The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

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CHAPTER I I
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AFGHANISTAN: THE ROAD TO CENTRAL ASIA
Afghanistan may be described geographically
and culturally as a no-man's-land lying between
India, Iran, and Central Asia. This land of
towering ranges of mountains and arid wastelands,
populated by peoples of fierce pride and
barbarous standards, has for generations loomed
as a beckoning and mysterious El Dorado for
romantic and dangerous adventure and exploration.
Afghanistan came to notice through
Byron's contemporaries and spiritual confreres,
the unsung adventurers and soldiers of fortune
whose romantic wanderlust took them to the
court of the Amir before the days of the First
Afghan War. The savagery of Afghan tribesmen
has been immortalized by Kipling's
exaggerations in story and verse. Some of the
early visitors, like Lieutenant Burnes, in addition
to their geographical exploration, discovered
the archaeological wealth of the Kabul
Valley in the great hoards of Bactrian coins and
occasional fragments of Gandhara sculptures
but, owing to the unfavourable political conditions
and intense anti-foreign sentiment, no
scientific excavation or exploration became
possible until a French archaeological mission
was able to secure the rights for excavation in
1922. On the results of the work of such
distinguished and devoted archaeologists as
Alfred Foucher and the late J. Hackin and J.
Carl is based all our knowledge of art on this
threshold of Central Asia.
Although the early remains belong to what
we know as Gandhara art, the development of
Buddhist art in Afghanistan requires separate
treatment. The region, it is true, has always
been intimately connected, both geographically
and politically, with north-western India, but
its position in relation to Iran and Central Asia
has made it a kind of melting-pot and a centre
for the diffusion of Indian, Iranian, and
Classical forms and techniques. It is important
to note at the outset that southern Afghanistan,
mainly the valley of the Kabul River, belongs
geographically to India; once across the continental
divide of the Shibar Pass in the Hindu
Kush, however, we find ourselves in the watershed
of the Oxus; this northern region of
Afghanistan, in other words, belongs culturally
as well as geographically to Central Asia.
In the fourth century B.C., Afghanistan, then
part of the Achaemenid Empire of Darius, was
overrun by the armies of Alexander and
garrisoned by Greek troops at strategic points
on the road to India. We have already referred
to the coins of Alexander's successors in Bactria
[65] as evidence for the penetration of Hellenism.
Excavations begun in 1965 near Khodjagan
on the Oxus are uncovering the remains of the
Greek city of Ay Khanum, and the Greek
sculptures discovered at Nisa in Russian
Turkestan are actual examples of Hellenistic
art in Asia. The types of Buddhist architecture
in Afghanistan are no different from what may
be seen in Gandhara proper. In the mountains
near Kabul and along the Kabul River by
Jelalabad rise the ruined cores of stupas built in
the same shape and of the same mixture of
boulders and small stones used at Taxila.
Originally, like the buildings excavated at
Hadda and the Ali Masjid stupa [81], they were
brilliantly decorated with polychromed stucco.
The earliest site of consequence that has been
excavated is the ancient Kushan capital of
Kapisa, the present hamlet of Begram on the
banks of the Panjir River. Kapisa, which
over a period of centuries was the northern and