Introduction to Ramayana in Archaic Greek & Etruscan Art, Part III

Description (Intro, Part III):

Previews the upcoming presentation and gives an outline of the different sections that will cover each major topic: the front and back sides of the Caeretan hydria, the dating of this Caeretan hydria and the Campana slabs, comparison with Greek myths of abduction, and identification of the major characters Rama, Sita, Laksmana, and Ravana in each episode depicted. We will arrive at the tentative conclusion that Eurocentric bias is one of the key reasons why Indian influence on Greeks and Etruscans has been neglected, which is elaborated upon later in the main presentation.

Additionally, there is a discussion about the definition of myths, which are fictional or non-fictional stories that matter to communities of people for generations. There are variations of myths across different regions or cultures, which we observe with the Ramayana in distinct parts of India. Finally, we explain why the deer hunt on the Caeretan hydria in Boston cannot be related to the Greek myth of the Ceryneian hind, even as a variation. Fundamental thematic and structural differences preclude any association with this Greek myth, including the elements of the abduction of a lady, co-operative hunting of the deer by two brothers, and the objective of capturing the deer's golden skin by killing it.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xPoH4gHJng&t=2s

Transcript (Introduction, Part III):

So in this upcoming presentation I am going to exhaustively prove that the South Asian myth of the Ramayana was known in the Mediterranean world in the 6th century BC, particularly in southern Etruria, Caere, as well as among the Ionians who immigrated there. So why has this important event in world history not been documented or proven before in any classical history textbooks? Well, the answer to that is related to the way we learn about current events as well. And I think that’s what we’re going to be talking about here in this slide is that biased historical narratives omit important events, both in modern history, as well as in ancient history. And if we look at modern news media outlets both on the left and the right, they often selectively choose to report current events based on a motivated political agenda, leaving out key news stories that skew our understanding.

And it’s the same thing with our understanding of world history from thousands of years ago. The modern historians, they don’t necessarily distort our comprehension of world history by avoiding certain topics such as Oriental influence on the ancient Mediterranean, but they certainly make our comprehension less complete and satisfying. So you can see the similarity between the modern news media and the modern historians. They leave out important information either consciously or semiconsciously, not necessarily fully deliberately, but definitely they ignore certain information because it does not fulfill their interests. I mean it doesn’t promote their interests and promote their own agenda.

At the end of this presentation there will be some corollaries that we can arrive at as well and I’ve just listed a couple of them briefly here. A thorough examination of ancient artworks in Etruria, that is central Italy, would reveal that Greek myths were not the only stories known to Ionian artists and their clients, the Etruscan aristocrats, in the 6th century BC. So that’s one corollary and then another one would be that if we do have an admission finally that the Indian myth of the Valmiki Ramayana was also known in ancient Etruria via Ionian immigrants circa 525 BCE, then it would encourage new research into a missing chapter of world history and into the mythological origins of Etruscan Rome, including the foundation story of Romulus.

So in this upcoming presentation, I want to give you a brief overview of each section or set of slides the I will be showing you. And they each form a particular group of slides that are important, for proving an important point. So in the first nine slides I will be giving an introduction to the Caeretan hydria at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which includes the deer hunt on one side and the abduction scene on the back side. On the slides from 10 to 16, I will be trying to go into more detail about this Caeretan hydria, particularly the back side of the abduction where Ravana and Sita are identified as the satyr and maenad in the pairings on that back side.

Now for the third section, the slides 17 to 24, I will be discussing the maenad’s dress and anatomical characteristics of each of the characters, male and female, and also making a comparison of the Caeretan hydria to the Campana plaques, both of which were produced in the southern Etruscan city of Caere. And one of them is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Campana plaques are in the famous museum of the Louvre in Paris. So they’re kept in very different places but they’re intimately related to one another and this is the section where I’m going to start comparing them. In the fourth section, slides 25 to 30, I’m going to be discussing the more exact dating of the Caeretan hydria, and also get into more detail about the sequential order of the Campana slabs, and also identify each major scene in the story of Rama in those slabs.

In the fifth section, which is slides 31 to 38, I will be going into a significant amount of detail about the golden deer episode of the Valmiki Ramayana from India (from the Indian epic). And also some of the things I’ll be discussing will be the dynamic motion of the stag Maricha and his deceptive nature, which we will be able to observe on the Caeretan hydria on the front side of the deer hunt. Now in the sixth section, slides 39 to 47, I will be going into a recognition analysis of the two hunters on the front side of the deer hunt of the Caeretan hydria and I will be proving that they are indeed Rama and Laksmana from the Valmiki Ramayana, by comparative analysis with other great heroes from Greek mythology such as Heracles.  

Now in the seventh section, I will be looking at slides 48 to 58, and these are different case studies of Greek myths of abduction, similar to the Indian myth of abduction of Sita, where we have Heracles and his wife Deianira and the demon centaur Nessos in one affair, and then we have another Greek myth of abduction where a female deity Eos abducts a male Kephalos. So these are both Greek stories of abduction and I’m going to be comparing them to the Indian myth of abduction where Sita is abducted by Ravana, and she is Rama’s wife, of course. Definitely there’s a very close comparison that you can make between Heracles and Deianira and Rama and Sita, as well as the demon abductors Nessos and Ravana. But there’s also an interesting comparison that can be made with the story of Eos, the female deity abducting Kephalos, as well. So we will get into that in great detail on those slides.

Now in the last two sections (eighth video part), I’ll be discussing how and why the Ramayana actually traveled from India to Ionia and Etruria and that’s mainly because of the Persian empire at that time, which was ruling much of the then known world. And then in the last section I will be talking about the preservation and interpretation of the red-colored Campana plaques in more detail. There’s also a final concluding section that we are going to get into on the next slide. Also I want to add that throughout the presentation I’m going to be displaying images of Indian art from the medieval world, especially to use for comparison to the Caeretan hydria and the Campana plaques, in order to really confirm that these are also depictions of the Indian myth of the Ramayana. So to summarize, there are plenty of examples of Indian art depicting the Valmiki Ramayana and I will be using them (those examples) throughout the presentation for comparison with the hydria from Caere, as well as the Campana plaques from Caere.

On this slide, I just want to list some of the main conclusions that I am going to draw from this presentation. The first major conclusion is that xenophobia and Eurocentrism are the main reasons, unfortunately, along with sheer ignorance of Eastern myths, that certain Greco-Etruscan works of art from the 6th century BCE have not been positively identified as Oriental, that is South Asian Indian, mythological scenes. So that’s one of the first major conclusions. More specifically, the second major conclusion is that the Caeretan hydria, or so-called Boston deer hunt, is an Ionian depiction of the Golden Deer episode of Rama and Sita, including Rama’s killing of the golden deer with his bow and arrow, and the demon Ravana’s abduction of Rama and Sita. Western scholars admit that this artwork may have a mythological explanation, but they do not go any further.

The third major conclusion is that the Campana plaques in the Louvre depict the events of the Valmiki Ramayana in a series of five panels that form a coherent sequence. The first scene is from the royal palace of Ayodhya, where a decision on the next king, which is supposed to be Rama, is thwarted. And in the next scene we see that Rama and Sita, his wife, and his brother, Laksmana, are walking through the forest because they have been banished from the kingdom into exile, and Rama has been prevented or thwarted in his coronation as the next king. The third panel is Rama and Sita sharing a romantic moment together during exile. And then in the fourth panel we have Bharata, the younger brother of Rama, performing austerities in front of a fire altar as he has renounced the kingship of Ayodhya in deference to his elder brother Rama, whom he did not want to usurp the throne from. And then lastly, the fifth panel is the divine winged hero Rama, who is famous as a god in India. He is depicted as a divine being, a winged being, who heroically rescues his wife Sita and carries her back home to his home of Ayodhya where he then regains his kingship. So everything comes full circle in the last panel and you can see the sequence is very logical here.

So these are the three major conclusions and they’re extremely important for our understanding of the connections between ancient India and Persia and also the ancient Ionian and Etruscan world of the 6th century BC. The cultural arrogance and the fear of the unknown is also another reason why these western scholars are unable to comprehend that these are Oriental scenes, or more specifically, Asian Indian mythological scenes. In my opinion, the western scholars feel overwhelmed that their knowledge base is not enough to totally comprehend the history of the Mediterranean world in the 6th century BC. They feel like their understanding of Latin and Greek, and the different cultures in the Near East and in Greece and Italy and Magna Graecia and in the greater Etruscan world and the Roman worlds, should be enough for them to analyze the material and draw conclusions and produce works. But unfortunately, they feel a sense of dread, I think, that they have to actually know even more than that in order to come to a full understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Before jumping into the presentation itself, I wanted to list the bibliography here of all the major sources of information that I drew from. And these include the classical works on the Etruscan world, the Greek world, and artwork from those two cultures, as well as Indian medieval art as well. And there’s also direct references to websites from the museums like the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston that show us the pictures of these works of art that we’re going to discuss in the presentation. We also have some periodicals that are in different languages. There’s one book from Raffaella Bonaudo that’s in Italian. There’s a German periodical from Antike Kunst by Konrad Schauenberg on the Caeretan hydria and we also have texts on the Valmiki Ramayana. All these works are important for demonstrating what I am going to try and show about the Caeretan hydria and the Campana plaques through comparison with the Greek art in the contemporary ancient world as well as medieval Indian art.

So let’s go through one by one, these important works cited. The first one is the Cradle of Hermes, Iconography and Imagery of the Caeretan Hydriae, which is written in Italian and I have translated it into English, i.e. many of the important excerpts from it. Then the next one is Caeretan Hydriae by Jaap Hemelrijk, which again has quite a few plates and pictures of the specific hydria that I’m going to be analyzing, which is hydria number two, the Boston deer hunt. Then another work is the Two-Headed Deer, Illustrations of the Ramayana in Orissa, by Joanna Williams, which is helpful for comparison to the hydria in terms of identifying the mythical scene as that from the Golden Deer episode in the Ramayana. And then there’s the actual text of the Valmiki Ramayana; specifically I’ve focused on Volume III, which is the Aranya Kanda, or the Book of the Forest, translated by Sheldon Pollock.

Then the next citation is from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts website directly, and that’s the Caeretan hydria number two, or the Boston deer hunt as they know it. Then there’s the German periodical from 1969 in Antike Kunst, which is very important on analyzing in pretty good detail, the Caeretan hydriae, including the Boston hydria, and it’s written by Konrad Schauenberg. Then there’s kind of a quaint reference here - it’s the archaic painted tomb chamber in northern Lycia in Kizilbel. And this author is discussing a contemporary tomb that has artwork that is comparing favorably to the Caeretan (hydria) and Campana plaques from the 6th century BC. So this archaic painted tomb chamber in northern Lycia is also from the late 6th century BC and it’s useful for comparison to the Caeretan hydria as well as the Campana plaques.

Now the next list here on the right is again a more in-depth look at the Ramayana in Indian art. So in Indian art we don’t have too many examples of depictions of the Ramayana from the ancient Indian world but we do have plenty from the medieval Indian world. And so one of the references is the Ramayana in Indian Miniatures, from the Collection of National Museum in New Delhi, by Dr. Daljeet and Dr. V. K. Mathur. There’s also the Mewar Ramayana by J. P. Losty and he has another book called The Ramayana: Love and Valour in India’s Great Epic, which I haven’t written down here, but basically they’re both related to the Rajasthani depictions of the Ramayana. Rajasthan is in the northwestern part of India and so he focuses on the depictions of the Ramayana from that region. Then we have the next reference, The Ramayana in Bengali Folk Paintings, by Mandrakanta Bose. And then a western author also looks at depictions of the Ramayana in Southeast Asia, outside of India. The title of his book is In the Shadow of Rama: Murals of the Ramayana in Mainland Southeast Asia, by Vittorio Roveda.

Then there are some important references on Etruscan and Greek art here: Etruscan Art by Otto Brendel, Ancient Greek Art and Iconography, edited by Warren G. Moon. We have Archaic and Classical Greek Art by Robin Osborne. And we also have the very important book, Etruscan Painting, by the renowned scholar Massimo Pallottino. And there are many other references that I have, you know, cited specifically within the slides in the upcoming presentation, so there’s no need to list them here. And those are also very important. But they’re all connected to Etruscan art, especially archaic Etruscan art from the 6th century BC, as well as comparing that to Greek art and medieval Indian art. And it’s something that’s hard to really explain here, but that’s why we’re going to be jumping into the presentation very soon.

In presenting my findings, I just wanted to emphasize that there is no political motive or intention when it comes to pro-Hindu or anti-Hindu views. Because the Ramayana is a sacred text in the Hindu religion, there is always a concern that labeling the story a myth is denigrating. But if we look at the definition of myth that I have quoted here, the realization should be that Valmiki’s poem is very important for objectively examining ancient art, no matter what your subjective opinion may be of the story itself and its historicity. My purpose is not to prove or disprove the historicity of the Ramayana, but to prove that the epic was known outside of India during a specific time frame. The conclusions I draw are meant to hold independently of anyone’s positive or negative views about Hinduism, including the story of Rama.

Timothy Wiseman, in his book The Myths of Rome, comprehensively defines the meaning of myth. He writes that in Rome, “kings and consuls, tribunes and tyrannicides, secessions and civil wars produced a world of stories that were both historical and mythic. For myth and history do not exclude each other. Mythos in Greek and fabula in Latin mean literally ‘that which is said’, and thus story. So let us define a myth as a story that matters to a community, one that is told and retold because it has a significance for one generation after another. Such a story may be (in our terms) historical, pseudo-historical or totally fictitious, but if it matters enough to be retold, it can count as a myth.” (Pgs 10-11). So therefore you could categorize the Ramayana by Valmiki in any of these categories as historical, pseudo-historical, or totally fictitious, and it still would not make any difference when it comes to the analysis that I’m going to be presenting to you.

So the Valmiki Ramayana is a story that has mattered to many different communities throughout India over the last few thousand years and you can see variations of it actually in North India, South India and also Western and Eastern parts of India. And that’s why I’m displaying for you two different scenes here from the same episode of the Golden Deer, which are somewhat different from one another in the sense there’s a variation or there’s permutations here. In the left scene, you’ll see Rama and Laksmana hunting the elusive deer together and the deer itself has two heads, signifying the duality in Maricha’s real and illusory forms along with its elusiveness. This scene comes from the British Museum in London. That is, the artwork is kept there at that museum. And on the right side, we see Rama hunting the dappled golden deer. In the previous scene on the left you see that it doesn’t have any bright dappled spots, but in this case this is more closer to the book, or faithful to Valmiki’s text. And so Rama is hunting it alone and this comes from the National Museum in New Delhi.

So you can see the differences between the two scenes even though they’re from the same episode and that indicates there are going to be variations also of a myth regionally. And that’s also going to be the case in some ways in terms of how it is depicted outside of India, as we will see. I just wanted to add that the two paintings below are from different regions in India. The left scene is from the Maharashtra region, which is in west central India, specifically Pune, and it was produced around the early 19th century. And the other painting on the right is roughly contemporary. It’s from the mid-18th century and it’s the Pahari style in northern India, specifically the Punjab hills, I believe. So they’re definitely two different regions in which these paintings were produced and that’s why, partly why, you see the variation in the depiction.

Before going into the details of why I think that the Caeretan hydria in Boston is a depiction of the Indian myth of the golden deer chase in the Ramayana, I want to explain why the Greek myth of Ceryneian hind, or any other Greek myth for that matter, cannot be a variant of what we see on the Caeretan hydria. Now the myth of the Ceryneian hind, which is the deer with the golden antlers, constituted the third labor of Heracles. In that story Heracles is supposed to chase down the Ceryneian hind and take her to King Eurystheus of Mycenae. Now, classical scholars themselves do not propose this Greek myth as an explanation for the deer hunt shown on the Caeretan hydria in Boston, despite superficial similarities such as the swiftness, which was one of the characteristics of the Ceryneian hind. And I think they realize why it’s not a good idea to propose it as a variant because it just simply does not come close to any of the other depictions of the same myth during the same period in the 6th century BC.

So if we look at these two art examples which are contemporary in the 6th century BC, we see that there’s a really strong difference, you know, a very fundamental difference in the structure of the narrative. In the Athenian plate from 560 BC, Heracles is on the left and Apollo is on the right, and they’re fighting over the Ceryneian hind and Artemis, the goddess for whom the deer is sacred, she stands in between them. And on the right hand side we have an Attic amphora from Vulci around 540-530 BC. So this is actually made in Etruria as well. And in this one you have Heracles cutting off the golden antlers which were prized; that was the prized thing from this hind. And Athena is on the left and Artemis is on the right as witnesses. So we can see that there’s a very strong difference in the structure, and also the theme of the narrative. In the actual Golden Deer episode of the Ramayana, the main theme is abduction and deception. Whereas here, the main theme seems to be just simply capturing the deer, and that’s about it really - and taking it back it alive actually, not dead, but taking it back alive to the king as a part of the third labor of Heracles. So this was really just one objective, one singular objective here.

What are the main differences if I want to summarize? Well, there’s no corresponding abduction of any female heroine like Athena or Artemis, although the Ceryneian hind was said to be sacred to Artemis. So Heracles catches this elusive beautiful deer after one year of pursuit! So it’s quite different from the golden deer episode in the Ramayana where Rama takes a while to pursue Maricha in the disguised form, but eventually he catches up to him and kills him. So it’s very different, and what we see on the hydria clearly indicates a pursuit to kill, and to kill as soon as possible. So it doesn’t quite match up with it when you look at the structure, or the theme. And of course, Heracles and Apollo, unlike Rama and Laksmana on the hydria, are actually quarreling for possession of the female deer, as we see in the leftmost example below. So it’s not a cooperative effort to hunt the deer like we see on the hydria, but it is definitely in accordance with what we see in Indian depictions of the Golden Deer episode, as we saw on the previous slide.

Finally, the most important thing perhaps, or one of the most important things, is the third labor of Heracles involved capturing the hind alive, which is the key word here, and taking her to King Eurystheus of Mycenae. So the objective was not to capture it for its skin, the golden skin, like it was for Rama and Sita. So Rama was capturing the golden deer or trying to capture Maricha in disguise for the golden skin, and to bring it back to his wife Sita. But here we have a totally different objective and it involves not actually killing the deer. So it’s totally opposed to what we really are seeing on that scene, as well as in Indian depictions of the Golden Deer episode. That’s why we can rule it out as an explanation.

The Caeretan hydria depicts two different events happening at the same time - the abduction of Sita by Ravana, and the golden deer hunt by Rama and Laksmana. And so it doesn’t make sense to apply the third labor of Heracles, which was to chase down the Ceryneian hind, to this particular work of art, because it involves two different events actually happening at the same time, rather than just one singular deer chase.