Brief Introduction to Gandharan Art from the 1st-5th Centuries AD.

A Brief biography of Alexander the Great.

Bamiyan destroyed – Taliban in Afghanistan

History of Afghanistan

Casting techniques and classification of South East Asian bronzes.

Table of Thai and Khmer sculpture.

The influence of Gandhara throughout Serindia – gateway to China

Central Asia, sometimes referred to as Turkestan from the predominantly Turkish peoples who settled in the area in the last millennium, can truly be referred to as the core of Asia.. Itself a landlocked continent, an area of desert wastes encroaching on fertile oases, enclosed by huge mountains and steppes. This vast tract extends from the Caspian Sea to the oasis of Dunhuang in northwestern China. Straddling the snow covered peaks of the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan. To the east, lies Chinese Turkestan or Serindia, with close historical ties with both India and China. To the north lies the T’ien Shan range and the steppes of Siberia. The southern boundary is farmed by the Karakorum, separating Serindia from India and Tibet. To the eastern frontier lies China and the end of the Great Wall. Locked within these natural ramparts, is the great Taklamakan Desert, an almost unbroken expanse of sands bordered by stretches of soil and stone deserts, a formidable place at any time of year but particularly when we were there during the scorching summer months.
Despite its awesome and seemingly impenetrable fortifications, passes opened through the encircling ranges, formed the gates of trade routes now known cumulatively as the Silk Road.

Within this vast desert scape were oases settled by river-valley principalities sustained culturally and politically by their contacts with the great civilisations adjoining them, a far cry from the photographic images taken by Sir Aurel Stein when he conducted extensive excavations at the Buddhist sites of Khotan, Turfan and Dunhuang's thousand Buddha caves at the beginning of the 19th Century. The development of this central Asian civilisation in its political, religious and artistic aspects was entirely dependant on the ancient trade routes, or Silk Road, which even as early as the third century BC, linked China with the west. Through these roads by which goods were transported and traded, Buddhism entered China and Serindia became a hub, with routes dividing into northern branches leading through Sogdinia by way of Bokhara and Samakrand through Uzbekistan to Kashgar. Southern routes followed the oxus by way of Bactria through passes to southern Afghanistan and ultimately via the Khyber and Bolan passes to India.

The influential factors in the Art and sculpture of this area were numerous, however non more so than Greek forms and techniques found in the colonies of Alexander in Bactria. The ancient traditions of Greece, Iran and India probably first appeared in this region around 250BC the moment when Alexander’s Hellenistic empire began to disintegrate. Resulting in the independence of Parthia and Bactria.

The prototypes of Central Asian art are from the west, the art of ancient Iran and the heritage of the Hellenistic world, implanted by Alexander’s conquest and maintained for centuries by the colonist successors of the Macedonian in Afghanistan and Northwest Pakistan, with contributions from India and the Roman world from the 1st-5th Centuries. Together with elements from Han period China it amalgamated to form the Art of Central Asia heavily influenced by Gandhara.

Although Gandhara, this ancient province comprising of parts of northwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, is not within Central Asia. The culture and Art of this region is so intimately related to developments in all Turkestan. The peak of the Gandharan school must have coincided with the reign of Kanishka the Kushan ruler a renowned patron of Buddhism. The Art of Gandhara in schist and stucco is devoted almost exclusively to the decoration of Buddhist architecture where its iconography is essentially derived from earlier Indian traditions recast in a classical mold, Hellenistic style imported through Bactria and reinforced by style and technique borrowed from Roman Art. This can be seen in particularly in some of our terracotta pieces, probably created by imported craftsmen from the Mediterranean. Gandhara stylistically was a bridge between India and Iran via the classical west. Therefore Gandharan art throughout its five century existence provided the chief source for Buddhist art and styles that were developing along the silk road. The process of modelling figures from stucco around a solid clay core, reinforced with chopped straw and small stones as a binding agent became universal throughout Gandhara. This translated into a similar medium throughout Serindia where the bodies of images were modelled out of local clay around a wooden armature and covered with a thin shell of lime plaster then painted or gilded.


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Images: Photographs taken by Aurel Stein on his 2nd & 3rd epeditions to Serindia, circa 1907