 The statue was excavated at Gandhara, Pakistan, and dates to the 1st or 2nd century CE.Some of the standing Buddhas (such as the example pictured) were sculpted using the specific Greek technique of making the hands and sometimes the feet in marble to increase the realistic effect, and the rest of the body in another material.Alfred Charles Auguste Foucher especially considered Hellenistic free-standing Buddhas as "the most beautiful, and probably the most ancient of the Buddhas", assigning them to the 1st century BCE, and making them the starting point of the anthropomorphic representations of the Buddha ("The Buddhist art of Gandhara", Marshall, p. 101).