"Gandharan Art in its Buddhist Context is the fifth set of papers from the workshops of the Classical Art Research Centre's Gandhara Connections project. These selected studies revolve around perhaps the most fundamental topic of all for understanding Gandharan art: its religious contexts and meanings within ancient Buddhism. Addressing the responses of patrons and worshippers at the monasteries and shrines of Gandhara, these papers seek to understand more about why Gandharan art was made and what its iconographical repertoire meant to ancient viewers. The contributions from an array of international experts consider dedicatory practices in monasteries, the representation of Buddhas, and the lessons to be learned from some of the latest excavations and survey work in the region."

Gandharan art is often regarded as the epitome of cultural exchange in antiquity. The ancient region of Gandhara, centred on what is now the northern tip of Pakistan, has been called the 'crossroads of Asia'. The Buddhist art produced in and around this area in the first few centuries AD exhibits extraordinary connections with other traditions across Asia and as far as the Mediterranean. Since the nineteenth century, the Graeco-Roman associations of Gandharan art have attracted particular attention. Classically educated soldiers and administrators of that era were astonished by the uncanny resemblance of many works of Gandharan sculpture to Greek and Roman art made thousands of miles to the west. More than a century later we can recognize that the Gandharan artists' appropriation of classical iconography and styles was diverse and extensive, but the explanation of this 'influence' remains puzzling and elusive. The Gandhara Connections project at the University of Oxford's Classical Art Research Centre was initiated principally to cast new light on this old problem. This volume is the third set of proceedings of the project's annual workshop, and the first to address directly the question of cross-cultural influence on and by Gandharan art. The contributors wrestle with old controversies, particularly the notion that Gandharan art is a legacy of Hellenistic Greek rule in Central Asia and the growing consensus around the important role of the Roman Empire in shaping it. But they also seek to present a more complex and expansive view of the networks in which Gandhara was embedded. Adopting a global perspective on the subject, they examine aspects of Gandhara's connections both within and beyond South Asia and Central Asia, including the profound influence which Gandharan art itself had on the development of Buddhist art in China and India.

The ancient Buddhist art of Gandh�ra was rediscovered from the 1830s and 1840s onwards in what would become the North-West Frontier of British India. By the end of the century an abundance of sculptures had been accumulated by European soldiers and officials, which constituted the foundations for a new field of scholarship and internationally celebrated museum collections. Both then and since, the understanding of Gandh�ran art has been impeded by gaps in documentation, haphazard excavation, forgery, and smuggling of antiquities. Consequently, the study of Gandh�ran archaeology often involves the evaluation and piecing together of fragmentary clues. In more subtle ways, however, the modern view of Gandh�ran art has been shaped by the significance accorded to it by different observers over the past century and a half. Conceived in the imperial context of the late nineteenth century as ‘Graeco-Buddhist’ art – a hybrid of Asian religion and Mediterranean artistic form – Gandh�ran art has been invested with various meanings since then, both in and beyond the academic sphere. Its puzzling links to the classical world of Greece and Rome have been explained from different perspectives, informed both by evolving perceptions of the evidence and by modern circumstances. From the archaeologists and smugglers of the Raj to the museums of post-partition Pakistan and India, from coin-forgers and contraband to modern Buddhism and contemporary art, this fourth volume of the Classical Art Research Centre’s Gandh�ra Connections project presents the most recent research on the factors that mediate our encounter with Gandh�ran art.

Gandh�ran art is usually regarded as a single phenomenon – a unified regional artistic tradition or ‘school’. Indeed it has distinctive visual characteristics, materials, and functions, and is characterized by its extensive borrowings from the Graeco-Roman world. Yet this tradition is also highly varied. Even the superficial homogeneity of Gandh�ran sculpture, which constitutes the bulk of documented artistic material from this region in the early centuries AD, belies a considerable range of styles, technical approaches, iconographic choices, and levels of artistic skill. The geographical variations in Gandh�ran art have received less attention than they deserve. Many surviving Gandh�ran artefacts are unprovenanced and the difficulty of tracing substantial assemblages of sculpture to particular sites has obscured the fine-grained picture of its artistic geography. Well documented modern excavations at particular sites and areas, such as the projects of the Italian Archaeological Mission in the Swat Valley, have demonstrated the value of looking at sculptures in context and considering distinctive aspects of their production, use, and reuse within a specific locality. However, insights of this kind have been harder to gain for other areas, including the Gandh�ran heartland of the Peshawar basin. Even where large collections of artworks can be related to individual sites, the exercise of comparing material within and between these places is still at an early stage. The relationship between the Gandh�ran artists or ‘workshops’, particular stone sources, and specific sites is still unclear. Addressing these and other questions, this second volume of the Gandh�ra Connections project at Oxford University’s Classical Art Research Centre presents the proceedings of a workshop held in March 2018. Its aim is to pick apart the regional geography of Gandh�ran art, presenting new discoveries at particular sites, textual evidence, and the challenges and opportunities of exploring Gandh�ra’s artistic geography.

Since the beginning of Gandharan studies in the nineteenth century, chronology has been one of the most significant challenges to the understanding of Gandharan art. Many other ancient societies, including those of Greece and Rome, have left a wealth of textual sources which have put their fundamental chronological frameworks beyond doubt. In the absence of such sources on a similar scale, even the historical eras cited on inscribed Gandharan works of art have been hard to place. Few sculptures have such inscriptions and the majority lack any record of find-spot or even general provenance. Those known to have been found at particular sites were sometimes moved and reused in antiquity. Consequently, the provisional dates assigned to extant Gandharan sculptures have sometimes differed by centuries, while the narrative of artistic development remains doubtful and inconsistent. Building upon the most recent, cross-disciplinary research, debate and excavation, this volume reinforces a new consensus about the chronology of Gandhara, bringing the history of Gandharan art into sharper focus than ever. By considering this tradition in its wider context, alongside contemporary Indian art and subsequent developments in Central Asia, the authors also open up fresh questions and problems which a new phase of research will need to address. Problems of Chronology in Gandharan Art is the first publication of the Gandhara Connections project at the University of Oxford's Classical Art Research Centre, which has been supported by the Bagri Foundation and the Neil Kreitman Foundation. It presents the proceedings of the first of three international workshops on fundamental questions in the study of Gandharan art, held at Oxford in March 2017.