Gandharis Erotic

The Gandharis were an Indo-Aryan people of the ancient northwest of the Indian subcontinent, attested from the Vedic period, roughly the late second millennium BCE, in the Peshawar valley, Swat and the country around Taxila, in what is now northern Pakistan and the eastern edge of Afghanistan. They did not vanish so much as dissolve into the peoples who came after. By the time Mahmud of Ghazni broke the Hindu Shahi kings in the early eleventh century CE, the name Gandhara was falling out of use, and the Pashtuns, Hindko speakers and Dardic-speaking hill communities who live there today stand where the Gandharis stood.

They enter the record early and at an angle. The Rigveda knows them for the wool of their sheep, and the Atharvaveda wishes fever away onto them, the way one curses distant neighbors. Buddhist texts count Gandhara among the sixteen great states of the Buddha's era. What set the Gandharis apart was position: they held the door between India, Iran and Central Asia, and everyone came through it. Darius I listed Gandara among his provinces, and Herodotus put Gandarian troops in the army Xerxes marched against Greece. Alexander arrived in 327 BCE, followed by the Mauryas, Indo-Greek kings, Scythians, Parthians and the Kushans, who made Purushapura, modern Peshawar, an imperial capital.

The Gandharis absorbed all of it and made something of their own. Their language, Gandhari, was a Middle Indo-Aryan Prakrit written in Kharosthi, a right-to-left script derived from Aramaic, the chancery script of the Persian empire. Ashoka's rock edicts at Shahbazgarhi are cut in it, and Gandhari birch bark scrolls from around the first century CE are the oldest Buddhist manuscripts known. The language traveled with merchants and monks along the Silk Road and served as an administrative tongue in oasis kingdoms of the Tarim Basin. Buddhism dominated Gandharan life for centuries, alongside Brahmanical, Iranian and Greek cults. Its workshops carved gray schist Buddhas with wavy hair and heavy draped robes that owe a plain debt to Mediterranean sculpture, among the earliest images of the Buddha in human form. Taxila drew students from across the north, and the grammarian Panini, whose analysis of Sanskrit remains a founding work of linguistics, was a Gandharan from Shalatura.

Hun invasions in the fifth and sixth centuries broke the monasteries and their patrons, and the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang found most of them deserted in the seventh. The legacy outlasted the people. The Buddha image that reached China, Korea and Japan descends from Gandharan models. The Mahabharata's queen Gandhari, mother of the Kauravas, carries the country's name. Some linguists regard Torwali and neighboring Dardic languages of the Swat hills as Gandhari's closest living relatives.