by Michael Wood
A few miles out of Pul-i- Khumri, north of the Hindu Kush, is a wide valley, covered in springtime with alpine flowers. The road north to the Oxus runs along the bottom, and the traveller might easily pass through, unaware that the hill terraces off to the left were artificially created in ancient times and were the setting for a splendid royal sanctuary. This included a temple standing in a paved courtyard surrounded by a colonnaded portico, which was approached from the valley bottom by a great stairway of five flights, each one leading to a spacious terrace. This was the site of one of Afghanistan’s greatest archaeological finds: the family temple of the rulers of the Kushan Empire. In the sanctum stood a great statue of the ruler in a patterned Kushan kaftan and riding boots, with an inscription noting that the shrine was dedicated by Kanishka himself. The image of the king was smashed by Taliban iconoclasts in Kabul Museum in April 2001, when the minister of information, prompted by Mullah Omar, the de facto head of state, ordered a five-day rampage to pulverize all human images. Kanishka himself, standing in pride of place on a plinth at the entrance to the museum, was reduced to a pile of dust and rubble, but an almost identical full-length portrait found in another Kushan royal shrine – at Mathura, deep inside India – shows us the man in the same baggy trousers and overcoat, with ceremonial staff and broadsword, and the same great riding boots. And what boots! With their big, built-up toes, one can imagine them trekking across the gravel wastes of the Lop Nor, and the rocky screes of the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush.
Like other foreign dynasties in India, the Kushans were ecumenical in matters of worship and had no interest in establishing a state religion. The inscription from Surkh Kotal shows that Kanishka’s ancestors worshipped Iranian gods, and they later added Greek deities when they came into Gandhara. Kanishka names Helios, Hephaistos and Selene among his patron deities, along with Babylonian gods, such as Nana, and even the delightfully syncretic Greek– Egyptian–Babylonian Serapis. Indian names appear later on the coins of his son Huvishka, such as Mahadeo (Shiva) and his son Skanda. One of Kanishka’s most striking coins shows the Buddha with halo and toga, bearing the name ‘Boddo’. Here at Surkh Kotal, just a mile or so away across the valley and lined up with the grand staircase, there is a ruined Buddhist temple of the same period, with monumental figures. This, then, was the place where the first fusion of Bactrian, Persian and Greek art took place, and led to the wonderfully expressive Gandhara art of northern India, one of the most vital artistic traditions in the world, which would play a foundational role in the history of Indian art.
From the top of Surkh Kotal there are wonderful views of the plain of Pul-i-Khumri and the distant whaleback massif of the Hindu Kush above the Khawak Pass. In the last ten years, unfortunately, the site has been devastated: the great terraces down the hillside, with their ceremonial stairway, have been gouged and slighted; the site of the temple with its Greek-style columns is hard to make out, the column bases having been thrown aside. But it is the place to reflect on the enigmatic Kanishka: his interest in Eastern and Western gods, his support of Buddhism, his munificent patronage of the arts, his economic astuteness in putting his empire on the Roman gold standard … He has left legends across the Eastern world to China, but the man behind the deeds is a shadow. To imagine him at Surkh Kotal in the Afghan hills is to catch a sense of a vigorous, dynamic, self-assured and egotistical man at the centre of a truly expansive age.
DISCOVERY IN THE KAFFIR’S CASTLE
Kanishka’s date, and even his century, have long been controversial. So too are the order and the names of those in his dynasty who ruled before and after him until their eclipse in the third century AD. But the veil has been lifted on the mystery in the last few years by an inscription found in 1993 during the Taliban war. The text, which has revolutionized the history of this period in central Asia and India, was found in the territory of Sayyed Jaffar, the local governor and head of an old Shi’ite family of Pul-i-Khumri. By a strange chance, I stayed with Jaffar after crossing the Hindu Kush to northern Afghanistan in the winter of 1995. At that time he showed me a photograph of the stone from which one could immediately see it was in the Bactrian language in Greek letters. But of its significance, no one at that stage could have been aware as the Bactrian language was still imperfectly understood. The stone had come, Jaffar said, from a place called the Kaffir’s Castle, not far from Kanishka’s shrine at Surkh Kotal. Deciphered in the last few years, it has turned out to be one of the most significant recent finds in early Indian history, for it is about Kanishka, not just as king of the Kushans, but as what one can only describe as the emperor of India:
Architect of the great salvation, Kanishka the Kushan, the righteous, the just, the autocrat, the god, worthy of worship, who has obtained the kingship from Nana and from all the gods. He inaugurated the Year One … and issued an edict in Greek, and then put it into Aryan … In the Year One it has been proclaimed unto India, unto the whole realm of the ksatriyas … his rule as far as the city of –––, the city of Saketa, the city of Kausambi, the city of Patna, as far as the city of Sri Campa … [to] whatever rulers and other important persons who submitted to his will, and he had submitted all India to his will …
The inscription has an astonishingly eclectic mix of gods: Nana and Umma, from Mesopotamia, the Zoroastrian god of wisdom Ahuramazda, and the Iranian deities Sroshard, Narasa and Mir, whose images were all placed in the royal shrine. This positively international polytheism echoes the coins of Kanishka and his son, which also depicted an eclectic choice of gods – Iranian, Greek, Indian and Buddhist. Crucially for the historian, the inscription at the Kaffir’s Castle also includes a list of Kanishka’s ancestors:
… for King Kujula Kadphises his great-grandfather, and for King Vima Taktu his grandfather, and for King Vima Kadphises his father, and for himself, King Kanishka, king of kings, the scion of the race of the gods … [As for] these gods who are written here, may they [keep] the king of kings, Kanishka the Kushan, forever healthy, fortunate [and] victorious, and [may] the son of the gods [Devaputra] rule all India from the Year One to the Year 1000 …
So now, for the first time, we have the order of the Kushan kings, and we can place Kanishka in history. We now know that he was a contemporary of Hadrian, who built the great wall across northern Britain, and of Antoninus Pius, with whom he exchanged embassies. He ruled around AD 120–150, his first year possibly AD 127. The inscription also gives dramatic new evidence about the extent of his empire: he was ‘ruler of the peoples of India’ all the way down the Ganges plain, from Saketa (the present-day city of Ayodhia), past Ashoka’s old capital at Patna, to Sri Campa, the giant unexcavated mound of Bhagalpur in the plain of southern Bihar, which has produced a huge amount of early Buddhist material.
So now it is possible to map the Kushan Empire from the Silk Route city of Khotan in Xinjiang, down through Afghanistan, with the summer capital at Kapisa-Bagram, across the Khyber to the spring residence at Peshawar, into the plains of India, with the main winter residence at Mathura, then down the Ganges to the edge of Bengal – an extent of nearly 3000 miles. Of course, it is hardly possible that this was a unitary empire: we must imagine provinces ruled by kinsmen, sub-kings and satraps (governors), who kept control through gifts and fiefdoms, exacting hostages and taking tribute. But theirs was an orientation in Indian history that looks forward to the Mughals, and will cast its shadow right down to Partition.
PESHAWAR, ‘THE CITY OF FLOWERS’
‘Ah, Peshawar, Purushpura – the city of flowers,’ says Zahoor Durrani, his eyes sparkling. We first met twelve years back, when he had helped us through Peshawar when we were following Alexander’s route down from the Khyber and up to Kaffiristan. Immaculate in tweed jacket and silk cravat, Zahoor is an enthusiast, an enabler, with an encyclopedic local knowledge, and a deep love for his native city, which I must say I share. Peshawar is, without question, one of the best places in the subcontinent.
‘Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, was very f
ond of the city for its green and magnificent gardens, and beautiful fertile valley bedecked with flowers and laden with fruit: it’s a little different today, of course!’
Zahoor comes from an old Peshawari clan. The family house still stands in a warren of streets in the old quarter of the Bukhara and Samarkand merchants, at the top of the old town, near the Mughal caravanserai. With their elaborate timber frames, carved balconies and extravagant ornamental flourishes, these palatial town houses make old Peshawar one of the most picturesque places in the subcontinent, and Zahoor is involved in a UNESCO project to save them before it’s too late. We pause at a gorgeous timber mosque from the eighteenth century in a sun-drenched courtyard. Although the city goes back at least to the age of Darius the Great, Zahoor believes it was the opening of the Silk Route that really changed the city’s fortunes: ‘See the wood carving? The marquetry? It was all brought from Bukhara on camel trains. Every piece!You see, this place has been a kaleidoscope of cultures and a melting pot of peoples for centuries, a haven of refuge for the wandering humanity coming down from the Afghan hills since the beginning of history.’
We had come down from the Khyber on a fabulous sunny day, when the road from Afghanistan was open despite growing rumours of worsening conflict in southern Helmand province and Kandahar. This ancient road is the great lifeline for Kabul, and vast queues of articulated lorries were waiting to cross over.
Coming eastwards from the viewpoint at the end of the pass, the plain of Peshawar stretches out, with its great old fort Bala Hissar 12 miles off. From here, even in the 1970s, you could see great camel caravans winding their way down into the plains to reach the serais and bazaars of Peshawar (see here).
We stop for tea in the Qissa Khawani bazaar, the ‘bazaar of storytellers’. Its name comes from olden times, Zahoor says, when this was the place where travellers and caravanners met, news and views were exchanged, and professional raconteurs enthralled audiences of merchants and passers-by. ‘In Queen Victoria’s day,’ says Zahoor, ‘the British commissioner in Peshawar, Sir Edward Herbert, described this as “the Piccadilly of central Asia”.’ And although the storytellers are long gone, the street still throbs with activity. Colourful fruit stalls and sweet shops compete for your attention, and wayside restaurants sell a bewildering variety of kebabs, grilled meats and freshly baked flatbread. The aroma of tea and cardamom, mingled with sandalwood, incense and tobacco, fills the air, and walking through the narrow side alleys, you find yourself engulfed by clouds from cooking fires and steaming samovars.
We are heading for Pipal Mandi, where an ancient pipal tree spreads shade over stalls selling clothing and woollens, nuts and dried fruit. It’s a famous place in Peshawari lore because this is where Kanishka is supposed to have enshrined the Buddha’s begging bowl. The story goes that Kanishka’s elephant bowed down to the bowl: unable to move it, the emperor built a monastery and a stupa around it. The bowl became a great pilgrim attraction in the fifth century AD, when the poor worshipped at it, throwing flowers and having their food blessed in the Hindu manner. Kanishka was also said to have planted a sapling here of the bodhi tree under which the Buddha had achieved enlightenment at Bodhgaya. The tree too became a stopping place on the Buddhist pilgrim trail, and one early Chinese pilgrim says that its ‘branches spread out on all sides and its foliage shuts out the sight of the sky’. Beneath it there were four giant, seated Buddhist statues. They have gone, but today’s bodhi tree still thrives, with shops built into and around its trunk, its long branches sticking through their roofs, while rickshaws jostle and splutter up the lane and the blanket sellers call out their wares.
Even now it has a real central Asian feel: the bazaaris offer silver coins of Alexander, huge copper rupees of the East India Company decorated with Hindu gods, and silver coins of Victoria as empress of India. There are old British Enfield rifles and hand-painted china teapots made in the imperial factory at St Petersburg before the White Russians’ fragile polity collapsed. Here, in short, you can see the detritus of history from wars ancient and modern. The big news is of Kushan coins in numbers, especially from a legendary hoard out in the hills near Gardez, beyond the Tora Bora. Over tea we are shown copper and silver coins of Kanishka – relics of the days when Afghanistan was not a black hole eating up lives, armaments and munitions, but a place of peace, a bridge and transmission point of the world’s cultures.
THE GREATEST BUILDING IN THE INHABITED WORLD
I’m heading out of the Lahore gate at Peshawar by taxi with Zahoor on another apparently hopeless historical quest. As we’ve seen, Kanishka supported all religions – uncannily like other great Indian rulers, such as Ashoka, Chandragupta, Harsha and Akbar the Great, and perhaps, above all, for good, pragmatic commercial reasons in a trading empire. But he was also remembered as a pillar of Buddhism, and here in Peshawar he built what with little exaggeration one might call the eighth wonder of the world: a Buddhist stupa 300 feet across at its base and, according to Chinese pilgrims, who described its giant metal and wood umbrellas and finials, soaring 600 feet high. If these Chinese eye-witnesses are to be believed, it was the highest building yet built on Earth, and it was still standing when the monk Fa Xien came here 250 years later. ‘Of all the stupas and temples the travellers saw in their journeys, there was not one comparable to this in its solemn beauty and majestic grandeur. There is a current saying that this is the finest stupa in the Jambudvipa [‘rose apple continent’, that is the inhabited world].’
Many miraculous stories were later told of the construction of Kanishka’s stupa. One of them, repeated in legends across China and Tibet, says that the Buddha himself prophesied the stupa and the name of the king who would build it and protect Buddhism; and that when the moment came for the prophecy to come true, a magical child led Kanishka to the spot.
More details come in the AD 640s from another Chinese pilgrim to India, the famous Hsuan Tsang. But these only deepen the mystery. Hsuan Tsang’s extraordinarily intricate description of the structure, half a millennium after it was first built, may reflect a rebuilding after several fires, destructions and lightning damage, not the original conception. But he says the base was 150 feet high, the stupa dome itself was 400 feet high, and above it were a cupola lantern and a metal pillar with twenty-five copper umbrellas or discs. The whole structure he estimated at 500–600 feet in height. Relics of the Buddha were placed beneath the stupa by the king. A monastery was constructed on one side of the great courtyard, with a host of smaller relic stupas and shrines. By the side of the stupa in Hsuan Tsang’s day there was also a great pipal tree about 100 feet high, which it was said had been grown from a sapling of the original bodhi tree at Bodhgaya.
If these stories are true, the stupa was the greatest building before the skyscraper age, soaring higher than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral or even the tallest of all Gothic cathedrals, Old St Paul’s in London. But could that really have been possible? It hardly seems likely, though the biggest stupa in the world today, at Nahkon Pathom in Thailand, a nineteenth-century restoration of an ancient building, stands at a staggering 412 feet. Following the clues in the Chinese pilgrims’ accounts, archaeologists first went looking for its remains a century ago. The French Silk Route explorer Alfred Foucher identified the site; then a British archaeologist discovered the stupa’s footings in 1908–9 and ascertained that its base was indeed nearly 300 feet across, roughly the size reported by the Chinese. But could it really have been 500–600 feet high, as the Chinese visitors claimed? It seems incredible that the technology existed to create, raise and support the vast superstructure with its copper umbrellas, though interestingly enough, the story is told that Kanishka’s builders couldn’t raise the great 90-foot iron post on which the umbrellas were mounted until pillars were erected at the four corners of the stupa to support scaffolding with a windlass system. Only then was the huge column lifted in the presence of the king and royal family, accompanied by prayers and libations and swirling clouds of incense. Looking at t
he proportion of base to height compared with other great stupas, and including flags and umbrellas, the whole structure could well have exceeded 400 feet. Certainly this would rank among the wonders of the ancient world – and even if the Chinese reports are exaggerated, construction of such a building could not have been imagined except in an age of incredible ambition and technical and artistic capability.
The site is forgotten now, a hundred years on from the British dig. It was out in the middle of open fields and graveyards then, but in the last twenty or thirty years, the suburbs of Peshawar have engulfed it. Asking directions to it under the old name, Shah-ji-ki Deri (‘mound of the great king’), draws a blank in the streets outside the Lahore gate – even with the local traffic police, who send us the wrong way. With Foucher’s sketch-map, I feel we are on the right track when we reach a vast graveyard, but we still have no luck asking the locals for directions. I am on the point of giving up when a local man with an Afghan hat and shawl comes over. He knows about the history of the place and tells us he’s been fascinated by the legend of the stupa since school. He points to a ridge a couple of hundred yards off crowned by a warren of brick houses: ‘That’s the place you are looking for – the site of the stupa of Rajah Kanishka. That’s where the Britishers dug when my grandfather was a child. Many ancient bricks here were used for building; bits of sculpture are always turning up, and coins.’
In front of us stretch thousands of tombs, gaily coloured tinsel offerings blowing in the breeze, and a big pipal tree with a shrine at its foot, where the Muslim mourners do their rituals for the dead. I recall the sacred pipal by the foot of the stupa seen by Hsuan Tsang in the seventh century: could this by any chance be a descendant? Zahoor is beginning to be excited. Perhaps our search is not going to be as hopeless as I feared. Our guide leads us on through the lanes of tombs, and then we discover that, as so often in the subcontinent, the site is still a place of worship. We walk through the graveyard towards the houses, and there at the base of the hill, through a tall brick and plaster gateway, stands a picturesque, white-domed Sufi shrine in an overgrown walled garden. The custodian who has kohl-rimmed eyes and henna-dyed hair, comes to greet us and offers tea. He’s been here fifty years, and the tomb, he says, belongs to the Kwadja order, and is related to the famous pan-Indian shrines of the Chistis at Ajmer, Fatehpur and Delhi. Sufi pilgrims still come here from India. He sits down with us and begins to tell the tale:
