CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Kushan Empire
Art under the Kushan empire, 1st–3rd century AD: Gandhara and Mathura sculpture, early Buddha images and cosmopolitan royal coinage.
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About
The Kushans, a people from Central Asia, built an empire that at its height in the 2nd century AD reached from what is now Uzbekistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan into northern India. Astride the trade routes linking Rome, Iran, India and China, their court absorbed influences from all of them, and its coins show Greek, Iranian, Indian and Buddhist deities side by side.
Kushan rule saw two great sculptural schools flourish. In Gandhara, around Peshawar and the Swat valley, sculptors worked in grey schist and stucco with a Hellenistic feel for drapery and anatomy, carving bodhisattvas with moustaches and jewellery, and reliefs narrating the Buddha's life. At Mathura, south of Delhi, carvers used mottled red sandstone for fuller, more frontal figures in an Indian idiom. Both produced some of the earliest images of the Buddha in human form. A headless statue of the emperor Kanishka from near Mathura shows a ruler in a stiff long coat and heavy boots.
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