(SESSION 2) "Cultural milieu as context”? — The Khor Rori Bronze, a Dancing Yakshi

This session addresses the materiality of objects exchanged and their Arabian milieu. Discussion leaders: Serena Autiero (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Carol Radcliffe Bolon (formerly Smithsonian, Freer Gallery of Art), and Antonietta Catanzariti (Smithsonian Institution).

The Khor Rori bronze (fig. 13), unearthed in 1953, is the only Indian statuette found in Arabia. The study of this object may lead to a better understanding of the contacts between South Asia and South Arabia in the early 1st millennium CE. 

The bronze is a fragmented female figure, but enough remains to identify her with a well-known iconographic type in Indian art—the salabhanjika (alt. salabhanjika), a divine or semi-divine female holding a tree branch. It was found at the port city of Khor Rori in Oman during an excavation sponsored by the American Foundation for the Study of Man. The Khor Rori bronze is part of a wider discourse on iconographic elements from South Asia visible in South Arabian art. It is important to acknowledge that South Arabian art has maintained a very strong autochthonous and original character over time, and that the external contributions are but evidence of its multicultural nature through the years.  

The dating of the figure ranges from the 2nd to the 4th Centuries CE, based on its stylistic elements and comparisons with salabhanjika figures from the Indian subcontinent. Serena Autiero compares it with the Sanchi salabhanjika (fig. 6) from the 1st Century BCE, while Hermann Goetz draws similarities with the yakshis at Jamalpur (fig. 14) from the 2nd Century CE, the fan bearer at Deogarh (fig. 15) from 500 CE, and the salabhanjika at Osian (fig. 16) from the 8th Century CE. The figure was not imported, but was interpreted by Autiero as most likely the personal belonging of a trader, or reached Oman with traders on their way back from India.

The figure is currently held at the National Museum of Asian Art of the Smithsonian in Washington D.C, as part of the Sackler collection. The website identifies it as the torso of an Indian goddess, possibly a yakshi, in a dancing position. The bronze is however currently not on display, although it will be from June 2022. It is classed under the Ancient Near Eastern art collection and its geography is identified as Indian. Such difficulty at categorizing this figure geographically speaks to the liminality of itinerant Indian Ocean objects, which raises the question for our discussion about moving beyond an area studies approach.

Object Video

Speaker bios

Serena Autiero is a researcher at the Centre of Religious Studies of Ruhr-Universität Bochum (Germany) where she works in the frame of the Digitisation of Gandharan Artefacts (DiGA) Project. She completed her PhD at the “Sapienza” University of Rome with a multidisciplinary project on cultural exchanges in the ancient Western Indian Ocean. She has long been a collaborator of the National Museum of Oriental Art ‘G. Tucci’ and has been a member of the Italian Archaeological Missions to Nepal and Pakistan. Before joining the Ruhr University, she was first assistant professor at Princess Noura bint Abdul Rahman University in Riyadh (KSA) and then associate research professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou (China). She authored several articles in academic volumes and journals and she recently co-edited with Matthew A. Cobb the volume “Globalization and Transculturality from Antiquity to the Pre-Modern World”. Her research interests focus on ancient globalizations, transcultural contacts in ancient Afroeurasia, the impact of South Asian cultural outputs in alien contexts.

Carol Radcliffe Bolon studied at NYU Institute of Fine Arts with Stella Kramrisch for her doctorate. Her dissertation focused on the 6th-8th century architectural sculpture of the Early Chalukya dynasty of Badami in the Deccan. Her work was included in the American Institute for Indian Studies Encyclopedia of Indian Temple Architecture and further published in many articles. She worked at several museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, and The Art Institute of Chicago. She taught South Asian art history at the University of Chicago before moving to Washington, D.C. to serve as curator for South and Southeast Asian art at the then new Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art. Among exhibitions mounted there were “The Golden Age of Sri Lankan Sculpture,” and “Court Arts of Indonesia.” Her first book was The Nature of Frank Lloyd Wright, followed by Forms of the Goddess Lajja Gauri in Indian Art. Next month her most recent study will be published, titled Light of Devotion: Oil Lamps of Kerala. Meanwhile, her article on the Nelson-Atkins Museum’s ‘Tree of Life’ related to Kerala oil lamps has been recently published in Artibus Asiae 81:1. Dr. Bolon is currently a Smithsonian Institution Research Associate.

Antonietta Catanzariti is the Smithsonian Institution Secretary Scholar and the Assistant Curator for the Ancient Near East at the National Museum of Asian Art. She completed her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research mainly focuses on delineating cultural interaction patterns at borderlands, landscape archaeology, and ceramic economy. She has excavated in Italy, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon and oversees an ongoing archaeological excavation in Iraqi-Kurdistan. As the curator in charge of the ancient Near Eastern collection across the Smithsonian, she conducts extensive research on the collection. She has lectured and published on topics related to her work, and has curated several exhibitions. She is currently developing two exhibitions; one focuses on the incense trade of Ancient Yemen and the other on the collecting of Egyptian art in the twentieth century. 

Images and Comparanda

• Khor Rori (fig. 13)

• Salabhanjika in Sanchi (fig. 6) and (fig. 6a)

• Yakshis at Jamalpur (fig. 14)

• Fan bearer at Deogarh (fig. 15)

• Salabhanjika at Osian (fig. 16)

• Hombrechtikon stone plaque from Yemen (fig. 17)

• Bronze female bust from Yemen (fig. 18)

• Standing bronze female figure from Yemen (fig. 19)

• Lady Ba'rat (fig. 20)

• Seated Hariti (fig. 21)

• Yakshi of Didarganj (fig. 22)

• Yakshini Chandra from Bharhut (fig. 23)

• Map of Khor Rori (fig. 24)

• Ayagapatta, Kankali Tila (figs. 40 and 40a)

• Bust of Tree Dryad (Sanchi) (figs. 41 and 41a)
• Reverse, Pompeii Figure (fig. 1d)
• Chausa, Jain Emblem (fig. 42)

Discussion Questions

1. Where could the Khor Rori bronze be from in the Indian subcontinent? 

2. The Khor Rori bronze was identified as a salabhanjika and compared to the salabhanjika in Sanchi, yakshis at Jamalpur and Deogarh. All these figures are carved in stone. Are there other figures from India that resemble the Khor Rori bronze and are also in bronze and of similar size? If not, what more can be said about the materiality and mobility of this object? 

3. Does the concept of a yakshi as salabhanjika (woman intertwined with a tree) have any meaning in early first millennium South Arabia? Aksūm, Nubia? Other places? If so, what meaning(s)? If not a yakshi what else could this figure represent? 

4. The object was interpreted to be a personal belonging and not an imported object. Does the archeological context confirm such theory; if so, does the context tell us more about who the owner could have been? Would the discovery of more Indian bronze objects in South Arabia open up the possibility that the object was instead imported?

5. How can we contextualize this figurine within a market context that prioritized raw materials? How was the material bronze understood at its point of manufacture? As a trade good? As a finished object where it was received?  What meanings were associated with the materials?

6. How can we imagine the use of this figurine based on its size and form?

7. What types of figures does the Khor Rori bronze resemble from the South Arabian world? Given the presence of certain Indian elements in South Arabian art would the object be received as ‘exotic’? 

8. How can the nude or semi-nude female be understood in its South Arabian context?

9. What can be said about the absence of evidence: why are there not more Indian figurines from the South Arabian peninsula? How much of this absence is tied to research biases, disinterest in the subject, loss of evidence, or even oversight and miscategorization of finds? 

10. Could the presence of South Asian artistic elements in South Arabian bronzes possibly indicate the extensive presence of Indian art in South Arabia in the 2nd-3rd c. CE? Could we imagine that there was a network of import of Indian bronze statues and that the metal was later melted down? 

11. What can we say about the location of this find?  How is it related to the locations of a port?

12. Literary texts mention many examples of foreigners resident in South Arabian cities. How can we identify seasonal versus more long-term mercantile communities in the Red Sea region of the Indian-ocean world? Is there any evidence of Indian artists/craftsmen settled in South Arabia? How can we trace the presence of foreigners? 

13. How did South Arabians perceive South Asian merchants and vice versa? How did the existence of seasonal merchant settlements possibly influence the reception of foreign items such as the Khor Rori sculpture? 

14. How did this finding expand our knowledge of the Indian Ocean cultural milieu? 

15. What are the implications of preserving this object in a North American museum? Is it presented effectively there? What are the implications of it not being on display and why is it not on display? 

Key References

Albright, William F. “From South Arabia.” Archaeology 7, 1954. 254

Antonini, Sabina. “Sculpture of Southern Arabia: Autochthony and Autonomy of an Artistic. Expression.” Arabia 1, 2003. 21–26.

ʿAqīl, ʿIzza ʿAlī and Antonini, Sabina. “Repertorio iconografico sudarabico.” Paris: de Boccard 2007.

Autiero, Serena. “Foreign Iconographic Elements in South Arabian Art: The Indian Contribution.” In Stories of Globalisation: The Red Sea and the Persian Gulf from Late Prehistory to Early Modernity, edited by Andrea Manzo. Chiara Zazzaro and Diane Joyce. Brill. 2018. 408–42.

Goetz, Hermann.“An Indian Bronze from South Arabia.” Archaeology 16, no.3, 1963. 187–89.

Goetz, Hermann. “A Unique Indian Bronze from South Arabia.” Journal of the Baroda Oriental Institute, no. 12, 1963. 241–43.

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