I have great pleasure in introducing Dr. Mansouri's brochure on ART-CULTURE OF INDIA AND EGYPT. He is a cultural scholar from Egypt and has rightly taken up as his special field of study the contacts between India and Egypt.
It is nowadays universally recognised that two of the earliest civilisations of the world developed in the Nile and the Indus Valleys. There are reasons to think that comparable civilisations developed at more or less the same time in the Ganges Valley in India and some of the river valleys in China. There have also been attempts to link these different river valley civilisations with one another. Some have expressed the view that the origin of civilisation took place in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley and spread to the East and the West. All this is highly conjectural and we have neither archaeological nor other type of data to fix definitely the relative ages of these different civilisations. About their antiquity and inter-connections, there is how- ever little doubt.
We are beginning to discover today that what was till recently called the Indus Valley Civilisation spread far beyond the reaches of the Indus. In fact, one may hazard the guess that there was a continuity of civilisation from somewhere in the Western coast of the Deccan right up to the shores of the Mediterranean. Excavations in the Gangetic plain have not yet been undertaken on any large scale, but many historians feel that we find evidence for the existence of contemporary civilisations in this area of India as well. We also know that from the earliest historic times, if not already in the pre- historic period, cantacts had been established between Eastern India and the Mediterranean countries.
There are elements in the folk art, language and rural culture of Bengal which cannot be explained from Aryan, Mongolian or Dravidian sources. Some philologists have found striking affinities between place names in Bengal and Egypt.
In beginning the present sketch initiating a study of the ancient art and culture of India and Egypt, it may be assumed that every student is familiar with the evidence that proves the historic relation- ship between the two countries through ties of common Dravidian and Aryan blood. close kinship in old traditions, thoughts, commerce, and through near affinities in the matter of religious beliefs, ritual observances, manners and customs. The worshipping of the sun, cows, snakes, and rivers in both India and Egypt is sufficient evidence of such a connection. The similarity between art of both countries provides further evidence while studying and trying to find out the relations between the two countries in ancient times.
Those who would really learn or understand art, should begin with Indian or Egyptian art; for these two great arts spring purely from the life of their people. These arts are stripped of the superfluities which delight the educated and uneducated eye. These two cultures are easily intelligible to those who will read them in the light of religion and philosophy of the two countries. These arts must be seen in their local environments and in the atmosphere of the thoughts which created them.
India and Egypt had built their art upon the idea and philosophies of their religions which, in both countries, were similar. It is quite certain, as Count D'Alviella has so admirably explained in his book on the Migration of Symbols, that each religion preserves in its rites and symbols survivals of a whole series of former religions; but, as he wisely observes, "it is not the vessel that is important, but the wine which we pour into it; not the form, but the ideas which animate and transcend the form". So, that is why Professor E. B. Havell has mentioned in his book The Ideals of Indian Art, that "it is by concentrating themselves (the symbols) upon the forms, rather than upon the ideas which animate them, that many archaeologists have gone so much astray in their interpretations of Indian art.
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