274 
T. Bloch —Buddhistic statue from Cr avast!. 
[No. 4, 
An ancient inscribed Buddhistic statue from Cravasti .— By Theodor 
Bloch, Ph.D. 
[Read March, 1898.] 
The statue with which I am dealing in this paper, was discovered 
by General Cunningham during the working season of 1862-1863 
among the ruins of the modern Set-Mahet, in the Gonda District, 
Eyzabad Division, of Oudh. It was presented by His Excellency the 
Viceroy Lord Elgin to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1863, and is 
now in the Indian Museum. It is a colossal standing figure, 1 11' 8" 
high, made of a sort of reddish sand-stone, the same material which 
the Mathura sculptures of the Kusana period are made of. The bead, 
the halo, and the right arm are almost entirely gone; the left hand is 
slightly damaged. The body is represented clad in a large garment, 
which leaves bare the right shoulder only. It is tied round the waist 
by a girdle, and reaches down to the ankles ; round the left shoulder 
it is laid in the fashion of a Roman tunica. The feet are naked, and 
a peculiar object of uncertain meaning is represented standing between 
them. The statue has always been described as an image of Buddha, 
but from what follows it will become clear that this is not quite 
correct. It is a figure of a Bodhisattva, and not of a Buddha. But, in 
any case, we may fairly well conclude from the analogy of similar statues 
that the missing right arm of the figure was represented lifted up in 
an attitude which is usually called that of “teaching,” while the left 
hand rested on the hip, holding up the end of the long vestment. 
The most important part of the statue, however, is its pedestal. 
This is due to the fact that it contains in three lines an inscription in 
ancient characters of what Prof. Biihler in his Indian Palaeography 
has called “ the Northern Ksatrapa type ” of the last century B.C. or 
the first A.D. This inscription has been edited before by B. L. Mitra , 
1 The statue has been described or referred to previously by General 
Cunningham in Archaeological Survey Reports, Yol. I, p. 339, Yol. Y, p. YII, and 
Yol. XI, p. 86, and by Dr. Anderson in his catalogue of the Archaeological Collections 
in the Indian Museum, Yol. I, p. 194. 
