An Ancient Greek Artist Engraves Bharata-Mata on a Silver Dish in Lampsacos

IN 1847, a bunch of farmers digging in a village near Lapseki accidentally unearthed a hoard of treasure that proved invaluable to archeology. The finding opened several fresh vistas in the reconstruction of the history of the Ancient World, especially that of the Byzantine period. It is variously known as the Lampsacus Hoard or Lampsacus Treasure and is split across the British Museum, the Louvre and the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.  

Lapseki is today a forgotten town in the Çanakkale Province, Turkey. But in the ancient world, it was a flourishing Greek colony founded in the sixth century BCE. Its original name was Lampsacos (Λάμψακος, also spelled as Lampsacus), the site of many history-altering events. 

For centuries, the fecund cultural soil of Lampsacos produced Greek philosophers, intellectuals and historians such as Charon, Metrodorus, Strato (Aristotle’s disciple) and Euaeon (Plato’s disciple). 

Lampsacos was the Tirtha-Kshetra of Priapus, the Greek God of vegetables, nature, gardens, fruit, livestock, beekeeping, fertility, sex, genitals and masculinity. The term Priapism derives from his name, signifying male sexual dysfunction. 

Lampsacos was also fabled for its silverware, which was heavily in demand in the Ancient World. A small fraction of this was what was found by those farmers in 1847.

One of the objects in this discovery was a large silver dish — a plate — depicting Bharata Mata as visualised by a Greek artist who engraved it on the plate in the first or second century C.E. It now resides in the Istanbul Archaeological Museum. 

See the image below.

IT WAS THE titanic scholar, Sri Vasudeva Sharan Agarwala who, for the first time, identified it as Bharata Mata in his brilliant paper (India Represented on a Silver Dish from Lampsacos) published in 1943. 

But a brief flashback is in order before we proceed. 

In my limited researches, the seminal, in-depth explanation of the artwork on this silver dish was published in the journal of the Jahrbuch des Kaiserlich Deutschen Archaologischen Instituts (Annual Journal of the Imperial German Archaeological Institute, Vol 15, 1900), in a paper entitled Die Darstellungen der Inder in antiken Kunstwerken (The Representations of Indians in Ancient Works of Art).

In turn, this paper became one of the raw materials for E.H. Warmington’s classic, The Commerce Between the Roman Empire and India, first published in 1928. He has reproduced a photograph of this silver dish in his book and added his own — rather faulty — interpretation of the same. Both Ananda Coomaraswamy and Vasudeva Sharan Agarwal have masterfully dissected his errors as we shall see. 

THE VALUE OF this silver dish is multidimensional. It is but a tiny slice that shows the commercial and cultural dominance that Bharatavarsha exercised throughout the Ancient World. 

The true conquest of a foreign nation is not military, but cultural conquest. 

Over the last half century, America has culturally conquered India by exporting ethics-free capitalism, poisonous fast food and depraved Hollywood movies, and by importing Indian traitors into their universities. 

In the ancient world, Sanatana Bharatavarsha culturally conquered Greece, Rome and Brhad-Bharata (incorrectly known as Southeast Asia) by exporting philosophy, wisdom, music, art and stories using commerce as the vehicle and the medium. But at this distance in history, it is extremely difficult to even mentally visualise the embracive thrall in which our culture had held ancient Greece and Rome.

The artwork on the aforementioned silver dish gives a peek into this impact of Bharatavarsha on Ancient Rome. It also offers the briefest glimpses into the vibrant trade route that connected Rome with India; the route that was later monopolized by barbarians after Islam’s advent into the world.   

To the full credit of the engraver (Warmington calls him a “Greek worker in silver”), he has depicted India as a woman. We can now turn to Sri Vasudeva Sharan Agarwala for his penetrative annotations of the image. 

“[This image bears] a strikingly original representation of India as a woman seated on a chair supported on elephant tusks…  

“The female figure occupies the centre of the dish, and the birds and animals are arranged in three rows and in pairs, one on each side of the figure. The bird on the proper right…[represents] the large Indian parrakeet found throughout India. It resembles the many other representations of this bird in Indian sculpture and art…

“The two animals in the second row near the ivory legs of the chair were supposed by Warmington to be Hanuman monkeys, but that is not correct. They represent dogs of the tigirine breed which was produced as a cross between a bitch and a tiger.”

In just two tightly packed sentences, Sri Agarwala punctures the errant Western scholarship on India, which was so typical in those days. Not stopping at this, he investigates the roots of this tigirine breed of dogs and gives us this gem taken from McCrindle’s Alexander’s Invasion. 

“Fortunately we possess a detailed account of this class of animals as recorded by Alexander’s historians. A demonstration of their extraordinary strength and ferocity was given in the presence of Alexander himself, who witnessed one of them matched to a lion and cut to pieces bit by bit but not yielding before bis adversary up to the last. This filled him with great regret that a specimen of such superb fearless spirit should be lost. However, four dogs of this class were presented to him.” 

But where was the real origin of these dogs? Sri Agarwala traces it to the ancient Kekaya Desha. As evidence, he cites this verse from Srimad Ramayana: 

“The king of the place presented to his nephew Bharata dogs of enormous size, who were brought up in the palace, had terrible fangs, and possessed extraordinary strength equal to that of tigers.”

After dissecting every single element in the artwork, Sri Agarwala brings the full might of his jaw-dropping scholarship when he analyses threadbare, the woman seated on the chair supported by elephant tusks. 

“The female figure is seated in the centre on a chair supported on elephant tusks resting on the ground. She wears a sari, most likely with one end tucked behind, i.e., the sakachchha style common amongst Maratha women in Western India. The sandals (chappals) on the feet deserve notice and are a Roman feature. In proper Indian art women generally do not wear shoes. She wears on her head a turban with a twisted role in front. Under it is shown the front line of frizzled hair, arranged on each side ofthe face in three superimposed tiers each consisting of three strands. We have yet to know if this style of coiffure was known to aristocratic Roman matrons in the first or second century A.D. In India this style of hair appears on the terracotta figurines of the early Gupta period, about 4th century A.D… 

“The crooked object in the left hand is a bow. Theright hand is held in abhayamudra, i.e., the pose for imparting protection. It is a happy conception of Mother India to show in one hand the abhayamudra and the bow-wielding attitude in the other hand. The attributes and emblems of the figure suggest its most obvious identification with India as Bharata-Lakshmi. 

“There seems to be no support to identify in the form of this figure any particular goddess from the Hindu pantheon.”

This standard of scholarship was what the Marxist academic goon squad purposely annihilated.  

At any rate, it is clear that the ancient Greek artist was knowledgeable enough to represent India in the form of the Sacred Feminine Divinity. And Sri Vasudeva Sharan Agarwala showers profuse laudations upon him.

“The artist who carved this beautiful dish in silver deserves much praise for his ingenuity in one respect, viz., associating Indian ivory in the representation of the figure… This feature pointedly refers to India as the object of portrayal. The art of this dish is distinguished by a remarkable freedom from conventions. It is eloquent in its expression and shows some independence of technique. For portraying a subject like this, no ready-made conventional formula existed before the engraver. He had therefore to fall back on his own resourcefulness to devise an effective symbol language for conveying the intended theme. There is no doubt that he succeeded eminently well in portraying India as a woman with fidelity to formal elements then associated with India in the contemporary commercial world. The entire conception is no doubt original and happy.”

The next time you visit Istanbul, you know what to look for.