71 
1878.] Foreigners in the Ajanta Frescoes. 
unmistakably the name o£ an Indian, and not of a trans-Indian locality, 
particularly Bactrian, for which the usual and very extensively-employed 
term is Valliika. In the Puranas these Valhikas are said to have reigned 
after Vindhyasakti. Denying, however, the accuracy of the identification 
of Vakataka with Bactria and of Vindhyasakti having been a Bactrian, it 
might still be said that the figures under notice are Bactrians. In some 
Kenerki coins the cap is conical, and surrounded by a turban or a band of 
fur like the Qilpaq cap ; the cut of the coat is of the same style, and the 
close-fitting trousers and stockings are, as far as can be made out in coins, 
the same. The coarse square face of the Mongolian type is particularly 
remarkable, and, as the Bactrians exercised supremacy for some time in 
India from a little before the commencement of the Christian era, to nearly 
a century after it, it would be much more reasonable to suppose the 
representations to be of Bactrians, rather than those of Afghans, who 
attained to no political distinction at the time, and were to some extent 
included among the Hindus. 
The stockings of the peculiar pattern which has hitherto been thought 
to be the outcome of modern European art, are remarkable: I have 
noticed them nowhere else in Indian paintings or sculpture. The Hindus 
seem to have borrowed the stockings from their neighbours ; for in a 
panel in Cave No. I, there is a representation of an Indian bacchanalian 
scene, unmistakable from the features and dress, in which they have been 
reproduced on the legs of a man and his lady-love. Before the importation 
of stockings from Europe, the Indians got their supplies from Kashmir. 
I do not, however, know when knitted stockings were first introduced 
into that country. To England they first came in the reign of Henry 
VIII, and it is extremely doubtful if they were of much more ancient 
date in Kashmir. And after all what I take to be stockings might be 
sewed hose of cloth or milled stuff of some kind. 
The indulgence in spirituous drinks was common all over India, Bactria 
and Persia in ancient times, and the evidence of it in the frescoes does not 
call for any notice A That the cup and the flagon indicate something 
more potent than sherbet, I believe, none will question. 
The curtains behind the divan suggest the idea that the sites of the 
Bactrian domestic scenes were tents, and that the peojfle shown had not be¬ 
come settled inhabitants of the country. But the evidence in this respect 
is too meagre to attach any importance to such an idea. 
Looking to the made-dresses of the Persians and the Bactrians, it might 
be supposed that the Indians got theirs from those sources ; but, as I have 
shown in my “ Antiquities of Orissa,” such was not the case, at least when 
the Ajanta frescoes were painted. In the Indian bacchanalian scene above 
noticed, the dresses of the Indian man and woman are quite different, and 
* Vide passim my paper on ‘ Spirituous Drinks in Ancient India,’ ante, XLII, 
PP. 1 ff* 
