Layman bearing offerings (c. 300 CE): Art, History and Details

Layman bearing offerings (c. 300 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The Buddhist monasteries at Hadda were famous internationally until their destruction by fire in the 800s CE. One thousand years later, a British explorer named Charles Masson (1800–1853) documented the site and collected many sculptures from the ruins that are now in the British Museum in London. French archaeologists carried out systematic excavations between 1926 and 1929. They brought many sculptures to the National Museum of Asian Art, Guimet, in Paris. Some sculptures entered other museum and private collections around the world. In the 1970s, Afghan archaeologists continued to document the Buddhist sites of Hadda and brought many more sculptures to the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul.

Object facts

• Title: Layman bearing offerings
• Date: c. 300 CE
• Culture: Afghanistan, Hadda, probably Tape Shotor
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: stucco with mother-of-pearl inlay
• Dimensions: Overall: 25.3 x 9 x 5 cm (9 15/16 x 3 9/16 x 1 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Kushan, Gandhara
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1967.40

A detail from the museum

The Buddhist community (sangha) consists of both monks and laypeople who brought wealth to support the monasteries at Hadda.

Collection credit

Edward L. Whittemore Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• "Year in Review." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 10 (December 1967): 302–347.
• Haesner, Chhaya. "A Cultural Diffusion" in India and Greece, Connections and Parallels. Saryu Doshi, ed. Bombay: Marg Publications, 1985.
• Czuma, Stanislaw J., and Rekha Morris. Kushan Sculpture: Images from Early India. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1985.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.