Buddhas of Bamiyan

The Buddhas of Bamiyan were two colossal standing figures of the Buddha cut into a sandstone cliff in the Bamiyan valley of central Afghanistan, about 130 kilometres north-west of Kabul at an altitude of some 2,500 metres. Radiocarbon dating places them in the later sixth and early seventh centuries CE, when Hephthalite rulers held the region. For some fourteen centuries they were among the great landmarks of the Silk Road, until the Taliban destroyed them in March 2001.

Bamiyan lay on a caravan route through the Hindu Kush, and it had been a Buddhist centre since the second century CE, under the Kushan Empire. Monks lived in painted caves dug into the cliffs. The two great figures were reliefs rather than free-standing statues, joined to the rock at the back. Their bodies were hewn from the cliff, while faces, hands and the folds of the robes were modelled in mud and straw, covered in stucco and painted; the larger was red and the smaller in several colours.

The western figure stood about 55 metres high and the eastern about 38 metres. Local names call the larger Salsal and the smaller Shah Mama, "Queen Mother". Dating of organic material recovered from the rubble after 2001 gave a range of about 544 to 595 for the eastern Buddha and 591 to 644 for the western one; older studies, struck by the resemblance to the art of Gandhara, had often proposed earlier dates. Paintings on the niche ceilings showed a sun god in a chariot and richly dressed donors whose costume and features resemble those of the Hephthalites, suggesting who paid for the work. Paint from nearby caves contains seventh-century drying oils, thought to be the oldest known oil painting.

The Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang came in 630 and found a thriving Buddhist community with more than ten monasteries and over a thousand monks. He described both figures as adorned with gold and jewels, and he also mentioned an even larger reclining Buddha that has never been found.

Abbasid forces conquered the valley in 770 under the caliph al-Mahdi. Bamiyan returned to Buddhism from around 870, until the Turkic Ghaznavid Empire took it in 977. In 1221 the army of Genghis Khan besieged Bamiyan and killed most of its people, but the statues were left intact. In the seventeenth century the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb ordered them shelled with artillery, which caused some damage without seriously harming them.

During the Afghan civil war the Taliban took Bamiyan town in September 1998. A local commander drilled holes in the heads of the statues for explosives before his leaders stopped him; others dynamited the smaller figure's head and fired rockets at the larger. In July 1999 Mullah Omar decreed that the statues be preserved. On 26 February 2001, however, he ordered all statues in Afghanistan destroyed, "so no one can worship or respect them in the future". Work began on 2 March and lasted weeks: artillery and anti-aircraft fire, mines in the niches and finally explosives placed in drilled holes.

Taliban officials gave differing reasons. The foreign minister called it purely a matter of Islamic law, while an envoy linked it to foreign offers to repair statues while Afghan children went hungry. Some accounts point to the influence of al-Qaeda, though the evidence is circumstantial. The destruction was condemned worldwide, including by every member state of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, and the UNESCO director-general called it a crime against culture. In the same period the Taliban carried out killings of the Hazara population of the region, which Hazara leaders later put at up to 15,000 dead.

The empty niches still show the outlines of the figures, and the caves around them remain. Bamiyan's cultural landscape was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003 and is on the list of World Heritage in Danger. Fragments have been gathered, sorted and sheltered, and a 2011 expert meeting in Paris recommended leaving the western niche empty as a memorial while studying whether the eastern Buddha could be partly rebuilt from its original pieces. A 2013 rebuilding of the smaller figure's feet with modern materials was halted by UNESCO. Work stopped after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021 and resumed in 2023 with Italian funding.