Word: gandhara
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mountains and valleys of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, palace ruins and crumbling Buddhist monasteries dot the hills above war-torn locations such as Mingora, Peshawar and the Swat Valley. These magnificent ruins are all that's left of the Gandhara kingdom, which flourished from the 6th century B.C. to the 11th century A.D. It vanished under the pressure of war and conquest, re-emerging only in 1848 when relics and ruins were re-discovered by the British archaeologist, Sir Alexander Cunningham...
...Gandhara is in danger of vanishing a second time from the same old threats. Just as the Afghan Taliban destroyed the 1,500-year-old statues of the Buddha in Bamiyan, Afghanistan in 2001, militants in Pakistan have attacked the Buddhist heritage in Pakistan, driving away foreign research teams and tourists, forcing the closure of museums and threatening the integrity of valuable digs. "Militants are the enemies of culture," says Abdul Nasir Khan, curator of the museum at Taxila, one of the country's premier archaeological sites and a former capital of the Gandhara civilization. "It is very clear that...
Forged artifacts are nothing new in Pakistan, whose ancient Gandhara-era Buddhist treasures are frequently copied and sold to unsuspecting collectors. Police have charged no one in the case, either for murder or forgery. So, for now, the body remains like a delicate patient on life support behind a locked door in a hermetically sealed glass chamber in the bowels of the National Museum, preserved by a steady stream of nitrogen. It is Pakistan's best-conserved and most intensively studied murder victim...
Hyndman's interest in the meeting of East and West began in junior high school, when he wrote a paper on the Gandhara art of India. Last summer he studied Chinese at Vermont's Middlebury College; there he met some South Vietnamese who opened his eyes to the cultural differences between the U.S. and Asia. By the time the U.S. began the heavy bombing of North Viet Nam, Hyndman was thoroughly disenchanted with the nation's war policy. He is now firmly convinced that U.S. military power offers the South Vietnamese "a worse alternative than Viet Cong control." From...
This delay, ironically, caused the first Buddhas to be made on Roman models. The earliest known figures date from the 1st century and come from the ancient Indian region of Gandhara. The Gandhara artists were imported from the thriving cities of the Near East, and when faced with the problem of inventing a Buddha image, they fell back on the Greek and Roman image of Apollo dressed in a kind of Roman toga. They probably borrowed the halo from the traditional Iranian sun disk that symbolized the heavenly light of Ahura Mazdah. For Buddha's ushnisha-the bump...