The Kushan Empire

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then-current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

BetterHelp Online Therapy bought this 30-second ad to remind you right now, wherever you are, to unclench your jaw, relax your shoulders,

take a deep breath in

and out.

Feels better, right?

That's 15 seconds of self-care.

Imagine what you could do with more.

Visit betterhelp.com slash random podcast for 10% off your first month of therapy.

No pressure, just help.

But for now, just relax.

Thanks for selling your car to Carvana.

Here's your check.

Whoa, when did I get here?

What do you mean?

I swear it was just moments ago that I accepted a great offer from Carvana Online.

I must have time traveled to the future.

It was just moments ago.

We do same-day pickup.

Here's your check for that great offer.

It is the future.

It's it's the present and just the convenience of Carvana.

Sorry to blow your mind.

It's all good.

Happens all the time.

Sell your car the convenient way to Carvana.

Pickup times may vary and fees may apply.

Hello everyone.

I hope you're all well.

We're all good at Ancients HQ.

Just finished recording three ancients episodes in a row.

So now just out for a quick walk.

Now for today's episode, we have received quite a few comments asking us to do more episodes on ancient Central Asia and India.

In particular, I remember receiving an email from an ancients listener.

Her name was Brianna.

And Brianna, she's been listening to the podcast for more than a year and a half.

And she suggested that we do an episode all about the Kashan Empire.

Well, it's taken a bit of time, but Brianna, I'm delighted to say we're now making that episode a reality.

It's the first century BC, and a new power has risen to prominence in Central Asia, in the land known as Bactria, present-day Afghanistan.

Over the previous century, Greek overlords had ruled here, but no longer.

Hailing from the Great Steppe in Central Asia, nomadic invaders had swept westwards and ultimately settled in Bactria, establishing their own kingdom along the fertile banks of the Oxus River.

We know it today as the Kushan Empire, named after its ruling dynasty.

Over time, this empire would expand across the Hindu Kush into northern India, reaching as far as the Gangetic plain.

Both sides of the Hindu Kush became connected under one empire.

The story of the Kushan Empire is that of an ancient superpower at the center of Eurasia, with connections to Rome, Persia, China, the steppe, and India.

And yet, so much of its story remains shrouded in mystery.

Today on the ancients, we're giving you an introduction to the enigmatic Kushan Empire, exploring themes such as their extensive trade connections, their strong links to Buddhism, and potentially to famous ancient Indian epics like the Mahabharata.

As for our guest, well, I was delighted to welcome back to the podcast the one and only William Dalrymple, CBE, renowned historian, writer, and a host of the popular history podcast Empire.

William has recently written a groundbreaking book all about ancient India and how it was at the center of the ancient world.

It was great to catch up with William again.

He is a good friend of the podcast.

He's a lovely man.

And I really do hope you enjoy this episode all about the Kushan Empire.

William, what a pleasure.

Great to have you back on the podcast.

It's very nice to be back in this country and very nice to see your swanky studio.

Each time I come,

I get more podcast envy.

Never before, though, have I gone to the bathroom in summer with a

silver lame loose eat, which is something that only the ancients can afford with their spectacular success.

You're right, and I did demand, I did demand that as long as you need

a silver loose seat.

Yes, but we're talking about something a bit different today than the silver loose seat.

We're talking, of course, about the Kushan Empire.

You say Kushan, do you?

That's how you say.

I say Kushan.

Better than I know it, anyway.

But so this feels like I didn't really realize that much about the Kushans.

Done a bit about the Greco-Bactrians in the past, Central Asia.

It feels like a name

little heard of today, and yet they are still really important in the story of ancient Central Asia and of India.

They are very little known.

I think especially most people who are not Indian ancient history buffs are likely to have heard of them at all.

There are aspects of Kushan culture which are quite widely known, like the Gandharan Buddha, these beautiful, very classical looking figures of the Buddha with very classical Greek or Roman faces and wearing martins or togas.

And these exist in the great museums of the world.

So anyone in Paris or London or anywhere that has one of the major international collections will recognize these things.

But the name of the dynasty under which these were produced, the Kushans, are not widely written.

And even in India, which is the place they're probably best known, they're one of the least recognized moments in Indian history, partly because, like anywhere in the world, history is often written on a fairly nationalistic basis.

And the Kushans are seen in modern India, as far as they're known at all, as incomers, not as sons of the soil.

So they don't appear much in Indian textbooks.

And they you know, are virtually absent from popular perceptions of the past, but they're incredibly important.

And more and more archaeology is appearing both within India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, but also in places like Egypt and Rome, where it's showing the much greater impact the Kashans had outside South Asia and Central Asia.

And well, we'll talk about all the different things they did, but they're a hugely important and very little known part of ancient history.

We are going to talk through all those things, but you mentioned the art there, and it feels important to highlight that straight away because we are, after this chat together, we're going off to the British Museum to their new ancient India exhibition, in which they have some examples of Kushan art.

So art of Kushan origins has been discovered in abundance in northern India.

So one of the odd things is that although the Kushan name, as I said, in India, is not the most prominent of ancient dynasties, arguably they produced more sculpture than any other ancient Indian peoples.

There are vast quantities of Kushan art, much of it coming out of one particular city, Matra, which we'll be talking more about.

Matra, again, a place little known outside India, in India, known associated with the Krishna myths, and it's the place where in the Mahabharata Krishna's people are from, the Yadavs.

But it's one of the richest archaeological sites in ancient India.

And so much of what is central to Indian art, mythology, history, derives from innovative practices in art, in religion, in the depiction of divinity that happened in this one city.

And what's incredibly irritating is that because it yielded so much beautiful sculpture, a lot of it quite sort of sexy, voluptuous women, which we're going to talk again about later, but a lot of it these very striking male figures, whether Jain or Buddhist or Hindu.

Because these things were so readily excavated, it was one of the first places where amateur archaeologists of the Raj sort of just dug holes and just sort of dragged up sculpture, which has meant that a lot of the main Kushan sites were basically wrecked by very unscientific archaeological methods in the 1860s, 70s, and 80s through to about the 1910s.

Then more recently, the other great center of Kushan culture, which is Afghanistan, has been also looted and unscientifically dug by looters looking for things to export to art galleries and dealers around the world.

So they are, of all the ancient peoples in India, perhaps the ones that have produced the most stuff, but most of it coming without strict archaeological stratification.

Often we don't know where great masterpieces came from beyond a region.

So Gandhara is as good as we can do, the Peshawar Valley or Matra, the wider Mathra region.

And the chronology, the stratigraphy, the history of these regions is very unclear even now.

And yet the quantity of important materials and the fact that so many ideas that will travel the world, images of the Buja that are found as far west as Egypt, as far east as Japan, are derived from innovations made in matra.

And yet we don't know the sequencing, we don't know the stratigraphy, and it's all a bit of a mess.

But it's also a bit of a mystery, which is why it's quite fun to talk about it and speculate.

It feels like the Kushans, although you have all of this art and it sounds also like actually the antiquities market you know quite infamous antiquities market things are coming up from there as well because of these um these illegal excavations that are happening in those kind of heartland regions does it feel like at the same time although we have this quite a lot of archaeology and art are they still quite a mysterious people do we have many sources for them So we have very few.

As I say, there are a few dynasties in ancient India which have produced more in terms of material remains or artistic remains.

But in terms of scientifically dug archaeological sites, there's some pretty good archaeology that happened in Afghanistan in the 1970s.

There are a few documentary references in Chinese chronicles, but the Chinese are about sort of two empires along.

So they're reported, the Kushans, in their earliest incarnation, are the enemies of the Chinese enemies.

And in that sort of endless shuffling of tribes westwards, out of the steppe, out of the Tarim Basin, into Afghanistan and down to India, The Kushans are too away from the people who are writing the reports.

So it's quite hazy.

One thing we do have very good evidence of is numismatic

coins.

We have spectacularly beautiful coins produced by the Kushans, some of the earliest, a lot of them in gold.

So these are things that go very

for a lot of money on the art market.

And Sphinx has auctions of these things very regularly, which go for more and more each year.

So we have the names, but even, it's I mean, it's only in the last 10 or 15 years that we've really got a safe chronology for the different major Kushan kings.

And the biographical details that we know of these people can be written on sort of, you know, two sides of a notepad.

It's uh we won't do that then, because it will finish very quickly.

And so it's a funny, it's a funny mixture of things.

There are also hints that they help form a lot of the geography of the major Indian epics, particularly in the Mahabharata.

And the Mahabharata, although the origins of those stories probably predate the Kushans by centuries, if not millennia, the Mahabharata is reaching its final form at a period of Kushan rule.

And the descriptions in the epic often reflect the material culture of the Kushan period, not the ancient, ancient period in which the stories originate.

And indeed, the geography that, you know, on one hand, you have the northernmost point as Gandhara, where one of the queens of the Mahabharata, gandhari comes from on the other hand you have matra which is where krishna another of the central figures of the mahabharata comes from in between that you have the great capital of indraprastha which is probably under puranakila in the center of delhi now

and so there's in every way the Kushan period seems to be the period when a lot of the iconography, the mythology, the stories crystallize into forms that we recognize today.

So let's set the scene then with how the Kushan Empire ends up controlling not just Afghanistan, but also into northern India as well.

And how long ago we're talking.

Now you mentioned those enemies of the Chinese, which hopefully we'll get to the word Shongnu or Han then.

I'm pretty sure.

That's exactly who we're talking about.

So explain then how it goes from these people living further east in Eastern Asia to ultimately forming this great dynasty that is the Kushan Empire.

So the Zhongnu or the Huns, people people we know quite a lot about because the Chinese are scared of them and wage war on them and successfully drive them westwards.

And then the Zhongnu drive the UAZ who are the ancestors of the Kushan down into Afghanistan.

So it's like a domino effect.

It's like a domino effect.

So the success of the Chinese in moving their Hun problem westwards.

leads to the Kushans tumbling down through Afghanistan, through Pakistan, through the passes, to the Gangetic plain and the Doab, the region around Delhi today.

And

we see the Kushans appearing for the first time, or the UAZ as the Chinese know them.

They are an Indo-European people.

So from the very first representations of them, they look like modern Afghans.

They're big guys with big noses and big lips.

They're not Chinese looking in their features.

They're not Central Asian looking in their features.

Their language is Indo-European and archaeologists tend to think that their ancestors are probably these strange characters buried in Tartan in the Tarim Basin, which I know is something you're interested in talking about.

Tell me about these Tartan buried people in East Asia.

Well, strictly speaking, we should probably talk about plaid rather than Tartan.

This is not a lost tribe of the Frasers or the Campbells

or even the Stuarts making it to Western China.

But over the last 30 years, Chinese archaeologists have been finding these extraordinary burials, which are a non-Chinese people, a non-Mongol people, non-Turkic people, who are occupying territory that is now thoroughly Turkic, the area that the Uyghurs now occupy in Western China.

And these guys, again, are quite big.

They're often six feet tall.

They...

bury themselves in this in this plaid.

There's no other word for it.

These textiles that have cross-patch

coloured textiles, which are actually not dissimilar to Tartan, reds and blues that could easily find themselves on a kilt or a scarf.

USA Scots must absolutely love this.

I've always loved this.

And so these seem to be the people that become at some point known to the Chinese as the USE.

And they begin to infiltrate into what's now Afghanistan around 150 BC.

In other words, a century after the death of Alexander the Great.

And in Afghanistan at that time, you still have the Bactrian Greek cities, though,

you know, less

than before and less Greek, obviously, than they were a century earlier.

Far more Persified, far more Central Asian, far more indigenous now,

feeling.

And it is the Kushans, apparently.

who overrun these cities,

but clearly maintain the irrigation works.

So

they're looting the cities, but they're keeping the water systems going.

And we have at Tilya Tepe in Afghanistan, and anyone that saw the great Afghan treasures show at the British Museum more than a decade ago now

will remember those fantastic, it was the climax of the exhibition, these gold cases full of beautiful early sort of semi-Hellenistic crowns and this sort of almost dewdrops of gold falling down in these headdresses.

But with them,

these royal burials.

And you had clearly a point of transition because you have the male figure, the chieftain, who is buried in a sort of

in a nomad grave.

And he's wearing, you know, Scythian, twisting animals of a sort that we're used to on the steppe.

But one of his queens has cherubs and erotes in in the jewelry and she has a silver coin on her tongue and so we assume this means she's someone of a greek princess who marries one of these guys maybe as a diplomatic gesture and she's putting a coin for the ferryman on her tongue and she's asked to be buried as per her old faith.

So there's this moment of transition.

And it is in this whole ensemble of Beryogas that we find this mysterious, very early figure of the Buddha, which has a Sanskrit inscription, he who moves the wheel of law, but it has no relation to any Buddhist iconography that we know of.

We have this figure that looks more like Zeus pushing a spiked wheel, that is the wheel of Dharma.

So it's a sort of early moment of iconic Buddhism.

by which I mean

Buddhism with an image of the Buddha as opposed to an an-iconic, a non-figurative image, which is something that we'll see is very much the norm in early Buddhism.

And it's there in northern Afghanistan, it's there associated with

these nomad people, with this nomad jewelry, but with influence, a little bit of India and a little bit of Greece, and

it's this moment of transition.

And the closer that the Kushans then move towards Persia and towards India, the more that their mythological pantheons reflect both those countries.

So the first Kushan king we have that has firm dates attached to him is Kujala Kadfaises.

That's quite a name.

Quite a name.

That's a good name.

And he seems in his religious leanings to be more associated with the Persian pantheon.

So he has Nana, the Persian love goddess on his coins and he has Osho, the Persian wind god, who then seems to appear with the imagery that we associate with Lord Shiva.

He has a bull that looks like Nandi, a trident, which is one of the basic identifiers of Lord Shiva.

And in some of the images, he has an erect penis, which is also something which is very clearly associated with Lord Shiva and it's something that you

tend to notice straight away when you look at the coin.

Is Lord Shiva Hindu pantheon?

So Lord Shiva is the Hindu pantheon.

And this is the first appearance as these guys are heading down the passes towards India of Hindu gods.

But interestingly, we don't have much before the Kushans of these Hindu gods because early Vedic Hinduism in the periods before this is an iconic and Vedic sacrifices take place on

temporary fire altars

rather than the sort of temples that we get later.

And so ironically, the Kushans, it's during the Kushan period that we get the first images of Hindu gods, but they're associated with the wrong names.

The Greek inscription says Osho

or the Kharoshdi inscription in some cases.

But you've got Greek as a...

So this is one of the fascinating things that I really want to highlight straight away.

So, I mean, William, the Ueji or the Kushans, they come down into Afghanistan.

There is elements of Greek culture still there, as you're saying, from the Greco-Bactrian kingdom, but lots of local culture as well and Persian culture.

And you've already mentioned that, you know, images of Buddha, Buddhism is already in that area as well one and initially one just one stray extraordinary early image okay so it's the early Buddhist image that we probably have right okay so that so that's almost the exception but it's so interesting when they come into this area and almost as nomads that then they encounter all of these different things like Greek language these other other traditions as well as you say it's one of those amazing moments that's this all known about but when they finally reach that area and and encountering all these different things and then how they embrace it in the forming of their kingdom.

Exactly that.

And there's also something very counterintuitive about the effect the Kushans have on this region, because these guys are coming in from what's now Xinjiang, from western China into Afghanistan, pushing down towards the Ganges and the Amuna, towards where Delhi now is.

Yet the effect culturally of these guys coming south and unifying both sides of the Himalayas, so that you have one set of rulers who rule both Kashgar,

beyond the Pamirs, beyond the Himalayas, the Pamirs and the Himalayas themselves, and now the plains of North India.

What this does is it opens a floodgate of Indian influence going northwards.

So even as the Kushan armies are going south, you have Buddhist monks and Indian traders heading north.

So contrary to all expectations, it is the southward passage of a nomad people from Western China that opens up northern Central Asia and Western China to the first Buddhist missionaries coming into that region.

And they come in during the Kushan period.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

Hey there, it's Ryan Seacrest for Safeway.

Now through August 26th, it's back to deals time where you can enjoy store-wide deals and earn four times points.

Look for in-store tags to earn on eligible items from black label bacon, pop-tarts, Quaker, Activia, Lunchables, Frito-Lay, Goldfish, and Jack Links.

Then clip the offer in the app for automatic event-long savings.

Shop in-store or online for easy drive-up-and-go pickup or delivery, subject to availability restrictions apply.

Visit Safeway.com for more details.

Thumbtack presents.

Uncertainty strikes.

I was surrounded.

The aisle and the options were closing in.

There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes, and natural bristles.

There were too many choices.

What if I never got my living room painted?

What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use?

What if

I just used Thumbtack?

I can hire a top-rated pro in the Bay Area that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices, and read reviews.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

Why choose a sleep number smart bed?

Can I make my site softer?

Can I make my site firmer?

Can we sleep cooler?

Sleep number does that, cools up up to eight times faster, and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side, your sleep number setting.

It's the sleep number biggest sale of the year.

All beds on sale, up to 50% off the limited edition smart bed, limited time.

All sleep number smart beds offer temperature solutions for your best sleep.

Check it out at a sleepnumber store or sleepnumber.com today.

It almost feels like a bit of a U-turn as well, if I'm thinking about it in the map.

So it's kind of going west and then south.

So, yeah.

So suddenly you're getting these extraordinary sites in Afghanistan, these remarkable early Buddhist monasteries in places like, well, a very important site that ancient listeners would greatly enjoy exploring and a place I had great privilege of visiting just before the Taliban took over and before everything closed down is a remarkable Kushan site called Mezaynak.

And Mezainak is incredibly important.

It's about three hours drive from Kabul.

You can, if you leave, you know, just before early breakfast in Kabul, you can be there before lunch at this site.

And the site is now threatened for the same reason that the monks first went there, which is it's sitting on the biggest copper deposit in Central Asia.

And the monks seem to have literally coined it, that they excavated it, turned it into coins, they had mints there.

And one of the things we learn about early Buddhism, which is counterintuitive and surprising, is that today, when you think of Buddhist monks, you tend to think of them as otherworldly figures.

Hollywood identifies

the Tibetan as this sort of mystic figure floating, often levitating in sort of Marvel movies.

Doctor Strange and stuff like that.

Exactly.

Exactly that.

But in reality, Buddhism is a religion that appealed to merchants and which

existed in a very capitalist world.

The Buddhist monks we know from inscriptions were lending money.

In fact, they were effectively the first bankers in South Asia.

They often site their monasteries on mineral deposits.

Medzinak is on copper.

I was visiting early Buddhist sites in Malaysia in the autumn, which are on iron ore.

And the monks were using this.

Other regions where they're not on mineral deposits, they are important in the textile trade.

And you have Buddhist nuns making cotton, for example, in Gujarat and in Andhra Pradesh.

And we have an inscription from another very early Buddhist monastery in Andhra Pradesh, which talks about,

which gives some very nice biographical detail of the sort of people who are using these monasteries.

And there's a guy who identifies himself as a Mahanavika, which is Sanskrit for a great sailor.

And he has traveled, I think, to what's now Malaysia, to the Bujang Valley on a trading expedition.

And he comes back and he repays the monks the loan that they've made.

And this is why it's recorded.

He puts up an inscription basically saying, I've paid my debt to you.

But on the way, we learn that, A, he's a sailor, and B, that his father was a rice farmer.

So

we have two generations of family.

We have a rice farmer who produces a great navigator.

And it's very clear that all the way along these trade routes, these early Buddhist monasteries, as well as being centers of Indic civilization, they're bringing into Central Asia not only the Buddhist philosophy, but with it a whole set of Indian ideas about

time being circular, yugas and so on.

We have ideas of geography involving Jambudvipa, languages such as Prakrit and Sanskrit.

So you have these Buddhist monasteries where rich merchants are sheltering, like the later Karavansarais.

Their thick walls and sort of fortified position at the top of a valley is not just good against invaders, it also obviously protects traders who've got valuable goods.

They are apparently borrowing from the monks and maybe we can imagine depositing their gold with the monks maybe,

the way that not only Indic civilization and Indian religions such as Buddhism and philosophies, but also early mercantile capitalism is spreading up into this region.

Coin production is associated with the Kushans at this time, so we have early use of coins.

The most extraordinary question is the whole question of how, in these monasteries, at this point in the first, second, third century AD now,

you have the first appearance of the Buddha image.

And the big academic debate, which is still unsettled and people,

evidence emerges, which shifts the debate every few years, is at what point does these aniconic religions, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, which initially do not represent their saviors and deities except through symbols such as a sacred tree, a throne.

an umbrella, a flaming pillar, in the case of Buddhism, a stupa.

Suddenly, in the first century, this gives ways to the Buddha image.

Well, let's kind of follow on from there.

So, by that time, by the first century AD, the Pamirs, the Hindu Kush, is no longer a boundary, it's the spine of the Kushan Empire.

They've expanded.

Thank you very much.

I've been thinking about that all the time.

I said they expanded into northern India as well.

So, Afghanistan on one side, northern India on the other.

And we'll get a bit more to Matara in a bit.

But, how does this spread?

How does this emergence of the Kushan Empire?

Do you think that contributes and is critical to that big transition in those religions to then actually showing the gods and the Buddha in human form?

So

this is a great scholarly debate.

So there's two or three different views.

The first view is that there are these pre-existing cults of nature spirits, tree spirits called yakshas, the male ones, who are shown as sort of big, hefty, sumo-wrestler types with big tummies with often sort of highly developed muscular forms.

And some of the images are very big.

There's one at a place called Parkham, which is about sort of 12 foot tall.

I mean, these are big, big images of big deities.

They often hold medicine, weapons, and money.

They have money bags.

And they have a female counterpart called Yakshis, who are these sort of super curvy, voluptuous images.

Again, do very well on the market.

And you see a lot of these now in museums and in sale rooms across the world.

And you talked about one of those actually in our last chat with the Romans and India, how there is actually a mosaic in Sicily, which shows one.

Exactly that.

This Roman image, personification of India, is based on a Kushan Yakshi image.

There's one nice detail of that is that one of the points of the Yakshis, the female Yaksha,

are that they are symbols of fertility, hence why they're voluptuous, hence why they're symbols of sort of sexuality and fecundity.

And the way this is expressed in the image of Yakshis is that

they either hold on to a branch or they kick the bough of the tree and the tree bursts into flower.

Now this is weird enough and an image that exists through all of Indian art, having started with the Kushans, it reappears in Rajput art, then later in Mughal art and even in Rajput paintings of the 18th and 19th centuries, you see this image of this beautiful girl touching a tree or so or whatever.

Now in the Roman version of that, they haven't understood what's going on.

So, they get the fact that she's voluptuous and so she's got all the curvy bits, but they haven't understood that the point is that she's holding onto the tree because the tree, the moment she touches the tree, the tree bursts into flower.

She's just holding a tree in the Roman fashion.

Sounds like in her the equivalent images that come out of Matra and the workshops of the southern Kushan area, wherever she touches, there's a bloom and a huge lotus flower appears in a gorgeous thing.

So, the different theories are that it was out of these nature spirits that early Buddhists took the image of the Buddha.

And in Matra, the early figures of Buddha are these sort of big, heavy guys.

I mean, we think of the Buddha as, you know, this sort of small ethereal figure, cross-legged, locked in meditation.

But the earliest images we have of him in the southern part of the Kushan area have him as this sort of nightclub bouncer kind of figure,

looking like someone you wouldn't want to bring to.

No, exactly.

And then the second theory is it's not Buddhism at all, that the first time that

these savior figures are depicted in stone

iconically as a human figure is actually the Jains.

And there's quite a lot of evidence that that's true.

There's one or two very early Jain figures that may well predate anything Buddhist.

The third theory, which is the one that the Victorians latched onto when they first started discovering these gorgeous Gandharan Buddha images in the Hindu Kush, is it's the influence of the ancient Greeks, that somehow the Hellenistic spell stayed in these mountains, and that when the Greeks converted to Buddhism, as the Victorians saw it, and the Victorians are reading too much Kipling, the Man of the Pic, all this sort of stuff,

that suddenly they change from this aniconic image of the Buddha as a pair of feet or a throne or a stupa.

Suddenly, he becomes a Greek Buddha in a tuga, looking like a Caesar or something.

And in fact, in my book, The Golden Road, I place an image of Augustus next to one of these early Gandharan Bodhisattvas, and the folds of the clothes are almost identical in a very intriguing way.

So however it happened, and whatever the order, and there is no scholarly final consensus on this, in the first century, in the Kushan kingdom, we get the Buddha image that we know today taking form for the first time.

But as if that's not enough, at the same time, we get the first images of Lord Shiva, Lord Vishnu, Krishna, Balaram.

Tonight, when you and I go to the British Museum to see the Asian India Show, there's an amazing, very early image of Balaram, who in time will become the brother of Krishna in the Mahabharata,

but at this point seems to be a sort of self-propelling deity with a plow,

a sort of

figure of fertility.

And

he's sheltered by a hooded cobra.

So he's related to these early Naga snake cults.

So all this,

we're used to sort of, you know, trying to classify these religious boundaries and say this is Buddhist, this is Jain, this is animist.

But clearly you have all these religions living cheek by jowl in a city like Mathra or in the Gandharan Valley.

Clearly same sculptural workshops are working for patrons who could be Jain or could be Buddhist or could be animist.

And

in the way that Polytheus often did in the Roman Empire and the Greek Empire, the same images

can be read by people of different faiths as different gods.

So while a Persian may see this tall image of a man with a bull holding a trident as Osho, the Indian will see him as Lord Shiva.

So we just don't know enough to place the boundaries between these images.

And the images are deeply porous between different faiths.

So it's interesting.

So you said there's not one religion and these sculptures of different religions in place that matter.

Do we know whether certain Kushan rulers, did they very much buy into it?

Or is it the more local elites who are potentially the ones who are really promoting the spread of these religions and so on?

Do we know much about that within the actual power structures of the Kushan Empire and the people in control?

So what we see very clearly is that the further south the Kushans move, the more they get influenced by Indian religions.

And while the early Kushan kings, who seem to have been based in a particular Sukh, Kotal in central Afghanistan,

subscribe to a mixture of ancient Greek and Persian deities,

by the time that they're running a lot of their empire from Mathara, which is now in India, they are worshipping first Lord Shiva and then finally the Buddha.

And it is ultimately with the greatest of the Kushan kings, Kanishka, who's the only one who's a household name in India today, and who's remembered in Buddhist tradition as the man who chaired the fourth Buddhist council, which is for Buddhism what I suppose the council of Nicaea or the Council of Chalcedon is for early Christians.

I was literally going to say, he almost feels like, and it may be later Buddhist tradition, of course, with the sources being written later, but he almost feels like a Constantine equivalent in how he's portrayed in the sources.

That's exactly fair comparison.

And yet he's 200 years earlier.

I mean, Constantine is what, the 315s, 300s.

Kanishka, the date associated with him is 127 AD, which is there on a lot of his coins.

And in one of Kanishka's coins, we have this extraordinary first

numismatic appearance of the Buddha looking like a Gandharan Buddha with this familiar now toga figure and it just says in a Greek script bodo very helpful there it is bodo kanishka on on one side, bodo on the other.

But Greek script is still there at the same time, which isn't.

So all this stuff is bubbling around together.

Mainly they're working in, there's a whole variety of different languages which are being used, but yeah, Greek is one of them.

And there is, both in terms of language and in terms of religion, this sort of surprising multiplicity and porosity, which the Kushan.

kings seem to employ.

But what we have with Kanishka is a very clear image of him himself.

There are two famous headless images.

One, now decidedly destroyed, was in the Kabul Museum.

And that was this sort of figure with an enormous cloak, a Central Asian knee-high boots.

And then there's a very similar image in the Matra Museum where he's got this club.

And again, the same sort of padded boots.

and this lovely kaftan with beaded pearl rim on it.

And it's only lately that we've had a complete image with Kanishka's face appear, and he's wearing this little sort of Parthian peaked hat with curls.

So he's this big guy with a club and a big nose and big physique.

Very Heracles-like almost.

Yeah, a sort of bodybuilder

figure.

And it's under him that we see, in a sense, the final triumph of Buddhism as the religion which at this period seems to win out over the Greek cults, over the Persian cults, and even over many of the Hindu ones.

But it doesn't last.

It is just this brief moment when Buddhism is triumphant.

So they've still got Greek at this time.

There's Greek in this inscription.

But just as you have different gods, often with the same king, from what we would regard as competing pantheons.

So one day there's a Hindu image, there's another one there's a Greek, third one, there's a Persian.

So the different languages are there.

So the Bodo seems to be in a debased version of the Greek script, but most of the Kushan inscriptions are in a language called Karoshti,

which is a version of Aramaic.

So Aramaic gets as far as Afghanistan.

We think of it as a language associated with the Middle East and the language of Jesus and an early cousin of Hebrew.

But it's there in inscriptions

in Kandahar.

It's amazing, isn't it?

We've talked quite a bit now about Buddhism and religion in the Kushan Empire, and it seems like there was this kind of great multitude.

I'd like to ask a bit about the position.

So with the Kushan Empire at its height, so it stretches from southern Uzbekistan to the Ganges plain in modern this.

As far as Allahabad,

the place where the Kummela happens every few years.

There was a big Qum this year, which I went to.

And big ancient Indian cities like Taxila, Sagala, Pataliputra.

Taxila.

So Pataliputra is near modern or under modern Patna in Bihar, so a little bit further east.

Taxila is way north in what's now outside Islamabad today, outside Roalpindi, in what's now Pakistan.

And Taxila seems to have been a major Kushan center too.

It's associated in many of the Buddhist Jataka tales with education

and seems to have been an early,

some scholars use the word university town.

So you have these centers of learning where people go to study.

And in fact, one of the first references we have to Taxila is Chandragupta Maurya.

the grandfather of Ashoka, who goes to study in Taxila.

And that's where he encounters Alexander.

Alexander the Great.

Yes, exactly.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with MyPlan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then-current base monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

Thumbtack presents.

Uncertainty strikes.

I was surrounded.

The aisle and the options were closing in.

There were paint rollers, satin and matte finish, angle brushes, and natural bristles.

There were too many choices.

What if I never got my living room painted?

What if I couldn't figure out what type of paint to use?

What if

I just used thumbtack?

I can hire hire a top-rated pro in the Bay Area that knows everything about interior paint, easily compare prices, and read reviews.

Thumbtack knows homes.

Download the app today.

The whole central position of the Kushan Empire, you know, existing at the same time that you have the Han Dynasty in China and of course you have to the west you have the end of the Roman Republic and the beginnings of the Roman Empire.

You have mentioned in our last chat how India was the biggest trade partner of the Roman Empire and this idea of an overland Silk Road, it's difficult to portray it as that way, how the Romans had contact with China in that way sort of thing.

Well, we know that the Romans and the Chinese had no clear conception of each other's existence.

There's rumors in both places that there may be this city called These, which they talk about in the Peripolis, where silk silk is said to come from but it's not like the indian ports in the same text where which are described as you know you go here you buy that and it's here and then it's north of here and south of there these is this distant mythical city that is said to be beyond the seas and difficult to get to likewise the roman texts talk about this sort of distant empire that that is said to exist to the far west uh daquin So there's no clear evidence for any direct contact

between Greece and Rome.

there may have been capillary trade you know things moving slowly along trade routes and eventually reaching the far end of a long trade route but that's in strong contrast to what you've got between the red sea coast of egypt and the west coast of india where you have whole fleets of 250 vessels setting off as strabo describes in great merchant fleets going to trade with with each iteration of the monsoon wind.

One of the Indians, India's great gifts is that the winds blow hard in one direction for six months and then it reverses and comes back.

So if you're an Indian sailor, you've just got to put up a sail.

And if you're looking westwards, you can end up, if you trim your sails correctly, at the Red Sea coast where Mon Porphyrites, the source of porphyry, is, where Berenike, which is this wonderful trading port where the Chicago archaeologists under Steve's sidebottom had found these extraordinary Buddha images and landing places for Indian vessels.

And the Kushans were an important part of that trade.

What seems to have happened is that they captured both

the port of Barbarakum, which is more or less where modern Karachi is, or rather Karachi airport, in fact, just

to the east of Karachi, where the mouth of the Indus is, where the Indus debouches into the ocean.

And people seem to have landed there, then punted on rafts up as far as Bagram, where the Bagram treasure, where we were talking about earlier, turns up.

So under the American Air Force Base in Bagram, archaeologists found Alexandrian glassware with pictures of the Pharaoh's lighthouse or, you know, sort of gladiator images.

There's a beautiful gladiator cars, isn't there, from Begrum, from Bagram.

Another of the date harvest, another of the wine harvest.

And

in reverse, you get Yakshis, these gorgeous, voluptuous figures we were talking about.

made under Kashan rule in ivory turning up in Pompeii.

Also, Also, the one we often forget about, we think about, we always talk about the trade between Rome and India.

What we forget is there's also Aksum and the Ethiopian kingdoms on the way, halfway point.

And so there's an enormous hoard discovered fairly recently in one of the high early churches of Ethiopia of, I think it's 250 Kushan coins turned up there, which.

There are wonderful descriptions and very good scholarly papers about.

And also, I'm guessing, I don't want to use the word middlemen because I don't think it's accurate.

However, there is evidence of Kushan contact with the Han dynasty in China as well.

And they're kind of these beautiful lacquer wares they found in the Begram horde.

So you have all this kind of beautiful stuff.

Plus, you get a lot of very nice Kushan textiles turning up in the Zhongnyu burials in what is now Mongolia.

Wow.

So the Huns are actually the middlemen between the Chinese and the Kushans.

And if you go to the hermitage, Russian archaeologists digging in the 20s and 30s, or Soviet archaeologists, found these incredible Kushan textiles that look quite like the early images in Ajanta from the cave nine in Ten Ajanta is about 150 BC.

And these have the same three-quarter profile images of vaguely Hellenistic, not a million miles from the Fayoun portraits.

That's early sort of Hellenistic with these melancholy faces.

And these are now, you know, in St.

Petersburg,

miles away from the world that we associate.

But that's because the Zhongnu traded for these things.

They were found in Zhongnu burial grounds and are now in Russia.

So do you think it's not improbable, or it is certainly possible, if we also go back to that point you mentioned earlier, that

Buddhism is big with traders, that you could have had someone from the Kushan Empire living in that area of the world, actually.

going on a trading mission down to, well, the Indian Ocean and then across to the Red Sea and up to Alexandria.

So you could have had within the Roman Empire Kushan traders.

Almost certainly.

So there's several signs of this.

So first of all, there are

figures that are almost certainly Kushan ambassadors on Trajan's connect who seem to have arrived in Rome, found that the emperor was away and followed him to Dacia, where the images are recorded.

That's Romania to Romania.

So you have Kushan, what looks very like Kushan ambassadors turning up in modern Romania, which is way up beyond where you expect to find them.

But

the big excitement and where a lot of new data is turning up are these excavations in Berenike, Berenike,

on the Red Sea coast.

This is near two crucial places.

One is Mons Porphyritis, where all the porphyry in the world comes from.

So the phrase born in the purple, that's because the imperial birthing chamber in Rome is clad with this porphyry.

The other other interesting site that's just near to there is the monastery of St.

Antony, the first Christian monastery in the world.

And given that we now have clear evidence from Berenike that there is Buddhist activity, I mean, beautiful Buddha's heads carved in Alexandria, set up in a temple to the goddess Isis on the Red Sea coast, given that that is the case, And given that by this stage, Buddhist monasticism was already 400 years old and had spread from the Ganges plain right across india through sri lanka to burma to afghanistan pakistan

is it possible now to imagine that

these buddhist monks if they were familiar figures in egypt inspired the early christian monks to head out in the desert the desert fathers were basically a christian take on buddhist monks we can't ask that question yet but it's a question we can now ask

and we couldn't ask it but you know, 10 years ago, because we hadn't found clear Buddhist remains in Egypt.

We now have, they're on the Red Sea, they're just on the coast where St.

Anthony's is just

50 miles from St.

Anthony's.

It's absolutely extraordinary.

William, I wish I had so much more time to ask so many more questions.

I'm going to limit myself only to a few more.

And I want to go back to actually something that is a pet favorite topic of mine.

Now, when the Kushans take over in Afghanistan, as you mentioned, there are those Greek cities, you know, it's more

places like that.

But of course, the Greco-Bactrian rulers that had come before, you have, I mean,

they leave behind what I would argue is the most beautiful coinage in the ancient world.

There's one coin of Eucrates, I think, which is the largest coin from antiquity.

They're gorgeous.

They are absolutely gorgeous.

And their faces look like our faces.

They look, I mean, very specifically European faces.

And some of the hats they're wearing are rather like sort of cenotopes.

So they do feel...

No wonder the Victorians got so excited when they dug them up because they look just like the Victorians.

Well, exactly, exactly.

But so the question I'd like to ask then is when the Kushans arrive, and if it seems like at least for a time, they continue with Greek writing as well and the Greek language, at least in Persian.

And Greek queens, if we're writing,

as you were saying, with their coinage as well, can we see a significant influence from that preceding dynasty with the Kushan coins?

I mean, what do we know about that?

I think there is influence, but it's there in a salad that includes Persian and Indic influence.

And it's just one element in the salad.

If you read Victorian archaeologists talking about it, they were obsessed, of course, with the classical and tend to drown out the Indic and the Persian elements

in this mix.

But

there's all sorts of things going on.

And right through the Kushan period, there's very different vibe in Gandhara, which is now the Peshawar Valley, to what's going on in Matra.

You can always tell the sculptures apart because

the stone they use

in the gandharan valleys is this dark schist which is often gilded and so we have some of the very first gilded images of the of the buddha you know which becomes such a big thing in thailand and burma later on and japan but these early classical schist images often have still their gilding intact when they're dug up

and these are quite different from the far more indian looking far more rounded figures dug up in Matra.

And so, for example,

the female images that appear in the in in in the sequences showing the life of the buddha in gandhara they're all wearing basically roman clothing or what we can recognize as as sort of mediterranean classical wear and the women are quite covered up in matra they've got everything out they're all half naked they're wearing these tiny little girdles a lot of them are courtesans that are deliberately showing off their everything.

I mean,

they're full-on

voluptuous images.

I mean, the point of these images is that they're meant to be symbols of fertility.

So they're playing up the sexiness, the fecundity, the fertility of the female figures.

But there's a, you know, the Indian ones from Matra often have these Yakshis

who are carrying wine.

There's a little artistic trope whereby the sort of capital above them is in the form of a couple in a sort of booth at a Taverna with glasses and the Yakshis filling up their glasses or bringing a jar of wine to them.

And we're right back there in that classical world of courtesans and taverns and wine drinking and merriment.

And Gandhara is slightly more sort of covered up.

It's slightly more decorous.

It's slightly more sort of proper.

Plus, you have these extraordinary classicized figures, which always used to be thought by the Victorians to be the evidence of the surviving currents of Bactrian Greek imagery, but which archaeologists now emphasize

is probably nothing to do with the Bactrian Greeks at all.

It's contemporary Roman models.

So there are only a few hints in classical art to distinguish what was ancient Greek from what is first, second century Roman.

But the Gandharan images

have those pointers.

So for example, ball and claw feet on furniture.

It's something that didn't exist in ancient Greece, but did exist in classical Rome.

And you find them in Gandharan

So these key telltale pointers that the kind of Western art that is influencing the art of Gandhara is coming from contemporary Rome, not from leftover legions of Alexander stuck in the Hindu Kush or all this romantic stuff that we love.

But it actually doesn't work time-wise because the Bachelor Greeks are kind of out of the picture by 150 BCE

and the

gorgeous Gandhara Buddha figures with these tall, handsome bodhisattvas with these moustaches and

these very developed physiques they're meant to be

the future Buddha Maitreya in his paradise and he's shown as if he's just come out of the gym you know buffed torso covered in gold jewelry with just had a nice visit to the barber and his moustache is perfectly waxed

and And these images actually

become, reach their peak in sort of second, third, fourth century AD.

Right.

So it's late classical.

And then we even have some images of Gandhara which seem to reflect Coptic art.

So we have,

which I have in the book, an extraordinary image of a Coptic papyrus of Jesus and his disciples, which has identical iconography to some Gandhara murals which are now in western China, the site of Miran, discovered by Oral Stein in the 1920s,

currently located in the National Museum in Delhi.

Exactly the same iconography, except it's the Buddha and his disciples, not Jesus.

So

the Coptic original of Jesus has become the Buddha in the...

And the Kushans were still ruling at that time over that central area, were they?

So the Kushan dynasty had fallen, but their cultural influence and the kind of artistic models that they have pioneered by the fourth and fifth century are still in use in the post-Kushan world.

Talk to us a bit about that as we wrap up now, William.

You've highlighted, you know, the Kushan, it's the name of the dynasty ruling over these regions where you see these great transformations in art, like in Gandhara, as you say, and that influence from the Roman world is fascinating.

What happens to the Kushan dynasty that's been watching it, you know, that had great figures like Kanishka and so on?

So Kanishka is usually regarded as the peak of Kushan power, about 127 AD.

And he manages to defeat the Parthians for his lifetime, but the Parthians begin to roll back and you get the

coming after

the Kushans' fall.

And you have a period of various dynasties and unclear chronologies until a century later, you get the rise of the Imperial Guptas.

Now, the Imperial Guptas are clearly Hindu, and they are great favourites of Indian nationalist textbooks because they are...

they follow the same gods as modern Indians do.

So they have very clearly Brahma, Vishnu, Lord Shiva, the goddess, particularly the goddess Durga.

And we see with Gupta rule the period that is always said to be the high classical period of Indian civilization.

It's the period when the Indian Shakespeare

writes Shakuntala and the Cloud Messenger.

It's the period when the Karma Sutra is composed.

It's the period when the great mathematician Aribatta is writing about zero and

between him and Brahmagupta developing the Indic number system, which is the one we use today.

The nine Indian figures plus zero is India's greatest gift to the world.

So we hear a lot about the Guptas in Indian history books.

They're very familiar to anyone that's grown up in India in a way the Kushans often aren't, with the single exception of Kanishka.

But in many ways, there is less evidence archaeologically of the Guptas than there should be.

Maybe it's just we haven't found the sites yet.

Maybe it's that they're built in wood.

But in sheer terms of the amount of artworks sitting there as sculpture in Indian museums and particularly in Indian museum storerooms, there's vast amount of Kushan material with very little historical names and battles and biography to associate with.

And then we get these Gupta, this Gupta period, where we have

these very clear images of great classical Indian kings like Chandragupta and

a whole succession of great Gupta kings, but there's much less building work, archaeology and art.

I mean there's some lovely stuff, but there's less.

And there's a bit of a mystery because if the Guptas were as powerful as their coins and their inscriptions indicate, and if they were as important to the

foundations of Indian civilization as generations of Indian school children have been told,

there should be slightly more than there is.

And, you know, maybe, you know, archaeology is still

not as well funded in India as it should be.

And it could be that in the next generation, we discover all sorts of really amazing Gupta sites.

But my personal opinion, judging on what's available now, is that in a sense, we've slightly overdone.

the importance of the Guptas and we've slightly underdone the importance of the Kushans who I think deserve deserve more recognition than they currently have.

And, you know, neither in the West nor in India are they accorded the importance that they really seem to show in the archaeological record.

And so, are the Guptas the ones who then had defeated the Kushan dynasty and took over?

No, it's the Sasanians that really knock out the Kushans.

You get this revival of Persian power in the early third century AD,

and the unfortunate Kushan king who takes on the Sasanians and loses is Vasudeva I.

And in 240 AD,

he is defeated.

He is clearly Hindu.

Vasudeva is a Hindu name.

And his coins show this image that looks to us like Lord Shiva, but which has the name Osho attached to it.

And I think they basically lose the...

Afghan territories.

They've already begun to lose their Western, what's now Western Chinese territories, what's now Xinjiang, to the Zhongnu.

And so they're left with a rump state in the

in the Gangetic and Yamuna basin, the Doab.

And eventually there's all sorts of dynasties rise up.

And the next sort of big thing, if you like, in Indian history is the rise of the Guptas.

So that's how he gets the Guptas.

And the Guptas come out of the east and come and confront the descendants of the Kushans.

And that is the point.

when in most Indian textbooks, you get, in a sense, the golden age of classical India.

And Indian national textbooks look on the Guptas as Hindu sons of the soil who defeat these invaders.

And so, having got as far as Allahabad, Priyag, on the Ganges, the Kushans have then finally rolled up.

And their last stand is probably Matra, which is the city where everything happens.

It's funny how it all ends in Matra.

That's there we go once again.

Well, William, we've covered a lot.

We've covered our loss in this channel about the Kushans.

Last but certainly not least, talk to us.

You have your book which covers the Kushans and so much more.

It is called.

It is called The Golden Road, How Ancient India Transformed the World.

It's available in Hubbard, but next month it's coming out in paperback.

Whoa, okay,

this is beautifully, beautifully timed.

It came out nine months ago when I last came on your wonderful podcast, my favorite history podcast, but it is coming out this month in paperback and will be available, apart from anything else, at the British Museum shop.

Illustrates everything we've talked about for this last hour.

If you want to see tangible evidence of all the things we've talked about, if you're in Britain or in London, do go to the British Museum for this wonderful ancient India show and then go to the shop afterwards and buy the Golden Road.

Go and buy the book.

Well, there you go.

William, you are a salesman at heart and also a brilliant historian on all things ancient India.

It just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today.

Thank you.

Well, there you go.

There was William Dalrymple returning to the podcast to give you an introduction to the Kashan Empire.

I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

William will be back in the near future for a follow-up episode, so stay tuned for that one.

All about India, the spread of Buddhism and Hinduism into Southeast Asia and great monuments such as Angkawat and Borobadur.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Ancients.

Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

It really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour.

If you leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that.

Don't forget, you can also listen to us and all of History Hit's podcasts at free and watch hundreds of TV documentaries when you subscribe at historyhit.com slash subscribe.

That's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.

Popsicles, sprinklers, a cool breeze.

Talk about refreshing.

You know what else is refreshing this summer?

A brand new phone with Verizon.

Yep, get a new phone on any plan with Select Phone Trade In MyPlan.

And lock down a low price for three years on any plan with my plan.

This is a deal for everyone, whether you're a new or existing customer.

Swing by Verizon today for our best phone deals.

Three-year price guarantee applies to then-current-based monthly rate only.

Additional terms and conditions apply for all offers.

This Back to School, hear your teens say something you never thought possible.

Thanks, Ma.

Come to your booth store and take home iPhone 15 with its amazing camera and all-day battery for only $99.99.

Perfect for back to school.

Thanks, Ma.

You won't get tired of hearing it.

Visit your nearest boost store.

Requires ID verification, port in and activation on $60 per month plan and $35 device setup fee.

Taxes extra.