CAROE, Olaf (1958), Kushans, Karachi, Oxford University Press

On their way south the Kushans had attacked and greatly weakened the Parthian Empire of the Arsacids, which was under simultaneous pressure from the Rome of the Caesars in the west. Their first conquest was Bactria south of the Oxus, whence under their first ruler of note, Kujula Kadphises, they organized advances to south, east and west which in due course gave them an immense empire covering not only the whole of what was then Eastern Iran (modern Afghanistan and Pakistan as far east as the Indus) but the Punjab and the India of the Ganges Valley as far as Allahabad or Benares. It is probable that Kujula himself, having first made himself master of the Kabul Valley, annexed Gandhara as far as the Indus about 600 ADA, conquering it from the successor of the Parthian Gondophares. The decisive battle giving him the mastery of what was then northern India was the siege and storm of Taxila some fifteen years later, the victor being either a nameless successor or Kadphises II, known from the coins as Wima Kadphises. The sway of Wima extended to the mouth of the Indus, and he profited from the weakness of the Parthians, engaged with Rome, to seize the whole of modem Afghanistan, the then Aria, Sakistan, and Arachosia. Wima was succeeded by the greatest of the Kushan monarchs, the famous Kanishka, whose succession starts a new era. Under Kanishka the Kushan empire was extended far into the Ganges Valley, and a capital city of the Indian province established at Mathura. The actual date of his succession is disputed between wide variants, the latest scholars fixing the Kanishka era as starting in the second quarter of the second Christian century, possibly AD 128, some five hundred years before the Hijrat. His northern capital was at the central point, of the empire, Purushapura or Peshawar.

The ethnic stock of the Kushans is in some dispute, and a considerable body of opinion has maintained that, while their subjects were Iranian in the western part of their dominion, and Indian in the east, they themselves were an early wave of Hun or Turk affinity. Others are firmin holding them to be yet another horde of Scythians, and therefore akin both to the Sakas and the Parthians, arid this I accept as the more authoritative view. They are known to Chinese records as the Yuezhi, of whom the Guishang, or Kushan, were the leading clan.

Excavation and numismatic study reveal that the original religious background of the Kushans was a Mazdean fire-worship of which traces remain even in the monuments they left in their new homes along the Indus. But when they reached the Indus Valley, they became subject to many religious influences, the first effect of which was to produce a syncretism so tolerant that its niches received deities as varied as Heracles, Hephaestus, Mithras, Shiva, and finally the Lord Buddha. It was down this broad path of eclectic experiment that the great Kushan king Kanishka proceeded, to find in the ettd that Buddhist revelation which caused him to displace the other gods from their pedestals and to offer devotion to the form of worship now associated with Gandhara and the Kushan age.

Kanishka having chosen Gandhara, with its capital Peshawar, as the nodal point of his empire, the state which he ruled has come to be known as the Kingdom of Gandhara. And since Kanishka, following in the footsteps of Asoka, four centuries earlier, had embraced or at least greatly encouraged Buddhism, and Gandhara under his leadership became the centre of an important civilization especially as regards art, the name has come to be used in designation of the signifcant art forms which spread outward from Peshawar to many other parts of Asia. It was because under Kanishka there had developed a golden age of Buddhism that the Chinese pilgrims, Faxian and Xuanzang, later made it one of the bournes of their pilgrimage. Outside the Ganj gate of the modern Peshawar City was discovered in 1909 the remarkable relic casket of Kanishka now deposited in the Peshawar Museum. The site of these excavations is now locally known as Shahji khi dheri, the King’s mound.

The difficulty of reconstructing Kushan history arises from the fact that their main contacts extended to the inhabitants of India, the least imbued with an historical sense of any ancient civilization in the world. Relatively to the size and scope of the Empire little contemporaty evidence is available, and though the later Chinese Buddhist literature records legends of Kanishka, these books do not fill in accurate historical detail and are largely repetitions of Indian religious speculation. Moreover the records which do exist throw little light on the tribes and people in the Gandhara region over whom Kanishka and his successors ruled. Coins and works of art are innumerable, and from them the dynastic over-tones may be painted in. But, for the identity, or way of life, or language, of the ruled we look in vain. Only the name of the capital is known; of the Paktues, the Aparutai, the Gandarioi, and their successors we have no word. We do not even know for certain of what stock the rulers themselves claimed to be. This is a pity, for it is only under the Kushans that Peshawar attained the dignity of an imperial capital.

It was under the Khushans that the channels of trade between the Roman world and furter Asia were at last unblocked. Ever since the Seleucids had yielded power to the Arsacids on the Iranian plateau, the implacable barrier of Parthia had stood astride these routes, often at war with Rome and closing the Orient trade by extortionate levy or actual veto. But the rise of the Kushan power on her eastern flank involved Parthia in a war on two fronts; Iran had become a much reduced central state sandwiched between Rome and a new empire based on Gandhara. The Kushans and the Romans had a common interest both in politics and in commerce; the Kushans now holding stretches of the east-west trade routes were able to divert merchandise to avoid Parthian territory. And it was from this time that the Parthian period of decadence set in.

We may follow Tarn in his conviction that Gandhara art would never have been brought to birth had not Greek kings ruled in that country in the second and first centuries B.C. But it is now more generally held that it is to this age, the age of Kanishka (AD 128-51), two hundred years later, that we must attribute the full flowering of the famous Gandhara art in sculpture in stone, bronze and stucco, in coffers, plaques, bowls and objets d’art of all descriptions. This astonishing mass of material represents not a Greek influence as such but the most penetrating and enduring impact of the Roman upon the Eastern world. The craftsmen may often have been Greeks but the source of this plethora of art treasures has been traced to Roman Alexandria. By the absorption of the Western modes of expression, in the representation of figure statuary and so on, the face of Buddhism was changed. The Hinayana, or lesser Vehicle, expanded into the Mahayana, or Greater Vehicle. Under the former the Buddha was never represented; he was not a god but a sage. Under the Mahayana, a persuasion which first took shape under Kanishka and is represented by the art of Gandhara, the Buddha has become divine and is the focus of every composition. The Roman heroic and funerary art is indeed transmuted by the oriental craftsmen and given a Buddhist context, but both iconograpbically and aesthetically the change was revolutionary, and represents a synthesis of the utmost interest and importance. As to the controversy on the point whether this new effulgence should be linked with Greece or with Rome, it is possible to hold that in this region it is perhaps unreal to make a distinction between the two sources of influence. It is generally agreed that the fountainhead of inspiration was Alexandria, the centre of neoPlatonism and Hellenistic art whether under the Graecized Ptolemies or the Romans who succeeded them. Admitting that Gandhara art was the outcome of Kushan commerce bringing in the craftsmanship of the Roman Empire, it is worth remembering that the time now assigned for it coincided with the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (AD117-138), a devotee of esoteric cults and the arts who spoke Greek better than Latin. It is certain too that the craftsmen employed stood for an Eastern Mediterranean rather than a Latin tradition. We may follow Tarn at least so far in believing that the earlier Graeco-Bactrian kingdom in Gandhara had paved the way for this development.

In King Kanishka’s later days, when he had become a fervent Buddhist, he created t great relic tower - probably just outside the Ganj Gate of Peshawar at Shahji ki Dheri - with a superstructure of carved wood rising in thirteen storeys to a height of some 400 feet, and surmounted by an iron pinnacle. It was visited by Sung-yun, a Chinese pilgrim at the beginning of the sixth centxry, by which time it had thrice been destroyed by fire and as often rebuilt by pious kings. A monastery of exceptional magnificence was still flourishing here as a place of Buddhist education as late as the ninth century when it was visited by Vira Deva, an eminent Buddhist scholar. But the Brahminical revival which beganin the later Kushan period frowned on Buddhist piety, and what was left by the Brahmins seems to have been finally destroyed by Mahmud of Ghazni and his successors in the eleventh century.