In the south of Italy Greek art prevailed, and many of the finest works belong to this civilization. The Greek in Italy had rather different ideals to those of Greece; he started more from the level of Polykleitos and Praxiteles than from the severe age; his favorite type is that of youth and adolescence, never of maturity. The grace and feeling of such bronze statues as the Hermes and so-called Sappho of Herculaneum are peculiar to southern Italy. And when the Greek artist penetrated north and allied himself with the mechanical skill of the Etruscan, such splendid work was done as the Orator of Sanguineto.
Rome in the earlier centuries was an Italic town which came under Etruscan influence as Tuscany was conquered. But from the age of foreign conquest in the first century B. C., Greek art in a debased form ruled over all else, and ran into utter degradation in the third century A. D. It was this art that the power of Rome spread around the whole Mediterranean, from Palmyra to Britain, and is the parent of most modern decoration. But in the great reconstruction of the empire under Diocletian the debased Greek taste was mostly shaken off, and Rome went back to the old Italic-Etruscan style and motives. The statues have the round heads and staring eyes of old Etruria; the taste for quaint accessories, such as lions supporting objects, came back and passed into mediæval art, and the exaggerated, lengthy forms of men and animals reappeared.
Of the Christian period De Rossi’s work in the catacombs has given a firm base of facts for the third to the sixth century A. D., the actual tomb and body of Saint Cecilia being the most striking result. The later Roman and mediæval age in Italy is full of interest, but in that—as in the rest of mediæval Europe—research has been mainly on architecture and objects which are not the result of excavation.
INDIA
The Hindus have never been chronologists or historians, and their great Sanskrit literature tells practically nothing about the rise of Buddhism, the invasion of Alexander, or the spread of civilization in Indo-China. All before the Islamic conquest in the tenth century A. D. is in a mist of Puranic mythology. Here, then, more than in other countries, archæology has restored the history, and done so entirely within the nineteenth century.
The existence of Sanskrit literature was revealed to the West by Sir William Jones at the end of the last century, and this gave scope to Oriental scholars, while antiquities only interested the collector. But serious exploration was led by Prinsep, whose decipherment of the Asoka inscriptions in 1837, which ranks with the achievements of Champollion and Rawlinson, gave the key to a mass of inscriptions.
His assistant, Cunningham, excavated many sites and collected coins, being head of the Archæological Survey from 1861 to 1885. Fergusson was the historian of Indian architecture; Burgess has published the cave-temples in west and south India; Sewell in Madras and Führer in the northwest have excavated and explored, and a few native pundits have been educated to such research. The government, in financial difficulty, has withdrawn from the work, but the congress of Orientalists in 1897 resolved to establish an Indian exploration fund.
Inscriptions abound in India, on copper plate, stone pillars, and native rock. Those in Sanskrit, or modern vernaculars, are records of land grants or local dynasties. The oldest—in two different alphabets (of Semitic origin)—are the famous edicts of Asoka (third century B. C.), who has been called The Buddhist Constantine. He placed these monuments of his power and religion around his frontiers of northern India; but their meaning was forgotten until Prinsep’s decipherment. The Hindus seem to have a coinage of stamped silver plate before Alexander; but regular coinage begins in the Bactrian kingdoms (200 B. C.–200 A. D.), with Greek and native inscriptions. Since then the coinage is continuous, and invaluable for history. No stone building or sculpture is older than Alexander (327 B. C.), or certainly earlier than Asoka (264–233 B. C.). Greek influence is plain in the Punjab, but native style is seen in the cave-temples. The richest results have been from the mounds, some of which are ruins of forts or palaces, but the more important are the stupas, lofty domes erected two to one thousand years ago to enshrine Buddhist relics. These domes are surrounded with sculptured reliefs of scenes in the life of Buddha, and are often dated by inscriptions. From one lately opened the Buddha relic has been sent to the King of Siam, the only Buddhist king. Much has been done by the government in publishing and providing casts and photographs; but India yet needs a scientific archæologist to record details with the accuracy demanded by modern research.
AMERICA
Archæological work in the United States and in Central America was begun by Squier about the middle of the century, and the attention thus drawn to the subject has borne fruit in the more accurate and scientific explorations connected with the surveying and geological departments, and, above all, those of the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology. The names of Whitney, Wright, Cyrus Thomas, Holmes, Fowke, Mindeleff, and others, will be familiar to all American readers by their work of the last twenty years, and need no introducing here.