The valley
Bamiyan lies in a green valley between the Hindu Kush and the Koh-i-Baba ranges, on a route that linked Bactria to the north with Kabul and Gandhara to the south-east. Its position on this route made it a stopping place for merchants and pilgrims, and from about the fifth century Buddhist monasteries were cut into the soft conglomerate of the cliff along its northern side. Hundreds of caves were excavated as cells, assembly halls and shrines, many of them painted.
The Buddhas
Two colossal standing Buddhas were carved in niches in the cliff, about a kilometre and a half apart. The western figure stood about fifty-five metres high and the eastern about thirty-eight. Their bodies were cut from the rock, and their robes and faces were modelled in mud and straw plaster over the carving, then painted. Radiocarbon dating of material from the figures has placed them in the sixth and early seventh centuries, the eastern the earlier. The niches were painted with figures of buddhas and donors, in a style that mixed Indian, Sasanian Persian and Central Asian elements. Recent study has shown that some cave paintings used oil-based paints, among the earliest known uses.
The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang passed through around 630 and described the king as a devout Buddhist, ten monasteries with thousands of monks, and the two great images, one of which he described as golden.
After Buddhism
The region came under Muslim rule from the ninth century onward, and the monasteries were abandoned. The Buddhas remained a landmark, and local legend named them Salsal and Shahmama. Medieval writers recorded them, and Mughal accounts report that the emperor Aurangzeb's troops damaged one of them. Chinggis Khan's armies destroyed the city of Bamiyan in 1221, after a grandson of his was killed in the siege; the ruins of the citadel, Shahr-i Gholghola, the "city of screams", stand in the valley.
2001 and after
In March 2001 the Taliban government declared the statues idolatrous and destroyed them with explosives and artillery, despite international appeals. The destruction was filmed and caused widespread condemnation. In 2003 UNESCO listed the cultural landscape and archaeological remains of Bamiyan as a World Heritage Site in danger. Conservation teams have since stabilised the niches and recovered fragments, and the question of whether to reconstruct the figures has been debated without resolution. Xuanzang also described a reclining Buddha of enormous size in a monastery east of the royal city, and archaeologists led by Zemaryalai Tarzi searched for it for years; in 2008 they reported finding the remains of a large reclining figure, though not of the size the pilgrim described. The valley's people are mostly Hazaras, who suffered severely under Taliban rule.
Further reading
- Neelis, Jason. Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks. Brill, 2011
- Behrendt, Kurt A. The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007
- Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism. Cambridge University Press, 2013
See also
- Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms of Afghanistan — The Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms of Afghanistan were a succession of polities in Gandhara, Bactria, and the Kabul valley — including the Kushan Empire and the later Kabul Shahi and Hindu Shahi dynasties — that governed the region before its Islamization was completed in the 11th century CE.
- Turk Shahi dynasty — The Turk Shahis ruled the Kabul valley and Gandhāra from the seventh to the ninth century CE, holding the passes into India against the Arab advance for two hundred years.
- Buddhism — Buddhism is a religious and philosophical tradition founded in northern India in the 5th century BCE by Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, centred on the Four Noble Truths and a path to liberation from suffering.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.