The sanctuary
The Kushan rulers, who came from Central Asia and built an empire from the Oxus to the Ganges in the first and second centuries CE, honoured their dynasty in temples where statues of the kings stood with images of the gods. Surkh Kotal, "the red pass", was one of these. It stands on a hill above the valley of the Surkhab river on the route from Bactria to the Hindu Kush passes. A monumental stairway of several flights climbed the hillside from the valley to a walled court on the summit, where a temple stood on a raised platform, with a fire altar.
Daniel Schlumberger of the French archaeological delegation in Afghanistan excavated the site from 1952 to 1963. He found fragments of large statues, including a standing figure in Kushan dress with heavy boots and a long coat, similar to the headless statue of Kanishka found at Mat near Mathura, which suggests a royal portrait.
The inscription
The most important find was a long inscription in the Bactrian language, an Iranian language, written in a form of the Greek alphabet. It records that the sanctuary, which it calls a bagolango, "place of the gods", built by the king Kanishka, had been abandoned when its water supply failed, and that an official named Nokonzoko restored it in the year 31 of the Kanishka era, repairing the well and the walls. It was found in several copies.
The inscription transformed the study of Bactrian. Before its discovery the language was known almost only from short legends on Kushan coins. It showed that the Kushans used Bactrian as a language of state, replacing Greek, a change confirmed by the Rabatak inscription found in 1993, in which Kanishka states that he issued an edict in Aryan, meaning Bactrian, instead of Greek. The Rabatak inscription, found by chance in the same province, also gives the genealogy of the dynasty, from Kujula Kadphises through Vima Taktu and Vima Kadphises to Kanishka, settling a long-standing debate about the order of the early Kushan kings, and it records the foundation of another sanctuary of the same type.
Religion
The gods worshipped at the sanctuary were probably those of the Kushan pantheon shown on their coins, a mixture of Iranian, Greek and Indian deities, including the fire god Athsho and the royal glory, Pharro. The fire altar suggests Iranian rites. The temple is therefore classed with other faiths of the Kushan world rather than with the Buddhism that the Kushans also patronised.
The site suffered during the wars in Afghanistan after 1979, and many of the finds kept in the Kabul museum were damaged or lost.
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
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
See also
- Kushan Empire — The Kushan Empire (c. 1st-3rd century CE) was a Central Asian dynasty of Yuezhi origin that ruled a domain stretching from Bactria and the Tarim Basin to the Gangetic plain, linking the Silk Road's trade and Buddhist networks between China, India, Persia, and Rome.
- Kanishka — Kanishka I was a Kushan emperor of the 2nd century CE whose empire spanned Central Asia and northern India and who became one of history's foremost imperial patrons of Buddhism.
- Greco-Bactrian Kingdom — The Greco-Bactrian Kingdom was a Hellenistic state in northern Afghanistan and Central Asia, independent of the Seleucids from about 256 BCE, whose expansion south of the Hindu Kush produced the Indo-Greek kingdoms.
- Gandhara — Gandhara was an ancient region centred on the Peshawar Valley, Swat Valley, and Taxila in present-day northern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan that served for over a millennium as a crossroads between the Indian subcontinent, Central Asia, and the Persian and Hellenistic worlds, and as a major centre of Buddhist art and learning.
This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.