Abstract
THE mystery and fascination of Central Asia X have been felt by three generations of travellers and scholars, and to-day we are blinded by treasures which a series of great excavations has given to the museums of Europe and Asia. It is in the museums and weighty reports of excavations that the historian must quarry for the raw material of history. The history of Central Asia has yet to be written ; and for the most part we have to be content with brief and disconnected fragments, forming a background on which we must try to place the pieces of archaeological evidence. The present expedition was undertaken in part with the object of directing attention to these problems, in part in the hope of providing a few fragments of evidence bearing on the great problem-that of chronology-in the study of the Buddhist art of Gandhara, the country which lay between the Indus and the Hindu Kush. The chronological scheme of Foucher, who wrote what still ranks as the standard work on Gandharan art, convenient and coherent as it is, is purely stylistic, and does not meet the requirements of the archaeologist and historian, as had been demonstrated by the archaeological investigations at Hadda of the French delegation, which has been at work in Afghanistan since 1922. Evidence of the influence of Gandharan art has come from various central Asian sources, extending so far as Turfan in Chinese Turkestan ; but there is one blank in the record--Bactria and the Oxus territory.
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