MEMORIES FROM AFGHANISTAN

Buddhism had probably reached Bamiyan before 320 BC.
The smaller of the two great Buddhas was certainly carved by early second century AD and the bigger Buddha in the fifth.

The other statue was "only" 33 meters high.

... while the caves in which they stood were covered with paintings.

A honeycomb of caves still exist where monks went into retreat for part of the year. Apart from the semi-permanent population of monks, others travelled with the caravans that did the Silk Route. Statues were most likely carved as votive offerings by these merchants praying for a safe journey from India to Central Asia.

A sad history...

Buddhism had probably reached Bamiyan by 320 BC, when Chandragupta Maurya was the throne of India. Afghanistan was then under Mauryan dominance, and this helped Buddhism to flourish there.When the Maurya Empire disintegrated, this part of Afghanistan was ruled by Indo-Bactrians kings, followed by the Kushans who came from Central Asia. It is possible that the cave-monasteries started coming up during the reign of their famous king Kanishka.

By the middle of the third century AD, Iran's fire-worshipping Sassanian dynasty took control over the Bamiyan region. But they let the Buddhist fraternity in Bamiyan be and Bamian probably enjoyed a semi-independent status.

In the fifth century AD, the region was invaded by the Huns. And before their advance was halted by the Guptas in the east and Sassanians and Turks in the west, they had a brief run in Afghanistan. They tried to exterminate Buddhism from Kabul, Peshawar and Gandhara, but deep in the mountains, Bamiyan probably laid off their route.

When the Chinese scholar Hiuen-Tsang visited Bamiyan in the early seventh century AD, the valley was flourishing as a Buddhist centre. He wrote that there were "tens of Buddhist monasteries with several thousand brethren". Bamiyan was a very cosmopolitan place then, a meeting ground of different schools of Buddhism and a retreat for monks from different parts of the world.

In the late seventh century, the Arabs defeated the Sassanians, and in time took over both Kabul and Kandahar. But the small Buddhist kingdom of Bamiyan remained intact for another century. The princes of Bamiyan were converted to Islam probably during the reign of the Abbasid dynasty, a century later.

After changing hands several times, Bamiyan was apparently devastated for the first in around 870 AD by Yakub-bin-Laith who came to destroy the "idols"and pluck the monasteries. It must be around that time that the inhabitants of the valley converted to Islam. In 1221, the Mongol Gengis Khan destroyed the valley and killed all its inhabitants but the statues survived. Later, in the 17th century AD, rather like the Talibans who decided to blown them up in july 2001, the Great Mughal Aurangzeb ordered canon-shots to be fired at the huge images.

Out of the Bamiyan valley, nobody knows for sure today if they still exist...