On the Date of the Buddhist Sculptures excavated at Kapisa, Afganistan

Most of the scholars of the so-called Graeco-Buddhist Art of Gandhara have regarded the Buddhist sculptures excavated at Kâpisa and exclusively made of schist, as typically reflecting its final stage or decadance, and therefore postulated them to the 3rd and 4th centuries when the Classical tradition had fallen into decay.We have discerned two different periods of artistic activity among the schist sculptures hitherto excavated archaeologically, i. e., the first one was to copy consciously the so-called Graeco-Buddhist Art of Gandhara proper, and the second to assimilate it into a racial aesthetic system, rather deliberately discarding some Classical ideas.The latter phase is so intimately connected with the Second Kushan Dynastic Arts found at Surkh Kotal and Mathurâ that we might attribute the artistic innovation to the Kushans who established their summer-capital at Kâpisî-Begrâm, rather than to the indigenous Buddhists.When we compare the sculptures of the second period with those of Western Asia (mainly Parthian), we cannot but acknowledge certain common peculiarities such as the principle of rigid frontality characterizing the Buddhist-donor representation.Their stylistic identity together with other iconographic conventions leads us to the supposition that the schist sculptures of Kapisa are nearly contemporary with other Kushan sculptures of Surkh Kotal and Mathurâ, and also with the Parthian Art from the first to the third centuries.On the other hand, the artistic trends at Mathurâ under the Third Kushan Dynasty (3-4th centuries, and containing Kâpisa) have nothing in particular and common to do with those of Kâpisa, although the former shares with Gandhara proper some distinguished motives.This fact seems to imply that in the Third Kushan Dynastic period the sculpturing activity in stone almost ceased to flourish at Kâpisa, but stone-sculpturing of Gandhara proper further survived to be gradually replaced by modelling in stucco.