06-23-2004, 04:14 PM
new exhibition of relics from the Silk Route shows how religions merged and heresies flourished. It's a revelation, says William Dalrymple
Saturday June 19, 2004
The Guardian
Urumqi monster from the British Library Silk Road exhibition. Photo courtesy of the British Library / British Museum
Some 1,500 years ago, in the same area of northern Pakistan that American troops are scouring for Osama bin Laden, there flourished the Silk Route Kingdom of Gandhara. It was ruled at one point by a dynasty of Bactrian Greeks, descendants of Alexander the Great's stranded legions, with such wonderfully unlikely names as Diomedes of the Punjab and Menander of Kabul. At its height in the sixth century AD, traders came to Gandhara from all over the world, bringing painted glass from Antioch, porphyry from upper Egypt, ivories from south India and lacquers from the China coast. Hellenistic in spirit, Buddhist in religion, Gandhara's principle icon was a meditating Buddha, dressed in a Greek toga.
The British began discovering Gandharan Buddhas in the late-19th century, and one of the first men to be dazzled by them was a young Hungarian Jewish emigre intellectual called Aurel Stein. He spent hours in the Lahore Museum, then run by Rudyard Kipling's father, studying the beautiful sculptures. Intrigued, he soon began walking the Karakorums to find further relics of this unlikely Greco-Buddhist world.
He was in the right place at the right time. Rumours had already begun circulating in India about early Sanskrit manuscripts emerging from the sands of Chinese Central Asia. From his reading of Hiuen Tsang, the Chinese pilgrim who ventured across the Gobi desert to visit the Buddhist shrines of India, Stein knew the oasis towns of the Silk Route to the north of the Himalayas had once been sophisticated outposts of Buddhist civilisation, but no one suspected anything had survived the twin onslaughts of the austere monotheism of Islam and the encroaching desert sands. Stein jumped at the chance to explore the area - and what he found surpassed anyone's wildest expectations.
The sands had perfectly preserved every detail of the life that had once been lived in those lost cities - including, crucially, their sacred texts. "In this ever-dry ground," wrote Stein, "time seems to have lost all power of destruction." Although this was not always an unmitigated blessing (at one point Stein found himself digging through mountains of perfectly preserved turds left by generations of Chinese frontier guards), manuscripts, frescoes and painted silk banners soon emerged from the ground as if newly painted. Even the most perishable of grave-goods - such as fancy pastries dating from the time of Christ - emerged intact after 2,000 years in the ground.
Most remarkable of all, at the Cave of a Thousand Buddhas at Dunhuang, Stein persuaded a Taoist monk to part with a recently discovered library that had been bricked up in the wall of an ancient temple. Only when he got the hoard back to the British Museum did it become apparent that the bundle of documents included the earliest printed book in the world, the Buddhist Diamond Sutra of AD868.
Stein's reputation, however, has not shown the same ability to survive the passage of time as the objects he brought back from the Silk Road. The lack of any glittering Tutankhamen-style death-masks meant that the British Museum quickly consigned his collections to its basements. Outside academia, his name was soon forgotten.
Now the British Library is making amends, and looks set to complete the process of Stein's rehabilitation begun by Peter Hopkirk in his book Foreign Devils on the Silk Road . Its exhibition The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith shows, for the first time, the sheer wonder of the artefacts Stein brought back from his 25,000 miles of archaeological travels. Of the 400 treasures on show, over 250 are items excavated by Stein and 150 belong to the British Library, alongside rarely seen loans from China, Japan, Germany and France.
Although it contains no spectacular gold treasures, this is one of the most surprising and stimulating shows to be mounted in the capital for years. It concentrates on the Central Asian section of the Silk Route in the pre-Islamic period and, more specifically, on the stories and lives of the people who lived then. On show is a prayer for bad period pains, a piece of seventh-century anti-war poetry and a letter apologising for drunken behaviour at a dinner party.
There are some beautiful early-medieval silk paintings: my favourite is a humorous cari-cature of a beak-nosed storyteller, walking the Silk Route with a tame tiger and a backpack full of Buddhist scrolls. Yet every bit as moving as these delicate paintings are the simple remnants of everyday Silk Route lives: a felt slipper or a broken mousetrap.
Today, of course, what draws most travellers to the oasis cities of the Silk Route - Kashgar, Khotan, Samarkand - is their breathtaking remoteness. Yet what most distinguished these places in the early first millennium AD was the opposite: the fabulously wealthy and cosmopolitan nature of the societies that thrived there. Central Asia was the centre of first-century AD globalisation: ideas of art, decorum, dress and religion passed backwards and forwards, melding to create unexpected cultural fusions. Strange heresies and heterodoxies grew and flourished in this environment - something that is dazzlingly apparent from the show's very first exhibit.
As you walk into the gallery, you are immediately confronted with the carved marble funerary monument of a Sogdian trader from sixth-century Samarkand, who died far from home on the edge of the Gobi. He is shown pot-bellied and fork-bearded, sitting down with his Chinese wife under a tented canopy as Sogdian and Chinese dancers strut their stuff to the music of harps, lutes and Indian tabla. Elsewhere on the monument we see the merchant's Zoroastrian funerary rites being performed by a long-robed magus, a veil over his mouth to prevent his breath polluting the sacred fire. A dog stands to one side to drive away the spirit of defilement. Yet the promiscuous nature of the intermingled religious ideas of the time is indicated by the presence, on the very next panel, of the Sogdian goddess Nana, who has no relationship with Zoroastrian beliefs, but whose four arms and lion mount show instead the influence of Hindu-Himalayan Tantrism.
Trade and religion were often fellow travellers: in Syriac, the language of west-Asian trade, the word for merchant ("tgr") was the same as that for missionary. One religion that travelled eastwards along the Silk Route, and was brought to Central Asia by Mesopotamian merchants, was Manichaeism. It was founded by the prophet Mani in Babylon in the third century AD. Brought up in a heterodox ascetic environment where Christian and Jewish Gnostic ideas mingled with Zoroastrianism, Mani went on a pilgrimage to Gandhara where he encountered Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Conceiving all creation as the product of a great struggle between light and dark, good and evil, he saw his religion as a fulfilment of all these different religious currents, and accepted Adam, Zoroaster and the Buddha as prophets, while also subscribing to the Hindu idea of the transmigration of souls. His ideas rapidly spread from Carthage in the west (where the young St Augustine briefly converted to Manichaeism) to Xi'an, the Chinese terminus of the Silk Road in the east, before disappearing by the late Middle Ages.
Stein's discoveries of a Manichaean library recovered not only several of the sacred texts of this lost faith, such as the Great Hymn of Mani, but also images of the vegetarian Manichaean elect, in long white robes and tall, cylindrical hats. Perhaps the strangest image in the show is an eighth-century fragment showing Jesus as an unbearded Manichaean prophet, mounting to heaven in a crescent-shaped moon boat.
No less strange are the relics from the brief moment when Central Asia converted en masse to Nestorian Christianity. Expelled from the Byzantine empire in the fifth century, the church had taken root with astonishing speed further to the east. By the seventh century, Nestorian archbishops watched over cathedrals as far apart as Bahrain, Kerala, Kashgar and Lhasa. By 660AD there were more than 20 Nestorian archbishops east of the Oxus, and Nestorian monasteries in most Chinese cities.
Genghis Khan had a Nestorian guardian and at one point the Mongol Khans nearly converted to Nestorianism, which might have made the church the most powerful religious force in Asia. But instead, by the early years of the 20th century, a series of genocidal reverses brought the church to the verge of extinction.
Archaeologists have recently recovered many relics of this lost eastern Christian church: last month SOAS in London displayed some of the remarkable hybrid gravestones discovered at Quanzhou (the ancient Zaitun) on the China coast. But nothing in Zeitun can match the most beautiful image in the Silk Route show: that of a Nestorian Christian saint from Samarkand, which at first sight appears to be Buddhist. The figure is wearing Buddhist-style robes and is sitting cross-legged in the mudra of preaching; only the two Maltese crosses that the saint is wearing - one on his headdress, the other on his torc - shows his true faith.
The saint represents the familiar in utterly unfamiliar garb - yet that this is so is itself a feature of our prejudices and assumptions. Today we think of Christianity as a western religion, forgetting that it is really an eastern one: it was born in Jerusalem and received its intellectual superstructure in Antioch, Alexandria and Constantinople. At the Council of Nicea in 325AD, where the words of the Creed were thrashed out, there were more bishops from Persia, Central Asia and India than from western Europe. This extraordinary show makes you re-examine that eastern world - and that is why it should not be missed.
The Silk Road: Trade, Travel, War and Faith is at the British Library, London NW1, until September 12. Details: 0870 444 1500.