Label Text:
Installed in Art Before 700 CE, Spring 2025 Label Text:
Buddhism and Gandharan Art
Three seated Buddhas face us and a lively group of animals and humans surround them. They reconstruct for us a narrative stela carved in stone for a Buddhist monastery. One stone fragment shows travelers with elephants and camels in procession; its curvature suggests it may have come from a stupa, the sacred mound occupying the center of a monastic complex. Other fragments show archers, processions, and a myriad of human and animal figures. Some, such as the scene of an archery context, may reference the life of the Buddha.
These fragments, alongside the Buddhas in the center case, capture the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia. In the 2nd century CE, the mountainous region of Gandhara (including Afghanistan, Pakistan, and northwestern India) first became part of an extensive trade network, known now as the Silk Roads, linking the Chinese Han Empire in the east to the Roman Empire in the west. Trading towns flourished alongside Buddhist monasteries, where sculptors borrowed from Greco-Roman gods, whose presence in Gandhara dates back to the conquest of Alexander III of Macedonia in the 3rd century BCE.
– Ajay Sinha, Julie ’73 and Helene ’49 Herzig Professor of Art History
[Displayed with 2018.14.9, 2018.14.4, 2018.14.6, 2018.14.7, 1996.9.14, 2019.4.4, and 2018.14.1]
Tags:
ancient; archaeology; camels; elephants Subjects:
archaeological objects; Civilization, Ancient Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=MH+2018.14.5 |
