Some favourite masterpieces of early Buddhist art. Over the last week I have been researching the diffusion of early Buddhism. Here are some favourites I dug out from my travels.

1.The King of Varanasi hunting- illustration from Shyama Jataka.
Cave Ten, Ajanta 1stC BC
Detail of Standing Buddha in Abhaya mudra
Gupta, 5thC
Jamalpur Tila
Now in the Mathura Museum
The Fasting Buddha
Gandhara, 3rdC
Now in the Lahore Museum
Barhut Yakshi
2ndC BC
Indian Museum, Kolkata
Boddhisatva Maitreya
Newly excavated from Hathikal near Lalitgiri, Orissa, 9thC
Stucco Buddha from Hadda, Afghanistan
5th/6thC
Now in the Met, NYC
Salabhanjika Yakshi
Kushan, c100 AD, Stupa railing,
From Sonkh Tila, Goverdhan
Now in the Mathura Museum
Gupta Bronze Buddha Offering Protection
Now in the Met Museum NYC
From India (probably Bihar)
5th/6thC
Portrait of a Monk Begging for Food
Gandhara, 2ndC AD
from Takht-I-Bahi
Now in the National Museum, Karachi
Mara's Demon Army try to distract the Buddha before he achieves Enlightenment
Gandhara 5thC
Now in the Freer Sackler, Washington DC
A Naga Nobleman Escapes from the Jaws of a Beast
From Sonkh Tila, Mathura
Kushan, c100 AD,
Now in the Mathura Museum
Mara's Demon Army try to distract the Buddha before he achieves Enlightenment
Gandhara, 5thC
Now in the Freer Sackler, Washington DC
Padmapani, Ajanta Cave 1, c600:
a Bodhisattva of otherworldly elegance & compassion, eyes half-closed, inward-looking, weightlessly swaying on the threshold of Enlightenment, caught in what Stella Kramrisch, described, wonderfully, as “a gale of stillness.”
Head of a Buddha or Bodhisattva
5th–6th century
Afghanistan (probably Hadda)
Now in the Met Museum, DC
Boddhisatva
Gandhara, 4thC
Now in the Freer Sackler, DC
Stucco Buddha from Hadda, Afghanistan
5th/6thC
Now in the V&A, London
Boddhisatva Maitreya,
Sikrai, NWFP
2ndC CE
Now in the Chandigarh Museum
Meditating Buddha
Takht-I-Bahi 2ndC AD
Gautama Buddha's First Meeting with the Brahmin
Gandhara, 2nd C
Now in the Peshawar Museum
Buddha (impishly Mathuran) in protection mudra
Kushan, c100 AD,
Found at Katara Keshav Dev
Now in the Mathura Museum
Nati: the legs of a dancer
Kushan 1stC CE
Now in the Mathura Museum

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More from @DalrympleWill

2 Sep
The Diwani- the document that handed over the three richest provinces in India to the East India Company, 1765. Later, the British dignified the document by calling it the Treaty of Allahabad, though Clive had dictated the terms & a terrified Shah Alam simply waved them through.
As Ghulam Hussain Khan put it ‘A business of such magnitude & which at any other time would have required the sending of wise ambassadors & able negotiators, was done and finished in less time than would usually have been taken up for the sale of a jack-ass, or a beast of burden’
Before long the EIC was straddling the globe. Almost single-handedly it reversed the balance of trade, which from Roman times on had led to a continual drain of Western bullion eastwards.
Read 9 tweets
28 Aug
India & the Ancient Ocean Trade World  

My next book, The Golden Road, will be focusing on the diffusion of Indic culture in the early centuries AD, and this short video gives an idea of the richness of the archaeological material from the period.
livehistoryindia.com/tales-and-trai…
Here is an idea of some of the material I'll be covering, from a piece I wrote for the New York Review @nybooks in 2015

The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms: Hindu-Buddhist civilisations of Southeast Asia, Fifth to Eighth century CE

nybooks.com/articles/2015/…
There will also be a lot about the diffusion of Indic art forms and how the iconography of Ajanta diffused through Gandhara, Afghanistan and Central Asia

nybooks.com/articles/2014/…
Read 9 tweets
19 Jul
Tragic news from Old Delhi: the dome of the Masjid Mubarak Begum (aka the Rundi ki Masjid) just collapsed....
Mubarak Begum was wife of Sir David Ochterlony. She started off a Brahmin girl in Pune; found her way to Delhi where she converted to Islam & married Ochterlony, who built her the last great Mughal tomb, Mubarak Bagh. She then remarried a noble who fought vs the British in 1857.
In middle age Mubarak Begum became very grand and demanded to be referred to as Lady Ochterlony. Sadly her social mountaineering gave her a bad name in Shahjahanabad where her mosque was commonly known as the Rundi ke Masjid.
Read 10 tweets
15 Apr
"In reviewing the vast literature on the subject, one gains the impression that the whole story of Rome−China trade has been vastly exaggerated by the myth of the Silk Route," Warwick Ball.
Far more important, it seems was the Rome-India sea trade & the India-China sea route.
"Of the few bits of both archaeological and literary evidence that we have, by far the bulk supports a sea route to north-western India, thence through the Kushan Empire. Other overland routes were almost negligible in terms of Roman trade links with Central Asia."
Warwick Ball
"The existence of the ‘Silk Road’ is not based on a shred of historical or material evidence. There was never any such ‘road’ or even a route in the organisational sense, there was no free movement of goods between China and the West until the Mongol Empire in the Middle Ages 1/2
Read 6 tweets

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