Commander Aspavarman is known from inscriptions and coins to have ruled in Gandhara in the early part of the 1st century.
The left scene is a well-known Hellenistic scene often found in Gandhara.
Semitic scripts were not used to write South Asian languages again until the arrival of Islam and subsequent adoption of the Persian-style Arabic alphabet for New Indo-Aryan languages like Urdu, Punjabi, Sindhi and Kashmiri.
Decorated stair risers were used extensively in the Greco-Buddhist art of Gandhara, to form the pedestal to small devotional stupas.
Gandhara |
In 1001, he defeated Raja Jayapala of the Hindu Shahi Dynasty of Gandhara in the Battle of Peshawar and marched further into Peshawar and, in 1005, made it the center for his forces.
It is a relatively broad mythology, as it was adopted and influenced by several diverse cultures such as Gandhara (Peshawar, Pakistan) which was the capital of Bactria.
The Gandhara kingdom of the northwest, and the legendary Gandhara peoples, are also a major part of Hindu literature such as the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
Talageri (2000), based on his proposition of an westward expansion early Rigvedic culture from Harayana (contrary to the nearly universally assumed eastward expansion from Gandhari) and his identification of some Rigvedic rivers, claims this Mandala as the oldest of the family books.