Place · buried Roman town · Italy
Pompeii
The Roman town buried by Vesuvius in 79 CE, and the findspot of a small carved ivory figure of an Indian yakshi, made in the Deccan and used as the leg of a piece of furniture. It fixes an absolute date before which the object had reached Italy.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 40.750, 14.487
Worth knowing
The figure was found in 1938 in a house on the Via dell'Abbondanza. Its style matches ivory work from Bhokardan and Ter in Maharashtra, and it is the single most precisely dated Indian export object anywhere — not because of anything Indian, but because of a volcano.
Connections (2)
- Trade routeBhokardan
The ivory yakshi from Pompeii is a Deccan carving, and Bhokardan is one of the Satavahana towns where ivory of exactly that kind was worked. The object connects an inland Maharashtra workshop to a house buried in 79 CE, by way of a Konkan port and an Egyptian one, with no text mentioning any step of the journey.
- Trade routeRome
The Pompeii yakshi and the Roman gold hoards of south India are the two halves of Pliny's complaint. Indian luxury goods reached Italian houses; Roman coin reached Tamil villages in enough quantity to be buried there in pots. The balance ran against Rome, which is why a Roman writer treats an ivory ornament as a symptom of moral decline.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pompeii”. Archaeological Survey of India and State Archaeology monument records, and the standard regional literature.
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