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How Did Alexander The Silk River Influence Ancient Greek Art

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Title: Alexander and Bodhisattva’s Heads

The Silk road provided many people the opportunity to trade with other countries. They could exchange so many aspects of their culture, recipes, currency, folklore, art. With every piece of art that has traveled along the Silk Road, connections can be made demonstrating the influence cultures had on each other. Travelling merchants, doctors, actors, or tribes could all carry their unique knowledge to new people to pass along. These connections could have been cultural, artistic, religious, or a combination of all three. One artwork from the Cantor Museum, the Head of a Bodhisattva, from the 1st-2nd century can be connected to another work of art in this way. The Bodhisattva head is from the ancient …show more content…

Before Gandhara being conquered by the Kushan dynasty, it had been conquered by Alexander the Great in 326-23 B.C (Smith). So, the Greco-Roman influence there makes sense as Alexander the Great was born in Macedon as a Greek king and brought his history wherever he traveled (Wood 32). Tracing Alexander the Great’s path from his start in Greece, beginning his invasion plans with Arabia, and making his way down south shows that Alexander, through conquering, spread a Greco roman style of art to Egypt as well. The syncretic style of artistic influence in Egypt can also be seen in stone sculpture. The Egyptians began to make stone heads, but the lack of supply of stone meant these heads were often placed onto bodies that had been constructed from different materials. (Wood 120) After Alexander conquered Egypt, he turned his sights further east to Persia, then to India, taking with him the Hellenistic art style. As he traveled through the Silk road, he left traces of this artistic style to other places along his path. (Çakmak). In class we have previously discussed art depicting Greek gods being found far east from the European countries, which is another example of the spread of Hellenistic art and culture. Before Alexander’s presence in India, representations of Buddha had often been purely symbolic (Wood

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