Word: gandhara
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...Gandhara kingdom and its art are important because it shows the impact of Hellenistic influence brought by Alexander the Great and his Macedonians. Likewise Gandharan Buddhist art reached as far as China, Korea, and Japan. After it became part of the pre-Islamic Persian Empire, Gandhara's culture went on to influence artistic developments in the Middle East. Peshawar, Swat and much of northern Pakistan lay astride a portion of the old Silk Road, the ancient highway that transported riches between the east and west. Indeed, the Jehanabad Buddha looks out over a stretch of the old path. Later...
...travelers like Xuanzang seeking Buddhist scripture and wisdom. Formerly part of the Persian Empire, Taxila was one of Alexander's conquests and is today a World Heritage Site. The museum there, started in 1918, is one of Pakistan's finest, with more than 4,000 artifacts from the Gandhara civilization. But no one comes to visit much anymore. Nasir Khan says there have been warnings of a possible attack on the museum, and some security procedures have been put in place, but he said they're insufficient. (See pictures of Pakistan subcultures...
...heritage of the region. In October 2007, as militants cemented their hold on the former tourist area, the Taliban dynamited the face of the Jehanabad Buddha into oblivion. The 23-foot-high carving of the seated Buddha, dating from the 7th century, is regarded as the second most important Gandhara monument after the Taliban-eradicated Bamiyan Buddhas. (See pictures of the battle against the Taliban...
...contracts also often include a commitment to help preserve and develop a site after the initial research is done. Without that, excavations are being started and then left open when local funding dries up, Khan says. "We don't have the resources to protect each and every site in Gandhara," he explains. "We don't have any resources to make it a model site for tourism, which would create jobs and bring in money...
Speaking from his home in London, Knox says that it would be catastrophic to lose Gandhara and other ancient civilizations that sprung up along the Indus Valley to direct threats from militants or neglect caused by the security vacuum. "Journalists can't even go there, quite apart from people who want to do field archaeology," he says of the sites near Waziristan and other war-ravaged locations. "I don't think I shall ever see those places again...