The Ancients - The Kushan Empire

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Embark on an epic journey with Tristan Hughes and acclaimed author William Dalrymple as they unravel the enigma of the Kushan Empire, the ancient superpower of Central Asia. Together they tell the riveting stories behind the Empire's rise in Bactria (modern-day Afghanistan), their astonishing spread into Northern India, and the profound impact of Indian religious traditions on their culture.An unforgettable exploration of one of history's most fascinating yet overlooked empires.MOREThe Origins of Buddhismhttps://open.spotify.com/episode/52mGOQenJdnN8NvYDDYstiOrigins of the Silk Roadhttps://open.spotify.com/episode/5GBcXUsq6V54S2ywICDbM9Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on

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Sacrilege blends pulse-pounding suspense with powerful explorations of identity and privilege to deliver a thriller as thought-provoking as it is terrifying. We all have our demons. Listen to Sacrilege, Curse of the Embiowee now. Go to audible.ca slash sacrilege. 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 ancient 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 centre 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 ground breaking book all about ancient India and how it was at the centre 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 Kashan Empire. William what a pleasure, great to have you back on the podcast.

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 lamé loose seat, which is something that only the ancients could afford with their spectacular success. You're right. And I did demand that as long as we're on the screen. 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. Or Kushan, you say Kushan, do you? That's how you say it. I say Kushan. Yeah. Better than I know it anyway. 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 it's fair to say that 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 known. 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, 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 are virtually absent from popular perceptions of the past, but they're incredibly important, 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 that Kashan's 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.

And 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 for 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 Kushana 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 Kushana, much of it coming out of one particular city, Mathura, which we'll be talking more about. Mathura, 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. What's incredibly irritating is that because it yielded so much beautiful sculpture, a lot of it quite 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, 1770s, and 1880s 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, you know, Gandhara is as good as we can do, you know, the Peshawar Valley or Mathura, the wider Mathura 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 Buddha that are found as far west as Egypt as far east as Japan are derived from innovations made in Mata 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. Absolutely. It feels like the Kushans, although you have all of this art 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 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 two empires along. 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, you know, are two away from the people who were writing the report. So it's quite hazy. One thing we do have very good evidence of is new, mismatic 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 well for a lot of money on the art market and Spinks has auctions of these things very regularly, which go for more and more each year. So we have the names, but even, 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 two sides of a notepad. We won't do that then, we won't because we'll finish very quickly. 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 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 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 Mathura, which is where Krishna, another of the central figures of the Mahabharata, comes from. On the other hand, you have Mathura, 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, in every way, the Kushan period seems to be the period when a lot of the iconography, the mythology, the stories crystallise into forms that we recognise 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 will get to the word Xiongnu or Hun then I'm presuming. Exactly. 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 Xiongnu or the Huns, 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 Kushans down into Afghanistan. So it's like a domino effect. So the success of the Chinese in moving their Han problem westwards leads to the Kushans tumbling down through Afghanistan,

through Pakistan, through the passes to the to the the Gangetic Plain and the Doab, the region around Delhi today. And we see the Kushans appearing for the first time, or at the USE as they 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 to talk

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 phrasers or the camels or even the Stewart's 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 Uighurs 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 plant. There's no other word for it. There's these textiles

that have cross patch colored textiles, which are actually not dissimilar to tartan, reds and blues that could easily find themselves on a kilt or a scarf today. No, you as a Scotsman absolutely love that. I've always loved this. And so these seem to be the people that become at some point known to the Chinese at 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 Batra and Greek cities, though 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 that they're looting the cities, but they're keeping the water systems going. And we have Atilya Tepe in Afghanistan. And anyone that saw the great Afghan treasure 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 dew drops of gold falling down in these headdresses. But with them these royal burials and you had clearly a point to 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 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 ferretman 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 Baryugas 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 aniconic, 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 Kadfaisi. That's quite a name. It's quite a 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 is something that you tend to notice straight away when you look at the coins. Is Lord Shiva Hindu pantheon? So Lord Shiva is a 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 Khoroshchity inscription in some cases. You've got Greek as a… So this is one of the fascinating things that I really want to highlight straight away. So William said the Yuezhi 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 images of Buddha, Buddhism is already in that area as well. Initially one stray extraordinary early image. Okay, so that's the exception. The earliest image that we probably have. Right. Okay, 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 traditions as well. As you said, it's one of those amazing moments that this is all known about, but when they finally reach that area 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 Yamuna, towards where Delhi now is.

Yet the effect culturally of these guys coming south and unifying both sides of the Himalayas. So 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. Right. 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 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. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack, or Julius Caesar, or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit. Because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience. What's in all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries, as well as probing into everyday issues, the

nitty-gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out here and avoid the bedpan. It almost feels like a bit of a U-turn as well if I'm thinking about 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 Mezaynak is incredibly important. It's about three hours drive from Kabul. If you leave 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 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. Dr. 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 cite their monasteries on mineral deposits, Mezzanak 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, gives some very nice geographical 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 a script basically saying, I 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 Caravanserais, 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 Kashans 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 follow on from there. 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. Very nicely put. Thank you. I've been thinking about that all the time. It expanded into northern India as well. So Afghanistan on one side, northern India on the other, and we'll get a bit more to matter 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?

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 super curvy voluptuous images. Again, do very well on the market. 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 Dindia, how there was 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 Yakshas,

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 Yakut is that they either hold on to a branch or they kick the bow of the tree and the tree bursts into flower. Now this is, weirdly enough, an image that exists through all of Indian art, having started with the Kashans. 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. But if 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, 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 bump into. 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'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 were reading too much Kipling, the Man of the Big King, 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 coga, 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 ancient Indian 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 plough, 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 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 Mathura or in the Gandhara 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 Polytheists often did in the Roman Empire and the Greek Empire, the same images can be read by people of different faith as different gods. So while a Persian may see this 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 of that matter. Do we know whether certain Kushan rulers, do 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 sort called Tal 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 Mathura, 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, the 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 one side, Bodo on the other. But Greek script is still there at the same time. 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 king seemed to employ. But what we have with Kanishka is a very clear image of him himself. There are two famous headless images. One now decided destroyed was in the Kabul Museum. And that was this sort of figure with an enormous cloak, central Asian knee-high boots. And then there's a very similar image in the Muttra Museum,

where he's got this club. And again, the same sort of padded boots, and this lovely koftan with beaded pearl rim on it. And it's only lately that we've had a complete image with Konishka's face up here, 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 king from what we would regard as competing pantheon. So one day there's a Hindu image, there's another one, there's a Greek, there's a Persian. So the different languages are there. So the Bodo seems to be in the debased version of the Greek script, but most of the Kushan inscriptions are in a language called Karashti, 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 northern India. Correct. As far as Allahabad, the place where the Kumbh Mela happens every few years. There was a big Kumbh this year, which I went to. And big ancient Indian cities like Taksila, Sagala, Pataliputra. Taksila, so Pataliputra is near modern, under modern Patna in Bihar, so a little bit further

east. Taksila is way north in what's now outside Islamabad today, outside Raupindi, in what's now Pakistan. And Taksila 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 Ali Khan. That's under the grotes, yes, exactly. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack? Or Julius Caesar? Or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast

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The whole central position of the Kushan Empire, 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 rumours in both places that there may be this city called Thies, which they talk about in the Peripolis, where silk is said to come from. But it's not like the Indian ports in the same text, which are described as, you go

here, you buy that, and it's here, and then it's north of here and south of there. Thies 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 is said to be beyond the seas and difficult to get to. Likewise, the Roman texts talk about this sort of distant empire that is said to exist to the far west, Daqun. So there's no clear evidence for any direct contact between Greece and Rome. There may have been capillary trade, 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 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 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 Porphyretes, the source of porphyry is, where Berenike, which is this wonderful trading port where the Chicago archaeologists under Steve 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 Barbaricum, 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 debushes into the ocean. 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 out. So under the American Air Force base in 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 Faroes night house or, you know, sort of the gladiator images. There's a beautiful gladiator vase isn't there 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, 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 Axum 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 it. 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 Begrim Horde. So you have all this kind of beautiful stuff. Plus, you get a lot of very nice Kushan textiles turning up in the Zhongnu 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 and ten Ajanta is about 150 BC. And these have the same three quarter profile images of vaguely Hellenistic, not a million miles from the fire and portraits. That's early sort of Hellenistic with these melancholy faces. And these are now in St. Petersburg, miles away from the world that we associate. But that's because the Xiongnu traded for these things. They were found in Xiongnu 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 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 is figures that are almost certainly Kushan ambassadors on Trajan's column, who seemed to have arrived in Rome, found that the emperor was away and followed him to Daesha where the images are recorded.

So it's Romania today. So you have Kushan, what looks very like Kushan ambassadors turning up in modern Romania. So it is way beyond what you expect to find them. But the big the big excitement and where a lot of new data is turning up are these excavations in Berenice on the Red Sea coast. This is near two crucial places. One is Mons Porphyritus, 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 interesting site that's just near to there is the monastery of St.

Anthony, the first Christian monastery in the world. And given that we now have clear evidence from Berenice that there is the monastery of St. Anthony, 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 spread from the Ganges plain right across India, 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 to the desert

and 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 10 years ago because we haven'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. 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. I want to go back to actually something that is a pet favourite topic of mine. Now, when the Kushans take over in Afghanistan, as you mentioned, there are those Greek cities, it's more complicated.

Ikanum. Ikanum, 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 Eucratides, I think, which is the largest coin from antiquity. They're great. They're gorgeous. They are absolutely gorgeous. And their faces look like our faces. They look, I mean, very specifically European faces.

Yes. And some of the hats they were wearing are rather, very specifically European faces. Yes. And some of the hats they were wearing are rather like sort of cenotopes. They do feel, one of the Victorians got so excited when they dug them up, 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 parts. And Greek language, at least in parts.

And Greek queens if we're right. And Greek queens 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 intend 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 Mathura. 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 Buddha, which becomes such a big thing in Thailand and Burma later on in 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. For example, the female images that appear in the sequences showing the life of the Buddha in Gandhara, they're all wearing basically Roman clothing or what we can recognize as Mediterranean classical wear. 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 the Indian ones from Matra often have

these Yakshis who are carrying wine. There's a little artistic trope whereby the capital above them is in the form of a couple in a booth at a at a taverna with glasses and the actually is 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 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 is something that didn't exist in ancient Greece, but did exist in classical Rome, and you find them in Gandhara. 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 Batchimis are kind of out of the picture by 150 BCE and the gorgeous Gandhara Buddha figures with these tall, handsome Bodhisattvas with these mustaches and they're very developed for Sikhs. 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, just had a nice visit to the barber and his mustache is perfectly waxed. And these images actually reach their peak in 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 Gandharam 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. Well, talk to us a bit about that as we wrap up now, William. You've highlighted 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, 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 Indo-Parthians 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 favorites of Indian nationalist textbooks because 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 Aryabhata 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 built it wood. But in sheer terms of the amount of artwork sitting there as sculpture in Indian museums and particularly 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 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 maybe 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 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 in Turkos? No, it's the Sassanians 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 the first. Right. And in 240 AD, he is defeated.

He's 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 Gangetic and Yamuna based in 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.

Yeah. 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 Kashans are then finally rolled up. And their last stand is probably Mathura, which is the city where everything happens. It's funny how it all ends in Muttra. There we go once again. Well William, we've covered a lot.

We've covered a lot in this channel about the Kushans. Last but certainly not least, talk to us. You have your book on 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 Habat, but next month it's coming out in paperback. Whoa, okay, okay. So 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 talked about on this for this last hour. If you want to see tangible evidence of all the things to talk about, if you're in Britain or in London, It 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 to 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 South East Asia and great monuments such as Angkor Wat and Borobudur. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify

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