We don’t know who this woman was, but there are clues to be found on other objects from the hoard – a gold bracelet is inscribed UTERE FELIX DOMINA IULIANE, meaning ‘Use this happily, Lady Juliane’. We will never know if this is the lady on our pepper pot, but she may well have been its owner. Another name, Aurelius Ursicinus, is found on several of the other objects – could this have been Juliane’s husband? All the objects are small but extremely precious. This was the mobile wealth of a rich Roman family – precisely the type of person who is in danger when the state fails. There were no Swiss bank accounts in the ancient world – the only thing to do was bury your treasure and hope that you lived to come back and find it. But Juliane and Aurelius never did come back and the buried treasure remained in the ground. That is, until 1,600 years later, when in 1992 a farmer, Eric Lawes, went to look for a missing hammer. What he found, with the help of his metal detector, was this spectacular hoard. And he found the hammer too – which is now also part of the British Museum’s collection.
Many of the objects in this history would mean little to us were it not for the work of thousands of people – archaeologists, anthropologists, historians and numerous others – and we wouldn’t even have found many of these objects without metal detectorists like Eric Lawes, who in recent years have been rewriting the history of Britain. When he found the first few objects he alerted local archaeologists so that they could record the detail of the site and lift the hoard out in blocks of earth. Weeks of careful micro-excavation in the laboratories of the British Museum revealed not only the objects but the way in which they were packed. Although their original container, a wooden chest about 60 centimetres (2 feet) wide, had largely perished, its contents remained in their original positions. Our pepper pot was buried alongside a stack of ladles, some small silver jugs and a beautiful silver handle in the shape of a prancing tigress. Right at the top, lovingly wrapped in cloth, were necklaces, rings and gold chains, placed there by people uncertain of when or whether they would ever wear them again. These are objects that bring us very close to the terrifying events that must have been overwhelming these people’s lives.
Written on one of the spoons in the hoard is VIVAS IN DEO (‘May you live in God’) – a common Christian prayer – and it is likely that our fleeing family was Christian. By this date Christianity had been the official religion of the Empire for nearly a hundred years. Like pepper, it had come to Britain via Rome, and both survived the fall of the Roman Empire.
PART NINE
The Rise of World Faiths
AD 100–600
Striving to comprehend the infinite, a small number of major faiths have shaped the world over the last 2,000 years. Strikingly, the defining representational traditions of Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism all developed within a few hundred years of each other: Buddhism first began to allow images of the Buddha in human form from AD 100 to 200, and the oldest images of Jesus Christ coincide with the acceptance of Christianity as the predominant religion of the Roman Empire in AD 312. At a similar time, Hinduism established the conventions for depicting its gods that are still familiar today. In Iran, Zoroastrianism, the state religion, articulated the ritual duties of the ruler to secure order in the world. The birth of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 570 set the scene for the rise of Islam, which eventually overwhelmed the many local gods who had been worshipped in Arabia.
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Seated Buddha from Gandhara
Stone statue, from Pakistan
100–300 AD
Battersea Park in London, just south of the Thames, isn’t the obvious place to encounter the Buddha. But there, next to the Peace Pagoda, a Japanese Buddhist monk, watched by four gilded Buddha statues, drums his way over the grass each day. His name is the Reverend Gyoro Nagase, and he knows these gilded Buddhas very well. But then in a sense so do we all: here, looking out over the Thames, is the Buddha sitting cross-legged, his hands touching in front of his chest. I hardly need to describe the figure any further, because the seated Buddha is one of the most familiar and most enduring images in world religion.
In the British Museum we have a Buddha sculpture carved from grey schist, a rock that contains fragments of crystal which make the stone glint and gleam in the light. The Buddha’s hands and face are more or less life-size, but the body is smaller, and he sits cross-legged in the lotus position, with his hands raised in front of him. On both shoulders he wears an over-robe, and the folds of the drapery form thick, rounded ridges and terraces. This drapery hides most of his feet, except for a couple of the toes on the upturned right foot, which you can just see. His hair is gathered up into what seems to be a bun but which is in fact a symbol of the Buddha’s wisdom and enlightened state. He looks serenely into the distance, his eyelids lowered. And rising from the top of his shoulders, surrounding his head, is what looks like a large grey dinner plate – but of course it is his halo.
Today, you can find statues of the Buddha, seated and serene, all over the world. But the Buddha hasn’t always been there for us to contemplate. For centuries he was represented only through a set of symbols. The story of how this changed, and how the Buddha came to be shown in human form, begins in Pakistan around 1,800 years ago.
By that time Buddhism had already been in existence for centuries. According to Buddhist tradition, the historical Buddha was a prince of the Ganges region in north India in the fifth century BC who abandoned his royal life to become a wandering ascetic, wanting to comprehend and therefore to overcome the roots of human suffering. After many experiences he finally sat under a pipal tree and meditated without moving for forty-nine days until, at last, he achieved enlightenment – freedom from greed, hate and delusion. At this moment he became the Buddha – the ‘Enlightened’ or the ‘Awakened One’. He passed on his dharma – his teaching, his way – to monks and missionaries who eventually travelled across vast expanses of Asia. As the Buddhist message spread north, it passed into the region known as Gandhara, in what is now north-eastern Pakistan, around Peshawar in the foothills of the Himalayas.
All religions have to confront the key question – how can the infinite, the boundless, be apprehended? How can we humans draw near to the other, to god? Some aim to achieve this through chanting, some through words alone, but most religions have found images useful for focusing human attention on the divine. A little under 2,000 years ago, this tendency strikingly gained impetus among a number of great religions. Is it more than an extraordinary coincidence that at about the same moment Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism first start showing Christ, Hindu gods and the Buddha in human form? Coincidence or not, it is at this point that all three religions established artistic conventions which are still very much alive today.
In Gandhara, from the 1850s onwards, large numbers of Buddhist shrines and sculptures were discovered and investigated – in fact more Buddhist sculpture and architecture comes from Gandhara than from any other part of ancient India. Our virtually life-size and lifelike figure is one of these. It must have been a startling sight for any Buddhist 1,800 years ago. Until shortly before then the Buddha had been represented only by sets of symbols – the tree under which he achieved enlightenment, a pair of footprints, and so on. To give him human form was entirely new.
The move towards representing Buddha as a man is described by the historian Claudine Bautze-Picron, who teaches Indian art history at the Free University of Brussels:
The Buddha was a real historical character, so he was not a god. There was a movement 2,000 years or so ago when they started representing various deities and human wise men who had lived a few hundred years before. The first evocation of the Buddha’s presence is carved around the circular monuments called stupas. There the Buddha is referred to through the tree below which he sat, where he became awakened, which is in fact the meaning of ‘Buddha’ – to be awakened. The worship of footprints is a major element in India still today; they refer to a person who is no longer there but who has left traces on Earth. This developed to
wards an even more elaborated structure, where you have a flaming pillar in place of the tree, which means that light emerges out of the Buddha. So there were symbols which were creeping in to the artistic world and which really opened the way to the physical image of the Buddha.
Our sculpture – one of the earliest known – probably dates from the third century AD, when Gandhara was ruled by the Kushan kings of northern India, whose empire stretched from Kabul to Islamabad. It was a wealthy region thanks to its position on the Silk Road, the trade routes linking China, India and the Mediterranean. From Gandhara the main route ran west through Iran to Alexandria in Egypt. Gandhara’s prosperity and political stability allowed the construction of a great landscape of Buddhist shrines, monuments and sculpture, as well as supporting further missionary expansion. The religions that survive today are the ones that were spread and sustained by trade and power. It’s profoundly paradoxical: Buddhism, the religion founded by an ascetic who spurned all comfort and riches, flourished thanks to the international trade in luxury goods. With those valuable commodities, like silk, went the monks and the missionaries, and with them went the Buddha, in human form, perhaps because such an image helps when you are teaching across a language barrier.
There are four standard poses for the Buddha that we know today: he can be shown lying, sitting, standing or walking. Each pose reflects a particular aspect of his life and activity, rather than a moment or an event. Our sculpture shows him in his enlightened state. He is robed as a monk, as might be expected, but unlike a monk his head is not shaved. He has dispensed with finery and removed his princely jewellery. His ears are no longer weighted down with gold – but the elongated lobes still have the empty holes that show that this man was once a prince. His cross-legged lotus position is a pose used for meditation and, as here, for teaching.
But this statue, and the thousands made later that look so like it, has a purpose. Thupten Jinpa, a former monk and translator for the Dalai Lama, explains how you use an image like this one as a help on your journey towards enlightenment:
Religious practitioners internalize the image of the Buddha by first looking at the image and then bringing that image of the Buddha within themselves in a sort of mental image. And then they reflect upon the qualities of the Buddha – Buddha’s body, speech and mind. The image of the Buddha plays a role of recalling in the mind of the devotee, the historical teacher, the Buddha, his experience of awakening and the key events in his life. There are different forms of the Buddha that actually symbolize those events. For example, there is a very famous posture of the Buddha seated but with his hand in a gesture of preaching. Technically this hand gesture is referred to as the gesture of turning the wheel of Dharma: Dharmachakra.
This is the hand gesture of our seated Buddha. The Dharmachakra, or ‘Wheel of Law’, is a symbol that represents the path to enlightenment. It’s one of the oldest known Buddhist symbols found in Indian art. In the sculpture Buddha’s fingers stand in for the spokes of the wheel and he’s ‘setting in motion the Wheel of Law’ to his followers, who will eventually be able to renounce the material states of illusion, suffering and individuality for the immaterial state of ‘the highest happiness’ – Nirvana. The Buddha teaches that:
It is only the fool who is deceived by the outward show of beauty; for where is the beauty when the decorations of the person are taken away, the jewels removed, the gaudy dress laid aside, the flowers and chaplets withered and dead? The wise man, seeing the vanity of all such fictitious charms, regards them as a dream, a mirage, a fantasy.
All Buddhist art aims to detach the faithful from the physical world, even if it uses a physical image like our statue to do so. In the next chapter we have a religion that believes in the delights of material abundance, and it has a profusion of gods: it is Hinduism.
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Gold Coins of Kumaragupta I
Gold coins, from India
MINTED AD 415–450
In north-west London is what must be one of the most startling buildings in the capital, indeed in the whole of the UK. It’s the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, the Neasden Hindu temple – a huge white building, made of marble quarried in Italy, elaborately carved in India by more than 1,500 craftsmen and then shipped to England.
After taking their shoes off, visitors enter a large hall, sumptuously decorated with sculptures of the Hindu gods, carved in white Carrara marble. They cannot enter in the middle of the day – at that time the gods are asleep, and music is played every day, at around 4 o’clock in the afternoon, to wake them up. Images like these sculptures, of Shiva, Vishnu and the other Hindu gods, strike us now as timeless, but there was one particular moment when this way of seeing the gods began. The visual language of Hinduism, just like Buddhism and Christianity, crystallized somewhere around the year 400, and the forms of these deities now in Neasden can be traced back to India’s great Gupta Empire of around 1,600 years ago.
Gold coin showing a horse on one side and a goddess, probably Lakshmi, on the other
To interact with gods we need to be able to recognize them – but how are they to be identified? Hinduism is a religion that, although it has its ascetic aspect, acknowledges the delights of material abundance, and it has a profusion of gods, to be found in temples covered in decorations, flowers and garlands. The great gods Shiva and Vishnu are easily recognizable, Shiva with his wife Parvati and his trident, and Vishnu sitting with his four arms, holding discus and lotus flower. Often found nearby is a god who was particularly important for the Gupta kings of some 1,600 years ago, Shiva’s son Kumara (more familiar now as Karttikeya). All these Hindu gods began to assume the shapes we recognize today in the brand-new temples built by the Gupta kings of northern India around the year 400.
In the Coins and Medals Department of the Museum we have two coins of the Indian king Kumaragupta I, who ruled from AD 414 to 455. They show very different aspects of this king’s religious life. They are each almost exactly the size of a 1p coin but are made of solid gold, so they sit quite heavily in the hand. On the first coin, where you would normally expect to see the king, there is a horse – a magnificent standing stallion. He is decorated with ribbons, and a great pennant flutters over his head. Around the coin, in Sanskrit, is an inscription that translates as ‘King Kumaragupta, the supreme lord, who has conquered his enemies’.
Why put a horse on the coin instead of the king? This design looks back to an ancient sacrificial ritual, established long before Hinduism, that had been observed by the Indian kings of the past and was preserved and continued by the Guptas. It was an awesome and elaborate year-long process that a king might do once in a lifetime – it cost a fortune and culminated in a massive theatrical act of sacrifice. Kumaragupta decided that he would perform this rite.
A stallion was selected and ritually purified, then released to roam for a year, followed and observed by an escort of princes, heralds and attendants. A key part of their job was to prevent it from mating: the stallion had to remain pure. At the end of its year of sexually frustrated freedom, the horse was retrieved in a complex set of ceremonies before being killed by the king himself, using a gold knife, in front of a large crowd of spectators. Our gold coin commemorates Kumaragupta’s performance of this ancient pre-Hindu ritual that reaffirmed his legitimacy and his supremacy. But, at the same time, Kumaragupta was vigorously promoting other, newer religious practices, invoking other gods in support of his earthly power. He was spending large sums of money on building temples and filling them with statues and paintings of the Hindu gods, making them manifest to their worshippers in a new and striking form. He and his contemporaries were, in effect, creating the gods anew.
The Gupta Dynasty began a little after the year 300 and rapidly expanded from its base in northern India until it covered much of the Indian subcontinent. By 450 the Gupta Empire was a regional superpower, ranking with Iran and the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium. Not long after Constantine had granted tolerance to Christianity in Rome in 313 the Gup
ta kings in northern India set down many of the enduring forms of Hinduism – creating the complex apparatus of the faith, with its temples and priests, and commissioning the images of the gods that we know now.
Why did this happen at this point in history? As with Christianity and Buddhism it seems to relate to empire, wealth, a faith that is gaining new devotees and the power of art. Only stable, rich and powerful states can commission great art and architecture that, unlike text or language, can be instantly understood by anyone – a great advantage in multilingual empires. And once buildings and sculptures exist, they last, and become the pattern for the future. But whereas in Rome Christianity was soon imposed as the exclusive religion of the Empire, for the Gupta kings worship of the Hindu gods was always only one of the ways in which the divine could be apprehended and embraced. This is a world which seems to be at ease with complexity, happy to live with many truths and, indeed, to proclaim them all as an official part of the state.
What sort of relationship between devotee and deity was being fostered during this flourishing of Hinduism under the Guptas? Shaunaka Rishi Das, the Hindu cleric and Director of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, explains:
Hindus will see a deity, on the whole, as God present. God can manifest anywhere, so the physical manifestation of the image is considered to be a great aid in gaining the presence of God. By going to the temple, you see this image that is the presence. Or you can have the image in your own home – Hindus will invite God to come into this deity-form, they will wake god up in the morning with an offering of sweets. The deity will have been put to bed in a bed the night before, raised up, it will be bathed in warm water, ghee, honey, yoghurt, and then dressed in handmade dresses – usually made of silk – and garlanded with beautiful flowers and then set up for worship for the day. It’s a very interesting process of practising the presence of God.
A History of the World in 100 Objects Page 24
