Introduction

Source: Hallade 251

For the past seven months I have been learning about the Silk Road and all that it encompasses. The Silk Road was not only a place of trade, but also a place of culture, art, religion, hardship and conquest. Along the several trade routes, people of different historical and contextual backgrounds came across the Silk Road, creating a beautiful mosaic that, for years, many scholars have attempted to decipher. An example of such a magnificent medley of cultural contributions can be illustrated in the art of Gandhara. Gandhara was an ancient city that covered the surrounding basin of present day Peshawar, Pakistan. The geographic region of Gandhara was bound by foothills (north and west), the Indus river (east), and by arid flatlands (south). However, in the nineteenth century, the word Gandharan depicted several culturally related regions beyond the geographical area of Gandhara city, whereby different archaeological finds were discovered (Brancaccio and Behrendt 1). This vast territory provided the Indian sub-continent with a link to the rest of Asia and it was also along the Silk Road, which linked the Medditerranean with China (Hallade 4). Overall, this area was in such a geographic orientation that high traffic and the exchange and crossing of different cultures could not have been avoided (Czuma 18). While Gandhara’s strategic location influenced Gandharan style, several rulers and dynasties also contributed to it. The following is a condensed account of the historical conquests that occurred in Gandhara:

“Beginning with Achaemenid domination (sixth-fourth century BC), followed by the Alexandrian conquest (329-326 BC), Mauryan rule (fourth-third century BC), Indo-Greek rule in Bactria (third-second century BC), and the invasion of the Scythians (second century BC), which resulted in Scytho-Parthian domination (first century BC/first century AD) and ultimately the foundation of the Kusana empire (sometime during the first half of the first century AD)” (Czuma 19).

Then came the rise of the Sassanid dynasty (3rd to the 6th century AD) (Hallade 64). By the seventh century AD, Gandharan art had steadily declined and then merely vanished, giving way to the rise of a new religion – Islam (Hallade 71).