Ramayana in Archaic Greek and Etruscan Art at Caere, Part VIII
Description (Main Presentation, Part VIII):
Once it is accepted that the Caeretan hydria in Boston and the Campana plaques are representations in all probability of episodes from the legend of Rama, the question of how the story was transmitted from India to Etruria is equally confounding. The basic explanation, given the absence of any written documentation, is that the Persian Achaemenid empire (c. 550-525 BCE), through its noted religious tolerance, permitted artists, bards, and pundits from northwest India to narrate the story of Rama to Ionians and other foreigners that they came into contact with throughout West Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean world, including Asia Minor. This process certainly occurred centuries later when the Ramayana traveled from India to China and Southeast Asia in the eastern direction.
Reaching the boundaries of Indian states such as Gandhara and Taxila, the Persian empire facilitated peaceful movement of stories, beliefs, and people from South Asia to Ionia in Asia Minor (Anatolia). The immigrant artists who moved to Caere in the latter half of the sixth century most likely came from the Ionian city of Phocaea; here they probably gained exposure to the Ramayana because of their strong interest in epic literature and mythology. The Etruscan aristocracy in Caere, having been steeped in Orientalizing influences since at least the seventh century BCE, naturally gravitated towards this legendary hero of Rama and his wife Sita. Their obsession with marital bliss in the afterlife, religiosity, desire to learn about other cultures, fascination with animal hunting and Greek myths of abduction, and interest in emulating great Oriental monarchs, were all factors in the Caeretan embrace of the Valmiki Ramayana.
Reproductions of the Campana slabs in full color assist us in properly analyzing the mythological content in them, including four major episodes of the Ramayana. Unfortunately, no reproductions or color photos of the Caeretan hydria in Boston have been made available for further examination. Given this discrepancy in the graphic research material, there are more speculative interpretations that have been proposed for the Campana plaques than the hydria. These guesses about the identity of each figure on the Campana panels reveal ignorance of the actual myth but also useful insights about the general narrative depicted on each panel and the roles of each character.
Finally, we compare two Indian paintings to the two most important Campana slabs. The flight of Vishnu and Lakshmi, gods who incarnate as Rama and Sita in Hindu religious belief, is a reasonable counterpart to the winged Rama flying through the air with Sita cradled in his arms. The familiar scene of Rama, Sita, and Laksmana walking through the forest in a Bengali painting is a close match to the Campana plaque where Rama leads Sita and Laksmana in their travels outside Ayodhya. In each scene, one of the characters holds a plant or leaf, signifying their life in the wilderness.
Transcript (Main Presentation, Part VIII):
Now that we have examined the Caeretan hydria in great detail, as well as the Campana slabs, the question arises, of course, “Well, okay, these are Ramayana scenes, we can concede that. But how do you prove that they even knew about this legend in the first place? I mean, how did the Oriental legend of Ramayana travel from India to Etruria?” It’s an excellent question and one that is not possible to answer within the scope of this presentation, but I can touch upon it briefly and try to explain how it happened on a high level.
So this process of transmission of the Ramayana, it happened during the 550 BC to 500 BC range, that is the latter half of the 6th century. And that was when the Persian Achaemenid Empire had stretched itself from Ionia to India (to the borders of northwest India), and that’s in essence what allowed the epic Ramayana to be told for the first time to Europeans in the Mediterranean world. This process is not as certain or as easy to describe in detail because it’s not been documented that well, given that it’s over 2500 years old. But we do have documentation of the fact that the Valmiki Ramayana was transmitted to China and many Southeast Asian countries about 1500 to 2000 years ago. And these Southeast Asian countries are numerous. They include Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and Indonesia. And if it could travel 2,000 years ago to these Southeast Asian and East Asian countries, then it definitely could travel far westward as well. So if it could travel far eastward from India, then it surely could also have traveled far westward. It’s only because of the superiority complex of Europeans that it’s not something they’re willing to even admit could have happened.
Generally speaking, the classical scholars like to emphasize how the Greeks influenced the Persians and the Indians, and not the other way around. And that is part of the Eurocentric bias that I’ve been talking about. If you look at the quote from Margaret Miller below, from her book Athens and Persia… A Study in Cultural Receptivity, she notes the “peaceful conditions that were helpful to trade under the new empire (the Achaemenid Persian empire),” starting around 530 BCE, which just happens to coincide with the starting date of the Caeretan workshop that produced all these hydriae (pg. 67). So, in my opinion, there’s too much emphasis on the Greek influence on the Asian countries rather than the other way around. And I think that’s again, part of the problem with the effects of colonialism, and the way the modern world is structured, with the Western world being more materially advanced.
To continue our conversation about the transmission of the Ramayana via the Persian empire, I want to present this graphic which comes from Lindsay Allen’s book The Persian Empire. (Side note: According to the author, the Persian monarchy “fostered unprecedented international communication and cultural exchange.”). And in it (the map) you can see the roads that were existing at that time in the 6th century BC that allowed the Indians to communicate the story all the way to the Mediterranean borders of Ionia. And if you look at it, you can see the roadways connecting from the Indus River Valley in the region of Gandhara and Bactria all the way to Lydia and Caria and Lycia, as well as other parts of Ionia, including Phocaea, where the artists of the Caeretan hydria probably came from.
To make this more specific, the Indians communicated the story of Valmiki’s Ramayana to the Ionians, specifically the Phocaeans in all probability, who then told it in Etruria. The Persian empire reached northwest India - Gandhara, Takshashila (or what is known as Taxila). These areas of northwest India are where the myth of Rama and Sita were probably told by bards, and this included the Golden Deer episode, which then likely traveled all the way to the western coast of Asia Minor, that is Ionia.
Hemelrijk in his book (More on Caeretan Hydriae, Addenda and Clarifications, pg. 76) states: “I take it that the two master-painters of our hydriae left East Greece (Phocaea) before the age at which they would become adult ceramicists. The refugees from Asia Minor fleeing from the Persians in the 40s of the sixth century who wanted to found a new home in Corsica must have been about the best educated people of the time and among them, we gather, our painters grew up. This explains their great interest in literature and mythology.” So this is certainly a very dense explanation and detailed one of the education of the painters, how well-informed they were, and also why they were leaving potentially from Asia Minor, and when they were leaving as well, in the 40s of the sixth century. So there’s a lot of detail here.
Some of it is not necessarily correct because in my opinion, the idea that Ionian artists were fleeing the tyranny of the Persian oppressors is only one possibility. It is also just as possible that stable conditions around 540 to 530 BCE (which Margaret Miller hints at in the previous slide) may have allowed safe travel and secure trade for the Phocaean immigrants to explore new business opportunities and settle themselves in a land with more hope for a higher quality of life. This is a hypothetical situation of course, but it does resemble contemporary times. People in the 20th century have immigrated to America, not necessarily to escape tyranny, but often simply for a chance at a better life. So what I’m saying here is that there could be a variety of reasons why they immigrated from Asia Minor all the way to Caere in Etruria, but suffice to say they did immigrate, that’s for sure. And they did it early on in the latter half of the sixth century. And they were very well-educated, and they clearly knew about a great variety of myths in literature, not just in the Greek world but even outside of the Greek world.
Now that we have explained how the Ramayana was transmitted to Etruria, the next question would be well, Why did the Etruscans embrace the story of Rama and Sita in the first place? In my opinion, the Etruscans could relate to the ancient Indians and their epic story, even though they were not related at all to them ethnically, racially, linguistically, etc. So they didn’t have any biological relationship with them, but that’s not how they related to them and their epic story. So how could they relate to the main protagonists Rama and Sita? I think one needs only to view the great works of art depicting the happily married couples enjoying the afterlife together, which you can see in the Villa Giulia Museum in Rome, including the famous Sarcophagus of the Spouses (which also comes from Caere). And you just need to see those works of art to see how the Etruscans must have valued the Indian paragon of faithful spouses, Rama and Sita. They definitely put an emphasis on marriage between man and woman, and the marital bliss in their art.
The next point would be, I believe the Etruscans saw nobility and strength in the story of the Ramayana as well as great drama, especially in the abduction scene of Sita, which was clearly one of their favorites. And I think the popularity of the narrative of satyrs chasing maenads, and hunting animals such as deer, made it easy for this part of the story to become accessible and convertible into a medium that was understandable to the native population in the Mediterranean world. It was easy to translate this part of the story, the Golden Deer episode, into a form that was going to become very popular in the Mediterranean world. And the third point would be that Rama’s qualities of self-restraint, valor, and loyalty were unparalleled in the Indian lore. And the Etruscan kings or the aristocrats, you could say, in Rome and in Caere, likely wanted to emulate these traits. And that’s what explains the somber and devotional tone that you see in the Campana plaques.
The fourth point would be that the Etruscans, being socially isolated from the rest of the world because they were speaking a language that was not part of any major family, Semitic or Indo-European (they were not speaking a language that was Semitic or Indo-European), probably had an unusually strong desire to learn about other cultures and their mythical stories. The tomb also was the perfect storage house for preserving the relics of their far-ranging interests. I think all of these factors contributed to the survival of amazing artifacts that allow us to peer into a mostly undocumented and shadowy period in human history. Therefore, why don’t we celebrate, rather than doubt, the embrace of Indian influence by Etruscan aristocrats of the sixth century?
The Etruscan scholar Jean MacIntosh Turfa explains this Etruscan embrace of Oriental cultures in three words. She calls it the “cosmopolitan inquiring spirit” of the Etruscans, which is a great way to summarize who they are. Another comment I want to make is that we should not be surprised that the Etruscans preserved artistic works depicting the Ramayana better than the Indians themselves were able to do. Because even if we look at the modern world of today, one could very much argue that the traditions of yoga, and even the health system of Ayurveda, are better preserved in the Western world than they are in India itself, and will continue to trend in that direction.
Regarding preservation, (for) the photos you see here of the Campana slabs both on the left and the right, you can see a clear distinction between the color and black and white photos. And furthermore, we don’t have any corresponding color photos for the Caeretan hydria in Boston like we do for these Campana slabs. Even the color photos that you see here that we have of the Campana series are often inferior in quality. So if you look at the bottom left, you’ll see that the black and white image of Rama and Sita and Laksmana walking forward is quite a bit better than the color image.
And also on the right hand side here we have the fifth Campana slab that we have yet to analyze. And the main reason is that unfortunately part of it is broken off. And so we don’t have the face of the lady completely painted and depicted. But I think the most likely explanation for this one is that it’s just a romantic scene between Rama and Sita during their stay in the forest. So it’s not as important as the other four slabs, but definitely seems to be a continuation of the slab on the left where Rama and Sita and Laksmana are walking in the forest here. It’s probably the two of them just casually relaxing, during their time in exile.
Also, I want to add that the scholar Mario Del Chiaro (see also Part III) noticed that there were “essentially congruent profile heads exhibited by the women depicted on three of the Campana panels,” including this last panel here, which is broken off. And that indicates clearly that Sita is being depicted in three of the scenes, in all three scenes. There are also three congruent profile heads of Rama in the Campana panels, including these two scenes that you can see on this slide, where you have Rama holding bow and arrows on the leftmost slab, as well as on this broken slab where he’s unarmed and enjoying a romantic moment with his wife. You can see the same shape of the beard, the same type of eyes and facial appearance and long hair. And you also see a gesture with the right hand as well in both, and similar clothing.
They really are the same person on three of the slabs, including the other one where he’s rescuing Sita. In that one, there’s two versions of Rama. The one on the leftmost side is also bearded, just like these two characters here. So, there are actually three congruent profile heads for Sita and for Rama in the Campana slabs. That really confirms that these are the two most important characters that are featured on these Campana panels. I think that people should petition the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to put the Caeretan hydria No. 2 with the Boston deer hunt on display so that people can look at it in color, and also take photos of course, but especially to be able to view it and see it in its full glory and really judge for themselves what they think it is.
We actually do have reproductions of the Campana slab paintings at the Bologna Etruscan Museum, which is in the northern part of Tuscany. And these provide more visual evidence of the Valmiki Ramayana, through these modern renditions, where the characters are restored and the painting is restored to what it may have been originally. So if we examine these modern renditions, these reproductions in Bologna, we see that in the bottom left corner from left to right, King Dasaratha is again seated with his preceptor Vashishta, with Kaikeyi flying over to intervene. And you can see her right hand raised to interfere with what they were discussing. Then in the middle we have the Rama and Sita and Laksmana walking close together, both in the top and bottom photos. They’re the photos of the same picture (of the same artwork that’s been reproduced). And on the bottom right you have Bharata performing penances in solitude at a fire altar. So that’s the bottom right. And then on the top right corner you can see Rama again, carrying his wife back home as a triumphant hero.
I want to give a brief overview of some of the speculative interpretations of these Campana plaques. The Etruscan researchers have come to conclusions that reflect both their ignorance of the actual myth from the Ramayana and also their sporadically correct observations of the characters’ general roles. So the first quote I’m going to give you is correct actually. It’s a correct statement and it’s found in the book Etruscan Art by Otto Brendel. He writes (pg. 174) that “evidently five of the slabs formed part of a continuous decoration,” meaning that they formed a connected narrative. And definitely this is a statement that I agree with and it refutes the published views of the Louvre Museum that we discussed earlier.
But the problem is that Otto Brendel incorrectly guesses the meaning of the three main Campana slabs. He writes that “in one slab one may identify Iphigenia led to her sacrifice by two men carrying weapons.” (pg. 175). So instead of it being Sita, and Rama and Laksmana leading her in the front and back, it’s instead Iphigenia being led to a sacrifice by two nondescript men. But clearly these two men are not nondescript. They’re clearly great heroes, just like the two youths in the Caeretan hydria. So we can refute that one right away. Now the next statement is, in another slab, he says that “Calchas the seer and King Agamemnon, seated, (are) deliberating about the means of reconciling the offended goddess Artemis.” (pg. 175). So you can see that he does come close here in the sense that he identifies that one is a king and one is a seer, just like King Dasaratha and the seer Vashishta. So conceptually he’s right, but the characters he has gotten wrong because of the obsession with trying to fit this forcibly into some kind of Greek myth.
And the last statement is in the abduction scene: “Iphigenia may again be recognized, this time rescued from the sacrificial altar by Apollo with bow and arrows (which would be the left figure) and then Artemis (who’s the winged figure in his eyes), who carries her away through the air.” (pg. 175). Now, there is one problem with this, which is pretty glaring. And Warren G. Moon, which is the next quote that I’ll give you, he observes in his book Ancient Greek Art and Iconography that “Artemis is identified as the winged figure (in Brendel’s book) even though her flesh is not painted white as is Iphigenia’s.” (pg. 117). And this observation is critical because it proves that the character is not female like Artemis, but is male with a tanned face and a shaven face. But if you look at the skin color (and I think we’ve discussed this earlier), the females tend to be painted lighter skinned or fairer skinned than the male characters. If you again look at any of the Campana plaques, you’ll see that Rama is depicted with a darker skin and Sita is depicted with fairer skin. So this statement or this opinion that it’s Artemis who’s the winged figure just simply does not accord with the reality that it’s a male figure, clearly because of the tanned color of the face.
Now that’s wrong, yes. But he has gotten something right here. And that’s the fact that he realizes that Iphigenia, who is really Sita, is again recognized a second time (and he also seems to recognize that Apollo, who is really Rama, is rescuing the lady). So he recognizes that the same character is being depicted in two different Campana slabs. And that’s exactly what I’ve been talking about with not only the Campana slabs, but also the Caeretan hydria, that Sita is the maenad in both scenes on the left and right on the reverse side of the hydria. So he does get that right. He does realize that the same female character is being depicted twice (he also nearly realized that Rama is depicted twice on this particular slab, but felt like identifying the brother Apollo with his sister Artemis in a dual rescue).
I wanted to finish our discussion about the Campana slabs with a presentation of two Indian counterparts to two of the main Campana slabs that are not exactly the same. But (they) are definitely similar to the two Campana slabs in which Rama and Sita and Laksmana are walking in the forest, and the other Campana slab where Rama is carrying Sita in the sky as a winged figure. So on the left hand side we see here the royal, divine bird Garuda carrying the divine couple Vishnu and Lakshmi. Now Rama and Sita are earthly incarnations of these two Hindu gods Vishnu and Lakshmi respectively, and you can see them smiling at each other while flying in the sky in this painting on the left.
In the book In the Realm of Gods and Kings: Arts of India, they describe this scene in more detail. They say Garuda, the divine bird (“king of birds”), “bears Vishnu with his consort Lakshmi in stately flight,” and Vishnu “holds a bow and arrow” just like Rama (pg. 114-115). And “the divine couple here gaze at one another with serene devotion.” (pg. 115). And we can see that even in the Campana plaque with Sita gazing at her husband and hero, Rama, with that same kind of serene devotion.
Now on the right hand side we see another Bengali folk painting depicting Rama and Sita in the middle and Laksmana walking behind them through the forest. And what you will notice is that Laksmana is the one holding the leaf this time over their heads to protect them, probably from the rain or whatnot. And as you can see it’s very similar to the Campana slab again. Just the variation is in the person who is holding the leaf or flower. It could be Rama, it could be Sita. It could be Rama, Sita, or Laksmana himself. So it could be any one of the three characters holding the leaf or flower or branch, signifying that they are walking through the wilderness. And you can also see the design of green leaves on the top of the painting as well, just like the lotus palmettes in the Caeretan hydria.
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