This 1,900-year-old statue of the Buddha is 28 inches (71 centimeters) tall and was found at Berenike, an ancient port city in Egypt by the Red Sea.Image credit: Courtesy of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities
This 1,900-year-old statue of the Buddha is 28 inches (71 centimeters) tall and was found at Berenike, an ancient port city in Egypt by the Red Sea.Image credit: Courtesy of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities
He appears to have been slimmer back then.
Drunken Indian sailor......................
Trade is my guess.. rather than anything else.
” indicates Buddhists lived there in Roman times”
Click-bait. I have a Buddhist elephant but I am not a Buddhist.
Lha gyalo!
well, there was trade between India and Egypt from at least the Bronze age - and arguably the ships from Dilmun went to the Indian continent
Decades ago I saw a magazine article (LIFE magazine) about how Alexander the Great had been used as a model for Buddhist statues in Afghanistan back in those days. It is easy to see how such a thing could reach Egypt. I remember reading of Hindus being in ancient Egypt.
Yet the earliest surviving (extant) manuscript of any of Siddhartha Gautama (who lived in South Asia during the 6th or maybe 5th century BC) teachings date from the first century BC to the third century AD, found in Afghanistan - hundreds of years after his existence - and there is no single textual collection for all of Buddhism, being were not committed to writing until some centuries after the death of Gautama Buddha. cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_texts
Yes, Romans did tourism, yes, they brought home souvenirs. Yes, the shipping your foreign "finds" back home was a big business. Yes, some of them decorated entire rooms in themes from their travels.
Yes, life has changed a lot in 2000 years but people really haven't.
