of an idea. A great mass of sculptures and reliefs is now known, and the Gandhāra art extended all over the Greek North-West; practically everything is an illustration of the life and the previous lives of Buddha, very few pieces being known which do not relate to him,¹ and the Gandhāra influence has been traced into Central Asia and, some would say, still farther east, as well as in the later Buddhist art revealed at Hadda and Bamyan. The content of the art is purely Buddhist; the form at the start is largely Hellenistic Greek, and commonplace Greek motives are freely used as decoration; as time passed the style steadily became more and more Indian and less and less Greek. This Graeco-Indian art is distinct from the purely Greek pieces found in north-west India, like the Athena of the Lahore Museum, which represent the art of the Greeks for themselves; some of these pieces are said to belong to the second century B.C., but some have been placed in the first century,² so that the two arts may have overlapped. There are affinities between the Greek decorative motives of the earlier Gandhāra pieces and the coins; the Tritons³ recall Hippostratus' coinage of c. 60-50 B.C. onwards (p. 326), and the so-called gigantomachy,⁴ which shows the influence of Pergamum, is a parallel to the serpent-footed giant on Telephus' coin of c. 70-60 B.C. (p. 333), which also connects with Pergamum; it seems probable that an occasional artist came out from the West.