Overview

Who were the Kushan? Why does a powerful Central Asian empire that thrived for centuries rarely appear in world history books? To address questions raised by this obscure yet highly influential period of ancient history, David Jongeward, author of Kushan Mystique, presents a personal narrative, something of a travel memoir, along with profiles of people he encountered during his research into the Kushan era. The story begins in a lakeside cottage in northern California, where friendship with an eccentric country doctor prompted the author’s evolving interest in Kushan coinage and the Buddhist sculpture of ancient Gandhara. The narrative includes meetings with key players among a handful of specialists, including coin collectors, museum curators and historians who have been captivated by the Kushan mystique. This book brings alive the rewarding insights derived from the author’s museum-based research, together with discoveries inspired by visits to virtually unknown major archaeological sites in Pakistan that date to the Kushan era.

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9781912667468

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David Jongeward is an independent cultural historian and a departmental associate with the Royal Ontario Museum, Department of World Cultures, Toronto, Canada. He was visiting scholar from 2005 to 2013 with the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. His most recent project is a catalog of the Gandhara sculpture collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, forthcoming in 2015. He coordinated and coauthored an interdisciplinary collaborative research project: Gandharan Buddhist Reliquaries, published in 2012. Joe Cribb is the former Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, where he worked for forty years as a curator of Asian coins and currencies. He has published many articles on Kushan, Kushano-Sasanian, and Kidarite coins and on the processes of numismatic research. In 1997 he was awarded the Ikuo Hirayama Silk Road Art and Archaeology prize, in 1999 the Royal Numismatic Society’s medal, and in 2008 the American Numismatic Society’s Archer M. Huntington Medal. He was President of the Royal Numismatic Society 2005–2010, and has been Secretary General of the Oriental Numismatic Society since 2011.

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