Place · Gandharan Buddhist valley · Pakistan

Butkara & Swat valley

Function

Sacred site & pilgrimage

Tradition

Gandharan archaeology

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

34.770, 72.360 (approximate)

Connections (6)

• Site adjacencyGandhāra

  The Swat valley — Uddiyana in the Tibetan texts — is the northern reach of Gandhara, and the Butkara stupa there was enlarged five times over a thousand years, each casing built around the last. Its sculpture is among the earliest Gandharan work. Padmasambhava, who took tantric Buddhism to Tibet in the eighth century, is traditionally from this valley, which is why Swat is still a Tibetan pilgrimage destination.

• AnalogueKanishka Stupa, Shāh-jī-kī-Dherī

  Butkara in Swat and Kanishka's stupa at Peshawar are the two poles of Gandharan stupa building. Butkara was enlarged five times from the Mauryan period onward and its sequence shows the form developing in situ across seven centuries, which is why the Italian excavation there is the reference for stupa typology. Kanishka's is the form at its imperial maximum, over a hundred metres with a timber superstructure — the limit of what the type could be pushed to, and consequently the one that did not survive.

• Site adjacencyAmluk-Dara stupa

  Butkara and Amluk-Dara are both in the Swat valley within about twenty kilometres, and both were dug by the Italian Archaeological Mission, which has worked in Swat continuously since 1956. Butkara gives the long stratigraphy of a sacred area rebuilt again and again; Amluk-Dara gives the standing elevation. Between them, with Barikot's urban sequence, they are why Swat is the best-documented Buddhist landscape in Pakistan and the place Gandharan chronology is argued from.

• Site adjacencyBarikot / Bazira

  Barikot and Butkara are four kilometres apart on the Swat river and together they give the valley its double sequence — the town and the sacred area of the same society, excavated by the same Italian mission. Barikot has the defensive walls, the houses and the Indo-Greek through Shahi stratigraphy; Butkara has the stupa rebuilt across seven centuries. Reading the two in parallel is what allows Swat's Buddhist establishments to be dated against secular occupation rather than against each other.

• Site adjacencySaidu Sharīf

  Butkara and Saidu Sharif I are two excavated sacred areas a few kilometres apart in the same Swat basin, both dug by the Italian mission. Butkara gives the long sequence, a stupa enlarged five times from the Mauryan period onward. Saidu Sharif I gives the narrative programme: its Great Frieze carries the Buddha's life in a continuous band, one of the most complete such schemes surviving in position rather than in a museum case. Between them the valley supplies both the chronology and the iconography of Gandharan Buddhism.

• Site adjacencyThe Gandhara grave culture

  The cemeteries came first. Beneath and around the Buddhist sacred area at Butkara, and at Katelai, Loebanr and Timargarha, lie the stone-lined graves of the Gandhara grave culture, roughly 1700 to 800 BCE — burnished grey ware, copper pins, terracotta figurines, horse gear. The Italian mission dug both, which means the same excavations that established Gandharan stupa chronology also produced the only substantial body of evidence for the north-west in the millennium before the historic period.

On these journeys

• The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India
• Faxian — overland to India, home by sea (399–414)
• The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush

Sources

Butkara Stupa; Gandharan Buddhism

• Wikipedia