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Originally posted by DarkCloud
But if that's true, then why build them in response to Alexander? To show that they were greater than foreign devils?
But if that's true, then why build them in response to Alexander? To show that they were greater than foreign devils?
I suspect that the Hellenized images of Buddha were more part and parcel of a Greek response to combatting the Achaemenid Empire. The Iranian Achaemenids ruled over a very heterogeneous gaggle of peoples, from the sophisticated Greek city state dwellers in the Mediterranean, to the nomad steppe dwelling horsemen to the north, the relatively primitive peoples on Persian Gulf (some of whom were the Asian equivalent of pygmies) and the various different peoples Afghanistan, northern India, and the Fertile Crescent.
Many languages, different religions, different ways of life, but one ruler, so the image became important to the Achaemenids, to show who was powerful and how tribute should be paid.
Alexander's response was to issue coinage with his image, and art with his image- a counter propaganda war when he succeeded and outstripped the bounds of the Achaemenid Empire.
Successor states to the Seleucid Empire in Afghanistan and India produced a hybrid Hellenized Indian art and culture- the Gandhara style of sculpture fuses Indian religion with Greek & Indian techniques in stonework.
On early Buddhist iconography:
From Macedonian Egypt to China's ocean strand:
" Although the art and practices of the heretical Armana dynasty were later suppressed in Egypt, a more naturalistic styling in painting and sculpture persisted throughout the following New Kingdom dynasties and on into the time when Alexander became the first Greek pharaoh. It is purely this author’s speculation that a style originating in the Nile Valley in 1358 BC may have penetrated as far as the Pacific shore of China 1,800 years later. "
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Mark's DL is Kuci!
yin is Sid.
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