The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s7.47

c10.s7.47

The one definitely Greek public building which has been discovered did not belong to the Hellenistic city. It is a little Ionic temple of the Parthian period at Jandial,⁵ which in form is a Greek temple; the column drums were ground together in the Greek way, but it was covered with the common shell stucco and built on to it was a square tower; it is thought that this may have been a Tower of Silence and that the temple was built by a Greek architect for the Iranian community. There is a square Parthian tower also at Tel Umar (Seleuceia on the Tigris),⁶ the so-called ‘Ziggurat of Opis’; what the relation, if any, between the two may be I do not know. Jandial attests the presence, shortly after the Christian Era, of a Greek or semi-Greek architect who still understood Greek methods of work; this naturally suggests the former existence of Greek architecture in Bactria, but it does not follow, and nothing can be known till excavation be possible in that country. But one other building at Taxila reinforces my conclusion that *c.* A.D. 50 is the period after which we cease to find anything which can really be called Greek. A little Buddhist building of the late first century A.D. (early Kushan period), inside the Kunāla stupa, shows that its architect had heard of, and had tried to apply, the Greek principle of *entasis*, that is, giving a slightly convex curve to parts of the building instead of a flat line in order to correct certain optical illusions; but he did not really understand the matter, and though he knew that there ought to be curves he has made his own curves concave instead of convex, thus increasing the optical illusion which the curves were intended to correct.¹ In other words, understanding of this principle of Greek architecture was dead; all that remained was the knowledge that there once had been some principle.