Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/73

 Alexander were such keen competitors. Artisans, who had followed the Greek armies in their march towards the East with the object of supplying the wants of any colonies which might be established in those distant regions, reproduced upon their vases and in their terra-cotta figures the motives of the painting, the sculpture, and the architecture which they left behind; goldsmiths, jewellers and armourers cut, chased, and stamped them in metal. And it was not only the Greek colonists who employed their skill. Like the Scythian tribes among whom the Greek cities of the Euxine were planted, the nations to the north of India were astonished and delighted by the elegance of their ornament and the variety of its forms. They imported from Bactriana these products of an art which was wanting to them, and soon set themselves, with the help perhaps of foreign artists settled among them, to imitate Grecian design in the courts of the Indian rajahs.

That this was so is proved by those coins which bear on their reverse such Hindoo symbols as Siva with his bull, and on their obverse Greek inscriptions, and by the remains of what is now called Græco-Buddhic art, an art which seems to have flourished in the upper valley of the Indus in the third or second century before our era. These remains, formerly much neglected, are now attracting much attention. They have been carefully studied and described by Cunningham ; Dr. Curtius has described them and published reproductions of the most curious among them. They are found in the north of the Punjab upon a few ancient sites where excavations have been made. Some of them have been transported to Europe in the collection of Dr. Leitner, while others remain in the museums of Peshawur, Lahore, and Calcutta. In those sacred buildings which have been examined the plan of the Greek temple has not been adopted, but the isolated members of Greek architecture and the most characteristic details of its ornament are everywhere made use of. It is the same with the sculpture; in the selection of types, in the arrangement of drapery, in the design, there is the same mixture of Greek taste with that of India, of elements borrowed from foreign, and those drawn from