The ancient Buddhist art of Gandhara 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 Gandharan art has been impeded by gaps in documentation, haphazard excavation, forgery, and smuggling of antiquities. Consequently, the study of Gandharan archaeology often involves...

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...