From colonial Greece to postcolonial Rome? Re-orienting ancient Pakistan in museum guides in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

In 1956, the National Museum of Pakistan, a recently established institution in Karachi, launched a new exhibit on Buddhist sculpture from Gandhāra to mark ‘the 2500th anniversary of the birth of the Buddha’ (Gandhara Sculpture in the National Museum of Pakistan 1956: 3). To celebrate this new exhibit, Pakistan’s Department of Archaeology published Gandhara Sculpture in the National Museum of Pakistan to go along with the new exhibit. The anonymous exhibit organizers flagged two important elements of this ancient Buddhist sculpture for the newly created Muslim-majority nation-state of Pakistan. First, the exhibit organizers noted that in the first century BC, ‘Buddhist sages made Gandhāra a sacred region’ through the production of texts that connected ‘local sites with previous incarnations of the Buddha.’ Second, they emphasized the alleged Roman influences on ancient Gandhāra. In their own words, ‘Mediterranean influence, first from Greece by way of Iran, and more directly and for a longer period from the Roman Empire, gave Gandhāra sculpture the character which distinguishes it from all other Buddhist art’ (Gandhara Sculpture in the National Museum of Pakistan 1956: 3). In turn, the exhibit organizers celebrated this ‘fusion of Buddhist forms with Mediterranean humanistic style’ as ‘forming a part of Pakistan’s own cultural heritage’ (Gandhara Sculpture in the National Museum of Pakistan 1956: 4).