Sew La Ti Embroidery:
Central Asia

Flanked by River Haro on the one side and Margalla Hills on the other, Taxila is a vast serial site that includes a Mesolithic cave and the archaeological remains of four early colony sites. “It is one of the most important archaeological sites in Asia,” according to UNESCO.

With so much to show the world, Taxila is ignored on the tourist map largely because of the country’s security situation, lack of tourism promotion, and privation of facilities in the city.

From the famous Grand Trunk (GT) Road, a small and poorly metalled road leads to Taxila Museum and the archaeological sites. The picturesque lush green natural landscape has changed dramatically over the last 25 years.

Unplanned houses, hand carts, shops and vendors’ stalls are the modern hallmarks of the area, instead of its previous relaxing and enjoyable natural beauty. The rapid urbanisation of the area and the plunder of the sites has cost the sites dearly and yet nobody pays attention to it.

The results are obvious. The Global Heritage Fund has identified Taxila as one of 12 sites worldwide that are “On the Verge” of irreparable loss and damage. The fund’s 2010 report attributes this irreparable loss to insufficient management, development pressure, looting, and war and conflict as primary threats.

Moving along the dusty and crowded Grand Trunk (GT) Road from Islamabad to Taxila, the monument of Brigadier general John Nicholson, a famous military figure of the British Empire, greets a visitor. The monument is located on the Margalla Hills — the gateway to Taxila.

The sighting of Nicholson’s monument takes the visitor instantaneously to the days of British Colonial Raj. The time when teams of archaeologists were digging around the town of Taxila in search of the lost civilisations. The finding has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

“It’s the marvel Pakistan got from the British Colonial Raj and yet it has not properly promoted as a tourist destination,” said Javed Iqbal, an archaeologist. Taxila is one of the three top Pakistani archaeology sites including the ruins of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro — two of the main cities that comprise the Indus Valley Civilisation, he said.

Sir John Marshall, the director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India from 1902 to 1928, began the excavations at Taxila that continued for the next twenty years. In 1918, Marshall laid the foundation stone of the Taxila Museum to preserve the precious findings.

The museum is built in the middle of the archaeological site and has a rich collection of relics, artefacts, stupas, and stone and stucco sculptures from different Buddhist monasteries, Gandhara Art and the Kushana period. The Kingdom of Gandhara lasted from the Vedic period (1500-500 BC) as a centre of Graeco-Buddhism, Bactrian Zoroastrianism and Animism.

Ahmad Alamgir, another archaeologist and historian, who met me at the museum said that only one significant development had been carried out by the government of Pakistan in almost a century.

“Sir Marshall actually could not complete the original plan of the museum when he had to leave for England. After the creation of Pakistan, the government of Pakistan constructed the northern gallery of the museum in 1998 … and that’s it,” he said.

The museum has a number of galleries in which findings from the surrounding sites have been presented subject wise. There are lines of wall and table showcases in the galleries and a complete stupa, from the Buddhist monastery of Mohra Moradu, stands in the middle of the main hall of the museum.

A vast collection of stucco heads of Buddha showing different faces and styles is the main attraction for tourists. The big Buddha heads are typically Gandharan in style, according to the archaeologists.

City of Cut Stone

The historic town of Taxila, originally Takaśilā in Sanskrit  (meaning City of Cut Stone) is located around 35km from Islamabad just off the famous Grand Trunk Road. The city is still famous of its artisans, who keep their ancestors’ profession alive, by making stone sculptures, murals and panels.

They also produce flower pots, planters, fountains, garden ornaments, balusters, pillars and railings, and fire places. Taxila, according to historians, thrived from 518BC to 600AD. In 326BC Alexander the Great and his armies encountered charging elephants in battle against Hindu king Porus.

Before fighting the battle, Alexander marched through the city and was greeted by King Ambhi. In 300BC Taxila was conquered by the Mauryan Empire under Chandragupta Maurya that disintegrated the Bactrian Greeks, the successors of Alexander, in 190BC. Ashoka, the legendary king of India, ruled Taxila as governor under his father Bindusara’s rule. The city, which is a part of Rawalpindi district, is now a main industrial town of Pakistan with heavy machine factories and industrial complex, stoneware and pottery.

Author: Aftab Kazmi | Source: Gulf News [July 18, 2015]

The two Buddhas of Bamiyan were constructed in the sixth century, at a time when the area was a site of pilgrimage and learning for Buddhists. Both Buddhas were carved out of sandstone cliffs and stood at well over 100 feet, and at one point painted and gilded. They managed to withstand the introduction of Islam to the region and the armies of Genghis Khan, but were unable to survive past the first year of the 21st century. The Taliban destroyed the Buddhas in March 2001.

“These idols have been gods of the infidels,” declared Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, in marking the statues for destruction. “First they fired at the Buddhas with tanks and artillery shells,” recalled one Afghan who participated in the attack. “But when that was ineffective, they planted explosives to try to destroy them.” When the Buddhas finally crumbled, Taliban fighters “were firing weapons into the air, they were dancing and they brought nine cows to slaughter as a sacrifice.” The monuments had endured for centuries, only to disappear in a matter of weeks.

The city is situated about half a kilometre north east of the district, on the banks of River Daur near Sera-e-Saleh. Once housed by the last of the Central Asian kings Azes I and II in Gandhara, the city today is a graveyard of yesteryear.

At a height of about 1,000 feet above the river, the settlement overlooks the entire Haripur landscape, whispering anecdotes of the past. Indo-Scythians were essentially Central Asian tribespeople who migrated to South Asia in 2 BC. They were called ‘Shaka’ in the vernacular, a morphed version of their Persian name Saka. They have been repeatedly mentioned in classical Hindu texts as a warrior nation. Their foothold in the region remained firm for several centuries.

Unearthed by accident

Legend has it the ancient city, proverbially called the ‘Castle of three sisters’ – Katiyan, Matiyan and Satiyan, was first discovered in 1993 when locals shovelled the area to cement the grave of Pir Mankay, a saint who used to meditate there. In no time the gravediggers’ spades hit the treasure buried for centuries beneath. A sizeable quantity of silver coins were thus stolen and sold to jewellers in Rawalpindi.

Police subsequently arrested the thieves and recovered the ancient artefacts which were handed over to Peshawar Museum authorities. Thus the existence of this fascinating settlement on Pir Mankey de Dheri (Mound of Pir Mankay) came to be known.

Opening up the black box

Archaeologists were quick to react and soon a full-scale excavation project was launched by the University of Peshawar archaeology department. The initiative was headed by archaeologists and historians Professor FA Durrani, Dr Shafiqur Rehman Dar and Shah Nazar. By 1997, the entire site was brushed up. Spacious houses, a medium-sized fortress, a large temple complex with a smaller place of worship inside, were unearthed. All artefacts, including vessels and tools, were sent to the provincial capital’s museum. The excavators probably lost interest as the project was soon shelved, paving way for illegal digging for valuables, Muhammad Aslam, a resident of Mankrai village, told The Express Tribune.

Another villager Waheed Khan said wild vegetation has enfeebled the structure, but illegal digging has further harmed the site, one shovel-ful at a time.

Who’s to blame?

Social activist Qamar Hayat said following the 18th Amendment, the control of heritage sites has been handed over to provincial authorities whose responsibility is to safeguard them. “Haripur houses most of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa’s major archaeological sites. A museum should be constructed here, as it was earlier approved in 2008,” he said, adding all unearthed artefacts should be brought back to the district.

When approached for a comment, Peshawar archaeology department official Maseeullah expressed his ignorance over the discovery.

Hazara University assistant professor Dr Shakirullah Khan stressed on the need to preserve the Indo-Scythian city and develop Haripur’s tourism industry.

Answering a question, Shakirullah said the then HU vice chancellor Dr Ehsan had approved the construction of a museum near Fort Harkishan Garh and the late tehsil nazim Iftikhar Ahmed Khan had also allocated land for the purpose. “Following the latter’s assassination and the former’s transfer to Mardan University, the project was put on the backburner,” he said.

Author: Muhammad Sadaqat | Source: The Express Tribune [June 02, 2015]

Mes Aynak is a vast site in a mountainous area south of Kabul, near Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan and adjacent to Taliban supply routes. The area is roughly the size of the city of Pompeii in Italy. Archaeologists say it is one of the richest sites in the country, with objects dating back 5,000 years. Excavations were conducted recently with the support of the French government and continue with urgency with a skeleton Afghan crew. Yet more than 90% of the site still remains unexamined.

It is almost sure to be under-examined. Mes Aynak is also the site of extensive copper deposits, which explains why it was a trading centre for centuries. The name Mes Anynak means “little source of copper,” although “little” understates the case. Those deposits are now under contract for extraction by China Metallurgical Group Corporation, a state-owned Chinese mining conglomerate that plans to begin mining the site this year. The copper underneath is said to be worth $100 billion, according to the Afghan government. That is an amount that might make the occasional Taliban attack seem tolerable.

The fight over Mes Aynak is the subject of this documentary film by Brent Huffman. The main narrator of the grim tale is the Afghan archaeologist Qadir Temori. With the help of French archaeologists, Temori and his team have unearthed temples, fortifications, objects and stupas (memorials) that reflect the Buddhist and Hellenistic styles common to the region. But China Metallurgical Group Corporation has built an extensive modern camp for workers and is poised to remove the hills and the ancient remains beneath with modern bulldozers.

To call this a David and Goliath story is like saying $100 billion is a modest incentive. The American archaeologist Mark Kenoyer, a specialist in Afghan and Pakistani cultures, compares bulldozing the site to submerging the city of Atlantis. The French archaeologist Philippe Marquis calls it “the tip of the iceberg.”We are told in interviews with Afghan officials that the proposed mine will enrich the country with $7 billion dollars of economic activity.

We are also told by former government employees that the minister responsible for the deal— which involved a Chinese payment of some $3 billion to the minister—is living in a luxurious new house. (That official has since resigned and has accused his successor of corruption, Huffman says.)

International protests have not made much difference. Alarmed archaeologists and Buddhists around the world achieved a brief delay by raising their voices, yet the mining seems set to begin.

Saving Mes Aynak does not fit the usual contours of films about art. There are exquisite objects on screen that came fr om recent excavations, although most of them are too recently unearthed to be conserved and exhibited in a delicately-lit jewel-box museum context. They are hardly the proven treasures that might induce politicians to fight for preservation.

A chilling parallel to this film came in another documentary at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. Overburden by Chad Stevens examines the practice of mountaintop removal to extract coal quickly and cheaply over a vast area, with a fraction of the workers required in the conventional deep mining process. Citizens in West Virginia who feared the destruction of their homes and water sources locked horns with a huge coal company, Massey Energy (which has since been sold to Alpha Natural Resources), and coalminers who were fighting for their jobs.

Saving Mes Aynak involves a hauntingly similar standoff. Overburden is the mining term that refers to rock and dirt between the surface and mineral deposits. In Mes Aynak, 5,000 years of culture are the overburden.

Huffman shows grim video of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2002, yet at a time when the destruction of ancient cultures is a stated policy of the Islamic State, Saving Mes Aynak presents us with a different crisis: the horror of business as usual. Under governments wh ere conservation doesn’t count for much, the race for resources runs faster than rescue archaeology.

Author: David D'Arcy | Source: The Art Newspaper [May 30, 2015]