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0224 On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1
On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks : vol.1 / Page 224 (Grayscale High Resolution Image)

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doi: 10.20676/00000214
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126   THE RUINS OF MIRAN

CH. VII

The wall, being broken farther on, did not allow me to follow the rest of the story. But fresco fragments surviving above the dado on the northern hemicycle proved that there had been represented the hermit life led by the princely couple after their retirement into the jungle, and finally their happy return to their royal home with which the pious story ends.

Both frieze and dado were clearly painted by the same hand. But while in the frieze the painter was manifestly following the conventional representation which GraecoBuddhist art had long before adopted for that particular legend, he was left free by the quasi-secular character of the dado to take there his inspiration from the contemporary art of the Roman Orient. This impression has received distinct support from what a short inscription in Kharoshthi painted on the thigh of the white elephant has fortunately revealed to us about the painter of the frescoes. As interpreted by Abbé Boyer, s. J., the distinguished French scholar and a valued collaborator on all my Kharoshthi materials, it records the name of the painter as Tita as well as the amount of the payment he received for his work. There is some doubt as to the words indicating the amount, but none about the name, and as `Tita' is a form which cannot be accounted for etymologically in any Indian or Iranian language, I feel no hesitation about recognizing in it the rendering which the Roman name Titus would necessarily receive in Sanskrit and Prakrit.

We need feel no surprise to find this name Titus, which was in popular use during the early centuries of our era throughout the Roman Orient, borne by a painter-decorator whom his calling had carried so far east on the way to