The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.262

c10.s7.262

On the other hand Dr A. K. Coomaraswamy, who has always championed Mathurā, has seen that it is really putting too much strain on people’s credulity to ask them to believe that a Buddha-image was created afresh and quite independently at Mathurā a century or more after it had already been created in Gandhāra (a point which Dr Vogel has often emphasised), and he has always made the two creations take place simultaneously; in 1926 he declined to fix a date,¹ but in 1927 he put the date in the middle of or early in the first century A.D.,² and in 1931 he repeated that the Gandhāra Buddha must be later than the Christian Era.³ Other writers also, as already noticed, have thought to solve the problem by dating the Gandhāra school late, since the Mathurā Buddhas could not be put early. Mr C. de B. Codrington, who found the Greek side unintelligible both in fact and chronology⁴ and therefore turned to the Indian side, has said that Foucher’s chronology does not contain a single fixed point and that there is no reason to antedate Gandhāran art in order to provide a borrowed origin for the Buddha image.⁵ L. Bachhofer in 1925⁶ argued that Gandhāra art *must* be late because no coins earlier than Azes I were found under excavated stupas without coins of Azes I also, which is not even true to the facts⁷ and also neglects to notice that under many stupas there were no coins at all; and in 1931⁸ he argued that, as the heads from Hadda look like Hellenistic work of the second century B.C. and in fact belong to the fourth-fifth centuries A.D., the earlier any Gandhāra work looks the later it actually is; one would have expected a critic of his experience to have had some inkling of the explanation.⁹ Dr Sten Konow,¹⁰ after finding that on his own chronological scheme all *dated* statues of Buddha are very late, has made the Gandhāra school begin *after* the Kushan period, *i.e.* at a time when Greeks and everything Greek had completely vanished from India; and finally Dr E. Herzfeld has put the Gandhāra monuments ‘later by many centuries’ than the Graeco-Bactrian empire.¹ It is a fact that there is nothing to be made of the dated Buddha statues; the earliest, the Loryan Tangai Buddha, is dated 318,² and even if the earliest possible dating, the hypothesis that the figures refer to the Seleucid Era, be taken, that only makes it A.D. 6; in fact it is quite uncertain in what Era it is dated. And though the Bimarān casket in the British Museum was found with some coins of Azes I, that only means that it is probably not earlier than *c.* 30 B.C. and may be a good deal later; his big coinage may have long remained in circulation.