AN EXHIBITION ON THE ANCIENT SILK ROAD is now open at the British Library:

Sands of time

A new exhibition of relics from the Silk Route shows how religions merged and heresies flourished. It's a revelation, says William Dalrymple

Saturday June 19, 2004
The Guardian

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The British began discovering Gandharan Buddhas in the late-19th century, and one of the first men to be dazzled by them was a young Hungarian Jewish emigre intellectual called Aurel Stein. He spent hours in the Lahore Museum, then run by Rudyard Kipling's father, studying the beautiful sculptures. Intrigued, he soon began walking the Karakorums to find further relics of this unlikely Greco-Buddhist world.

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Trade and religion were often fellow travellers: in Syriac, the language of west-Asian trade, the word for merchant ("tgr") was the same as that for missionary. One religion that travelled eastwards along the Silk Route, and was brought to Central Asia by Mesopotamian merchants, was Manichaeism. It was founded by the prophet Mani in Babylon in the third century AD. Brought up in a heterodox ascetic environment where Christian and Jewish Gnostic ideas mingled with Zoroastrianism, Mani went on a pilgrimage to Gandhara where he encountered Hindu and Buddhist ideas. Conceiving all creation as the product of a great struggle between light and dark, good and evil, he saw his religion as a fulfilment of all these different religious currents, and accepted Adam, Zoroaster and the Buddha as prophets, while also subscribing to the Hindu idea of the transmigration of souls. His ideas rapidly spread from Carthage in the west (where the young St Augustine briefly converted to Manichaeism) to Xi'an, the Chinese terminus of the Silk Road in the east, before disappearing by the late Middle Ages.

Stein's discoveries of a Manichaean library recovered not only several of the sacred texts of this lost faith, such as the Great Hymn of Mani, but also images of the vegetarian Manichaean elect, in long white robes and tall, cylindrical hats. Perhaps the strangest image in the show is an eighth-century fragment showing Jesus as an unbearded Manichaean prophet, mounting to heaven in a crescent-shaped moon boat.

No less strange are the relics from the brief moment when Central Asia converted en masse to Nestorian Christianity. Expelled from the Byzantine empire in the fifth century, the church had taken root with astonishing speed further to the east. By the seventh century, Nestorian archbishops watched over cathedrals as far apart as Bahrain, Kerala, Kashgar and Lhasa. By 660AD there were more than 20 Nestorian archbishops east of the Oxus, and Nestorian monasteries in most Chinese cities.

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. .. . But nothing in Zeitun can match the most beautiful image in the Silk Route show: that of a Nestorian Christian saint from Samarkand, which at first sight appears to be Buddhist. The figure is wearing Buddhist-style robes and is sitting cross-legged in the mudra of preaching; only the two Maltese crosses that the saint is wearing - one on his headdress, the other on his torc - shows his true faith.

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