Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 23, 1912.djvu/290

 Euphrates, and Alexander's conquests seated Greek culture in north-west India and Bactria. But the Chinese acquisition, at the end of the second century B.C., of part of Bactria opened a fresh outlet for a flood of Greek influence which caused the sudden blossoming of Chinese art under the emperor Wu Ti, and was only stayed by the shores of the Pacific, leaving behind it even in far Japan such unmistakable traces of its passage as the familiar Grecian Key ornament. This classical current took its course through the aee-long caravan route between East and West over which Marco Polo journeyed and around which has lain Sir Marc Stein's work on his two expeditions of 1900-1 and 1907-9.

The indebtedness to Greece of ancient Persia has been a commonplace, but there is still much to learn about that of China, and the study of that Asian culture-complex in which Hellenic, Indian, and Chinese elements were mingled and Buddhism and various forms of Christianity strove for mastery will gain enormously from Sir Marc's excavations of documents in several languages with classical seals and Græco-Buddhist wood carvings and frescoes, when these have been fully reported upon by the army of scholars to which they are now affording employment. Discussing his finds, the author suggests (vol. i., p. 476), with much probability, that the non-Oriental winged angels he illustrates from Miran are affected by early Christian iconography. Other figures from the same site resemble the Greek Eros and Persian Mithras, and frescoes of the Jataka legend of King Vessantara are inscribed as the work of Tita,—obviously Titus, a Westerner.

The most remarkable acquisitions, however, were won, not by digging, but by diplomacy exercised upon a wary but corruptible Taoist priest at the sacred "Caves of the Thousand Buddhas," to the south-east of Tun-huang, where a honeycomb of cells showed Indian and Greek influences in their fresco work and stucco statuary of the date of the T'ang dynasty (A.D. 618-907). About five years before Sir Marc's visit, there was accidentally discovered an immense mass of manuscript etc. rolls concealed in a rock chamber apparently walled off from the passage of one of the cave-temples in fear of invasion early in the eleventh century of our era. Some of the writings date back to the third century, and one antedates printing from wooden blocks to at least A.D. 860.