Kushans/History

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The Indo-European Kushan peoples had their roots in what is today Xinjiang province in China. These semi-nomadic peoples once known to the Chinese as the Yuezhi, and were involved in the trade in jade with the Chinese nation, but following the rise of the Xiongnu Horde in southern Siberia, they eventually migrated west and subjugated the Indo-Greek cities of Bactria. The Yuezhi eventually settled down, developed a unique cosmopolitan society of their own, and later founded their own empire, the Kushan empire, before eventually fading into obscurity.

https://www.cemml.colostate.edu/cultural/09476/afgh02-08enl.html

"Under the rule of the Kushans, present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan and western India participated both in seagoing trade and in commerce along the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean.

The word Kushan derives from the Chinese term Guishang, used in historical writings to describe one branch of the Yuezhi—a loose confederation of Indo-European tribes that had been driven out of northwestern China in 176–160 BC, migrated south, and reached Bactria (Tajikistan and northwest Afghanistan) around 135 BC.

The first self-proclaimed Kushan king, Heraios (ruled: 1–30 AD), was one short step away from being a Yuezhi tribesman. Thus it fell to his successor Kujula Kadphises (ruled: 30-80 AD) to assume the role of a true monarch and unite the disparate and quarrelsome Yuezhi tribes under the Kushan banner during the 1st century AD.

After gradually wresting control of Bactria from the Scythians and the Indo-Parthians, Kujula Kadphises moved the Kushantribes into the region known as Gandhara (northeast Afghanistan and northern Pakistan) with the main capital located at Taxila (northwestern Pakistan) and the summer capital at Begram (known in ancient times as Kapisa, near the present-day Bagram Air Base), which also served as a major trading cneter.

From these two capitals, plus other settlements and trading posts farther north, the Kushansbecame master traders , adopted the Greek alphabet and struck their own gold coins featuring Kushan royal portraits, Greek mottos and symbols inspired by Roman coins that were widely used at that time to purchase goods from caravans along the Silk Road.

By positioning themselves at the center of the Silk Road, midway between China and India in the east and the Mediterranean world in the west, the Kushans became a world power second only to China and Rome and the first unified force in Afghanistan to dispense rather than receive authority.

In 48 AD Kujula Kadphises crossed the Hindu Kush and formed an alliance with the last Greek king in the region, Hermaeus, in the Kabul Valley, which allowed Kujula's son Vima Kadphises to attack and defeat the Scythians (known as Saka) in northern India and establish an empire that his successors continued to enlarge until it extended from the Ganges River in the east to the Gobi Desert in the north.


The rule of Kanishka, the third Kushan emperor, who flourished from the late first to the early/mid-2nd century AD, was administered from two capitals: Purushapura (present-day Peshawar) adn the summer capital complex at Begram (Kapisa), which rivalled the pleasure palaces created by the emperors in Rome or Han dynasty China.

Under Kanishka's rule, the Kushans controlled most of Central Asia and amassed great wealth through extensive mercantile activities, a flourishing of urban life and continued patronage of Buddhist sculpture and the building of monasteries.

Settled life brought great changes to the lives of these former nomads. Having no traditions on which to build, they adapted what they found in ways best suited to their own personality. The result was a vibrant indigenous culture born of the fusion of western oriented Graeco-Bactrian ideals with those of eastern oriented India and interpreted by the forceful character of Central Asia — vital and dynamic.


The Gandhara region at the core of the Kushan empire was home to a multiethnic society tolerant of religious differences. Desirable for its strategic location, with direct access to the overland silk routes and links to the ports on the Arabian Sea, Gandhara had suffered many conquests during its long history — by the Achaemenid Persians, by Alexander the Great (327/26–325/24 BC), by the Mauryans from India, the Seleucid Empire, Graeco-Bactrian kings and their Indo-Greek successors (3rd-2nd centuries BC), as well as Scythians and Parthians (2nd-1st centuries BC).

The melding of races, beliefs and skills developed in the West and the East produced an eclectic culture, vividly expressed in the visual arts produced during the Kushan period. Themes derived from Greek and Roman mythologies were blended with Buddhist symbols and sensibilities, resulting in the first representations of the Buddha in human form during the Kushan era, as well as the earliest depictions of key Buddhist figures such as the bodhisattva.



The Kushans were patrons, not mere collectors of art. In works of art they commissioned, the Kushan kings ordered their faces and garments be placed side-by-side with the Buddha and his retinue. This new self-confidence invigorated a uniquely Ghandharan style of art in which Graeco-Roman art subject matter and motifs enriched by Indian ideals were employed by literally thousands of craftsmen in the service of the rapidly growing Buddhist faith.

Buddhists texts are full of praise for the Kushan Kanishka, "King of Kings" (circa 100 AD), whose benevolent patronage supported Buddhism like no one else during his lifetime.

Buddhist Patronage. Kanishka's reputation in Buddhist tradition began with convening the 4th Buddhist Council in Kashmir, circa 100 AD, which became essential to the development of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition. Kanishka provided encouragement to both the Gandhara school of Greco-Buddhist Art and the Mathura school of Hindu art. His greatest contribution to Buddhist architecture was the Kanishka stupa at Peshawar. Archaeologists who rediscovered the base of thes stupa in 1908-1909 ascertained that this stupa had a diameter of 286 feet. Reports of Chinese pilgrims such as Xuan Zang indicate that its height was roughly 600 to 681 feet high and was covered with jewels. This immense multi-storied building must have ranked among the wonders of the ancient world.

Buddhist monks from the region of Gandhara during Kanishika's lifetime played a key role in the development and the transmission of Buddhist ideas from India and Gandhara to China. For example, the Kushan monk, Lokaksema (c. 178 AD), became the first translator of Mahayana Buddhist scriptures into Chinese and established a translation bureau at the Chinese capital Loyang.

Kanishka's Casket. While the accounts of Kanishka's interest in Buddhism have been verified by numerous archaeological finds, he was also a devotee and patron of other local religions. Kushan coinage includes representations of the Buddha as well as a wide pantheon of gods and goddesses, deities of Greek, Persian and Hindu origin. Kanishka's reliquary casket, for example, features cast representations of Buddha as well as Hindu dieties Brahma and Indra, Persian sun and moon gods on the sides of the container and a garland, supported by cherubs in typical Hellenistic style.

Dated to the first year of Kanishka's reign in 127 CE, the casket was discovered in a deposit chamber under Kanishka's stupa, during the archeological excavations in 1908-1909 at Shah-ji-Dheri on the outskirts of Peshawar. The original is today at the Peshawar Museum; and old replica is in the British Museum. Rarities inside the casket are said to have included three bone fragments of the Buddha.

The inscription on the casket is signed by the maker, a Greek artist named Agesilas, who oversaw work at Kanishka's stupas (caitya), confirming the direct involvement of Greeks with Buddhist artworks [the inscription reads in part, "The servant Agisalaos, the superintendent of works at the vihara of Kanishka ..."].

The attribution of the casket to Kanishka has been recently disputed, on stylistic grounds [the casket may instead be attributable to Kanishka's successor Huvishka].



Surkh Kotal. The presence of Persian symbols in Kushan-era culture is most evident among the ruins of Surkh Kotal, a Zoroastrian temple complex with a vast processional stairway located north of the Hindu Kush near the city of Pul-i Khumri, the capital of Baghlan province.

Excavations at Surkh Kotal between 1952 and 1966 proved the co-existence of a purely indigenous Zoroastrian religion, unaffected by Buddhism, centered around the cult of fire. Kanishka personally seems to have embraced both Buddhism and the Persian cult of Mithra. Fragments of his statue found at Surkh Kotal ranks among the most precious objects in the Kabul Museum collection.



The Buddhist Shrine Complex at Hadda. A Greco-Buddhist archeological site located in the ancient area of Gandhara, six miles south of the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan, Hadda was one of the largest Buddhist temple and pilgrimmage complexes in the world during the 1st through 3rd centuries AD.

A key location on the 2,000-mile path that pilgrims followed in the transmission of Buddhism from India to China, Hadda was an active center for manuscript translation and duplication as well as sculpture.

More than 23,000 Greco-Buddhist sculptures made of clay or plaster, architectural decorations plus heads and figures depicting men, women, children, assorted demons, as well as the elderly, with every conceivable mode of expression and dress, every rank and status, every facial type from all corners of the known world — more faces than one would need to re-create an entire Buddhist city — were excavated from Hadda in a series of archaeological excavations during the 1930s and the 1970s.

Sculptures from Hadda combine elements of Buddhism and Hellenism, in an almost perfect uniquely identifiable Hellenistic style. Although the style itself is suggested by experts to date from the late Hellenistic 2nd or 1st century BC, the sculptures from Hadda are usually dated, tentatively, to the 1st century AD or later.

Given the early date, superb quality, technical refinement, variety and stupendous quantity of sculptures, Hadda must have been a "factory town" where Greek or Greek-trained artists familiar with all the aspects of Hellenistic sculpture, lived and worked in, what scholar John Boardman described as "the cradle of incipient Buddhist sculpture in Indo-Greek style."

The transferance of Greek heros to Buddhism (e.g., Herakles being the inspiration and model for the Buddhist Bodhissatva) is fully on display at Hadda.

A sculptural group excavated at the Hadda temple known as Tapa-i-Shotor, for example, represents a Buddha flanked by a perfectly Hellenistic figure of Tyche holding her cornucopia and Herakles holding not his usual club, but the thunderbolt associated with the Boddhisatva fiture Vajrapani.

In addition to sculpture, Hadda contained some of the the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts in the world, which are perhaps the oldest surviving Indian manuscripts of any kind,the long-lost canon of the Sarvastivadin Sect that dominated Gandhara and was instrumental in Buddhism's spread from India to China.

Probably dating from around the 1st century AD, looted from Hadda during the 1990s and smuggled to Pakistan, these Buddhist manuscripts were written on birch bark in the Gandhari language. Discovered in a clay pot bearing an inscription in the same language eventually passed to the British Library in London and the University of Washington in Seattle. The legal ownership of these priceless manuscripts remains in dispute.

More than 1000 of the vast assemblage of sculptures found at Hadda during the 1930s and 1970s were secured at the Kabul Museum and the Musée Guimet in Paris.

The temples and row upon row of burial stupas at Hadda became an open air museum — accessible to yet extremely vulnerable.











During the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, however, large numbers of Hadda sculpture were looted from the site and quickly appeared on the international antiquiites market.

A tank battle between Soviet troops and Afghan guerillas that passed through the Hadda complex destroyed many of the temples.

What remained after the Soviet withdrawal was looted to near-extinction during the 1991-2001 Afghan civil war.

This fabled site, a crown jewel of the Kushan era, is now all but destroyed.

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The Begram Treasure. Sixty kilometers northwest of Kabul, near today's city of Charikar, at the junction of the Ghorband and the Panjshir valley, the summer capital of the Kushan empire was built, known as Kapisa [later known as Begram, not to be confused with Bagram, site of the modern air base].

Located at a key passage point along the Silk Road between Kabul and Bamiyan, Begram was destroyed by Achaemenid emperor Cyrus, restored by his successor Darius, and then fortified and rebuilt by Alexander the Great as fortress Alexandria of the Caucasus, which made it a key city in the defense of the Graeco-Bactrian Kingdom.

Surrounded by a high brick wall and reinforced with towers at the angles, Begram's main street along the Kushan summer palace was bordered with workshops and shops. Precious carved ivories from India, lacquer boxes from China, glass and bronze from Eqypt and Rome, plaster decorative reliefs and other Silk Road trade goods were displayed and sold and perhaps kept in inventory for the purpose of making duplicates on site.

Despite the capture of Kapiza (Begram) by the Sassanians circa 241 AD, two storerooms of Silk Road trade goods, sealed up to escape detection, sat in place for nearly seventeen centuries until they were discovered by French archaeologists who excavated Begram in the 1930s.

Each piece of the world famous "Begram Treasure" testifies to the rich trade that took place during the Kushan era and the likely existence of similar workshop emporiums at various points along the Silk Road and throughout the civilized world. Such discoveries renew our facination with the skilled workmanship and highly refined and cultured citizenry under the Kushans."


Warbirth[edit | edit source]

Source: https://theprint.in/pageturner/excerpt/we-know-very-little-of-the-kushans-middlemen-of-silk-road-empire-that-gave-india-kanishka/858784/

"he Kushans were one of two key middlemen during the First Silk Roads Era (the other being the Parthians). Moving goods between Rome and China, they would unify the overland Silk Road between the Oxus and Ganges rivers and establish themselves as cosmopolitan masters of northern India. Much of their prosperity also came from controlling the maritime trade between the Indian and Roman ports and, in doing so, they were able to circumvent the Parthians and their high taxes levied on caravans. In the main, the Kushans kept peace with their neighbours, creating the stable conditions crucial to promoting trade and cultural exchange. Their rule as a family dynasty would last over two centuries; and after their fourth king Kanishka came to power around ad 127, the subsequent so-called Great Kushans era has been described by Narain ‘as one of the great periods of world history’.

Yet in comparison to the other three Silk Road empires, frustratingly little is known about them from when the Yuezhi- Kushans first migrated into Bactria [Afghanistan region], as they did not produce any great historian nor possess a script of their own. Moreover, there is no consensus about their borders or chronology. The art historian Benjamin Rowland regards the Kushans as ‘one of the most important yet least known agrarian civilizations in world history’. Even the span of their rule—for our purposes ad 25 to 225—is one of the most disputed in Asian history.

Yuezhi-Kushans emerged as prime middlemen of the Silk Road, ready to cash in on the great entrepôt of increasing Eurasian trade. No doubt, they learnt a good deal about the art of trading from the wealthy Bactrians whom they had unseated. In their adopted homeland, the Yuezhi-Kushan presence was strong, comprising 100,000 households with a population four times that number.

Other than dominating northwestern India, the Kushan Empire expanded across the Oxus to include parts of Sogdiana and Kangju in their sphere of influence. The Hou Hanshu records noted that their ‘way of life is identical’ and the Kushans would cement their relationship with the people of Kangju through marriage into their ruling family. Historians find the northern boundary of the Kushan Empire vague and difficult to pin down, and whether it incorporated the southern sections of Sogdiana or Kangju is uncertain.

Unfortunately, the fragmentary documents and inscriptions discovered to date only go a little way towards piecing together Kushan history. Critical evidence comes from another source altogether, numismatics; and the many thousands of coins unearthed over the years bear testimony to their story. In fact, the legend on these coins represents the only other extant writing generated by the Kushans, thus making their study critical.

Unlike most objects made from naturally occurring materials— such as wood, fabrics and leather—coins made from metal are obviously less likely to perish with time. Being mass produced, they also have a significantly higher rate of survival and therefore discovery. Even today, old coinage from as far away as Rome can be found in the bazaars of Asia, sometimes after being picked up by farmers while tilling their fields. Importantly, the script on these coins, although somewhat limited, provides hard evidence of the reign of past dynasties and their rulers. And since each monarch would typically issue new coinage upon assuming power, most can be readily dated.

Where these coins are found is also of importance. Areas across northern India and Central Asia in which Kushan coinage has been discovered help mark out the extent of the empire and the reach of their trading activity. Conversely, for example, the extreme rarity of finds in Sogdiana proper suggests that their northern neighbours had probably maintained their independence. Whereas a study by Cribb of Kushan coins found in Khotan provides further evidence of their direct economic and political control of this important Silk Road city.

The style of their coinage tells its own story. During the Yuezhi- Kushans migration into Central Asia and India, they encountered the Greeks and Romans whose influence is clearly visible on Kushan coins. For example, their strongman Hercules is depicted on the reverse side of some issues; while Kujula’s early portraits were clearly inspired by their emperors, reflecting the contact between Rome and India. His mint was largely based on Greek practices and copied styles from the regions he conquered. Although initially starting out with the simple yabghu title on his coinage, on achieving greater victories he began bestowing on himself grand titles such as Maharaja Rajarajasa Devaputra (Great King of Kings, Son of a Divine Being).

The Kushans would adopt Bactrian as their official script (using the Greek alphabet) and as one of their official languages, which they called Aryan. In fact, during this period, Bactrian was one of the world’s most important languages; and by inscribing their coinage with Greek letters, the Kushans ensured their currency was widely usable across the Silk Road. (Greek tradition would also have a profound and lasting effect on Kushan culture in many other ways.)

Kanishka expanded his nation’s territory to probably its greatest extent, heralding the start of the empire’s high point. His reign of some twenty-six years, beginning around ad 127, witnessed many caravans criss-crossing the Silk Road, and during this time Ptolemy would complete his Geographia (although he did not mention the Kushan Empire by name). When Kanishka took the throne he declared the start of a new era, which he signified by engraving his coins from ‘Year 1’.

Like the Mauryan emperor Ashoka the Great four centuries before him, Kanishka is also remembered as a great patron of Buddhism, leading to its proliferation throughout Asia. The same routes first taken into India by the nomadic tribes, the Saka and Yuezhi, served as pathways out for monks—hence, this route is sometimes referred to as the Buddhist Road.

In Sanskrit literature, the Enlightened One is referred to as the Mahasarthavaha (Great Caravan Leader) for leading his followers to nirvana after having eliminated human suffering. A disciple of his, the Indo-Greek king Menander, in describing his lord to a converted Bactrian king, explained that Buddha ‘is like a caravan leader to men in that he brings them beyond the sandy desert of rebirths’. Kushan merchants were particularly attracted to his teachings and, perhaps surprisingly, its strong commercial philosophy, as historian Xinru Liu points out by quoting the advice offered in Dialogues of the Buddha:

Whoso is virtuous and intelligent, Shines like fire that blazes [on the hill]. To him amassing wealth, like roving bee Its honey gathering [and hurting naught], Riches mount up as an ant-heap growing high. When the good layman wealth has so amassed Able is he to benefit his clan. In portions four let him divide that wealth. So binds he to himself life’s friendly things.

One portion let him spend and taste the fruit. His business to conduct let him take two. And portion four let him reserve and hoard; So there’ll be wherewithal in times of need.

Such advice was consistent with Kushans positioning themselves as middlemen on the Silk Road, enabling them and their caravans to thrive; as Liu again notes: ‘For merchants, making donations was a much more satisfying and practical approach than self-denial.’ Together with many of the rich and powerful, they reciprocated by becoming great patrons of the religion, channelling some of their wealth into its monasteries and temples, adorning them with great artworks, silk and gems to make them seem like paradise. They also created images of the Buddha and had his sutras copied out in an effort to acquire the ‘merit’ needed to escape the cycle of suffering and rebirth.

Kanishka is regarded as the greatest of the Kushan kings. He would be followed by two others before the dynasty began its steady decline, sometime after ad 225—a story again reflected in their coinage, which begins to show deterioration and debasement. During most of the First Silk Roads Era, the Kushans were the great merchants of Central Asia, playing such a critical role that Rowland suggests his designation of this period could also be labelled the Kushan Era. After their decline as middlemen, they would be replaced by another people: traders who had started out as their apprentices but whose time had now come—the Sogdians. "