The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c7.3

c7.3

With such a history behind them it is not surprising that the people of Gandhāra were thoroughly cosmopolitan in their culture and their outlook. Of their physical appearance we get some idea from the old sculptures. Some of the men, with strikingly tall and dignified figures, closely resembled many present-day Pathāns, and wore the same distinctive kind of baggy trousers and sleeved coat. Others were characteristically Greek; others just as characteristically Indian. And, no doubt, if we knew more about them, we should recognize other racial elements portrayed by the sculptors. The common speech of the people was an Indian Prākrit, but the script they used for the writing of this vernacular was not, as might have been expected, the current Brāhmī of Northern India but a script known as Kharoshṭhī—a modified form of the Aramaic of Western Asia, which had been adopted for official use throughout the Persian Empire during Achaemenid times. Other languages and other scripts were also employed, on occasion, in Gandhāra. The coins, for example, normally had Greek legends on their obverse, Kharoshṭhī on their reverse; but in rare cases the legends were in Brāhmī. Brāhmī, too, was the usual script employed in the sacred manuscripts of the Buddhists. Nevertheless it is true to say that Gandhāra took its everyday speech from India and its writing from the West. This intimate fusion of widely divergent elements was equally apparent in the religious life of the people. As each successive conqueror added his quota to the local galaxy of deities and creeds, the number and variety went on growing. In the second century A.D. the coins of the Kushān kings Kanishka and Huvishka, whose capital was at Peshāwar, exhibit a truly amazing gallery of gods and goddesses, unparalleled, I think, elsewhere in the field of numismatics. Most numerous are the Iranian types, including among others the sun (Mioro), the moon (Mao), the wind (Oado), fire (Athsho), war (Orlagno), victory (Oanindo). The names are given in corrupt Greek. The sun and moon also appear with the Greek labels of Helios and Salene [sic], the fire god with that of Hephaestos, while another Greek deity is Herakles. From the West, too, comes Anahita, the Babylonian Aphrodite, under the name of Nana or Nanaia; and from Egypt come Sarapis and Horus. Of Indian deities the most conspicuous are Śiva (Oesho) and the war gods, Skanda, Kumāra, Viśākha and Mahāsena (Skando, Komaro, Bizago, Maasena). To conclude that these multifarious deities were all worshipped at the heart of the Kushān empire in Gandhāra would be rash; for they may well have been designed as a means of popularizing the new gold currency in distant parts of the Kushān empire and even beyond its borders, where it was hoped the currency might compete with the Roman aureus. Indeed, the great predominance of Western Asiatic types on these coins suggests that the currency was intended for use in the West rather than in the East. But, however this may be, this gold coinage leaves us in no doubt that the attitude of the Kushāns towards religion was as thoroughly cosmopolitan as it was towards other matters, as cosmopolitan indeed as that of the Romans or Alexandrians, and perhaps no less practical. Looking at this