Home > History & Culture > Historical Places > Buddhas of Bamyan
 The Buddhas of Bamyan (Persian - tandis-ha-ye buda dar bamiyaan) were two monumental statues of standing Buddhas carved into the side of a cliff in the Bamyan valley of central Afghanistan, situated 230 km (143 miles) northwest of Kabul at an altitude of 2500 meters (8,202 feet). Built during the sixth century, the statues represented the classic blended style of Indo-Greek art.
The main bodies were hewn directly from the sandstone cliffs, but details were modeled in mud mixed with straw, coated with stucco. This coating, practically all of which was worn away long ago, was painted to enhance the expressions of the faces, hands and folds of the robes; the larger one was painted carmine red and the smaller one was painted multiple colors.[1] The lower parts of the statues' arms were constructed from the same mud-straw mix while supported on wooden armatures. It is believed that the upper parts of their faces were made from great wooden masks or casts. The rows of holes that can be seen in photographs were spaces that held wooden pegs which served to stabilize the outer stucco.
They were destroyed in 2001 by the Taliban. Japan and Switzerland, among others, have pledged support for the rebuilding of the statues.
Bamyan lies on the Silk Road, a caravan route linking the markets of China with those of the Western Asia. Until the twelfth century AD, Bamyan was part of the Indian kingdom of Gandhara. It was the site of several Buddhist and Hindu monasteries, and a thriving center for religion, philosophy, and Indo-Greek art. It was a Buddhist religious site from the second century up to the time of the Islamic invasion in the ninth century.
Monks at the monasteries lived as hermits in small caves carved into the side of the Bamyan cliffs. Many of these monks embellished their caves with religious statuary and elaborate, brightly-colored frescoes.
 The two most prominent statues were the giant, standing Buddhas, measuring 55 and 37 metres (180 and 121 feet) high respectively, the largest examples of standing Buddha carvings in the world. They were perhaps the most famous cultural landmarks of the region and the site was listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site along with the surrounding cultural landscape and archaeological remains of the Bamyan Valley. The statues were represented wearing Hellenic tunics, an echo of Alexander the Great's contribution to the Central Asian mix almost a millennium earlier.
The smaller of the two statues was built in AD 507, the larger in 554.[3] The statues are believed to have been built by the Kushans and Indo-Hephthalites (both eastern Indo-European peoples) at the heyday of their empires. The above mentioned groups were the ancestors of the Hazaras, the most persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan.[4] Physical and facial features of the Hazaras are greatly similar to those in the frescoes found in the ancient relics and caves. Furthermore, considering the historical importance of the Buddhas of Bamyan, unsuccessful claims over the Buddha's heritage have been made by all the ethnic groups in Afghanistan.
The Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Xuanzang passed through the area around AD 630 and described Bamyan as a flourishing Buddhist center "with more than ten monasteries and more than a thousand monks". He also noted that both Buddha figures were "decorated with gold and fine jewels" (Wriggins, 1995). Xuan Zang's account is intriguing as he mentions a third, even larger, reclining statue of Buddha;[1] although it is generally believed destroyed, some archaeological expeditions are searching for it.
A monumental sitting Buddha similar in style to those at Bamyan still exists in the Bingling Temple caves in China's Gansu province |
