Gandhara: Where Greek Gods Became Buddhas
In the 4th century BCE, Alexander the Great crossed the Hindu Kush and reached the valley of the Indus. His armies withdrew, but the Greek settlers did not — the Indo-Greek kingdoms they founded persisted for centuries in what is now northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, governing a frontier territory where the traditions of the Mediterranean world encountered the world of India for the first time in sustained contact. The result, fully flowering between the 1st and 5th centuries CE under the patronage of the Kushan dynasty, was one of the most extraordinary artistic syntheses in human history: Gandharan art , in which the sculptural vocabulary of Greece was placed at the service of the Buddhist dharma. The Buddha was first given a human face in Gandhara — before this tradition emerged, he was represented symbolically (by a footprint, a wheel, an empty throne). The face the sculptors gave him was Greek: the wavy hair of Apollo, the straight nose, the flowing drapery of a toga. Her...