The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.12

c8.12

What this district is at present I would only too willingly stop to describe to you; for I have trodden it in every direction during happy months of archæological campaigning. Gandhâra — for such was its Sanskrit name — shows us after all only a vast, gently undulating plain, bristling in places with rugged hills, and three parts encircled by a belt of fawn-coloured or bluish mountains, which nearly everywhere limit the horizon. But the opening left by them on the south-east over the Indus is the great gate of India; and to the west the winding Khyber pass remains the principal route of communication between the peninsula and the Asiatic continent; and the towns which formerly guarded this ancient route of invading armies and merchant caravans were Purushapura (now Peshawar); Pushkarâvatî, the Peukelaotis of the Greeks; Çalâtura, the natal town of Pânini, the great legislator of Sanskrit grammar; Udabhânḍa (now Und), where the great river was passed, in winter by a ford, in summer by a ferry, and whence in three days one reached Takshaçilâ, the Taxilâ of the historians of Alexander... And immediately you feel how in this country, which one might call doubly classic, memories associated with the two antiquities, Hellenic and Indian, arise from the ground at each step. Even if history had not preserved for us any remembrance of the memorable encounter between the two civilizations, the mute witnesses in stone, which we have come purposely to interrogate, would be sufficient to establish it. To cut as short as possible (¹), let me lead you straight to the centre of the country, into the little garrison town of Hoti-Mardân : and there, at the hospitable mess of the regiment of the Guides, I will show you, leaning against the wall of the dining-room and no longer inhaling any incense but the smoke of the cigars, the most beautiful, and probably also the most ancient, of the Buddhas which it has ever been granted to me to encounter (pl. XI, 2).