Gandhāra

The Sanskrit name of the region, Gandhāra, among the oldest named lands of the subcontinent. The Gandhāri and their famous sheep appear already in the Rigveda; in the Mahābhārata the land gives its name to the princess Gāndhārī, mother of the Kauravas, and to her scheming brother Śakuni. Gandhāra, astride the middle Indus and the Kabul valley, was the threshold between India and the lands beyond the mountains, and its great city Takṣaśilā, Taxila, was a center of learning renowned across the ancient world.

Gandhāra is the native, Indian name, the one all the others render. Its position as the gate of India made it the most cosmopolitan of the subcontinent’s regions, ruled in turn by Persians, Greeks, Mauryas, and Kushans, and the meeting-place of their cultures; the same name surfaces in the Achaemenid Gandāra, the Greek Gandárioi, and the Chinese Jiàntuóluó of the Buddhist pilgrims. Few Indian regions were named in so many tongues, and the Sanskrit Gandhāra is the source from which each of the others drew.

The Old Persian name of the region, Gandāra (written without the nasal, Gadāra), one of the easternmost satrapies of Darius, listed among his lands at Behistun and Naqsh-e Rustam. Gandhāra was the Achaemenid frontier toward India, the province from which the empire drew its Indian troops and through which it touched the subcontinent; Herodotus records the Gandarians among the peoples paying tribute and serving in Xerxes’s army.

Gandāra is the Sanskrit name in the Achaemenid chancellery’s form, the Indian region as a Persian satrapy. It is one of the trilingual administrative names, rendered in Elamite and Babylonian beside the Old Persian, and it marks the point where the Iranian and Indian worlds met under one empire. The same name the Vedas had used for the land of Taxila here becomes a line in Darius’s tribute-list, the eastern limit of the Persian world and the western edge of the Indian one.

The Greek name of the people, Gandárioi, and their land Gandaritis, which the Greeks knew first through the Persian empire. Herodotus lists the Gandárioi among the subject peoples in Darius’s seventh tax-district and among the troops marshaled for the invasion of Greece, equipped, he notes, like the Bactrians. The Greeks thus met Gandhāra as an eastern province of Persia before Alexander reached it in the flesh.

Gandárioi is the Sanskrit Gandhāra arrived in Greek by way of the Achaemenid satrapy Gandāra, the name passing through the Persian administrative system to Herodotus’s catalogue of empire. After Alexander, the region became a Greek kingdom and the seat of the Greco-Buddhist art that gave the Buddha his Hellenistic face, so that the Gandárioi of the tribute-lists became, within two centuries, the makers of statues in which Apollo and the Buddha share a profile. The bare ethnonym of Herodotus opens onto one of antiquity’s great cultural fusions.

The Latin name of the region, Gandaris, taken from the Greek; Curtius places it on Alexander’s road into India, the country of the king Taxiles whose capital, Taxila, received the Macedonians, and Pliny sets it among the lands along the Indus. To the Romans it was a name at the very eastern edge of the inhabited world, the threshold of India itself.

The Latin carried the Greek form into the Western geographical tradition, the last of the alphabetic versions of Gandhāra. By the time the name reached Rome it had passed through four languages and as many empires, Vedic India, Achaemenid Persia, Alexander’s Greece, and now Rome; and a fifth tradition, the Buddhist, would carry it east instead, to China, as Jiàntuóluó. Gandhāra is, in this atlas, the meeting-point of the western chain of names and the eastern one, the single region where the Greco-Roman and the Buddhist-Chinese transmissions of a name touch.

The Chinese name of Gandhāra, Jiàntuóluó, a transcription of the Sanskrit into Chinese characters chosen for their sound, used by the Buddhist pilgrims who crossed Central Asia in search of scriptures and relics. Faxian in the fifth century and Xuanzang in the seventh both passed through the region and described it at length: its monasteries, its great stupas, and the legends of the Buddha’s former lives attached to its landscape. To the Chinese Buddhist world Gandhāra was a holy land, the route by which the Dharma had traveled toward China.

Jiàntuóluó is the eastern terminus of the name, Gandhāra carried not west through Persia and Greece but east through Buddhism into China. It belongs to a different transmission entirely from the Greek and Latin forms: where those reached the name through the Achaemenid empire and Alexander, the Chinese reached it through the pilgrim-roads and the spread of the Buddhist canon. The single Sanskrit Gandhāra thus radiated in two directions at once, to Rome as Gandaris and to Chang’an as Jiàntuóluó, the western and eastern echoes of one Indian name.