Kushan Empire

Driven west

Drafted from Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002)formation

The Kushans are the far end of a collision that started three thousand kilometres away, and the Chinese histories preserve the first half of it because the Han empire caused it.

The Yuezhi

The Yuezhi held the Gansu corridor, between the Chinese frontier and the Taklamakan, until Modu's Xiongnu broke them in the 170s BC and drove them west. Their king's skull, the Chinese sources say, was made into a drinking cup.

They went across the Tarim, were pushed on again by another people, and ended up in Bactria — the country north of the Hindu Kush that Alexander had conquered, that the Seleucids had held, and where a Greek kingdom had been running independently for about a century. In the 130s BC they took it.

That is the migration Zhang Qian was sent to find. The Han envoy who reached them around 129 BC was proposing an alliance against the Xiongnu and found a people who had been settled in Bactria for a decade, were prosperous, and had no intention of marching three thousand kilometres back the way they had come.

Five tribes, and then one

The Chinese account says the Yuezhi in Bactria were divided into five principalities, each under a yabgu, and that after about a century the principality of Guishuang absorbed the other four and its ruler made himself king.

Guishuang is the Chinese for Kushan. That is the founding, and it comes to us because a Han court historian was keeping track of the peoples beyond the Tarim for reasons of frontier security.

Kujula Kadphises, the ruler in question, then took the country south of the Hindu Kush — Kabul, Gandhara, the Indus — and his successors went on into the Ganges plain.

What they walked into

Bactria and Gandhara in the first century BC were the most thoroughly mixed territory on earth.

Greek settlement from Alexander's colonies, still speaking Greek and striking Greek-legend coins. Iranian populations and Iranian religion. Indian populations, Buddhist and Brahmanical, on the southern side of the passes. Saka and Parthian rulers who had come through in the intervening century. And the trade of four directions crossing at the same passes.

A steppe people arriving in that took over an apparatus rather than a country. The Kushans kept the Greek alphabet — adapted, with an extra letter, to write their own Iranian language — because it was the writing already in use for administration and coinage.

Their coins say the rest. The earliest issues copy the types of whoever had been minting before: Kujula's coins imitate Augustus and imitate the last Greek king of the region. A dynasty establishing itself on somebody else's currency does not begin by asserting a new identity. It begins by being recognisable.

Why the dates are so bad

Almost everything above is approximate, and the reason is worth stating.

There is no Kushan chronicle. There is no king list from inside the empire. The dating rests on coins, on inscriptions using a regnal era whose starting point is not known, on the Chinese notices, and on cross-references to Roman and Parthian material.

The accession of Kanishka — the most important date in the whole subject — has been placed by serious scholars anywhere between about AD 78 and AD 230. The current consensus favours about 127, on the strength of an inscription found in 1993, and it is a consensus rather than a settled fact.

An empire that ran from the Aral Sea to Benares, minted gold to the Roman standard and carried Buddhism to China cannot be dated to within a century.

A Chinese princess

Drafted from Smith, The Early History of India, from 600 B.C. to the Muhammadan Conquest (1904)expansion

Kujula Kadphises died around 85 AD, past eighty years old, and left the Kushan throne to his son, generally known to history simply as Kadphises II. The new king inherited an ambition to match his father's conquests, and aimed it first at an adversary his father had never had to face directly: Han China, at the height of its own reassertion of control over the Central Asian oasis routes.

An insult, answered with a defeat

For thirty years, from 73 to 102 AD, the Chinese general Ban Chao had led campaigns that reopened the roads north and south of the Taklamakan and brought kingdom after kingdom - Khotan, Kashgar, Kuche, Kharachar - back under Chinese suzerainty. Kadphises II, who considered himself the equal of the Chinese emperor rather than a subordinate power on his frontier, responded to this advancing authority in 90 AD by demanding a Han princess in marriage. Ban Chao read the demand as the insult it was clearly intended to be, arrested the envoy who delivered it, and sent him home.

Kadphises II answered the rebuff by sending an army: seventy thousand cavalry under his viceroy Xie, across the Pamirs by a pass some fourteen thousand feet high. The mountains did more damage to the force than any Chinese army needed to. What emerged into the plains beyond was so shattered by the crossing that Ban Chao destroyed it without difficulty. Kadphises II was compelled to pay tribute to the Han court - the one clear military defeat in an otherwise unbroken record of Kushan success.

Compensation, found elsewhere

The check on his ambitions in the direction of China did not end them. Over the following decade Kadphises II turned the same energy against India instead, extending Kushan rule across the whole of the north-west and down the Ganges as far as Benares - a conquest apparently significant enough that an Indian embassy appeared in Rome in 99 AD to announce it to the emperor Trajan, at the furthest reach either empire's diplomacy stretched toward the other.

What the gold said

It was Kadphises II, not his father, who put Kushan coinage on a gold standard for the first time - striking an abundant issue of aurei that matched the weight of their Roman prototypes closely enough to circulate alongside them, at exactly the period Roman gold was arriving in quantity to pay for Indian silk, spices and gems. His own coin legends call him basileus basileon, king of kings, a title his father had never claimed for himself. A ruler who had just been humbled on his eastern frontier by an empire he considered his equal made sure that everywhere else his money travelled, it said otherwise.

Kadphises II reigned for perhaps thirty-five or forty years, into the 120s AD, before the throne passed to Kanishka - the successor whose name would outlast every other Kushan king's by a margin his own father's failed Chinese marriage proposal could never have predicted.

The tower over the boy's tower

Drafted from Faxian, A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms (1886)expansion

At Peshawar around 402, a Chinese monk was shown the largest building he had seen anywhere, and was told the story of why it was there.

The prophecy

Faxian records that when the Buddha was travelling in that country he told Ananda that after his parinirvana there would be a king named Kanishka who would build a tope on that spot.

Kanishka was duly born. One day, riding out to look about him, he came on a little herd-boy making a tope by the roadside — Sakra, the ruler of the gods, in disguise, put there to give the king the idea. The king asked what he was making. I am making a tope for Buddha. The king said, very good.

And then, directly over the boy's tope, he reared another, more than four hundred cubits high and adorned with layers of all the precious substances.

Of all the topes and temples which the travellers saw in their journeyings, there was not one comparable to this.

The little tope, the story ends, came out from the side of the great one, more than three feet high.

What the story is doing

Read it as a claim about legitimacy and it is exactly the right story for this dynasty.

The Kushans were a steppe people ruling Buddhists, Greeks, Iranians and Indians who had no reason to accept them. What the tale supplies is a prophecy: the Buddha named this king personally, five hundred years in advance, and the god Sakra came down to make sure he thought of it.

And the detail that makes it work is the boy's tope emerging from the side. The king's enormous structure does not replace the small one; it contains it, and the small one is still visible. That is a very precise image of what the Kushan empire was doing with the traditions it had come to govern.

The bowl

Faxian also records what else was at Purushapura: the Buddha's own alms-bowl.

And he records that a king of the Yuezhi had come with an army to take it, and could not — the elephants he had brought could not move it, so he built a tope and a monastery there instead and left a guard, and made offerings.

A Kushan king failing to carry off the relic and endowing a monastery on the spot instead is a story about the limits of conquest told by the people being conquered, and the Kushans evidently let it stand.

What the empire actually was

At its height it ran from the Aral Sea and the Oxus across the Hindu Kush, through Gandhara and the Punjab, down the Ganges to Benares — and the point of it is not the extent but the junction.

Four commercial systems met inside one government's territory: the Chinese silk route through the Tarim, the Iranian roads to Mesopotamia, the Indian trunk routes to the Gangetic plain, and the sea route from the Indus mouths to Egypt. Kushan gold was struck to a weight that matched the Roman aureus closely enough to circulate against it, which is what a state does when a great deal of Roman gold is arriving.

Kanishka's own titles on his coins say the same thing without a word of narrative: shaonanoshao, king of kings, which is Iranian; maharaja, which is Indian; devaputra, son of god, which is a translation of the Chinese tianzi.

Three imperial vocabularies on one coin, because the man issuing it was answerable to populations that used all three.

The junction

Drafted from Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002)peak

The Kushans came out of the Yuezhi, a Central Asian people displaced westward by the Xiongnu on the Chinese frontier, and by the second century AD they held Bactria, Gandhara and much of northern India — precisely the junction where the routes from China, Iran and India met.

Everything about them reflects that position. Their coins carry Greek letters writing the Iranian Bactrian language, and deities from the Greek, Iranian, Hindu and Buddhist pantheons on the reverse, sometimes across a single reign. Kanishka patronised Buddhism and is remembered in Buddhist tradition as a council-convening sponsor comparable to Ashoka.

The consequence that outlasted everything else is the transmission. Mahayana Buddhism moved out of India into Central Asia and from there along the oasis routes into China under Kushan rule and through Kushan territory, which is why there are Buddhist cave complexes in the Tarim basin and why the religion reached the Han court. The Gandharan sculptural tradition, Buddhist subject matter in Greek-derived form, is the visible residue of the same junction.

The empire was broken by the Sasanians in the third century, in the one period when an Iranian empire and an Indian one shared a frontier directly rather than through intermediaries.

What the coins say

Drafted from Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002)aside?What aside means

Kushan political history is thin — the chronology of the kings is still argued over, and the date of Kanishka's accession has been placed anywhere across a century. The coins carry most of the weight.

They are trilingual in effect: Greek script writing the Iranian Bactrian language, with Kharosthi on some issues, and a pantheon on the reverses that includes Greek deities, Iranian ones, Shiva, and the Buddha — the Buddha's first appearances in human form on coinage are Kushan. A single reign issues gold with Iranian fire gods and gold with Buddhist iconography, and the gold standard matches Roman aurei closely enough to indicate the trade the empire lived on.

This is not syncretism as a philosophy. It is a state advertising itself in every currency of legitimacy available to the populations it taxed and traded with, which is what an empire straddling Bactria, Gandhara and the Ganges plain had to do.

The transmission happened along the same routes. Buddhism moved north-west out of India through Kushan territory into the Tarim oases, and from there to China, where it arrives in the Han period at the far end of the road the Han had opened to buy horses. The Gandharan sculptural tradition, which gave the Buddha a Hellenistic face, is the residue of Alexander's colonists three centuries earlier.

A steppe people, a Greek settlement, an Indian religion and a Chinese trade route meet inside one government's territory, and the meeting is the empire.

Taken from the west

Drafted from Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002)end

The Kushan empire was broken by the state that replaced the Parthians in Iran, and the evidence for it is a rock inscription in three languages that lists the provinces of somebody else's empire as though they were now provinces of this one.

The Naqsh-e Rustam inscription

Shapur I, who ruled Iran from about 240, had his titles and dominions cut on the Ka'ba-ye Zartosht at Naqsh-e Rustam, in Middle Persian, Parthian and Greek.

The list of what he holds includes Sind, Sakastan, Turan, and — the phrase that matters — the Kushanshahr as far as Peshawar, and as far as Kashgar, Sogdiana and Tashkent.

Some of that is claim rather than possession. What is not in doubt is that the Sasanians took the Kushan territories north and west of the Indus in the middle of the third century, and governed them through princes of their own house who struck coins as Kushanshahs — Kushano-Sasanian, in the modern term: Sasanian rulers using Kushan titles and Kushan coin types over Kushan territory.

The other end

While that was happening from the west, the eastern part of the empire was coming apart on its own.

Kushan rule in the Gangetic plain shrinks through the third century; local dynasties reappear in the sources; the coinage debases sharply, from good gold to base metal, which is the ordinary signature of a state that has lost either its bullion supply or its ability to enforce a standard.

A rump Kushan kingdom persisted in the north-west into the fourth century and was finally cleared away by the Kidarites and then the Hephthalites — steppe peoples arriving by the same route the Yuezhi had used four hundred years earlier, and doing to the Kushans exactly what the Kushans had done to the Greek kingdom of Bactria.

Why the end is so vague

Because the sources that let us see the beginning were Chinese, and the Han empire fell apart in the same decades.

The Chinese notices that recorded the Yuezhi migration, the five principalities and the rise of Guishuang were written because a unified Chinese state was managing a western frontier and needed the intelligence. After the Han collapse in 220 there is no such state and no such interest for a very long time, and the Kushans go dark from that side at precisely the moment they start losing.

From the Iranian side there is Shapur's inscription and the Kushano-Sasanian coins, which say who won and nothing about how. From the Indian side there is almost nothing: no chronicle, no dated king list, and inscriptions in an era whose starting point is disputed.

So an empire whose beginning is dated by a Chinese envoy's report and whose end is dated by a Persian king's boast has, in between, no history from its own hand at all — which is a fair description of what it is like to hold a junction. You appear in everybody's records except your own.

The face

Drafted from Thapar, Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300 (2002)afterlife

For four hundred years after his death the Buddha was not shown. Then, in Kushan territory, he was — and what he looked like was Greek.

Aniconism, and the end of it

Early Buddhist art represents the Buddha by absence: an empty throne, a parasol, a pair of footprints, a wheel, the Bodhi tree with nobody under it. The reliefs at Sanchi and Bharhut are full of crowds worshipping a space.

In the first and second centuries AD that stops, in two places at once — Gandhara in the north-west, and Mathura on the Jumna. Both are Kushan.

The Gandharan Buddha wears a himation in heavy classical folds, has a straight nose and wavy hair gathered in a topknot that is treated like the hair on a Greek god, and stands in a contrapposto. The workshops that produced him were working in a Hellenistic idiom that had been in Bactria and Gandhara since Alexander's colonists, applied to an Indian subject by sculptors serving a Central Asian dynasty.

Kanishka's coins carry the earliest images of the Buddha in human form on any coinage, labelled in Greek letters: BODDO.

Why it happened there

Nobody knows, and the honest answers are all partial.

One is that a devotional Buddhism developing towards the Mahayana wanted an object to venerate, and the anthropomorphic image met a demand rather than creating one. Another is simply that the Gandharan workshops had the technique and the habit of representing gods as men, and were commissioned. A third, which the Kushan coins support, is that a dynasty putting Greek, Iranian, Hindu and Buddhist deities on its own money in human form had already normalised the practice.

What is certain is the direction it travelled afterwards. The Gandharan and Mathuran images are the ancestors of every Buddha figure from Bamiyan to Nara — the seated Buddha of the Tarim caves, of Longmen and Yungang, of Korea and Japan, descends by a traceable line of copying from statues made in the Kushan north-west.

The road

The other inheritance is the route, and the Kushans held every stage of it.

Buddhism moved out of India across the Hindu Kush, along the oasis chain of the Tarim — Khotan, Kucha, Turfan — and into China, arriving at the Han court in the first century AD. The translators who did the work at Luoyang in the second century included men from Parthia, from Sogdiana, and from the Yuezhi themselves: the names given them in the Chinese sources begin with a syllable identifying their origin, and Zhi marks a Yuezhi.

So the first substantial translations of Buddhist scripture into Chinese were made partly by subjects of this empire, along a road this empire policed, in a period this empire's own chronology cannot fix.

What is left of them

Almost nothing above ground, and an enormous amount underground.

The great tope at Peshawar that Faxian called the finest he had seen anywhere was excavated in 1908 and found to contain a reliquary casket with an inscription naming Kanishka. The Gandharan sculpture is in museums by the thousand. The Bactrian language, written in Greek letters, was largely unreadable until documents began surfacing in the 1990s.

And the dynastic sanctuary at Rabatak, found in 1993, gave a genealogy and a list of conquests in Kanishka's own words — the first Kushan king to speak directly rather than through a coin legend, seventeen centuries after he stopped.