Greek Influence on the First Emperor\'s Terracottas

[Sean Manning]

Dr. Lukas Nickel has published a paper arguing that the Terracotta Army was inspired by sculpture from the Kingdom of Bactria (“The First Emperor and sculpture in China,” Bulletin of SOAS, Vol. 76 No. 3 (2013), pp. 413–447). Unusually, Nickel is a specialist in Indian and Chinese art (source) trying to understand where something new in his field might have come from rather than a specialist in Greek art who has seen something similar in another culture. His argument seems reasonable and he has some photos of some newly excavated sculptures of entertainers which have not yet been well published (this blog has some photos). I can't help but suggest, however, that if “it was [the Greeks] who learned to calculate proportions,” their teachers were the Egyptians who had laid out human figures according to a grid for millennia. Perhaps Greek artists used different proportions, or Diodorus 1.98 is correct and they learned to do without a grid when sculpting human figures.

(A minor proskynesis to Dr. Beachcombing for the link).

[Lyceum]

Yeah this kind of hypothesising reminds me of the kind of shoddy work done earlier on cultural contact. In order to prove transmission you need to be posit a) a direct link and b) functional similarities which then enable one to c) detail how these things were used.

Nor is all cultural contact direct. A perfect example being the china in my cupboard bearing no testimony to a deep Chinese cultural influence in Britain. I think a more sensible way of examining it would be that Greek influence occured via Baktria rather than direct Greek influence on China. Also, given the complicated factors surrounding how this influence got there one would have to be very, very, careful with the term "Greek".

"This influence is well attested by such intriguing works as the Milindapanha, a dialogue in pure Platonic style between the Greek general (later king) Menander and a Buddhist monk called Nagasena"

See, I've actually read that and while it features the king Menander who did indeed become a Buddhist and a kind of saint for them I can not, alas, detect his or any real Greek influence, let alone Platonic. It's in dialogue form the same way all early didactic literature is. When Classicists use terms like Platonic, there are usually good reasons.

"Vajrapani, the guide and protector of the Buddha, could be mistaken for Herakles, being represented as a musclebound man armed with a club and wrapped in a lion skin."

Well originally Vajrapani was an epithet for the Indian king of the Gods, the one the author is thinking of looks like Herakles because....he was Herakles. Ironically here is some direct influence and epithet even got transferred due to Greek insistence on Herakles being the son of Zeus.

Eh this stuff is interesting and important but let's be honest, we don't have the heuristic models to even start making claims. The stuff done on the Indo-Greeks by Tarn and Narain is waaaay out of date. Nor, given the explosion of material in difference languages, due to the current (or the next even) generation of scholars really have the skills to begin. Before we try to assess things based solely on visual cues (!) which are non-contextual to the extreme, we need to establish a better model of the involved cultures and how they interacted.

[Sean Manning]

Yeah this kind of hypothesising reminds me of the kind of shoddy work done earlier on cultural contact. In order to prove transmission you need to be posit a) a direct link and b) functional similarities which then enable one to c) detail how these things were used.

...

Eh this stuff is interesting and important but let's be honest, we don't have the heuristic models to even start making claims. The stuff done on the Indo-Greeks by Tarn and Narain is waaaay out of date. Nor, given the explosion of material in difference languages, due to the current (or the next even) generation of scholars really have the skills to begin. Before we try to assess things based solely on visual cues (!) which are non-contextual to the extreme, we need to establish a better model of the involved cultures and how they interacted.

I should say that Beachcombing's summary has more things which make me uncomfortable than the actual article does (paywalled link). I will trust Nickel's professional judgement that the Terracotta Warriors are dramatically different from earlier sculpture, and that we have a good idea of what earlier Chinese sculpture looked like, and that there are no parallels from closer than Bactria. I'm not sure that I buy his explanation, but there are a lot of things in ancient history which are plausible but not provable.

I would recommend that anyone who thinks that only “Greek” art was naturalistic should ponder the Old Kingdom nude statue of Tjeti. Those are much too early and too distant to have influenced the First Emperor, but they certainly represent the human body in a sophisticated and realistic way.