Some Begram Ivories and the South Indian Narrative Tradition: New Evidence

Many of the Begram ivories rank amongst the finest works of art surviving from ancient India. Despite their profound interest, they are relatively small pieces of ivory and bone made in a wide variety of styles and techniques and probably by a large number of craftsmen from different regions and even at different times. The ivories were used to decorate wooden furniture, the wood having long since disintegrated. Many of them were imported from India and may have arrived in Begram already assembled into furniture while others may have been assembled somewhere near Begram, in eastern Bactria near the border of Gandhara (Map 1). The ivories were found in two sealed rooms, numbers 10 and 13, along with numerous other treasures that included bronzes and plaster casts of metalwork imported from the Greco-Roman world, Alexandrian glass, and lacquer work from China.1 Neither the site of the Begram hoard nor the accumulation of objects contained within it provides us with definitive dates. The hoard is culturally heterogeneous which certainly suggests that it is chronologically heterogeneous. The style of many of the ivories is Indian. Over the years, there has been much controversy as to their place of manufacture, as well as their date. They have been assigned to dates ranging from the first century BCE to the fourth century CE and have been compared to almost every major site of sculptural production within the Indian subcontinent. The reasons for this are intrinsic to the field of Indian art and archaeology. Since only a small percentage of ancient sites have been identified, excavated, and published, we are constantly restudying the same evidence over and over in hopes of somehow “redating” or “reassessing” them. Furthermore, the major regional sculptural schools were connected by trade routes and influenced each other so that styles frequently tended to comingle. Thus, despite the existence of clear regional styles, we often see forms or motifs in different regions at the same time.2 Further complicating the problem, India’s reverence for the past makes it difficult to separate that which is truly old from that which is merely archaizing. To date, none of the theories regarding the ivories are universally accepted, and I do not propose to definitively solve the problems of date and/or provenance in this paper. What I will do is to insist upon the importance of the southern Indian contribution to the style and motifs of the Begram ivories The Begram hoard was first excavated between 1937 and 1939 by Joseph Hackin and his wife Ria, and their initial publication of the hoard in the Mémoires de la Délégation archéologiques française en Afghanistan 9 appeared shortly thereafter.3 With regard to the ivories, Hackin compared some of them to Stupa I at Sanchi, while one very important one, Coffret IX (Fig. 6),4 he placed from the end of the third to the beginning of the fourth century CE.5 His second publication was posthumous, as he and his wife were both killed in 1941, but their notes were left in safe hands. By 1954, the second publication appeared in volume 11 of the same series with important articles by Philippe Stern, Jeannine Auboyer, Otto Kurz, and others, as well as important drawings by Pierre Hamelin. 6 Emphasizing a different group of ivories, and using different comparative material, Philippe Stern assigned most of the ivories to the first and second centuries CE but admitted that Coffret IX appeared stylistically somewhat later.7 These two studies, as well as the excavation notes, remain the foundation upon which all subsequent studies have been made. That the Hackins were killed in World War II was not only a human tragedy but also an archaeological one, for it seems that there was much to learn from further excavation. In the 1970s, a team from the Archaeological Survey of India planned reexcavate Begram, but unfortunately those plans had to be abandoned.8 The majority of the Begram treasure was housed in the Kabul Museum, and many of its objects were lost or damaged during the war and civil unrest in Afghanistan. Despite this, new studies have made the ivories easier to study, at least from photographs, than ever before. In the recently published catalogue of the National Museum of Afghanistan,9 covering the objects there from 1935 through 1985, Francine Tissot presents the ivories along with the proposed reconstructions of the furniture in which they were set, helping us to understand their context. Wisely, she cautions us when the reconstructions are speculative. The catalogue, complete with inventory numbers and references, also includes some unpublished material. While she dates the ivories to the first and second centuries or perhaps a little later,10 the emphasis of the book is documentation rather than a discussion of the dating. The detailed doctoral dissertation of Sanjyot Mehendale,11 which is available on a website,12 continues the process of organization. She separates the ivories into categories of subject matter and technique and brings together a vast amount of interpretive information. While she draws her own conclusions, she generously cites those taking other positions, creat-