I saw something at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge that bugged me because it tickled at my memory and I just knew that I had seen something very similar before:
A second century Buddha.
No record of where it was found.
From the moment I laid eyes on this, it niggled at me, and kept niggling until eventually it seemed very important that I worked out what precisely was unsettling me about this statue and although it took a while hunting through my zillions of photographs, I've finally found what I was looking for, and strangely it was in among my Seoul photographs. The last place you'd ever think of looking, right?
And here they are:
Radha?
A Hindu statue found
in the oddest place imaginable.
Krishna?
Note the broken halo behind the head?
It's also on the Fitzgerald statue!
So, considering all this, do you too suspect that these all were perhaps done by the same artist? Or if not, two artists who came from the same artisan school? Or one who apprenticed and trained the other?
No, I'm still considering possibilities, but I'm back again to my strong conviction that a single artist did all three!
But let's put that aside for a moment and let me tell you just WHERE these Hindu Statues were found.
Down an ancient well in South Korea!
I can hear you now: "Hindu statues found down a well in Korea??? You MUST be joking!" Well, no I'm not. And they're definitely Hindu statues because lots of others were found down there as well.
Here are only two:
Ganesh!
Inarguably Hindu!
Hanuman!
However this one definitely
wasn't carved by the same artist.
We took these shots when we were in Seoul last year. Back then, I was interested in whether the Spartans had come from Korea - which I have since decided against because I now think they came from Russia, from somewhere around the Black Sea - because of so many cultural similarities, two of which being "votive offerings" and "tumult burial mounds", so when I heard South Korea was putting on a display of "Korean votive offerings" we HAD to check it out.
I know I've blogged this story before, but I'll tell you again since it appears to be important again: South Korean archeologists thought it would be an interesting exercise to look at what was at the bottom of these old and now-disused wells and what they found down there was more extraordinary than they could possibly have imagined.
Anyway, as I blogged before, my conclusion - based on the range of objects located down those wells - was that I don't think Koreans performed "votive offerings" at all because everything just seemed like your regular flotsam and jetsam - stuff tossed and stuff lost - but nonetheless we did find those items they found completely fascinating. Mind-blowing even.
These statues are only a few of the items that absolutely beggars belief, although the most mind-blowing would definitely have been the tiny little adult human skeleton of a person who was only about a foot tall. I can't recall if I blogged that story or not, but I'll show you the fairy again since it took many weeks of hunting through my zillions of photographs to find the photos above, and since this one is right next to them it seems a waste not to use it again, and since I don't want to go through these hours of work again, let's put it here as well:
The fairy in among random pots
that span a period of over 10,000 years.
Guess those ancient people were
forever losing their pots while getting water
from those ancient wells.
These were the contents of a single well, btw.
And since I'm probably unlikely to ever locate this cache of shots ever again, not without hours of searching, let's have a quick look at where this exhibition was being held:
The Seoul History Museum,
full of people even on a school day
because South Koreans are MAJORLY
into their own history.
Rohini has a great deal of interest in the subject of evidence of Hinduism in places where you don't expect to find it and got rather excited when she read my post on Pak Ou Caves in Laos when I suggested that the reason certain statues in these sacred caves near Luang Prabang had their heads removed was because they were Hindu statues - most likely Ganesh and Hanuman, but that was just guessing from the poses - and then I posited the theory that now-Buddhist South East Asia was hiding a Hindu past.
Rohini too has long thought so and thus we've talked about this subject on several occasions. And I'll tell you exactly what I told her: that South East Asia's secret Hindu past is not so hidden in Chiang Mai, in the North of Thailand. Guess the Buddhist Taliban didn't get up that far north because nothing Hindu was smashed, decapitated or shoved into wells so it's all on open display, thus for anyone, like Rohini, interested in this subject that's the first place you should visit.
But anyway, back to these statues. I have no other proof beyond a certain similarity of aesthetics, that Helenic ratio, the form and manufacture but I wish to posit the theory that the same artist did all.
However the Fitzwilliam Museum didn't say where their Buddha had come from so we don't know how strange this could get. All we can know from this is that it was carved in the 2nd century AD.
And as two of these statues being Hindu and one being Buddha? I can only speculate. Did the artist change religion? Or was s/he a simple jobbing artisan who carved religious statues for all who paid her/him?
Although my original belief that these Hindu statues down that Korean well were the result of some religious zealotry on the part of some crazed Taliban-types who - Henry VIII-style - had ordered the destruction of anything belonging to the "Auld Religion", seeing the same artist may very well have carved that Buddha above, I'm now wondering if ... well, s/he changed religion and tossed them down the well him/herself.
No, too much evidence that the Korean statues were tossed as part of an undoubted purge ... so ... perhaps ... all it means having the same artist do all three was that back in the 2nd century AD there was an extraordinarily gifted artist who carved religious statues for a living.
How far this person traveled we can't know until Fitzwilliam Museum says where they located theirs.
And if we're right about it being the same artist, we can tell Rohini with a certain amount of conviction that this Taliban-style Hindu purge happened sometime after the 2nd century AD.
And that's definitely more than we ever knew before.
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