The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.247

c10.s7.247

The beginnings of the Gandhāra school have been dated everywhere from the first century B.C. (which was M. Foucher's view) to the Kushan period and even after it; and the late date, which one had hoped had died with Vincent Smith, is now becoming fashionable again (pp. 397 sq.) and is supported by postulating that in the Kushan period there was a large influx of artists into India from the Graeco-Roman West. There is indeed said to be a class of gems found in India which suggest that in the first and second centuries A.D. a strong wave of artistic influence from Asia Minor did reach India;⁵ but whether these gems were engraved in India or whether, like the Turkestan seals, they themselves came from the Roman world I do not know. But the builder of the little chapel inside the Kunāla stupa (p. 361) did not come from the West. The only people we actually know of who did come to India from the West in the Roman Imperial period were, on the one hand, the numerous merchants who frequented the ports of Southern and Further India and gave Ptolemy his information about these coasts and who certainly had nothing to do either with art or with north-west India, and, on the other hand, an occasional traveller like the one whose description of Taxila under Gondophares was reproduced by Philostratus (p. 360); and if it be supposed that the powerful Kushan kings did import artists on a considerable scale from Graeco-Roman Asia Minor, it is strange that these men, instead of working in their own Graeco-Roman style, should have proceeded to start a school of Indo-Greek art, and even stranger that no information about the Kushan kings or the Northern India of that period ever came back to Roman Asia or to the West at all. Gandhāra art, much Indianised, flourished under the Kushans because an art-current will last after the people who started it have vanished; but to date its *beginning* at a time when Greeks were dying out and Greek influence in India was over is an historical impossibility, and certainly no trained Greek historian will ever believe it unless something very much more to the point can be adduced than has yet been done. I have already pointed out (p. 134), with the terrible example of the Victory of Samothrace always before me, the danger of trying to found chronology upon different writers' different and perhaps subjective views upon style; no doubt style is sometimes useful as a support to or illustration of chronology, but the style-sequences must themselves be properly founded first, or else one is merely arguing in a circle.