Vesuvian Sky
09-17-2013, 02:20 PM
When Chinese pilgrim Hsuan Tsang arrived in Bamiyan in A.D. 632 he was awed by the sight of two massive statues of Buddha, rising 125 and 180 feet above the rugged valley floor. The statues, situated in niches carved out of the soft sandstone mountain face, were brightly painted and decorated with gold and jewels. They would have been dazzling in the intense sunlight of central Afghanistan. Hsuan Tsang was no less impressed by the 10 monasteries clustered in the surrounding caves and at the feet of the statues, housing more than a thousand Buddhist monks.
The monasteries eventually fell into ruin, a century or two after the arrival of Islam in the eighth century A.D. A series of conquerors—from the feared Mahmoud of Ghazni who forged a vast empire in the area in the eleventh century to Genghis Khan whose armies rampaged through Central Asia—wreaked havoc on the remaining buildings and population. For another thousand years, Muslims, offended by the images of Buddha, defaced the statues and the cave paintings that dot the honeycombed interior of the cliff face. Weather ate away at the statues' surfaces. Despite the abuse, in addition to normal wear and tear, the Buddhas of Bamiyan still dominated the valley.
Then, on March 2, 2001, the Taliban began to fire artillery at the statues. "The artillery probably did little damage," says Brendan Cassar, chief of cultural heritage at UNESCO's Kabul office, of the first Taliban attempts. Only by detonating explosives placed up and down the statues did they succeed in dislodging the Buddhas from their niches. By the end of that month, the 1,500-year-old statues were no more.
In the intervening years since these events, archaeologists and art historians have turned their efforts to studying the rubble left behind for new insights into how and when the statues were created. According to the Technical University...
More can be read here. (http://archive.archaeology.org/1107/trenches/bamiyan_buddha_statues_afghanistan.html)
The monasteries eventually fell into ruin, a century or two after the arrival of Islam in the eighth century A.D. A series of conquerors—from the feared Mahmoud of Ghazni who forged a vast empire in the area in the eleventh century to Genghis Khan whose armies rampaged through Central Asia—wreaked havoc on the remaining buildings and population. For another thousand years, Muslims, offended by the images of Buddha, defaced the statues and the cave paintings that dot the honeycombed interior of the cliff face. Weather ate away at the statues' surfaces. Despite the abuse, in addition to normal wear and tear, the Buddhas of Bamiyan still dominated the valley.
Then, on March 2, 2001, the Taliban began to fire artillery at the statues. "The artillery probably did little damage," says Brendan Cassar, chief of cultural heritage at UNESCO's Kabul office, of the first Taliban attempts. Only by detonating explosives placed up and down the statues did they succeed in dislodging the Buddhas from their niches. By the end of that month, the 1,500-year-old statues were no more.
In the intervening years since these events, archaeologists and art historians have turned their efforts to studying the rubble left behind for new insights into how and when the statues were created. According to the Technical University...
More can be read here. (http://archive.archaeology.org/1107/trenches/bamiyan_buddha_statues_afghanistan.html)