Against all this may be urged the difficulty of understanding how such direct and important influence could have been exercised by the Byzantines in this remote province without its leaving any trace of its existence on the arts of the Parthians or Sassanians, whose kingdom lay between, and without our having any written record of such intimate relations. It is difficult, of course, but, if the facts are as stated above, such negative inferences must make way before the positive testimony of the sculptures themselves. Till within the last very few years no one dreamt of classical art having any such influence at any age on the arts of Gandhara. That being established in contradiction of all previously conceived ideas, the time at which it took place ought to be ascertainable with comparative facility; and, in so far as any written evidence is concerned, may have been as probably at or after the time of Constantine, as at or after that of Augustus. It would be easy to extend this argument to any length; but without producing the data on which it is based, or giving references to drawings and photographs which have not been published, it would hardly carry conviction to the minds of those who have not access to means of information not yet made public.[226] To avoid, therefore, being tedious, perhaps I may be allowed to state that, having given the best attention to the materials at my command, the conclusion I have arrived at is, that though some of these Gandhara sculptures probably are as early as the 1st century of the Christian Era, the bulk of those at Jamalgiri and more especially those at Takht-i-Bahi, are subsequent to the 3rd and 4th, and that the series extends down to the 8th--till, in fact, the time when Buddhism was obliterated in these countries. The discovery of some new fact, or of an inscription on a piece of sculpture either with a date or a king’s name that can be recognised, may any day settle beyond dispute which of these views is the correct one. Meanwhile, however, as the evidence at present stands, it seems hardly doubtful that the theory which assigns the more modern date to these sculptures, is that which accords best with all that has hitherto been brought to light, or with the history of the Buddhist religion as at present known. If this is so, it is evident that the term Græco-Bactrian, or Græco-Buddhist, which has been applied to these sculptures, is a misnomer. The Bactrians may have sown the seeds of a classical style in these parts, but the art we now find there would be more properly called Indo-Roman or Indo-Byzantine, and must have been nourished and kept up by constant communication between the East and the West during the period at which it was most flourishing, which may be described as that intervening between the age of Constantine and that of Justinian.