The Pakistani Buddha of Liberty

In the collection of the MET in New York, there is a Gandharan Buddhist sculpture from present-day Pakistan that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Statue of Liberty.

In fact, both take common inspiration from the Colossus of Rhodes, which depicted the sun god Helios with a radiant crown of rays and a raised hand.

Direct interactions between Greece and India began in the reign of Alexander the Great, but it was the Roman conquest of Egypt (and thus the Red Sea Maritime trade) that really cemented India's trade with the Mediterranean.

Under the Kushan Empire, roman coins depicting the Emperor Nero as the Collosus of Rhodes made its way to the workshops of Gandhara, in modern-day Pakistan.

Here Gandharan artists used them as models for their own art, often detached from their original contexts.

The raised hand of the collosus of Rhodes was thus reinterpreted as the abhaya mudra, the Buddhist gesture of protection.

Two millenia later, French artists took similar inspiration from images of the collosus of Rhodes, building the Lady Liberty that stands in New York Harbor.