After first appearing in the religious art of ancient Iran, the disc halo migrated across cultures at an astonishing pace, aided by trade on the Silk Roads. This simple symbol connects Jesus, Buddha and Apollo.

Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism and Greek mythology are usually regarded as utterly distinct religions, largely defined by their differences. But if you just look at them, you will see a symbol that connects them all – the halo.

The halo has remained in Christian art ever since, although it has undergone some adaptations over the years. God the Father can sometimes be seen crowned with a triangular halo, Jesus with a cross-shaped halo, and the Living Saints with a square halo.

Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism coexisted peacefully in India in the first millennium CE, and all three religions shared artistic ideas and iconography, including halos. The earliest carved representations of halos in Indian religious art come from the two great centers of artistic production, Gandhara (on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan) and Mathura (150 miles south of Delhi).

Trading ideas

In late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Gandhara was at the center of an immense network of trade routes that stretched to China in the east and the Mediterranean to the west. Buddhist monasteries appeared along key junctions of trade routes to serve as religious versions of caravanserais. They offered merchants a place of rest, prayer and recuperation, and became the springboards from which Buddhism spread to China, where artists reproduced the iconography of the religion. In the 500s AD, halos appeared in art in Korea and Japan, indicating the arrival of Buddhism in these regions as well.