Kushan Empire

• 1. Introduction

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  The Kushan Empire sat, for a time, at the absolute center of the ancient world. Historian Alain Daniélou put it plainly: "for a time, the Kushana Empire was the centerpoint of the major civilizations." From roughly 30 CE to 375 CE, a dynasty born from nomadic roots in northwestern China reached south into the Indian subcontinent, west toward Persia, and east toward the Han dynasty of China. Its rulers hosted ambassadors from Rome, dispatched Buddhist missionaries to China, and stamped coins bearing more than thirty different gods from three continents. How did a group of wandering tribes from the grasslands of Xinjiang become the hinge of the ancient world? And how did they hold such a vast, culturally fractured empire together for three centuries before it began to fall apart?

• 2. From Grasslands to Bactria

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  The people who would build the Kushan Empire began as one of five aristocratic tribes of a confederation the Chinese called the Yuezhi. The Records of the Great Historian and the Book of Han place them in the grasslands of eastern Xinjiang and northwestern Gansu, in the northwest of modern China. Their displacement was violent. Around 176-160 BC, the Xiongnu, a rival nomadic power also at war with China, beheaded the Yuezhi king and forced the confederation to migrate west. They reached the Hellenic kingdom of Greco-Bactria, in what is now northern Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, around 135 BC, displacing Greek dynasties who retreated toward the Hindu Kush and the Indus basin.

  Of the five Yuezhi tribes, it was the Guishuang who rose to dominance. The Chinese source Ban Gu's Book of Han records that the Kushans divided up Bactria in 128 BC. By the 1st century BC, the Guishuang had welded the other Yuezhi clans into a tight confederation. Their leader, Kujula Kadphises, did not merely unify them. According to a Chinese report relayed by general Ban Yong to the Chinese Emperor around 125 AD, Kujula "attacked and exterminated the four other" tribal princes and established himself as king. He then pushed outward, taking the Kabul region and defeating the kingdoms of Paktiya and Gandhara. He was more than eighty years old when he died.

  The earliest documented Kushan ruler on record is actually a figure named Heraios, who called himself a "tyrant" in Greek on his coins and whose skull shows the deliberate deformation practiced across nomadic Central Asia. He may have been Kujula's father. What is certain is that by the time Kujula Kadphises was consolidating power, the dynasty he built would last for another three centuries.

• 3. A Pantheon of Many Gods

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  Kujula Kadphises, the dynasty's founder, was a follower of the Shaivite sect of Hinduism, yet he also absorbed Iranian and Greek cultural ideas straight from the Greco-Bactrian tradition he had displaced. This blend was not unusual for Kushan rulers. Vima Kadphises, Kujula's grandson and the father of Kanishka, embraced Shaivism as well, as his coins suggest. The great emperor Kanishka himself employed elements of Zoroastrianism in the imperial pantheon. Later rulers patronized Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, and Hindu Shaivism all at once.

  The evidence for this religious eclecticism lives on in the coinage. Kushan coins, struck in gold, silver, and copper, depicted more than thirty different gods drawn from Iranian, Greek, and Indian traditions. Iranian figures on the coins include Mithra, Ahura Mazda, and Verethragna, the god of war. Greek deities appear with their Greek names: Zeus, Helios, Hephaistos, Heracles, and the Greco-Egyptian god Sarapis. Indian figures include the Buddha, the bodhisattva Maitreya, and a figure associated with Shiva. After the reign of Huvishka, the coin imagery narrowed: only two divinities continued to appear, Ardoxsho and Oesho.

  The Kushans did not confine religious pluralism to their coinage alone. Apparently the main architect of the Kushan temple at Surkh Kotal was a Greek named Palamedes, whose name appears in a Greek inscription reading "through or by Palamedes." This single inscription proves that Hellenistic populations remained active in Bactria well into the Kushan era, working alongside the empire's Iranian and Indian builders.

• 4. Kanishka and the Buddhist World

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  Kanishka the Great, the fourth Kushan king, ruled for about 23 years from approximately 127 CE and commanded a territory that stretched from Ujjain and Kundina in central India east to Pataliputra. His era is now generally accepted to have begun in 127, based on the research of Harry Falk, and the Kushans used this dating system as a calendar reference for roughly a century afterward. The Rabatak inscription names the cities that fell under his rule and confirms he was the son of Vima Kadphises and great-grandson of Kujula Kadphises.

  Kanishka's two administrative capitals were Purushapura, now Peshawar in northwestern Pakistan, and Mathura in northern India. He also held a summer capital at Kapisa near modern Bagram, where a treasure comprising works of art from Greece to China has been found. He is credited, along with Raja Dab, with building the massive Fort at Bathinda, known as Qila Mubarak, in the modern city of Bathinda in Indian Punjab.

  In Buddhist tradition, Kanishka is celebrated as one of the faith's greatest patrons, ranked alongside the Indo-Greek king Menander I, the Indian emperor Ashoka, and Harsha Vardhana. He is renowned for having convened a great Buddhist council in Kashmir. Kanishka's armies pushed north of the Karakoram mountains, and a direct road from Gandhara to China remained under Kushan control for more than a century, facilitating the spread of Mahayana Buddhism into China. The 12th-century Kashmiri chronicle Rajatarangini records that the kings Huska, Juska, and Kanishka "constructed in Suskaletra and other places monasteries, Caityas and similar edifices," and that during their rule Kashmir "was for the most part an appanage of the Buddhists."

• 5. The Silk Road and Rome

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  The Kushan Empire's geographic position was not an accident of conquest. By linking the seagoing trade of the Indian Ocean with the commerce of the Silk Road through the Indus Valley, the Kushans became indispensable middlemen. Chinese silks moved toward Rome; Roman glass, perfumes, pepper, and ginger moved east. The Chinese described Roman goods available in the Kushan realm: "Precious things from Da Qin the Roman Empire can be found there."

  Several Roman sources describe ambassadors from the kings of Bactria and India arriving during the 2nd century. The Historia Augusta records that during the reign of Emperor Hadrian (117-138), "the kings of the Bactrians sent supplicant ambassadors to him, to seek his friendship." In 138, the emperor Antoninus Pius also received Indian, Bactrian, and Hyrcanian ambassadors. Some Kushan coins bear an effigy of "Roma," indicating the level of diplomatic awareness between the two empires. The summer capital at Kapisa has yielded a considerable quantity of goods imported from Rome, including various types of glassware.

  With China, the relationship was more complicated. The Kushans allied with the Han dynasty general Ban Chao against the Sogdians in 84 CE, and assisted him again in an attack on Turpan around 85. When the Kushans then requested a Han princess as a diplomatic reward, they were refused. In retaliation, they marched against Ban Chao in 86 with a force of 70,000 but were defeated by a smaller Chinese force. The Yuezhi retreated and paid tribute to the Chinese Empire during the reign of emperor He of Han (89-106). Despite this setback, Kushan Buddhist missionaries such as Lokaksema later became active in the Chinese capitals of Luoyang and sometimes Nanjing, where they translated Hinayana and Mahayana scriptures into Chinese.

• 6. Art Between Worlds

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  According to Benjamin Rowland, the first expression of Kushan art appears at Khalchayan at the end of the 2nd century BC, derived from Hellenistic art and possibly from the cities of Ai-Khanoum and Nysa. Rowland draws a direct line between the famous head of a Yuezhi prince from Khalchayan and the Gandharan Bodhisattvas, including a head of a Bodhisattva held in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He also notes the striking similarity between the Gandhara Bodhisattva and the portrait of the Kushan ruler Heraios.

  At Gandhara, which sat at the crossroads of Kushan territory in the area that is now eastern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan, the imagery blended Greek, Syrian, Persian, and Indian influences. Kushan figures in Gandharan art appear in tunics, belts, and trousers, positioned as devotees to the Buddha. The heavy drapery and curly hair visible in many Gandharan sculptures reflect Western stylistic influence absorbed through centuries of Hellenistic contact.

  When the Kushans also took control of Mathura, that city's artistic tradition expanded rapidly. Free-standing statues of the Buddha came to be produced in large quantities, encouraged by doctrinal shifts in Buddhism that allowed images of the Buddha where aniconism had previously prevailed at sites such as Bharhut and Sanchi from the end of the 2nd century BC. The monetary record provides one more artistic footnote: a gold treasure discovered in 1972 at Dalverzin Tepe revealed circular and parallelepipedic gold ingots. The parallelepipedic ingots bear inscriptions in the Kharoshthi script recording their weight and invoking the god Mitra as protector of contractual relations.

• 7. Fragmentation and Fall

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  After the death of Vasudeva I, the last of the "Great Kushans," around 225 CE, the empire split into western and eastern halves. The Western Kushans in Afghanistan were soon subjugated by the Persian Sasanian Empire. The Sasanian king Shapur I (240-270) lists the Kushan territory explicitly in his Naqsh-e Rostam inscription, claiming dominion "up to the limits of Paškabur and up to Kash, Sughd, and Chachestan." The Sasanians replaced the western Kushan dynasty with Persian vassals called the Kushanshas, also known as Indo-Sasanians or Kushano-Sasanians. This branch ultimately became powerful enough under Hormizd I Kushanshah (277-286) to rebel against the Sasanian Empire itself.

  The Eastern Kushan kingdom, based in the Punjab, fared differently. Around 270, their territories on the Gangetic plain broke away under local dynasties such as the Yaudheyas. In the mid-4th century, the Gupta Empire under Samudragupta absorbed the remnants. His inscription on the Allahabad pillar records that the last Kushan rulers were forced to offer "self-surrender, offering their own daughters in marriage and a request for the administration of their own districts and provinces." The coinage from this period tells the same story: silver coinage was abandoned entirely, and gold coinage was debased, suggesting the eastern Kushans had lost their central role on the trade routes that supplied luxury goods.

  The final blow came in 360, when a Kidarite named Kidara overthrew the Kushano-Sasanians and the remnants of the old Kushan dynasty. The Kidarites issued coins in the Kushan style, claiming Kushan heritage, but operated on a smaller scale. What remained of Kushan culture under the Kidarites in the northwest was wiped out by the end of the 5th century by the Alchon Huns, sometimes considered a branch of the Hephthalites, and then the Nezak Huns. The Gupta Empire's own coinage, which had initially derived its weight standard and designs from Kushan coins, gradually shifted to more distinctly Indian imagery, marking the quiet end of Kushan cultural reach across South Asia.