Abstract
This paper takes as its starting point an unpublished palette said to have been found in Begram, Afghanistan, depicting a syncretic image of a Greek Helios and an Indian Sūrya. In the light of this image, two other palettes whose iconography has been misinterpreted by the art historian who publishedthem will be re-examined .
In Greek mythology, Helios was a Titan, but not an Olympian god ; however, from the 6th century BC, he appeared in numerous artistic forms. In Central Asia, he was part of the monetary iconography of Greco-Bactrian, Indo-Greek and Indo-Scythian rulers. Kaniška I, the greatest of all Kuṣāṇs kings, had Helios represented on his issues, among many Greek and Iranian gods, with a legend in Greek but also with Mirro in the Bactrian language, designating Mithra, the ancient Iranian solar deity. Almost simultaneously, as Mithraism became very popular among the Romans, Sol Invictus (" invincible sun ") played a leading role in the Mithraic mysteries. Under the Severans, this oriental variant of Sol (Sun) occupied an important place in imperial religion. In ancient India, the earliest representations of Sūrya (Āditya), the sun god, date back to the second century BC. One of the most important features of Indian iconography is the presence of Uṣā (Dawn) and Pratyuṣā (Dusk), the wives of Sūrya who shoot arrows with their bows to dispel nocturnaldemons .
The three Gandhāra palettes are characterized by a syncretism of two cultures : one Indian and the other Hellenistic. For the Indo-Greek sculptor of these objects, the struggle between the women of Sūrya and the demons of darkness reflects a genuine conflict between the forces of good and evil. This syncretic iconography of Greek Helios, Iranian Mithra and Indian Sūrya traveled from Gandhāra to Bāmiyān and beyond along the Silk Roads. The earliest representations of the sun-god in India, Central Asia and China take place in a Buddhist context. Through the sun god, whether Sūrya or Mithra, it is the Buddha himself who is evoked, celebrated for his momentous achievement in dispelling the darkness of ignorance and restoring human consciousness. When the solar god travelled the Silk Road, the similarity between the Buddha and the " great sun " was very explicit in Tantric Buddhism. Although the Greek Helios, the Iranian Mithra and the Indian Sūrya originated in different and distant geographical areas, as they traveled through space and time, their iconographies, at once distant and so close, developed in mutually fertile contexts, skilfully incorporating the sentiments and aesthetics of their respective populations while creating new art forms.
