On the Cusp of an Era: Art in the Pre-Kusana World.

• Author: Quintanilla, Sonya Rhie
• Position: Book review

On the Cusp of an Era: Art in the Pre-Kusana World. Edited by DORIS METH SRINIVASAN. Brill's Inner Asian Library, vol. 18. Leiden: BRILL, 2007. Pp. vi + 402, plates. $264.

All but one (1) of the fourteen essays in this volume are based on papers delivered at a symposium at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (November 11-14, 2000) by a distinguished gathering of international scholars convened and organized by Doris Srinivasan. The title and introduction would lead one to expect much more of an emphasis on art history over a broader geographical range than one actually finds among the essays, which are largely concerned with the regions now bounded by Pakistan and Afghanistan, historically known as Gandhara and Bactria. (2) Furthermore, the essays primarily present research and findings from archaeological excavations and surface explorations, Buddhist literature, and epigraphy--a commendably interdisciplinary approach, but with very little art history. In general the papers are extremely engaging and present careful and thorough analyses of their topics in eloquent and readable prose indicative of meticulous editing. The volume includes an index, but a bibliography and short biographies of the authors would have been welcome.

There is no apparent logic to the order in which the essays have been presented, except that the three papers dealing with regions south of Gandhara appear last and the first two essays concern ancient travel routes. Saifur Rahman Dar lays out the web of roads and passes historically used by travelers to cross the forbidding terrain from Central Asia and Afghanistan to Pakistan and India. Most of us have heard only of the Karakoram Highway or the Khyber Pass through the Hindu Kush, so the author does a great service by revealing such a surprisingly complex array of routes. It is not always clear from which sources the information has been gleaned and how relevant each route was during the Pre-Kusana period specifically, but art historians and archaeologists will benefit from understanding which sites were actually connected by known travel routes, in order to better argue for the transmission of styles and motifs. Jason Neelis's essay provides a welcome clarification of the different branches and lineages of Saka or Scythian rulers and groups who traversed these routes and came to control areas of Pakistan and northern and western India during the Pre-Kusana and Kusana periods. He takes a fresh...