Place · archaeological museum · Pakistan
Peshawar Museum
Opened in 1907 as the Victoria Memorial Hall and holding the largest collection of Gandharan sculpture in the world — something near fourteen thousand objects, including the Kanishka casket from Shāh-jī-kī-Dherī and the fasting Buddha from Sikri, whose ribcage is the most reproduced image the school produced. The building itself is a colonial hybrid, Mughal domes and chhatris over a British hall. It is where the sculpture cleared out of the Mardan and Swat monasteries in the nineteenth century ended up, when it did not leave the country.
- Function
- Arts & performance
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.008, 71.558
Worth knowing
Because the monasteries were cleared for sculpture rather than excavated for evidence, the museum holds thousands of panels whose original position on a stupa nobody recorded — a complete corpus of a school's art with its architecture detached from it.
Connections (4)
- Image migrationKanishka Stupa, Shāh-jī-kī-Dherī
What Spooner found in the stupa is now in the museum. His 1908–09 excavation of Shāh-jī-kī-Dherī reached the relic chamber of Kanishka's great stupa and recovered the inscribed gilt-bronze casket that names the king and dates itself to his first regnal year — one of the anchors of Kushan chronology. The casket went to the Peshawar Museum, a few kilometres away; the Buddha relics inside it were presented to Buddhist Burma and are at Mandalay; and the stupa mound itself is built over.
- Image migrationJamāl Garhi
The museum holds what the monasteries lost. Jamāl Garhi was cleared for sculpture from 1848 — the schist panels of the Buddha's life prised off the chapels and shipped out, to Kolkata, to London, and to this building in Peshawar. Because the sites were mined for objects rather than excavated for evidence, nobody recorded which panel stood where, so the museum's fourteen thousand pieces constitute a complete corpus of a school's art with its architecture permanently detached from it.
- Institutional successionGandhāra
Gandhara as a school is largely known through this building. The monasteries of the Peshawar valley, Mardan and Swat were cleared of their sculpture across the nineteenth century, and the Peshawar Museum is where the largest share of it came to rest — some fourteen thousand pieces, the biggest Gandharan collection anywhere. The consequence is that the school's art and its architecture were separated: the panels are catalogued in a hall in Peshawar, and the walls they faced are foundations on hillsides fifty kilometres away.
- Site withinPurushapura / Peshawar
Peshawar Museum lies within Purushapura / Peshawar — the two sites sit about 2 km apart, well inside the city's historical boundary and part of the same urban or peri-urban landscape. Peshawar Museum is one of the specific sites that give Purushapura / Peshawar its layered character, and reads differently when seen as a stop within the larger city rather than as an isolated monument on an open map. The surrounding neighbourhoods, roads and other heritage ensembles belong to the same single urban fabric.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Peshawar Museum”. KP directorate of archaeology and museums records; Kurt Behrendt, The Buddhist Architecture of Gandhāra (2004).
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