page_title: Art of Mathura
section_title: Terracotta figurines (4th-2nd century BCE)
hierarchical_section_title: Art of Mathura / Early history / Mauryan period / Terracotta figurines (4th-2nd century BCE)
caption_attribution_description: English: Mathura Votive Figurine - Walters 25249
context_page_description: The Art of Mathura refers to a particular school of Indian art, almost entirely surviving in the form of sculpture, starting in the 2nd century BCE, which centered on the city of Mathura, in central northern India, during a period in which Buddhism, Jainism together with Hinduism flourished in India. Mathura "was the first artistic center to produce devotional icons for all the three faiths", and the pre-eminent center of religious artistic expression in India at least until the Gupta period, and was influential throughout the sub-continent.
  Chronologically, Mathuran sculpture becomes prominent after Mauryan art, the art of the Mauryan Empire. It is said to represent a "sharp break" with the previous Mauryan style, either in scale, material or style. Mathura became India's most important artistic production center from the second century BCE, with its highly recognizable red sandstone statues being admired and exported all over India.
context_section_description: Although no stone sculpture or architecture from the Mauryan period are known in Mathura, some relatively high quality terracotta statuettes have been recovered from the Mauryan strata in excavations. This would suggest that there was some level of artistic creation at Mathura during the period of the Maurya Empire. The creation of terracotta figurines is thought to have been much easier than sculpting stone, and therefore became the mainstream form of artistic expression. In Mathura, the first statuette were found in strata dating to the late 4th-2nd centuries BCE, and their production, together with associated terracotta miniatures of votive tanks and shrines, seems to have continued for close to a thousand years.
  Terracottas generally showed what appears to be female deities or mother goddesses, and from the 2nd century women in elaborate headdress. The ancient Vedic text of the Shatapatha Brahmana describes such figurines as "broad-hipped, of smooth breast-region and slender waisted" and suggests that they are personnifications of the earth, especially the earth goddesses Prithivi and Aditi, as "the container and supporter of the whole world", and the "repository of all Gods". Their headdress is often decorated with lotus stalks, complete with conical lotus pistils with their seeds, which symbolize fecundity and beauty. The lotus would remain an attribute of female deities in later periods. Some terracotta statuettes also show a child or children clinging to the goddess, thereby emphasizing her role as a symbol of fecundity. The cult of these female goddesses, characterized by small and easily manufactured figures, appears to have been essentially domestic.
  Several figures of foreigners also appear in the terracottas from the 4th and 3rd century BCE, which are either described simply as "foreigners" or Persian or Iranian because of their foreign features. These figurines might reflect the increased contacts of Indians with Iranian people during this period. Several of these seem to represent foreign soldiers who visited India during the Mauryan period and influenced modellers in Mathura with their peculiar ethnic features and uniforms. One of the terracotta statuettes, a man nicknamed the "Persian nobleman" and dated to the 2nd century BCE, can be seen wearing a coat, scarf, trousers and a turban.
  Terracotta figurine production evolved with the adoption of moulds in the 3rd-2nd century BCE.
caption: A terracotta votive figurine from Mathura. The wide hips and fantastic floral headdress suggest a devotion towards fertility and abundance. She has lotus stalks in her head, and children clinging to her.[16] Height: 25.7 cm (10.1 ″). Mathura, 3rd-2nd century BCE.[17]
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