Near the top of the stone’s rough, corroded surface are three lines of elegantly curved Sanskrit script. Strauch, wearing sunglasses and a Panama hat, traces the curling letters with his finger. “In the sixth year of King Philip,” he reads, “the
kshatriya Vasula gave this image for the welfare and happiness of all beings.” Then he points to a single line, in Greek, written by the same person but in a cruder style, that says simply: “Vasula set this up.” If not for the Greek translation and the reference to a Roman emperor—Philip the Arab, who ruled in the third century A.D.—this dedication could be mistaken as coming from India, Strauch says. The words are Sanskrit, expertly written in Brahmi script. The message itself, with its reference to universal happiness, is undeniably Buddhist. And the author, Vasula, who arranged for the dedication, proudly describes himself as kshatriya, from the warrior caste.
The stele is just one of a series of remarkable finds that have specialists scrambling to reassess their understanding of Rome’s connections to the Eastern world. Others include a magnificent Buddha statue, carved from Mediterranean marble and mixing Indian and Roman-Egyptian features, the first ever found anywhere in the ancient Western world. A second stele features a carved Greco-Roman arch that frames a triad of early Indian gods. Nothing like these objects, with their unmistakable blend of Eastern and Western styles, has ever been seen in the Roman world.
Peter Stewart, a historian of classical art at the University of Oxford, described himself as “flabbergasted” by them.
Shailendra Bhandare, an expert in ancient India at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, said that when he heard about the Indic triad, “I fell off my chair.”
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