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Takht-i-Bahi

Takht-i-Bahi is the ruin of a Buddhist monastery on a hilltop in the Peshawar valley of Pakistan, founded in the first century CE and occupied until about the seventh, the best-preserved monastic complex of ancient Gandhara.

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Foundation

Takht-i-Bahi stands on a ridge about 150 metres above the plain of the Peshawar valley, the heart of ancient Gandhara. Its name is usually explained as "throne of the springs". An inscription in Kharoshthi found at the site is dated in the twenty-sixth year of the reign of the Indo-Parthian king Gudufara, or Gondophares, which places the monastery's early history in the first century CE. Gondophares is also the king named in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas as the ruler to whose court the apostle Thomas travelled, and the inscription helped to show that he was a historical figure.

The complex

The monastery was enlarged over several centuries, mainly in the Kushan period. Its parts are arranged on terraces on the hillside. The main stupa court is a rectangle with a stupa base in the centre and small chapels on three sides, which once held images of the Buddha. The monastery court, a square surrounded by monks' cells on two storeys, had a kitchen and refectory beside it. A court of many small votive stupas, given by pilgrims, lies between them, and a large assembly hall and underground meditation rooms complete the plan. The buildings are of the typical Gandharan masonry of schist blocks with smaller stones packed between them.

On the plain below the ridge lies Sahr-i-Bahlol, the remains of a small fortified town of the same period, which was listed with the monastery. Together they show the relation between a Gandharan monastery and the lay settlement that supported it, with the monks above and the farmers, traders and craftsmen who provided their food and offerings below.

Sculpture

Excavations from the nineteenth century onward recovered large numbers of schist and stucco sculptures from the site: Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and reliefs of the life of the Buddha in the Gandharan style that combined Indian Buddhist subjects with Greek and Roman forms. Many are now in the museums of Peshawar, Lahore and London. Some of the stucco heads, in particular, are counted among the finest examples of late Gandharan art.

Decline and survival

The monastery seems to have been abandoned in the sixth or seventh century, as Buddhism in Gandhara declined, a process once attributed solely to the Huna invasions and now seen as more gradual. Because of its position on the hilltop, the site was not built over or reused for building material on a large scale, and its walls survive to a considerable height. Excavations were carried out by British archaeologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the site was listed by UNESCO in 1980.

Further reading

  • Behrendt, Kurt A. The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007
  • Neelis, Jason. Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks. Brill, 2011
  • Salomon, Richard. Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhara. University of Washington Press, 1999

See also

  • 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.
  • Indo-Parthian Kingdom — The Indo-Parthian Kingdom was a state founded by Gondophares in the first century CE across Sistan, the Indus valley and Gandhāra, and is the setting of the Christian tradition of the apostle Thomas in India.
  • 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.
  • 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.