Ramayana in Archaic Greek and Etruscan Art at Caere, Part IV

Description (Main Presentation, Part IV):

The so-called Boston Deerhunt, or Caeretan Hydria No. 2, is one of the earliest vases produced in the Ionian artists' workshop at Caere, dated between 530-520 BCE. Similarly, the Campana plaques are also dated around 530 BCE by the Louvre museum. The oldest contents of the Indian epic poem known as the Valmiki Ramayana, including the Aranya Kanda (Book of the Forest), are also dated to the middle of the sixth century BCE (circa 550 BCE). Therefore, archaeological evidence from Etruria, including the Campana slabs and the Caeretan hydria No. 2 (Rama's deer hunt), in the same century confirms the literary dating of the oldest kernel of the Ramayana. Finally, we determine the exact episodes in the legend of Rama that are shown on the Campana panels and their sequential order in Valmiki's poem, thus proving it to be a unitary literary work narrating Rama's story of exile and his journey to rescue his wife Sita.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDjYWLFn-EQ

Transcript (Main Presentation, Part IV):

Now we’re going to talk more about the date of the hydria No. 2, which is the Boston deer hunt, and see how that also coincides with the dating of the Valmiki Ramayana by Indologists. Just in the earlier slides, we confirmed that the Golden Deer episode of Rama and Sita, as depicted in Etruscan art, is dated approximately 530 to 520 BCE. And if we look at the analysis by Indologists of the kernel of the Valmiki Ramayana, which includes the Book of the Forest (which also contains the Golden Deer episode and Rama, Sita, and Laksmana walking in the forest, which is seen in the Campana plaques), we see the symmetry in their dating. The kernel of the Valmiki Ramayana and its bardic tradition dates to the 6th century BC (and you can see that in the below quote), which just happens to coincide perfectly with the date of this hydria and the Campana plaques.

So according to Robert Goldman, in his Volume I translation of the Bala Kanda (Book of Childhood), he writes: “It seems reasonable to accept for the composition of the oldest parts of the surviving epic a date no later than the middle of the sixth century BC.” (pg. 22). So the Ayodhya Kanda and the Aranya Kanda, the second and third books, which are the Book of the Kingdom of Ayodhya and the Book of the Forest, those two books especially are part of the oldest kernel of the Valmiki Ramayana. And they date no later that the middle of the sixth century BC, according to the Indologist Robert Goldman. So really there’s a perfect coinciding here between the date of these Caeretan artworks and the date that he provides, based on only literary analysis of Hindu and Buddhist and Jain texts; his analysis does not have anything to do with, or is totally independent of, what I have discovered here when it comes to Etruscan art.

That’s how archaeological and literary evidence can really come together to prove something, and that’s what we’ve been able to do here. It’s a remarkable thing and it really proves that the Valmiki Ramayana is at least as old as the 6th century BC. It really confirms that, through the combination of this archaeological evidence that comes from far-away Etruria and the literary evidence and analysis of the texts from India, and parts of South Asia and Southeast Asia. It’s just amazing, and I think that people need to notice just how remarkable it is that we can date this text, not just based on literary evidence, but also archaeological, artistic evidence.

And finally, the author Jaap Hemelrijk in his book on the Caeretan hydria notes, “We have seen that No. 2 (the Boston deer hunt) is undoubtedly an early vase…” And he writes: “The drapery of the two maenads,” which I have discussed before, “is as developed as the most progressive drapery of the Siphnian Treasury.” (pg. 157). We can compare that to Hera and Athena on the north frieze, and (her dress) is “clearly inspired by Attic red-figure examples of 525 BC at the earliest.” Therefore, it proves that maenad Sita is dressed like a goddess during the abduction by Ravana, just like Hera and Athena. That just doesn’t make sense unless we realize that the artist was trying to indicate to us that she was not an ordinary person. Even though she was living in the wilderness, she was still being depicted like a goddess out of respect for her stature and her personality.

At the beginning of this presentation, I showed this picture of one of the Campana plaques and now we’re going to examine it in more detail. It simply shows Rama and Sita and Laksmana, from right to left, walking through the forest. Rama holds a bow and arrows in his left hand, and with his right hand he’s gesturing above his chest, similar to the Campana slab where he rescues Sita. And then in the back, you have Laksmana holding a spear, instead of his usual bow and arrows, perhaps to signify his supporting role as the guardian of the divine couple who are walking ahead of him, Rama and Sita. And then in the middle we have Sita holding a leaf or a flower or a branch from a tree, similar to what we see in medieval paintings of the same scene from India, which you can see in the bottom left corner of this Etruscan image on the right. 

You see this image here (bottom left) is from the Victoria & Albert Museum and is a Punjabi painting from northern India in the medieval (period), 19th or 18th century. And it shows the same type of walking through the forest with Rama leading on the left and then Sita in the middle and Laksmana on the right. And you can see also (the two brothers) holding the bow and arrows and spears, as well as Sita holding something in her right hand as well. And you can also see that they’re not wearing a lot of clothes, because they were living very simply in exile in the wilderness, especially the two young men, Rama and Laksmana, who are both bare-chested. You can also see this characteristic of holding a leaf or a flower in other Indian paintings, as well as in Achaemenid sculpture from Persia from the 6th century BC. It’s very common, it seems like, in Indo-Persian art for them to emphasize this holding of a leaf or flower while walking.

From Rajasthan, India, we also have beautiful paintings of Rama and Sita and Laksmana walking through the forest like this one. And in this particular painting, you can see Rama actually holding the flower, and that kind of variation you’ll see in many of these different Indian paintings. Sometimes you’ll see Laksmana holding a leaf; sometimes you’ll see Sita holding a leaf or a flower; and sometimes you’ll see Rama holding a flower. So that kind of variation is to be expected, but it’s the same order where Rama is leading, and Sita is in the middle, and Laksmana is behind both of them, protecting them in the rear. 

The Campana plaque and this Indian painting and many other Indian paintings of Rama and Sita and Laksmana walking in the forest are all literal translations of the exact text that we have in the Valmiki Ramayana. In Sarga 10, Verse 1 of the Book of the Forest (Aranya Kanda), there is the statement that ‘Rama went in front, fair-waisted Sita in the middle, and behind followed Laksmana, bow in hand.’ So it’s more or less a literal translation, in a picture form of the text. And also another point, as I’ve said before, is that Sita or Rama holds a leaf or a flower or any kind of plant material to indicate that they are traveling in the wilderness (forest), and we observe that in the Campana panels as well.

The three main Campana slabs that we have discussed are placeable in sequential order within the epic storyline of the Valmiki Ramayana. The first slab is the one in which, as you can see on the left, King Dasaratha is deprived of his eldest son Rama because of the meddling of his wife Kaikeyi, who wants her own son instead of her stepson Rama to become the heir to the throne. So this episode occurs in the Ayodhya Kanda, which is the second book of the Valmiki Ramayana. In the third book of the Valmiki Ramayana, that is the Book of the Forest or Aranya Kanda, we have the second scene that’s in the middle here where Rama is holding his iconic bow and arrows. He’s leading his wife, who’s in the middle, and his brother Laksmana through the forest during their exile. In the last scene, which is basically the ending of the story, which occurs in the sixth book (Yuddha Kanda or the Book of War), Rama is again holding his iconic bow and arrows on the left side (before saving his wife). And you can see the symmetry with the previous scene, and then in the last part he’s carrying his wife Sita gently in his arms and taking her swiftly back home, and that’s what the wings indicate.

There are two more Campana slabs which are more ambiguous, and we will be getting to those later on in the presentation. But I want to again focus on these three slabs and really bring the point across that they do have a very clear sequential order, and it is well-organized actually. But the Italian author Roncalli does not see this. He doesn’t realize (this), and that’s why he remarks about the “desultory nature of the proposed themes, almost the result of a selection of partes pro toto (which is parts taken for the whole) by thematic samples from broader and more articulated narrative contexts (real or ideal).” So what does this mean? 

When he’s saying “desultory”, he’s basically remarking that he doesn’t see any plan, or purpose, or any even genuine understanding of the story. And that’s just not the reality. And I believe that there probably were certain slabs that are now missing that were part of the sequence that would have made it more obvious that there was a clear organization to these slabs. And I just feel like, because they do not have any familiarity with the myth of the Ramayana, they just think of it as samples of some larger story, but they don’t know what that larger story is. And that’s why he remarks about the “broader and more articulated narrative context”, which is really the larger story of the Valmiki Ramayana.

To summarize these terracotta slabs, I would like to explain that they have a versatility in regards to the setting of the story being depicted. And that is why each scene happens in a different location. In the leftmost scene, you have a royal palace with seats for dignitaries. In the middle scene, you have three people walking slowly in the wilderness where bearing arms and staying (close) together for protection is vital. And in the third scene, you have a romantic couple who have a lot of open area or free space in which to roam and travel long distance back to their home. So you have a variety of locations and three different points in time in the story.

And I would like to add that the earliest plaque, which is the one in which King Dasaratha is sitting with Vashishta, his royal advisor, and Kaikeyi is flying with her wings, you immediately notice that Kaikeyi’s wings have kind of a symmetry with the wings of Rama in the rightmost plaque. There’s a symmetry where Kaikeyi’s wings signify the start of Rama’s exile and Rama’s wings signify the end of his exile. And that firmly places those two plaques at the first and last chronological positions. 

So just to reiterate that in the leftmost plaque, Kaikeyi is flying over a conference between Dasaratha and Vashishta with the intention of foiling their intended coronation of Rama, symbolically depicted with her own deadly arrows that are headed for them, at least according to Massimo Pallottino in his book Etruscan Painting. So Kaikeyi’s actions, by attacking Dasaratha metaphorically, caused the death of the king and the exile of Rama to start in the forest. Not only there is a symmetry in the wings between Kaikeyi and Rama, but also in the weapon, at least according to Pallottino, of the bow and arrow. In the last plaque Rama holds a bow and arrows and has wings on his shoulders and boots as well, as he carries Sita back to Ayodhya at the end of his exile. Thus, the repeated iconography of flying wings and a bow and arrows helps us identify the first and last episodes in the sequence. 

Personally, if I re-examine this scene on the left of Queen Kaikeyi flying with wings, I think that if it was fully restored, it probably would not show her shooting arrows. But this was not my opinion, but an Italian author’s opinion, so I discussed it with you. But honestly, I think that even if it doesn’t show her shooting arrows, she’s clearly trying to interject or interfere with the plans of the two elderly men. And that is enough to make it easy to conclude that this must be Queen Kaikeyi, who is ruining the plans of King Dasaratha and his royal advisor Vashishta. And just briefly, I would like to add that when it comes to interrupting or interfering, a good comparison to this scene where Queen Kaikeyi is interrupting King Dasaratha would be actually the No. 12 Caeretan hydria, where at least according to Raffaella Bonaudo, the mother of Tityos is trying to interfere here with the attack by the two siblings, Artemis and Apollo, who are trying to kill Tityos with the bow and arrows. And she’s right in the middle protesting and her hand gesture certainly indicates that. And I think that’s what you would probably see if you had this scene fully restored here on the Campana plaque. I think you would see some kind of a hand gesture that’s very similar to what you see in the No. 12 Caeretan hydria, where the lady is trying to protest or interfere, and disrupt what the two other people are doing.

So based on this sequential order that we have established for the main Campana slabs, it definitely makes sense to title them “Rama’s Exile and Heroic Journey to Rescue his Wife Sita.” That would be the best way to describe the entire story of the Ramayana, really. And that’s what’s amazing, is that this small number of panels, five total, basically cover the core narrative of the Valmiki Ramayana, which is found in Books Two (Ayodhya), Three (Aranya), and the Sixth Book, which is the Book of War (Yuddha). And in particular, the three Campana slabs that I just described on the previous slide are almost enough really, to describe the entire journey of Rama and the whole story of the Ramayana in a very condensed way. They prove beyond a doubt that the Ramayana was always known and told to others in a completed form with a well-defined beginning and end, similar to what we read today.

There may have been more fantastical elements added later, after the sixth century, to the core plot of the epic, which are not depicted on the plaques, such as the forest monkeys who became allies of Rama. But these omissions of detail could just as easily be explained away as the desire of bards to selectively choose the salient events in the story line when narrating the Ramayana to others who were unfamiliar with it. So it really could go either way. But the main point being that the core narrative was clearly in place at that point in time in the 6th century BC. The scenes from the Caeretan hydria in Boston and these Campana panels from Caere demonstrate not only the Indian influence on the Mediterranean art, but also the continuity of the entire poem.

Finally, Sheldon Pollock, one of the main Indologists translating the Valmiki Ramayana, has criticized the western scholars who treat Valmiki’s poem as a combination of disparate stories, including the Ayodhya and Aranya Kandas. And he rightly criticizes them when he writes: “The need to develop a unitary understanding of the poem was eliminated by eliminating the perception of the poem as a unitary work. What is striking about this literary criticism, beyond the frailty of its arguments, is the cultural arrogance (and that’s what I want to highlight) that underlies it. The presumption of truth of a Western vision is coupled with an implicit dismissal of the entire tradition that produced and preserved the epic.” (Pgs. 4-5, Vol III, translation of Aranya Kanda). And later on, we’re going to go back to this cultural arrogance as being really fundamental to the lack of comprehension and understanding of these two works of art, the Campana slabs and the Caeretan hydria No. 2. It’s because of the cultural arrogance in the Western world that these two works of art have never been explained properly.