Place · princely capital & excavated stupa · Pakistan
Saidu Sharīf
Also known as Saidu Sharīf — the Swat state & stupa
Two things in one place. Saidu Sharif I is an excavated Gandharan stupa whose Great Frieze carries the Buddha's life in a continuous band, among the most complete narrative programmes the school left in situ. The town above it is named for the Ākhūnd of Swat, the nineteenth-century religious leader whose grandson Miangul Abdul Wadūd founded the Swat State in 1917 — a princely state until 1969 with a reputation, unusual in the region, for schools, roads and swift justice.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.750, 72.357
Worth knowing
The Ākhūnd of Swat was famous enough in Victorian Britain to be the subject of an Edward Lear nonsense poem, so a Pashtun saint of the Swat hills entered English children's verse in his own lifetime.
Connections (2)
- Route adjacencyMalakand
Malakand is the way into Swat, and whoever holds the pass holds the valley behind it. The British garrisoned it in 1895 and were besieged there in the general frontier rising of 1897, the largest tribal mobilisation they faced in the north-west. Twenty years later Miangul Abdul Wadūd founded the Swat State behind that same pass and ran it, with a reputation for schools and swift justice, until 1969 — a princely state that existed in the space the pass created between British India and the mountains.
- Site adjacencyButkara & Swat valley
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.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Saidu Sharif” and “Swat District”. Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan (ISMEO) reports on Saidu Sharif I; Fredrik Barth, The Last Wali of Swat (1985).
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