Hadda Buddha is an image of a Graeco-Buddhist sculpture from the National Museum of Afghanistan,which was destroyed by members of the Taliban in 2001. The Taliban used the teachings of the Koran, specifically the prohibition against depictions of beings created in God's image, to justify their destruction of part of the world's heritage.
The first print I've made in sixteen years, Hadda Buddha is one of the Kabul Series, with Gardez Shiva, and Tapakalan Hera.
The original Hadda Buddha came from Hadda, the site of a Buddhist monastery from the 2nd to the 7th centuries of the Common Era (CE.) Uncovered by French archaeologists in the 1920s, a large part of the recovered artifacts from the Hadda site were sent to the Musée Guimet in Paris, renknowned for its collection of Asiatic art.
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The Hadda trove was considered the most significant archaeological discovery from the first centuries CE. The heads of the Hadda Buddhas and saints were modeled from life, and each face was a mixture of ethnicities, and bore features that resembled Greek, Roman, Turk, Han Chinese, Mongolian, Aryan, or Davidic characteristics.
Afghanistan has an extremely vivid and exciting history. On the way to India, Alexander the Great drove his armies through Afghanistan. He founded cities there, and Greek public sculpture later influenced the style of carved images of Hindu gods, and representations of Buddha. Many museums around the world contain surviving sculptures of Buddha in this hybrid style, they're known as Gandharan Buddhas, after a city in present day Pakistan.
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Alexander married Roxana, a woman from the region called Bactria, known for the native Bactrian (two humped) camels. Those camels were used as the ships of the desert on the Silk Road, where traveling merchants and mystics exchanged precious cargo and contagious ideas, like Greek customs, Hinduism, Buddhism, and eventually Islam.
I found the image of this lost sculpture in A Guide to the Kabul Museum, a book compiled and written by Ann Dupree, Louis Dupree, and A.A. Motamedi and published in Afghanistan in 1968.
Louis Dupree was a famous and influential American scholar of Afghan history and culture. His widow Nancy Hatch Dupree is involved with the Society for the Preservation of Afghanistan's Cultural Heritage (SPACH). devoted to recovering and protecting the Afghan cultural inheritance for the future benefit of the Afghan people. |
