Place · Kushan summer capital · Afghanistan
Begram
The Kushan-period archaeological site at Begram (ancient Kapisa, Afghanistan), 80 kilometres north of Kabul — the summer capital of the Kushan empire under Kanishka I (c.127-150 CE) and the findspot of the 'Begram Hoard' of ivory, bronze and glass luxury objects discovered by Joseph and Ria Hackin's French archaeological mission in 1937-39 and 1946. The hoard includes Alexandrian glass vases, Indian carved ivory furniture plaques, Chinese Han-period lacquer, and Roman bronzes — a material record of long-distance exchange across the Silk Road, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean trade networks in the 1st-3rd centuries CE. The hoard was looted during the Afghan civil war; much was recovered by the Afghan National Museum from the Islamabad black market in 2004. Begram's political and commercial centrality to the Kushan empire is now the standard understanding of ancient trans-Asian trade.
- Function
- Archaeology & heritage
- Tradition
- Begram archaeology
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.970, 69.260
Connections (2)
- Trade routeMathurā school
The two sealed rooms excavated at Begram in the 1930s held Roman bronzes and glass, Chinese lacquer, and hundreds of Indian ivories — furniture plaques carved with women under gateways, in a style that belongs to the Mathura and Deccan workshops. Whether the rooms were a royal treasury or a merchant's warehouse is still argued, but the Indian half of the hoard is the largest body of early Indian ivory anywhere.
- Trade routeRome
The Begram hoard is the single clearest demonstration that the Silk Road worked, because the Roman glass from Alexandria, the Chinese lacquer and the Indian ivory were all stacked in the same two rooms in the Hindu Kush. Nothing else in the archaeology of the route puts the three ends of it in one place, and it is why a Kushan summer capital in Afghanistan is on every map of ancient trade.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Bagram”. Aurel Stein’s reports; Susan Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road; the International Dunhuang Project.
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