Page:Asoka - the Buddhist Emperor of India.djvu/144

by Alexander. The Persian word nipo for 'writing' occurs in the Shâhbâzgarhi version of the Edicts; the penalty of cropping the hair (ante, p. 100) was a Persian punishment^[1]; and the ceremonial washing of the king’s hair, which Strabo, no doubt transcribing Megasthenes, mentions as an Indian custom, seems to be copied from the similar coremony performed by Xerxes, as related by Herodotus^[2]. The Persian title of Satrap, which continued to be used in Western India as late as the closing years of the fourth century A. D., is not recorded for Maurya times. But the monolithic pillars alone are enough to prove the reality of the Persian influence, and M. Le Bon seems to be right in maintaining that early Indian art was very largely indebted to Persia for its inspiration ^[3]. The Hellenistic decorative motives, acanthus leaves, and so forth, which are common in ancient Indian sculpture, may have come through either Persia or Alexandria, or by both Ways. The problems concerning the relation between Indian, Asiatic, and Hellenistic art have never been threshed out, and are too complex for discussion in these pages, but I may say that I am inclined to regard the early Indian has-reliefs as translations, so to speak, of Alexandrian motives; by which I mean that the scheme of composition is Hellenistic of the Alexandrian school, while the

1. 'Athenaeum, July 19, 1902.
2. Strabo, Bk. xv, ch. 69; transl. McCrindle, Ancient India, p. 75; Herodotus, Bk. ix. 110; Ind. Ant. xxxiv (1905), p. 202.
3. Le Bon, Les Momnuents de l'Inde (Paris, 1893), p. 15.