Excerpts : Melting Pot of Civilizations / Mes Aynak: Afghanistans Buddhist buried treasure faces destruction / William Dalrymple / The Guardian, Friday 31 May 2013 22.00 BST : Qte a major Buddhist settlement, occupied from the first century BC and to the 10th century AD, at a time when South Asian culture in the form of the Buddhist religion and Sanskrit literature were spreading up the Silk Route into China, and when Chinese scholars and pilgrims were heading southwards to the Buddhist holy places of the Gangetic plain: Sarnath and Bodh Gaya, and the Buddhist university and library of Nalanda, the greatest centre of learning east of Alexandria. Mes Aynak was clearly an important stopping-off point for monks heading in either direction. //// Then, in 2008, the Chinese returned, this time not as pilgrims or scholars but instead as businessmen. A Chinese mining consortium – Chinese Metallurgical Group and Jiangxi Copper Co – bought a 30-year lease on the entire site for $3bn (£2bn); they estimated that the valley contained potentially $100bn worth of copper, possibly the largest such deposit in the world, and potentially worth around five times the estimated value of Afghanistans entire economy. //// When the medieval physician Abu Ubaid al-Jizani was writing in the early 11th century, it was widely known that Afghanistans former rulers have been famous and celebrated from the most remote ages for the abudance of their riches, the vastness of their treasures, the number of their mines, and their buried wealth. For that country is littered with mines of gold, silver, rubies and crystal, as well as lapis and garnets and other precious things. //// when Mes Aynak was at the peak of its prosperity between the fifth and seventh century AD, Buddhism was spreading over the Hindu Kush and the region was the meeting place for the ideas and peoples of the civilisations surrounding Central Asia. Its mountains and valleys were a major intellectual crossroads where the Hellenistic, Persian, Central Asian, Tibetan, Indian and Chinese worlds met and fused. //// Yet what most distinguished Mes Aynak in the early first millennium AD was the opposite: the fabulously wealthy and cosmopolitan nature of the society that thrived there. At this period, Afghanistan was the epicentre of classical globalisation: midway on the trade route from Rome to China, traders came to Afghanistan from all over the world, bringing painted glass from Antioch, inlaid gold vessels from Byzantium, porphyry from Upper Egypt, ivories from South India, carpets from Persia, horses from Mongolia and Siberia, and lacquers and silk from the China coast. //// One of the centres of this process was the region of Gandhara, whose centre lay around Peshawar in the North-West Frontier province of Pakistan. After the death of Alexander the Great in 323BC the Greek garrisons of India and Afghanistan found themselves cut off from their Mediterranean homeland, and had no choice but to stay on, intermingling with the local peoples, and leavening Indian learning with classical philosophy. The Bactrian Greeks survived for 1,000 years, long after Greek civilisation had disappeared in Europe. Kings with names such as Diomedes of the Punjab, Menander of Kabul and Heliochles of Balkh, ruled over a remarkable Indo-Hellenistic civilisation that grew up in what is now the Taliban heartlands of the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (Fata) and eastern Afghanistan. This civilisation was later cross-fertilised by new influences brought by the Kushans who succeeded the Bactrian Greeks as rulers of Afghanistan, while adopting much of their culture. //// Kushan Gandhara was Buddhist in religion but worshipped a pantheon of Greek, Roman, Iranian, Hindu and Buddhist deities. It left behind it a legacy of finely constructed and richly designed Buddhist monasteries such as Mes Aynak. theguardian/books/2013/may/31/mes-aynak-afghanistan-buddhist-treasure
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 05:23:12 +0000
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