Amaravati Collection | |
---|---|
Material | Limestone |
Created | 1st century BCE to 8th century CE |
Discovered | 1797 Amaravathi Mahachaitya |
Present location | British Museum, London |
The Amaravati Collection, sometimes called the Amaravati Marbles, is a series of 120 sculptures and inscriptions in the British Museum from the Amaravati Stupa in Amaravathi, Guntur in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The Amaravati artefacts entered the Museum's collection in the 1880s. The Amaravati sculptures were sometimes also called the Elliot Marbles on account of their association in with Sir Walter Elliot, who had them removed from the site to Madras in the 1840s. [1]
There are also large collections of Amaravati sculpture in the Chennai Government Museum, which has the best collection, and at the site museum at Amaravati, and smaller ones in other museums in India and around the world.
The Amaravati collection in the British Museum consists of over 120 different pieces made from a limestone called Palnad marble; although the material is certainly not marble and the source of the stone in the Palnad quarry not decisively proven. [2]
Most of the figurative sculptures are in relief, with many of the most crowded scenes illustrating stories from the Jataka tales, a large body of literature with complex accounts of the previous lives of Buddha. The largest collection, in the Government Museum, Chennai (formerly Madras) has a larger number of similar sculptures in relief, which they have classified by four periods of activity starting in the second century BCE and stretching to the second century CE. Early interest in the stupa and its sculptures was to some extent because it was wrongly thought to contain early evidence of Christianity in India. [3] More recent scholarship, notably by Akira Shimada (who made a close study of both collections), has tended to adopt slightly later dates.
The segments can be divided into a number of categories, including parts of the stupa's railings and gateways, and "drum-slabs" from the stone facing of the mound of the stupa itself. They include pillars, crossbars and copings, drum-slabs, pillar fragments, two guardian lions and a number of miscellaneous pieces, some of which date from later periods. In total, they represent one of the most important collections of ancient Indian sculpture outside the sub-continent.
After the first explorations of the site by Colin Mackenzie, Sir Walter Elliot of the Madras Civil Service undertook excavations at the Amaravati stūpa in 1845 and transported the excavated pieces to Madras, where they were placed on the greens in front of the College. [4] After enquiries from the Court of Directors of the East India Company, the stones were moved to a slightly less exposed site in front of the Museum. In 1853, the Curator of the Museum, Dr. Edward Balfour of the Madras Medical Service, informed London that the condition of the sculptures was deteriorating due to their situation and in order for the Company to make a decision as to whether the stones were of sufficient artistic importance to merit transportation to London, Balfour arranged for a series of drawings to be made of the pieces by the Indian artist P. Murugasa Moodaliar in 1855. The drawings are preserved in the British Library. [5] Although in general these drawings gave a good idea of the sculptures, Balfour was not entirely satisfied with their accuracy and therefore persuaded Dr A. J. Scott to take a series of photographs, which were also forwarded to London.
In 1858, Linnaeus Tripe made a further series of photographs of the sculptures in Chennai. A set is preserved in the British Library as Photographs of the Elliot Marbles; and other subjects; in the Central Museum Madras (Madras, 1858–59) under shelfmark Photo 958. [6] In the following year, namely 1858, some of the Amaravati sculptures were shipped to London on the orders of the Court of Directors of the East India Company.
In England, the Amaravati sculptures were destined for the museum of the East India Company. Known as the India Museum, this institution was established in 1801 to house the natural history specimens, books, samples of manufactures, manuscripts and other miscellaneous items collected by the Company and its officers in India. [7] The Amaravati sculptures arrived just as the East India Company was being dissolved, so the sculptures were stored at Beale's Wharf in Southwark before being transferred to Fife House in Whitehall, a building once occupied by James Duff, 2nd Earl Fife (d. 1809). The Indian collections in Fife House were opened to the public in July 1861. [8] Conditions at Fife House were less than ideal and the Amaravati pieces sustained some damage there due to weather conditions. This drew the attention of James Fergusson (1808–1886), who had published a book on Amaravati in 1868 and appears to have expressed his concerns to Augustus Wollaston Franks at the British Museum. [9]
Although several proposals were put forward in the 1860s to transfer some of the India Museum collections to the British Museum, moves supported by Antonio Panizzi, administrative complexities prevented a speedy decision. In addition, John Forbes Watson (1827–1892), in charge of the India Museum from 1858, was determined to preserve the organization and lobbied energetically for a new building and the creation of an 'Imperial Museum for India and the Colonies'. [10] After several failed proposals, the lease on Fife House expired in 1869 and the India Museum briefly rejoined the library in the newly created India Office. There was so little room that the Amaravati sculpture was sent to the India Office Stores in Lambeth. Some of the India Museum collections were slowly moved to the South Kensington Museum (forerunner of the V&A), where a three-year lease had been taken on some of the galleries there. This move coincided with the appointment of Dr. George Birdwood as the curator at South Kensington. After debates in and out of the House of Commons, Sir Louis Mallet (1823–90) asked Birdwood to prepare plans for the dispersal of the India Museum in 1879. The India Museum was then dissolved and the transfer of collections effected in 1880. [11]
After the sculptures in London were deposited in the British Museum in 1880, for a long time they were arranged on the museum's main stairwell until they were removed for safekeeping during World War II. They re-emerged in the 1950s, but the atmospheric conditions in London at the time caused the sculptures to deteriorate. They were moved to an air-conditioned basement in 1959 where they remained for over thirty years until a special gallery could be constructed, which now displays some 70 objects. [2]
In 1992, the British Museum's Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery (Room 33) was opened to feature antiquities from east Asia and south Asia. Adjacent to this gallery (Room 33a), the Amaravati collection is displayed in a special room with controlled humidity and air conditioning. [2] The gallery includes a reconstructed section of the stupa railing and a selection of "drum slabs" that once decorated the exterior of the stupa proper. [12] The gallery was sponsored by the Japanese publishing concern Asahi Shimbun after whom the space is named.
The first detailed study of the Amaravati sculpture was published by James Fergusson in 1868. [13] Just under a century later, the first catalogue of the collection was prepared by Douglas E. Barrett, one time Keeper of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, and published by the Museum in 1954. [14] This was followed by Amaravati: Buddhist Sculpture from the Great Stūpa, published in 1992 to coincide with the opening of the Asahi Shimbun Gallery of Amaravati sculpture. [15] The early printed catalogues have been absorbed and surpassed by the British Museum's collections online database. [16]
As the British Museum database emerged, work on the iconography of the early Buddhist art at Amaravati and Ajanta was being advanced by Prof. Dr. Monkia Zin. [17] Meanwhile, the study of the site's history has been led by Dr. Jennifer Howes who has written articles on the subject and been involved in the online publication of Colin Mackenzie's Album. [18] A wider study of the site and its history was published by Akira Shimada in 2013. [19] This monograph provides a detailed re-evaluation of the site itself, the documents in the British Museum and British Library, and the history of early Buddhist art. Shimada's chronology has superseded earlier attempts to date the phases of Amaravati sculpture and places the stupa in its wider cultural and physical landscape. [20]
In 2014, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation supported a conference at the British Museum entitled Amaravati: The Art of an Early Buddhist Monument in Context at the British Museum. [21]
Collaborative research into the Amaravati sculptures is ongoing through the World Corpus of Amaravati Sculpture Archived 23 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine , a project directed by Prof. Akira Shimada in collaboration with the Archaeological Survey of India. The aims of the project are to "facilitate access to the site’s sculpture and documentation, to encourage the interdisciplinary and international discussion of Amaravati and to promote new research and publication on Amaravati and Buddhist archaeology." [22]
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge.
In Buddhism, a stupa is a mound-like or hemispherical structure containing relics that is used as a place of meditation.
The Indian Museum is a massive museum in Central Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It is the ninth oldest museum in the world and the oldest and largest museum in India as well as in Asia. It has rare collections of antiques, armour and ornaments, fossils, skeletons, mummies and Mughal paintings. It was founded by the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, in 1814. The founder curator was Nathaniel Wallich, a Danish botanist.
Colonel Colin Mackenzie was Scottish army officer in the British East India Company who later became the first Surveyor General of India. He was a collector of antiquities and an orientalist. He surveyed southern India, making use of local interpreters and scholars to study religion, oral histories, inscriptions and other evidence, initially out of personal interest, and later as a surveyor. He was ordered to survey the Mysore region shortly after the British victory over Tipu Sultan in 1799 and produced the first maps of the region along with illustrations of the landscape and notes on archaeological landmarks. His collections consisting of thousands of manuscripts, inscriptions, translations, coins and paintings, which were acquired after his death by the India Office Library and are an important source for the study of Indian history. He was awarded a Companion of the Order of the Bath on 4 June 1815.
The Satavahanas, also referred to as the Andhras in the Puranas, were an ancient Indian dynasty based in the Deccan region. Most modern scholars believe that the Satavahana rule began in the late second century BCE and lasted until the early third century CE, although some assign the beginning of their rule to as early as the 3rd century BCE based on the Puranas, but uncorroborated by archaeological evidence. The Satavahana kingdom mainly comprised the present-day Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Maharashtra. At different times, their rule extended to parts of modern Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Karnataka. The dynasty had different capital cities at different times, including Pratishthana (Paithan) and Amaravati (Dharanikota).
The Government Museum, Chennai, or the Madras Museum, is a museum of human history and culture located in the Government Museum Complex in the neighbourhood of Egmore in Chennai, India. Started in 1851, it is the second oldest museum in India after the Indian Museum in Kolkata. It is particularly rich in archaeological and numismatic collections. It has the largest collection of Roman antiquities outside Europe. Among them, the colossal Museum Theatre is one of the most impressive. The National Art Gallery is also present in the museum premises. Built in Indo-Saracenic style, it houses rare European and Asian painting of renowned artists, including that of Raja Ravi Varma. It had 0.6 million visitors in 2018. It has the richest collections of bronze idols, 500 of them dating to 1000 BCE, in Asia.
Sir Walter Elliot, KCSI was a British civil servant in colonial India. He was also an eminent orientalist, linguist, archaeologist, naturalist and ethnologist who worked mainly in the Presidency of Madras. Born in Edinburgh, he studied at the East India Company College at Haileybury and joined the East India Company's civil service at Madras in 1820 and worked on until 1860. He was invested Knight Commander of the Order of the Star of India (KCSI) in 1866.
Bharhut is a village located in the Satna district of Madhya Pradesh, central India. It is known for its famous relics from a Buddhist stupa. What makes Bharhut panels unique is that each panel is explicitly labelled in Brahmi characters mentioning what the panel depicts. The major donor for the Bharhut stupa was King Dhanabhuti.
Sculpture in the Indian subcontinent, partly because of the climate of the Indian subcontinent makes the long-term survival of organic materials difficult, essentially consists of sculpture of stone, metal or terracotta. It is clear there was a great deal of painting, and sculpture in wood and ivory, during these periods, but there are only a few survivals. The main Indian religions had all, after hesitant starts, developed the use of religious sculpture by around the start of the Common Era, and the use of stone was becoming increasingly widespread.
Nagarjunakonda: Nāgārjunikoṇḍa, meaning Nagarjuna Hill) is a historical town, now an island located near Nagarjuna Sagar in Palnadu district of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It is one of India's richest Buddhist sites, and now lies almost entirely under the lake created by the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam. With the construction of the dam, the archaeological relics at Nagarjunakonda were submerged, and had to be excavated and transferred to higher land, which has become an island.
The Department of Asia in the British Museum holds one of the largest collections of historical objects from Asia. These collections comprise over 75,000 objects covering the material culture of the Asian continent, and dating from the Neolithic age up to the present day.
Linnaeus Tripe was a British pioneer of photography, best known for his photographs of India and Burma taken in the 1850s.
Robert Sewell (1845–1925) worked in the civil service of the Madras Presidency during the period of colonial rule in India. He was Keeper of the Madras Record Office and was tasked with responsibility for documenting ancient inscriptions and remains in the region, As with other British administrators of his type at that period, his purpose was not scholarly but rather to bolster administrative control by constructing a history that placed British rule as a virtue and a necessity rather than something to be denigrated. Portrayal of historic factionalism among local figureheads and dominion by alien despots would, it was thought, enhance the perception that only the British could rescue the country from its past.
Kanganahalli, situated about 3 km from Sannati, is an important Buddhist site where an ancient Mahastupa was built. It is on the left bank of the Bhima river in Chitapur taluk, Kalaburagi district in Karnataka, India. Nalwar is the nearest Railway station about 19 km from Sannati. The Buddhist site about 2.5 km from Chandrala Parameshwari temple of Sannati.
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The Buddhapad Hoard or Buddam Hoard is a large cache of Buddhist and Jain sculptures found near the town of Buddam in Andhra Pradesh, southern India. Since 1905, it has formed an important part of the British Museum's South Asian collection. Dating from 6th-8th centuries AD, the style of craftsmanship fuses the northern influences of the Gupta period with the southern traditions of the Deccan, which in turn greatly influenced Buddhist art in South East Asia in subsequent centuries.
Amaravati is the capital of the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. It is located on the banks of the river Krishna in Guntur district.
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