Gandhara location in present-day PakistanĪccording to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Gandhara is the ancient name of a region in northwest Pakistan bounded on the west by the Hindu Kush mountain range and to the north by the foothills of the Himalayas. Gandharan control of the high mountain passes vital to this international commerce made the region wealthy the resulting cosmopolitan elites became some of the most powerful Buddhist patrons in all of South Asia. These sea routes supplied an expanding overland trade network that passed through Gandhara and continued on to Central Asia and China. Starting about 50 B.C., this trade dramatically increased with the introduction of ocean routes employing monsoon winds to cross the Arabian Sea. This contact resulted in the establishment of overland trade routes through the Parthian empire and Indo-Greek cities like Ai-Khanoum in northern Afghanistan. This region and, together with the Indo-Greek kings that succeeded him, introduced classical traditions that became an important part of Gandhara's artistic taste over the next seven centuries. It was under their aegis that Gandharan Buddhist art, compounded of foreign and local ingredients, flourished. They were genuine cosmopolitans, linked to the Mediterranean, Persia and China, and tolerant of religions. Then, around the first century A.D., the Kushans, originally nomads from the steppe-lands north of China, settled in, extending their reach down into the Indian subcontinent. Over time Greco-Bactrians, Scythians and Parthians dominated the terrain. Two centuries later Alexander the Great, a Macedonian Greek and a conquest addict, charged in and charged out, leaving behind a Hellenistic occupation, which held firm even as Gandhara was absorbed into the Mauryan empire of India, South Asia’s first great Buddhist power. Persia, under Darius I, colonized the area in the sixth century B.C.
If you were in the business of empire building, you made every effort to control it. If you had business that took you to or from the Indian subcontinent, you passed through Gandhara. The area, which encompassed what is now northwestern Pakistan and a sliver of Afghanistan, was a crossroads for international traffic. Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times: “The multilayered and time-obscured history of ancient Gandhara is particularly difficult to grasp. Many different schools of Buddhist art in Pakistan and Afghanistan have been labeled Gandhara. Gandhara is perhaps best known for its very early Buddhist art and early Greco-Roman-influenced art. After that the name Gandhara disapearred from the historical record. The Buddhist civilization of Gandhara was finally completely destroyed by the White Huns, the Hephthalites, in the sixth century. Their rule, however, was interrupted by the invasion of the Persian King Shapur I in A.D. first century the Kushans, a tribe of Turkic-Scythian stock from western China took over Gandhara. Rejoined to India under the Maurya Dynasty, the Gandhara province became the object of intense missionary activity by the Buddhist emperor Asoka (reigned c. The successors of Alexander the Great maintained themselves in Bactria and Gandhara from 322 B.C. Gandhara was dominated under the Achaemenid Dynasty of Iran. Kingdoms in Gandhara lasted from the 6th Century B.C. Lying in Haro river valley near Islamabad, Taxila, the main centre of Gandhara, is over 3,000 years old.
A hallowed centre of Buddhism and the cradle of the world famous Gandhara art, culture and knowledge, it embraces the archaeological remains found in Taxila, Peshawar, Charsadda, Shahbaz Garhi, Jamal Garhi, Takht Bahi, Swat and rock carvings along the ancient Silk Road (KKH) have well recorded the history of Gandhara. “Gandhara” is a broad term that describes a region that existed over a relatively long period of time in the present-day Pakistani districts of Swat, Punjab and about 1,000 kilometers miles north of present-day Karachi. "Four Scenes from the Life of the Buddha" from Gandhara
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