The Rise, Zenith, and Legacy of the Kushan Empire - Paperback

by Alfredo O'Malley (Author)

The Rise, Zenith, and Legacy of the Kushan Empire

At the crossroads of Rome, China, Parthia, and India, an empire arose from the most unlikely of origins, nomadic refugees expelled from a narrow corridor of grassland in northwestern China, and proceeded to reshape the ancient world with a thoroughness that two millennia of subsequent history have not reversed. Pax Kushana traces the full arc of the Kushan empire from the catastrophic Xiongnu defeat that drove the Yuezhi people westward in the second century BCE, through the dynasty's consolidation in Bactria, its conquest of Gandhara and the Indian subcontinent, and the extraordinary cultural florescence of Kanishka the Great's reign, to the Sasanian dismemberment and Hephthalite catastrophe that ended the classical era of North Indian history.

Drawing on numismatic evidence, epigraphy, archaeology, and the records of Chinese, Roman, and Indian observers, this book argues that the Kushan achievement was above all an achievement of managed pluralism, the demonstration that a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state governed from the world's most contested crossroads could not only survive but flourish. The Kushan empire gave Buddhism its enduring image, carried it to China, established the first genuinely globalised Eurasian trade network, and created in Gandhara one of the ancient world's great artistic syntheses. This is the story of an empire the world forgot and cannot afford to continue ignoring.