The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.310

c10.s7.310

The Gandhāra Buddha is then at least a century, and perhaps nearer two centuries, older than the Indian Buddhas of Mathurā; by the time the latter started, statues of Buddha had been common for generations in the North-West of India, the original Greek territory, and Mathurā, situated on the great high-road, the most frequented road in India, which ran from Pātaliputra and the Ganges country through Mathurā, Taxila, and Pushkalāvatī to Kapisa and so to the West, could not possibly have remained ignorant of them. I shall not instance the pieces at Mathurā which show Greek motives unintelligently applied by some Indian artist commissioned to do something which he did not understand;¹ but Greeks had ruled Mathurā for three-quarters of a century, down to somewhere about 100 B.C., and therefore, whenever Mathurā first received Greek artistic *influences*,² it is idle to suppose that people there did not *know* what the Greeks were doing—quite a different matter—or that there could have been in that town a second creation of the Buddha image bearing no relation at all to the first creation.