The most recent research however (2015) attributes the coins to Indo-Scythian king Kharahostes or his son Mujatria, who minted posthumous issues in the name of Azes.

[4] The casket features hellenistic representations of the Buddha (contrapposto pose, Greek himation, bundled hairstyle, wearing a moustache, realistic execution), surrounded by the Indian deities Brahma and Śakra, inside arched niches (called "homme arcade", or caitya) of Greco-Roman architecture.

There are altogether eight figures in high-relief (two identical groups of Brahman-Buddha-Indra, and two devotees or Bodhisattvas in-between) and two rows of rubies from Badakhshan.

These are probably the first two layers of monastic clothing the antaravasaka and the uttarasanga, without the heavier overcoat, the sangati, which would only go as low as the knees and be more markedly folded.

The posture itself is well known in the art of Gandhara in sculptures of the Buddha as a Bodhisattva, but in these cases, he wears the Indian princely dhoti and the royal turban.

When opened in the 19th century, the box did not contain identifiable relics, but instead some burnt pearls, bead of precious and semi-precious stones, and the four coins of Azes II.

Such date would make the casket the earliest known representation of the Buddha: However, several features of the coins are unknown for coins of Azes: the Tyche on the reverse, the fact that the king is given the title of Dhramika in the Kharoshthi inscription on the reverse, and the fact that the Kharoshthi monograms and symbols used are those of the later Scythian king Kharahostes.

[7] On the obverse they show a king on a horse to the right with right hand extended, with a three-pellet dynastic mark and a circular legend in Greek.

[15] Susan Huntington sums up the issue: These disputes stem from the fact that the first representations of the Buddha are generally assumed to be around the 1st century CE or later, about fifty to a hundred years later than the reign of Azes II, under the rule of the Kushans.

Since the Bimaran casket, with its already advanced Buddhist iconography, was manufactured at the beginning of our era, give or take a few decades, it is highly probably that much earlier images of the Buddha had already been in existence before its creation, going back to the 1st century BCE.

This view, that Greco-Buddhist art already was flourishing in the 1st century BCE under the sponsorship of Indo-Greek kings, was originally advocated by Alfred A. Foucher and others, although with much less archaeological evidence.

Stylistically, the casket (gold inlaid with precious stone) is also highly consistent with the art of the Scythians, as known for example from the Tillya tepe archaeological site in northern Afghanistan.