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 CHAP. VII. GANDHARA MONASTERIES. 209 CHAPTER VII. GANDHARA MONASTERIES. CONTENTS. Monasteries at Jamalgarhi, Takht-i-Bahai and Shah-Dheri, Greek influence. FEW of the later discoveries in India have been more fruitful of important results for the elucidation of the archaeology of India than those obtained from the excavations of ruined monasteries in the neighbourhood of Peshawar. They supply us with the materials for settling not only the question of the amount of influence classical art exercised on that of India, but also for solving many problems of Buddhist archaeology and art. As mentioned above, it is from their coins, and from them only, that the names of most of the kings of Baktria and their successors have been recovered ; but we have not yet found a vestige of a building that can be said to have been erected by them or in their age, nor one piece of sculpture that, so far as we now know, could have been executed before their down- fall, about B.C. 1 30. This, however, may be owing to the fact that Baktria proper has long been inhabited by fanatic Moslims, who destroy any representations of the human form they meet with, and no excavations for hidden examples have yet been undertaken in their country ; while it is still uncertain how far the influence of the true Baktrians extended eastward, and whether, in fact, they ever really possessed the valley of Peshawar, where so many of the sculptures have been found. No one, in fact, suspected their existence in our own territory till Lieutenants Lumsden and Stokes, in 1852, partially explored the half-buried monastery at Jamalgarhi, which had been discovered by General Cunningham in 1848. It is situated about 36 miles north-east from Peshawar, and from it these officers excavated a considerable number of sculptures, which afterwards came into the possession of the Hon. E. Clive Bayley. He published a short account of them in the ' Journal of the Bengal Asiatic Society,' in 1853, and brought the collection VOL. I. O