The Story of India (2007) s01e03 Episode Script
Spice Routes & Silk Roads (200 BCE - 300 CE)
India today is bidding to become a world power and a global economy.
But the roots of her rise lie 2,000 years ago.
Rich in resources, India has traded with the world since the beginning of history.
But commerce is never just about commodities, it's the way civilizations adapt and grow, discover new ideas and new worlds.
We've now reached the days of the Roman Empire, which saw the beginnings of global trade on the silk road and the spice route the next chapter in "The Story of India.
" Sometimes change in history happens in the unlikeliest of ways.
Here in India, 2,000 years ago in the time of the Roman Empire, these 3 things: the produce of a weed, of a grass, and of the lava of a beetle changed the course of Indian history, brought about the growth of civilization and caused other countries to make great voyages across thousands of miles of ocean seeking the riches of India.
The Arabian Sea off the coast of Kerala, South India.
Our boat is carrying timber, pepper, and spices from South India to the Persian Gulf: the way they've done it for more than 2,000 years.
It's easy to forget the great voyages of Columbus and Vasco de Gama were to find India.
And those voyages started in the days of the Romans.
We know about the Roman trade with India because of a guidebook written by an old Greek sea captain who knew all the Indian ports like the back of his hand.
It's full of the most wonderful detail that enables us to sample the sights and sounds of India in the time of the ancient Romans.
"And this was the time," wrote an ancient historian, "when history became one, "when the affairs of the Mediterranean, "Africa and Asia connected.
" From the first century A.
D.
, Roman trading ports dotted the shores of the Red Sea, East Africa and India.
Ah, here we are.
Yes.
It started with the discovery of the monsoon.
Aiden.
Aiden? Ah, right.
July-August time, monsoon? You are sailing or not sailing? No.
In May, in June, July-August Indian coast.
Dangerous time.
Dangerous time.
It's so easy as a Western person to see things from a Western perspective, isn't it? We talk about these great voyages of exploration the discovery of the monsoon as if Indian sailors didn't know about the monsoon all along.
But still, the Romans and the Greeks did discover the monsoonfor themselves.
And the man who did it, according to the story, was a sailor called Hippalus in about 150 B.
C.
And what Hippalus discovered was this: in June, the south-west monsoon begins to blow in this direction across the Indian Ocean.
The seas become heavy, it becomes dangerous to sail but, with strong enough ships, you can take that wind, coming out of the Red Sea and it'll bring you across to India.
"It's hard going," says the Greek guide to the Indian Ocean, "but you can get there really quickly.
" And then, this is the really great thing about it, in November, a couple of months after the heavy winds die down, the north-east monsoon blows you back the other way.
In the last century B.
C.
, ocean-going ships from the Mediterranean began regular trade with the coast of South India.
But for distant worlds to make contact, they need the technology, and the Romans developed that.
And miraculously, you can see it today.
Here in Kerala, the traditional boat builders still build huge, wooden, ocean-going ships using methods brought to India 2,000 years ago.
How long is this boat? 70 feet.
70 feet? Yeah, yeah.
They recently built a monster here 170 feet long, bigger than biggest Roman ships purely by eye, without a single sketch.
So this is the modification of the ancient way of constructing.
Greek and Roman ship builders in Egypt, once the trade with India opened up, devised a special way of constructing the ships in which they made the skin first with those interlocking joints mortice and tenons and a dowel through, so it was incredibly strong, could cope with really heavy seas.
And then putting the frame in, full frame in, after they'd constructed the skin.
And it was that technical advance, plus the knowledge of the monsoons, that enabled the Greek and Roman navigators to open up the trade with India.
And what the Romans wanted were spices.
This is one of the pepper warehouses in old Cochin, built by Jewish merchants from Iraq long ago.
Sacks of pepper destined for the tables of the Europe and America.
Kerala's Jews first came with the Roman spice trade.
I wish you could smell the air, it really is spicy.
You know that connotation: heady, dreamy, erotic even.
And all of it is the produce of native South Indian plants, some of them weeds, like peppera Tamil word.
And another South Indian word: ginger.
"And ginger shall be "hot in the mouth," says Shakespeare.
It's about 60, 65.
And it's grown in Kerala? The history of food is a part of the history of civilization.
Food is an essential of life; and for all cultures, eating together, one of the life's great pleasures.
Indian was perhaps the first international cuisine.
And here you can see the beginning: born of the simple need to preserve food in the heat of the tropics.
This is what the Roman craze for spices and pepper was all about: food.
Coriander on the flesh, everything mixed, little water.
Garam masala? Garam masala.
Some wine? No wine.
Sour vinegar? Sour vinegar.
A top Roman celebrity chef wrote a cookbook with 460-odd recipes 350 of them full of pepper blasting away at the taste buds, from whole, spiced flamingos to dormice stuffed with peppercorns.
The stuffed dormice never caught on here in vegetarian South India, but many other commodities and ideas did.
The Romans wanted many things from India: spices, pepper and cardamom and many more.
Gemstones, berrel and one little known thing: peacocks.
They say South Indian peacocks were a favorite pet among the ladies of the Roman aristocracy.
Fantastic! But then, India was a golden sparrow then, not now.
India did not need much from Rome.
What we got is mainly gold as medals, coins, silver, copper, tin, antimony, and, of course, Roman wine.
There were 40 or 50 ports trading with Rome on the west coast of India.
Some of them were famous even faraway in Europe.
The greatest, near modern Cochin, was called Muziris, "the first emporium of India," the Roman geographers called it.
Everyone came here Jews, Arabs, Christians.
The Apostle Thomas, Doubting Thomas, is supposed to have landed here in A.
D.
50.
The Christians have been in India ever since, before they were in Europe, let alone America.
But then, as the coastline changed, the port of Muziris vanished.
It was only in 2005 that the site was found a mile or 2 inland under a tangle of pepper vines and banana trees.
Well, how about that! And this is the best piece of amphora.
Oh it's the bottom of an amphora, yes.
It's the bottom.
It's fantastic.
I've seen these all along the route from Egypt and the Red Sea ports and even in the Egyptian desert.
And this amphora was used for importing wine and also to smooth some excellent olive oil and a kind of fish sauce called garum.
Throughout its history, India has always been open to the world, welcoming incomers, imbibing foreign ideas.
And this coast of Kerala, where people of all the world's great religions settled peacefully, is a continuing testimony to the trade links forged 2 millennia ago.
I'm a great believer in the living presence of the past.
You've only got to spend an hour in a place like this and you can feel it all around you.
This is what it would have felt like 2,000 years ago: the evening catch being unloaded, the stalls cooking food.
A Greek or a Roman standing on this spot now would recognize this scene.
But ancient South India was more than a string of trading ports; it was a great classical civilization whose center of power lay over the mountains, to the east.
Over the western ghats: the spine of India.
There are 2 passes which lead eastwards through the mountains of Kerala into the plains of South India both of them used by the railway engineers in later times.
These routes lead into the land Marco Polo called, "the most splendid province on earth.
" The place the British thought the most fertile part of their empire: Tamil Nadu.
This is rice country; so fertile it gives 3 harvests a year.
And the capital of this southern civilization was the city of Madurai.
To arrive here is to enter one of those thrilling places on earth where the ancient past still exists alongside the modern world.
Just imagine if classical Athens was alive today and the goddess of the city still presiding over her citizens that's Madurai.
"At dawn," says a Tamil poem of the Roman period, "Madurai wakes to the sound of the Vedas, "and the air is perfumed with the scent of flowers.
" Tamil Nadu is the world's last surviving classical civilization.
Its people still live comfortably, both in modernity and in sacred time.
Part of the global culture, but also the guardians of humanity's older traditions.
And, as in Roman times, they still worship the city's goddess Minakshi.
So Minakshi, you especially go to for marriage? Yes, especially for marriage.
Also for babies? Her son to succeed in the engineer college over here, she has come to pray god.
Ah, right, for success in his studies.
Today, Tamil is India's last living classical language.
2,000 years ago, Madurai was the center of South Indian culture.
Wow, this is extraordinary, isn't it? So this is This palm leaf manuscript is a late copy of an epic poem composed here in Roman times.
It's only 100 years old.
So still in Tamil Nadu, 100 years ago they were writing palm leaf manuscripts.
So this is how the ancient scribes wrote? In the hand.
One letter, typewriting machine.
Right to left Really? Rare, rare.
Rare? Rare manuscript.
Wow, that's confusing, isn't it? You get Right to left: rare manuscript, left to right.
Normal script: left to right, rare manuscripts: right to left.
Oh, I see, coal and oilsoot.
Soot, soot and oil, yeah, yeah, ok.
It's absolutely great, isn't it? Wow.
So there you are: an ancient Tamil business card.
The old Tamil poems mention Greek and Roman traders bringing gold to Madurai in exchange for pearls and textiles.
The city still has 6,000 goldsmiths working in the gold quarter.
Your fathers did it before you and grandfathers? It runs in the family? Yes, yes.
My father, my grandfather, my grand-grand-grandfather always in this work.
Thank you.
Hello.
Man: Hello.
Everywhere around you, you're seeing what a pre-modern city would have looked like.
Indian textiles have been coveted since ancient times.
I'm not sure it's quite my color! There's more colors.
Very, very nice.
This is pashimina? Cotton, of course, is native to India.
Beautiful! Sells best in shirts.
Oh,it's lovely.
Yes But it's how the Indians dye it that has always dazzled visitors.
You can make 1 of these in 1 hour? One hour.
One hour? No wonder the Greeks loved it, hey? The ancient Tamil poems talk about the Greeks, the Avanas, wandering around with jaws dropping at Madurai and they still do drop, don't they? This building, market, 450 years ago.
This is a big market, like a stock exchange.
Madurai is a marketing town.
Marketing town, it's a center, it's a center.
Pilgrims are still coming here, but to do shopping.
Happy shopping.
Say "happy shopping;" they do happy shopping here.
What the Indians wanted most of all was gold.
India today is the biggest importer of gold in the world.
Although not much of it gets into circulation because the Indians, as the ancient Greeks observed, love above all "to decorate themselves.
" So this is a necklace of coins? It's traditional, you know, when we get married and those kind of special occasions.
Our parents give us a dowry of gold.
Second thing, we like to decorate ourselves with ornaments.
May I lift up? Yeah.
Sure.
So this is the necklace made out of very small coins? Size of the little gold coins that the Romans sent over here.
Ah, goddess Lakshmi, goddess of wealth.
Of wealth, yes.
Roman writers talk about 100 million sesterces being sent over to India, and the interesting thing is, back then they were used for adornment, too.
These things were not used as circulating money.
Romans complained about the balance of payments in their day, just as the Indian government is today.
So that's how ancient India began to trade with the Mediterraneanby sea.
The rulers here in Madurai even sent their own embassies to the Emperor Augustus in Rome the first glimmerings of a global economy.
But, at that same moment, far to the north, new connections were being made.
Just as the spice route was opening up by sea, in the north, beyond the mighty chain of the Himalayas the world's greatest tradeway would connect east and west and India with both: the silk road.
This is Merv in Turkmenistan in Central Asia.
And it was in the first century B.
C.
out here in Central Asia that the merchants of China and the western world met for the very first time.
From that moment, the silk route was open.
There are still little places where people come to do worship, aren't there? And it would be the silk route which would be the catalyst in a new and brilliant phase in the history of India.
That's just amazing, isn't it, like the interior of a volcanic crater.
This is just the citadel of ancient Merv, and the citadel was one tiny corner of the vast city built in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Doesn't that give you an idea of the wealth and the importance of the silk route? But the silk road was controlled by a mysterious Central Asian empire.
They had begun as a confederation of tribes who had migrated along the road from the edge of China.
Later, they conquered Afghanistan and then India itself.
They called themselves the Kushans.
The discovery of the Kushans' forgotten empire and their unknown language began in Afghanistan, and some of the most important discoveries have been made here during the war, fought since the 1970s.
The Kushans made their first capital near Kabul and, rich on the profits of the silk road, sponsored a flowering of the arts.
The Kushans adopted Buddhism and fostered Buddhist culture.
Since we shot this 12 years ago, these pieces of Kushan Buddhist art in Kabul museum have been smashed to pieces by the Taliban.
Here's a Greek period Buddha.
This headless statue of the greatest Kushan king, Kanishka, was also pulverized.
History, too, has been a casualty of the Afghan war.
The key find was a crucial inscription from Surkh Khotal, north of Kabul.
In Greek letters, it's addressed to the legendary King Kanishka himself.
And this text led to the decipherment of their lost language by an English professor Nicholas Sims-Williams.
Now a second inscription has been dug up by an Afghan warlord.
This inscription is not nearly as well-preserved as the inscription of Surkh Khotal, as you can see, but it actually is an even more important historical inscription because it describes the deeds of the great king and the extension of his power across India.
The new inscription also tells us about the great king himself.
Man: He describes himself as the righteous and as the autocrat.
He has this wonderful word autocrat, which is a Greek term, of course.
And he says that he received the kingship from Nanna and from all the gods.
From these texts, the Kushan story can be told for the first time.
King Kujula ruled Central Asia and took Kabul; his son pushed his power down the Khyber Pass into North-West India.
His great-grandson Kanishka, a contemporary of Emperor Hadrian, overran India almost to the Bay of Bengal.
Under the Kushans, trade grew, the economy thrived, and soon they followed the earlier Greek and Indian rulers here by minting coins for trade.
It was a boom time; the population increased several times in a few generations, and you can still find traces of that boom time in the bazaars all the way between Kabul and Peshawar in the coins.
Basilios, Apollodotus, King Apollodotus.
On one side, an Indian elephant; and on the other side, with the local script, a hump-backed Indian bull.
And then the Kushans themselves, the people who really opened up the silk route to trade sacrificing at a fire altar with an Iranian god Oshto, is it, on 1 side? Although, on their coins you get the Buddha, you get Atheni, Hercules, Shiva the gods of everywhere between the Mediterranean and India.
The Kushan kings now issued gold coins on the Roman gold standard.
They're among the most magnificent currency ever minted and they're found as far away as Ethiopia.
From around A.
D.
130, Kaniska ruled from the silk route cities through Kabul and Peshawar to the Lower River Ganges Plain.
Architect of the great salvation, Kanishka the Kushan, the righteous, the just, the autocrat who inaugurated year 1, and proclaimed his edict to all India: "may the gods keep me ever fortunate.
And may I rule India for a thousand years.
" Their first capital inside India was the ancient city of Peshawar in today's Pakistan.
It's been a caravan town ever since, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world.
Babur said that this was a garden city.
He said if you put a blind man towards Peshawar, the moment he is within the environment of Peshawar, through every smell and beautiful air, he will say, "Well, I am in Peshawar now.
" This is the Akhbari during the time of the Akhbar.
The moghul bricks.
Yeah, the moghul bricks.
And still the wooden gates we have.
Look at this, see the wood.
It's just fantastic, isn't it? This is the area which was really owned by very rich people, rich families with their very commercial background.
And they had their business investment in Bukhara.
So, really, this is Salaam.
So this is really the riches of the city coming from the silk route Oh, yes.
the old silk route connections with Central Asia, Bukhara, Samarkand.
Exactly, exactly, because the trade has been the trans-border trade had been for years from the north to the east.
Peshawar has played like a host, whether they were in or they were travelers or they were the riders.
Yeah, yeah.
So this was the place where they say intermingle with the people for endless cup of the green teas, sipping their green teas.
Endless cups of green teas? That's it.
And the richest cargo on those camel caravans that used to ply down the Khyber right up to the 1970s was silk.
Raw Chinese silk, to be turned by Indian weavers into works of art.
Seven months' time to make 1 each.
And all 1 piece, no anyjoint in this.
And look the back also.
Pepper on their tables, peacocks in their gardens, silk on their bodies.
"We must be mad," grumbled Pliny in Rome, "bankrupting ourselves for India.
" Gosh, the work is very, very fine, isn't it? Yes sir, thank you very much.
Very fine.
That is just knockout, isn't it? Then you should be careful, it's slippery.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's been a bit washed by the rain, hasn't it? Yes.
It's for the country, for the world, and to my mind this culture belongs to everybody.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not only ours.
It's a human culture.
Right in the middle of Peshawar, they've started the biggest excavation ever in the subcontinent, and it's turning out to be a revelation about the Kushans' role in Pakistani and Indian history.
Each layer is marked by 10-15 kinds.
Even the British are already stratified.
So, the Moghuls are about 6 feet down? Yes.
So that's 500 years.
Yes.
You can see that, in about 10 feet, you are covering about 1,000 years.
The Kushans about 24 feet deep.
Yes, about 24 to 26.
And you still haven't got the bottom yet.
No, no, we haven't reached to bottom.
These are the Greek levels.
So this is a continuous profile of 2,300 years, and this is the earliest living city in the whole South Asia.
The earliest living city in the whole of South Asia.
So far.
So what was it about the Kushans' rule that brought about this boom time in population, in towns, and economies? There seems to be some kind of almost revolutionary opening up of the world in the Kushan period.
Why do you think that is? Very simple question.
And I still say that to the Pakistanis, and particularly to my people, because of peace, because Buddhism was a religion of peace, no war.
And Buddhism is the key to an ancient legend of Kanishka, the tale of the greatest building in the world, and a prophecy from none other than the Buddha himself.
At the stated time, Kanishka came to the throne, and he ruled the whole world.
At first, he despised the Buddha's law, but 1 day, he was out hunting a white hare when he met a shepherd boy.
Some say the boy was Indra in disguise.
And he was building a small mud stupa.
The Buddha said that after his death, you would build the greatest building in the world to house the remains of his body.
So Kanishka ordered a stupa to be built around the boy's mud stupa.
But however high his stupa rose, the small one always exceeded it, until eventually it rose 700 feet high.
So legend says that Kanishka made the greatest building on Earth: a giant domed stupa.
Across Asia, he's still remembered as one of the 4 pillars of Buddhism, but all trace of his great monument has vanished.
We know the site lay outside the town, in open fields where traces were located a century ago by a French explorer.
He says this: If we set out from the Lahore gate and take the "Cherat" road or Khaz Al Khani.
Yes.
Al Khani this way.
Ok.
Today, the site has been completely swallowed up by modern Peshawar.
About 2, 3 kilometers from here.
Ok.
That's fantastic.
And this is the largest graveyard of Peshawar.
Ok.
Shokria, Shokria.
Thank you very much.
Ah, great, great.
Does he know anything about the story of the place? Great news.
This gentleman knows this was the place, Shahji-Ki Dheri, the mound of the great king.
He doesn't know who the great king was, but that was the place.
Ok.
Thank you very much! This is it? Yes.
That is all Shahji-Ki Dheri.
That is the mound? Yes.
The stupa is described by several Chinese Buddhist pilgrims of the late Roman period.
This whole great mound here was the complex that Kanishka built with, not only the giant stupa, but a huge monastery with other buildings.
It extended over a vast area.
And it's just been plundered for bricks by the locals for centuries.
And, as so often in the subcontinent, the site is still sacred.
Sufis still come here? Yeah.
Yeah.
Every year.
Every year? So, this is the line When I was in Calcutta, they have a model a big stone model of a stupa from here, from Peshawar.
And I drew the monument.
This is, I think this is what it looked like.
The Chinese pilgrims talked about 5 stages.
Sometimes they say the stupa itself was 300 feet, but I think maybe that's too big.
And then on top was a huge kind of wooden structure.
You would have had great flags coming out at an angle, blowing in the wind huge long silk streamers.
"Of all the stupas in the world," the Chinese said, "not 1 could compare to this in solemn beauty "and majestic grandeur.
" when the Chinese pilgrims came here 500 years later, they say that everybody agrees this was the most wonderful stupa in the whole of the inhabited world.
Yes.
Exactly.
You can image coming into the plain of Peshawar, can't you, with this gigantic structure.
"It radiated brilliance.
"And when the breeze blew, the precious bells "sounded in harmony.
" Like all great rulers of Indian history, the Kushans accepted and supported all religions.
In their patronage of Buddhism, they developed a new art form: representing the Buddha's story as a series of miraculous fairytale events.
Inventing the way we see the Buddha today.
Melding Greek and Indian style, they created an international art that was transmitted down the silk route and conquered the whole of the eastern world.
Legend said that Kanishka buried a small portion of the Buddha's ashes under his great stupa.
Thank you very much.
And tucked away in a corner case in the museum is a small bronze casket, found on the site, which had contained ashes.
But even this intimate gift is a testimony to the open mindedness of the rulers of this vast, multi-cultural empire.
And outside a series of images that's just wonderfully typical of Kanishka's era: there's the Buddha on the top with his "fear not" gesture.
But the figures by him, the devotees, are actually great Hindu gods.
There's Indra with his flat crown, and there, with his long hair, Brahma, the creator god.
If we move it round, there's Kanishka himself wearing the royal garb of the Kushan kings: the great big boots that have clod-hopped all the way across the Hindu Kush; the big coat that looks like a Tibetan tuba and the double crown, the king of kings: Maharaja Kanishka.
You can see why Kanishka and the Kushans chose this as their capital.
Looking towards the Khyber Pass and those routes into Central Asia across westwards to the Mediterranean and eastwards above Tibet to their ancestral home on the edge of China.
And yet, they also ruled 1,500 miles or more that way across the plains of India.
So by A.
D.
130, when the emperor Hadrian ruled the Roman empire in the west and the Han Chinese far to the east, the Kushans under Kanishka ruled the middle of the world, from the Aral Sea to the Bay of Bengal.
Around that time, Kanishka conquered the plains of India and made his new Indian capital the city of Mathura.
An early English traveler in India said that when you come down the grand Trunk road from Afghanistan, it's only when you reach Mathura, with its sacred turtles in the river and monkeys scampering through the streets, that you get the flavor of the real Hindustan.
Mathura became an international city, rich on the profits of the silk road.
"It was heaven on Earth," said one observer, "huge and prosperous, rich in money and people.
" And then, as now, it was also a great religious city, sacred to the god Krishna.
See, we've lost all this in the west, haven't we? But if you'd had come to Canterbury in the time of "The Canterbury Tales," with the hundreds and hundreds of coaching inns for the pilgrims, it would have been like this: a city teeming with pilgrims like this at festival time.
Where have you come from? I will come from Moradabad.
Moradabad.
This is a very long way.
Yeah.
And your husbands? No.
Husbands are there! You've got rid of them! You got rid of husbands.
Yeah.
9 ladies, only ladies.
Well, I hope you have a very happy rest of your tirthayatra.
Yeah.
Thank you.
The ancient Greeks called this city "Mathura Ton Theon," the city of the gods.
If you'd been here in the second century A.
D.
at the height of the Kushan empire, you would have seen Greeks, Romans, Bahtrians, Persians, maybe even the odd Chinese.
All the result of the opening up of the silk route and the contacts between the Mediterranean world, and India and China.
It was an incredibly exciting time and this city was at the center of it.
Dynamic economy, very diverse ethnically, in its religious life, just the place to be and that explains why you have such tremendous achievements in ideas and in art here.
A great historian of the Roman empire, Edward Gibbons, said this period, second century A.
D.
, was the happiest time for humanity in the whole history of the world.
Like the Moghuls and the British, the Kushans were outsiders, a foreign military elite ruling the people of India.
But by encouraging long-distance trade and religious tolerance, the Kushans brought peace to a vast area for more than 2 centuries.
And with this peace, they could foster the arts, literature, and science.
They were behind the development of Sanskrit as a language of international scholarship in the east, like medieval Latin in the west.
And another important area of their patronage was medicine.
One of founders of the Indian tradition of medicine, ayurveda, is said to have been Kanishka's guru and chief minister.
His name was Chanaka.
Here in Mathura, the Gupta family are doctors who, for many generations, have followed the ancient tradition handed down from the Kushan era.
300 different medicinal plants are growing here for healing different kinds of the problems.
So everything for your medicine you grow here yourself? Yes.
This is called Amaltas Rgveta.
It is a family Cassia Fistula, that's very good for constipation.
A system based on natural cures, ayurveda was transmitted east in the early centuries A.
D.
by Buddhist monks on the silk route to China.
This is now nicely aloe vera, which is going very famous now all over the world: aloe vera gel.
And this is what the ladies use for their skin cream and all this sort of stuff? Yeah.
May I look? Sure.
Sure.
Oh, yeah, look at that.
How about that? This is the gel, you know? Ayurveda is the science of life.
The whole body and whole nature is made by natural 5 element: earth, water, fire, air and ether.
50 years old.
More than that.
So, the Kushan era was a great time for the codifying of India's traditions of knowledge.
no electricity and no Like all ancient Indian sciences, ayurveda originally was orally transmitted from master to pupil, father to son.
Only later was it committed to writing.
And this in a form of poetry so the people can remember the poetry because it is difficult to remember the like, full book, so just the poetry poetry.
It's all vata, pitta, kapha disease names, disease symptoms, medicines, descriptions are in the poetry form.
How long, far back in time does it go? This is like all the literature on the Earth's planet.
It started near about 5,000 year before, like 3,000 year before Christ.
But the most important legacy of the Kushan age in world history was brought about by Kushan Buddhist monks and traders who traveled the silk route and took Buddhism to China.
Buddhism reach another great nation, China, around second century.
I always showing my sort of respect to the Chinese Buddhist because they are historically, they are elder student of Buddha; we are younger, so I always respect them.
Buddhism is one of the rich India's tradition.
Of course, recent time, certain sort of ideology or certain sort of political reasons, there's a lot of destructions happen, but time change, the things become more open.
So it is really very right that China, Chinese, again as a student of Indian master.
But the Buddhists were also the traders, and just as the rise of capitalism in Europe went hand-in-hand with the Protestant ethic, capitalism in the East was driven by the commercial ethos of Buddhist merchants who traveled the silk road.
As for Kanishka, his end is a mystery.
But a legend was told in the East for centuries: the king had conquered 3/4 of the world but still could not rest.
And he set off east with an army of white elephants, riding his magic horse.
But when he reached the snowy peaks of the North, a mountainous wall of ice, his horse reared up, unwilling to go any further.
The king spoke to his magic horse, "I have ridden you on all my victorious campaigns.
"Why do you hesitate now? "Why will you not go forward on this road?" I wonder, my king, will the conquest of the East satisfy you? Your hunger is boundless.
What will you do when there are no more worlds left to conquer? On seeing the king's magic horse hesitate, his army spoke amongst themselves and decided to get rid of the king.
Legend tells of assassination and regime change here in Mathura.
History says Kanishka died around 150 A.
D.
and was succeeded by others of his dynasty, but could a distant echo of those dark events have come down to us today? Here in Mathura every year a cycle of plays is performed about the god Krishna.
Part of a tradition of drama here which goes back, unbroken, to the ancient world.
The plays tell the story of young Krishna's overthrow of a great tyrant a fairy tale villain whose name is Kansa.
Now we come to the best bit: the killing of the wicked tyrant of Mathura, Raja Kans.
Great as the Kushans were in the history of India, they were, after all, foreigners.
Just outside Kanishka's former capital of Mathura, there's 1 last clue to the fall of India's forgotten emperor.
Do you could we just ask? Do you know a place called "Tochari Tila," "Tochari Tila"? Tochari Tila? Raja kanishki.
Raja kanishki! Fantastic.
They found a statue of King Kanishka.
Oh, there's a mound in front, can you see? This is Tochari Tila here? Tochari Tila, yes.
Ah, right right.
The place still preserves 1 of the ancient names of the Kushans from the time when they lived on the edge of China before their long march into history.
Unfortunately, the dig wasn't very well done back in 1912, but what they found in this little mound was a temple about 100 feet long by 60 feet wide.
Inside, a big circular feature and statues of the great kings of the Kushan dynasty.
The biggest mystery, though, is when the excavators picked over the remains of the place, the place had been devastated by vandalsdestroyed right at the end of the Kushan period, not in some later period by the Huns or Muslim invaders.
And one statue in particular great royal statue, 7 or 8 feet high had been smashed to bits with almost deliberate venom.
And today, in Mathura museum, you can still see the headless statue of Kanishka, the king of kings, the ruler of all India, "may his reign last for 1,000 years.
" In the early centuries A.
D.
, the Kushans had opened up India's horizons, creating a vast, multi-racial empire.
They put India onto the international map, linking it to the trade systems of the world, adding another layer to the story of India through peace, trade, and tolerance.
But, above all, is the simple civilizing influence of contact.
In the second century A.
D.
, the Indian subcontinent had the world's biggest population as it does today and one of the biggest economies.
And now, as the wheel of history turns full circle, that age looks like a precursor of our own.
Next in "The Story of India" the genius of early Indian technology, the astounding living traditions of the south, and the Indian science of the divine.
But the roots of her rise lie 2,000 years ago.
Rich in resources, India has traded with the world since the beginning of history.
But commerce is never just about commodities, it's the way civilizations adapt and grow, discover new ideas and new worlds.
We've now reached the days of the Roman Empire, which saw the beginnings of global trade on the silk road and the spice route the next chapter in "The Story of India.
" Sometimes change in history happens in the unlikeliest of ways.
Here in India, 2,000 years ago in the time of the Roman Empire, these 3 things: the produce of a weed, of a grass, and of the lava of a beetle changed the course of Indian history, brought about the growth of civilization and caused other countries to make great voyages across thousands of miles of ocean seeking the riches of India.
The Arabian Sea off the coast of Kerala, South India.
Our boat is carrying timber, pepper, and spices from South India to the Persian Gulf: the way they've done it for more than 2,000 years.
It's easy to forget the great voyages of Columbus and Vasco de Gama were to find India.
And those voyages started in the days of the Romans.
We know about the Roman trade with India because of a guidebook written by an old Greek sea captain who knew all the Indian ports like the back of his hand.
It's full of the most wonderful detail that enables us to sample the sights and sounds of India in the time of the ancient Romans.
"And this was the time," wrote an ancient historian, "when history became one, "when the affairs of the Mediterranean, "Africa and Asia connected.
" From the first century A.
D.
, Roman trading ports dotted the shores of the Red Sea, East Africa and India.
Ah, here we are.
Yes.
It started with the discovery of the monsoon.
Aiden.
Aiden? Ah, right.
July-August time, monsoon? You are sailing or not sailing? No.
In May, in June, July-August Indian coast.
Dangerous time.
Dangerous time.
It's so easy as a Western person to see things from a Western perspective, isn't it? We talk about these great voyages of exploration the discovery of the monsoon as if Indian sailors didn't know about the monsoon all along.
But still, the Romans and the Greeks did discover the monsoonfor themselves.
And the man who did it, according to the story, was a sailor called Hippalus in about 150 B.
C.
And what Hippalus discovered was this: in June, the south-west monsoon begins to blow in this direction across the Indian Ocean.
The seas become heavy, it becomes dangerous to sail but, with strong enough ships, you can take that wind, coming out of the Red Sea and it'll bring you across to India.
"It's hard going," says the Greek guide to the Indian Ocean, "but you can get there really quickly.
" And then, this is the really great thing about it, in November, a couple of months after the heavy winds die down, the north-east monsoon blows you back the other way.
In the last century B.
C.
, ocean-going ships from the Mediterranean began regular trade with the coast of South India.
But for distant worlds to make contact, they need the technology, and the Romans developed that.
And miraculously, you can see it today.
Here in Kerala, the traditional boat builders still build huge, wooden, ocean-going ships using methods brought to India 2,000 years ago.
How long is this boat? 70 feet.
70 feet? Yeah, yeah.
They recently built a monster here 170 feet long, bigger than biggest Roman ships purely by eye, without a single sketch.
So this is the modification of the ancient way of constructing.
Greek and Roman ship builders in Egypt, once the trade with India opened up, devised a special way of constructing the ships in which they made the skin first with those interlocking joints mortice and tenons and a dowel through, so it was incredibly strong, could cope with really heavy seas.
And then putting the frame in, full frame in, after they'd constructed the skin.
And it was that technical advance, plus the knowledge of the monsoons, that enabled the Greek and Roman navigators to open up the trade with India.
And what the Romans wanted were spices.
This is one of the pepper warehouses in old Cochin, built by Jewish merchants from Iraq long ago.
Sacks of pepper destined for the tables of the Europe and America.
Kerala's Jews first came with the Roman spice trade.
I wish you could smell the air, it really is spicy.
You know that connotation: heady, dreamy, erotic even.
And all of it is the produce of native South Indian plants, some of them weeds, like peppera Tamil word.
And another South Indian word: ginger.
"And ginger shall be "hot in the mouth," says Shakespeare.
It's about 60, 65.
And it's grown in Kerala? The history of food is a part of the history of civilization.
Food is an essential of life; and for all cultures, eating together, one of the life's great pleasures.
Indian was perhaps the first international cuisine.
And here you can see the beginning: born of the simple need to preserve food in the heat of the tropics.
This is what the Roman craze for spices and pepper was all about: food.
Coriander on the flesh, everything mixed, little water.
Garam masala? Garam masala.
Some wine? No wine.
Sour vinegar? Sour vinegar.
A top Roman celebrity chef wrote a cookbook with 460-odd recipes 350 of them full of pepper blasting away at the taste buds, from whole, spiced flamingos to dormice stuffed with peppercorns.
The stuffed dormice never caught on here in vegetarian South India, but many other commodities and ideas did.
The Romans wanted many things from India: spices, pepper and cardamom and many more.
Gemstones, berrel and one little known thing: peacocks.
They say South Indian peacocks were a favorite pet among the ladies of the Roman aristocracy.
Fantastic! But then, India was a golden sparrow then, not now.
India did not need much from Rome.
What we got is mainly gold as medals, coins, silver, copper, tin, antimony, and, of course, Roman wine.
There were 40 or 50 ports trading with Rome on the west coast of India.
Some of them were famous even faraway in Europe.
The greatest, near modern Cochin, was called Muziris, "the first emporium of India," the Roman geographers called it.
Everyone came here Jews, Arabs, Christians.
The Apostle Thomas, Doubting Thomas, is supposed to have landed here in A.
D.
50.
The Christians have been in India ever since, before they were in Europe, let alone America.
But then, as the coastline changed, the port of Muziris vanished.
It was only in 2005 that the site was found a mile or 2 inland under a tangle of pepper vines and banana trees.
Well, how about that! And this is the best piece of amphora.
Oh it's the bottom of an amphora, yes.
It's the bottom.
It's fantastic.
I've seen these all along the route from Egypt and the Red Sea ports and even in the Egyptian desert.
And this amphora was used for importing wine and also to smooth some excellent olive oil and a kind of fish sauce called garum.
Throughout its history, India has always been open to the world, welcoming incomers, imbibing foreign ideas.
And this coast of Kerala, where people of all the world's great religions settled peacefully, is a continuing testimony to the trade links forged 2 millennia ago.
I'm a great believer in the living presence of the past.
You've only got to spend an hour in a place like this and you can feel it all around you.
This is what it would have felt like 2,000 years ago: the evening catch being unloaded, the stalls cooking food.
A Greek or a Roman standing on this spot now would recognize this scene.
But ancient South India was more than a string of trading ports; it was a great classical civilization whose center of power lay over the mountains, to the east.
Over the western ghats: the spine of India.
There are 2 passes which lead eastwards through the mountains of Kerala into the plains of South India both of them used by the railway engineers in later times.
These routes lead into the land Marco Polo called, "the most splendid province on earth.
" The place the British thought the most fertile part of their empire: Tamil Nadu.
This is rice country; so fertile it gives 3 harvests a year.
And the capital of this southern civilization was the city of Madurai.
To arrive here is to enter one of those thrilling places on earth where the ancient past still exists alongside the modern world.
Just imagine if classical Athens was alive today and the goddess of the city still presiding over her citizens that's Madurai.
"At dawn," says a Tamil poem of the Roman period, "Madurai wakes to the sound of the Vedas, "and the air is perfumed with the scent of flowers.
" Tamil Nadu is the world's last surviving classical civilization.
Its people still live comfortably, both in modernity and in sacred time.
Part of the global culture, but also the guardians of humanity's older traditions.
And, as in Roman times, they still worship the city's goddess Minakshi.
So Minakshi, you especially go to for marriage? Yes, especially for marriage.
Also for babies? Her son to succeed in the engineer college over here, she has come to pray god.
Ah, right, for success in his studies.
Today, Tamil is India's last living classical language.
2,000 years ago, Madurai was the center of South Indian culture.
Wow, this is extraordinary, isn't it? So this is This palm leaf manuscript is a late copy of an epic poem composed here in Roman times.
It's only 100 years old.
So still in Tamil Nadu, 100 years ago they were writing palm leaf manuscripts.
So this is how the ancient scribes wrote? In the hand.
One letter, typewriting machine.
Right to left Really? Rare, rare.
Rare? Rare manuscript.
Wow, that's confusing, isn't it? You get Right to left: rare manuscript, left to right.
Normal script: left to right, rare manuscripts: right to left.
Oh, I see, coal and oilsoot.
Soot, soot and oil, yeah, yeah, ok.
It's absolutely great, isn't it? Wow.
So there you are: an ancient Tamil business card.
The old Tamil poems mention Greek and Roman traders bringing gold to Madurai in exchange for pearls and textiles.
The city still has 6,000 goldsmiths working in the gold quarter.
Your fathers did it before you and grandfathers? It runs in the family? Yes, yes.
My father, my grandfather, my grand-grand-grandfather always in this work.
Thank you.
Hello.
Man: Hello.
Everywhere around you, you're seeing what a pre-modern city would have looked like.
Indian textiles have been coveted since ancient times.
I'm not sure it's quite my color! There's more colors.
Very, very nice.
This is pashimina? Cotton, of course, is native to India.
Beautiful! Sells best in shirts.
Oh,it's lovely.
Yes But it's how the Indians dye it that has always dazzled visitors.
You can make 1 of these in 1 hour? One hour.
One hour? No wonder the Greeks loved it, hey? The ancient Tamil poems talk about the Greeks, the Avanas, wandering around with jaws dropping at Madurai and they still do drop, don't they? This building, market, 450 years ago.
This is a big market, like a stock exchange.
Madurai is a marketing town.
Marketing town, it's a center, it's a center.
Pilgrims are still coming here, but to do shopping.
Happy shopping.
Say "happy shopping;" they do happy shopping here.
What the Indians wanted most of all was gold.
India today is the biggest importer of gold in the world.
Although not much of it gets into circulation because the Indians, as the ancient Greeks observed, love above all "to decorate themselves.
" So this is a necklace of coins? It's traditional, you know, when we get married and those kind of special occasions.
Our parents give us a dowry of gold.
Second thing, we like to decorate ourselves with ornaments.
May I lift up? Yeah.
Sure.
So this is the necklace made out of very small coins? Size of the little gold coins that the Romans sent over here.
Ah, goddess Lakshmi, goddess of wealth.
Of wealth, yes.
Roman writers talk about 100 million sesterces being sent over to India, and the interesting thing is, back then they were used for adornment, too.
These things were not used as circulating money.
Romans complained about the balance of payments in their day, just as the Indian government is today.
So that's how ancient India began to trade with the Mediterraneanby sea.
The rulers here in Madurai even sent their own embassies to the Emperor Augustus in Rome the first glimmerings of a global economy.
But, at that same moment, far to the north, new connections were being made.
Just as the spice route was opening up by sea, in the north, beyond the mighty chain of the Himalayas the world's greatest tradeway would connect east and west and India with both: the silk road.
This is Merv in Turkmenistan in Central Asia.
And it was in the first century B.
C.
out here in Central Asia that the merchants of China and the western world met for the very first time.
From that moment, the silk route was open.
There are still little places where people come to do worship, aren't there? And it would be the silk route which would be the catalyst in a new and brilliant phase in the history of India.
That's just amazing, isn't it, like the interior of a volcanic crater.
This is just the citadel of ancient Merv, and the citadel was one tiny corner of the vast city built in the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans.
Doesn't that give you an idea of the wealth and the importance of the silk route? But the silk road was controlled by a mysterious Central Asian empire.
They had begun as a confederation of tribes who had migrated along the road from the edge of China.
Later, they conquered Afghanistan and then India itself.
They called themselves the Kushans.
The discovery of the Kushans' forgotten empire and their unknown language began in Afghanistan, and some of the most important discoveries have been made here during the war, fought since the 1970s.
The Kushans made their first capital near Kabul and, rich on the profits of the silk road, sponsored a flowering of the arts.
The Kushans adopted Buddhism and fostered Buddhist culture.
Since we shot this 12 years ago, these pieces of Kushan Buddhist art in Kabul museum have been smashed to pieces by the Taliban.
Here's a Greek period Buddha.
This headless statue of the greatest Kushan king, Kanishka, was also pulverized.
History, too, has been a casualty of the Afghan war.
The key find was a crucial inscription from Surkh Khotal, north of Kabul.
In Greek letters, it's addressed to the legendary King Kanishka himself.
And this text led to the decipherment of their lost language by an English professor Nicholas Sims-Williams.
Now a second inscription has been dug up by an Afghan warlord.
This inscription is not nearly as well-preserved as the inscription of Surkh Khotal, as you can see, but it actually is an even more important historical inscription because it describes the deeds of the great king and the extension of his power across India.
The new inscription also tells us about the great king himself.
Man: He describes himself as the righteous and as the autocrat.
He has this wonderful word autocrat, which is a Greek term, of course.
And he says that he received the kingship from Nanna and from all the gods.
From these texts, the Kushan story can be told for the first time.
King Kujula ruled Central Asia and took Kabul; his son pushed his power down the Khyber Pass into North-West India.
His great-grandson Kanishka, a contemporary of Emperor Hadrian, overran India almost to the Bay of Bengal.
Under the Kushans, trade grew, the economy thrived, and soon they followed the earlier Greek and Indian rulers here by minting coins for trade.
It was a boom time; the population increased several times in a few generations, and you can still find traces of that boom time in the bazaars all the way between Kabul and Peshawar in the coins.
Basilios, Apollodotus, King Apollodotus.
On one side, an Indian elephant; and on the other side, with the local script, a hump-backed Indian bull.
And then the Kushans themselves, the people who really opened up the silk route to trade sacrificing at a fire altar with an Iranian god Oshto, is it, on 1 side? Although, on their coins you get the Buddha, you get Atheni, Hercules, Shiva the gods of everywhere between the Mediterranean and India.
The Kushan kings now issued gold coins on the Roman gold standard.
They're among the most magnificent currency ever minted and they're found as far away as Ethiopia.
From around A.
D.
130, Kaniska ruled from the silk route cities through Kabul and Peshawar to the Lower River Ganges Plain.
Architect of the great salvation, Kanishka the Kushan, the righteous, the just, the autocrat who inaugurated year 1, and proclaimed his edict to all India: "may the gods keep me ever fortunate.
And may I rule India for a thousand years.
" Their first capital inside India was the ancient city of Peshawar in today's Pakistan.
It's been a caravan town ever since, one of the oldest inhabited cities in the world.
Babur said that this was a garden city.
He said if you put a blind man towards Peshawar, the moment he is within the environment of Peshawar, through every smell and beautiful air, he will say, "Well, I am in Peshawar now.
" This is the Akhbari during the time of the Akhbar.
The moghul bricks.
Yeah, the moghul bricks.
And still the wooden gates we have.
Look at this, see the wood.
It's just fantastic, isn't it? This is the area which was really owned by very rich people, rich families with their very commercial background.
And they had their business investment in Bukhara.
So, really, this is Salaam.
So this is really the riches of the city coming from the silk route Oh, yes.
the old silk route connections with Central Asia, Bukhara, Samarkand.
Exactly, exactly, because the trade has been the trans-border trade had been for years from the north to the east.
Peshawar has played like a host, whether they were in or they were travelers or they were the riders.
Yeah, yeah.
So this was the place where they say intermingle with the people for endless cup of the green teas, sipping their green teas.
Endless cups of green teas? That's it.
And the richest cargo on those camel caravans that used to ply down the Khyber right up to the 1970s was silk.
Raw Chinese silk, to be turned by Indian weavers into works of art.
Seven months' time to make 1 each.
And all 1 piece, no anyjoint in this.
And look the back also.
Pepper on their tables, peacocks in their gardens, silk on their bodies.
"We must be mad," grumbled Pliny in Rome, "bankrupting ourselves for India.
" Gosh, the work is very, very fine, isn't it? Yes sir, thank you very much.
Very fine.
That is just knockout, isn't it? Then you should be careful, it's slippery.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's been a bit washed by the rain, hasn't it? Yes.
It's for the country, for the world, and to my mind this culture belongs to everybody.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not only ours.
It's a human culture.
Right in the middle of Peshawar, they've started the biggest excavation ever in the subcontinent, and it's turning out to be a revelation about the Kushans' role in Pakistani and Indian history.
Each layer is marked by 10-15 kinds.
Even the British are already stratified.
So, the Moghuls are about 6 feet down? Yes.
So that's 500 years.
Yes.
You can see that, in about 10 feet, you are covering about 1,000 years.
The Kushans about 24 feet deep.
Yes, about 24 to 26.
And you still haven't got the bottom yet.
No, no, we haven't reached to bottom.
These are the Greek levels.
So this is a continuous profile of 2,300 years, and this is the earliest living city in the whole South Asia.
The earliest living city in the whole of South Asia.
So far.
So what was it about the Kushans' rule that brought about this boom time in population, in towns, and economies? There seems to be some kind of almost revolutionary opening up of the world in the Kushan period.
Why do you think that is? Very simple question.
And I still say that to the Pakistanis, and particularly to my people, because of peace, because Buddhism was a religion of peace, no war.
And Buddhism is the key to an ancient legend of Kanishka, the tale of the greatest building in the world, and a prophecy from none other than the Buddha himself.
At the stated time, Kanishka came to the throne, and he ruled the whole world.
At first, he despised the Buddha's law, but 1 day, he was out hunting a white hare when he met a shepherd boy.
Some say the boy was Indra in disguise.
And he was building a small mud stupa.
The Buddha said that after his death, you would build the greatest building in the world to house the remains of his body.
So Kanishka ordered a stupa to be built around the boy's mud stupa.
But however high his stupa rose, the small one always exceeded it, until eventually it rose 700 feet high.
So legend says that Kanishka made the greatest building on Earth: a giant domed stupa.
Across Asia, he's still remembered as one of the 4 pillars of Buddhism, but all trace of his great monument has vanished.
We know the site lay outside the town, in open fields where traces were located a century ago by a French explorer.
He says this: If we set out from the Lahore gate and take the "Cherat" road or Khaz Al Khani.
Yes.
Al Khani this way.
Ok.
Today, the site has been completely swallowed up by modern Peshawar.
About 2, 3 kilometers from here.
Ok.
That's fantastic.
And this is the largest graveyard of Peshawar.
Ok.
Shokria, Shokria.
Thank you very much.
Ah, great, great.
Does he know anything about the story of the place? Great news.
This gentleman knows this was the place, Shahji-Ki Dheri, the mound of the great king.
He doesn't know who the great king was, but that was the place.
Ok.
Thank you very much! This is it? Yes.
That is all Shahji-Ki Dheri.
That is the mound? Yes.
The stupa is described by several Chinese Buddhist pilgrims of the late Roman period.
This whole great mound here was the complex that Kanishka built with, not only the giant stupa, but a huge monastery with other buildings.
It extended over a vast area.
And it's just been plundered for bricks by the locals for centuries.
And, as so often in the subcontinent, the site is still sacred.
Sufis still come here? Yeah.
Yeah.
Every year.
Every year? So, this is the line When I was in Calcutta, they have a model a big stone model of a stupa from here, from Peshawar.
And I drew the monument.
This is, I think this is what it looked like.
The Chinese pilgrims talked about 5 stages.
Sometimes they say the stupa itself was 300 feet, but I think maybe that's too big.
And then on top was a huge kind of wooden structure.
You would have had great flags coming out at an angle, blowing in the wind huge long silk streamers.
"Of all the stupas in the world," the Chinese said, "not 1 could compare to this in solemn beauty "and majestic grandeur.
" when the Chinese pilgrims came here 500 years later, they say that everybody agrees this was the most wonderful stupa in the whole of the inhabited world.
Yes.
Exactly.
You can image coming into the plain of Peshawar, can't you, with this gigantic structure.
"It radiated brilliance.
"And when the breeze blew, the precious bells "sounded in harmony.
" Like all great rulers of Indian history, the Kushans accepted and supported all religions.
In their patronage of Buddhism, they developed a new art form: representing the Buddha's story as a series of miraculous fairytale events.
Inventing the way we see the Buddha today.
Melding Greek and Indian style, they created an international art that was transmitted down the silk route and conquered the whole of the eastern world.
Legend said that Kanishka buried a small portion of the Buddha's ashes under his great stupa.
Thank you very much.
And tucked away in a corner case in the museum is a small bronze casket, found on the site, which had contained ashes.
But even this intimate gift is a testimony to the open mindedness of the rulers of this vast, multi-cultural empire.
And outside a series of images that's just wonderfully typical of Kanishka's era: there's the Buddha on the top with his "fear not" gesture.
But the figures by him, the devotees, are actually great Hindu gods.
There's Indra with his flat crown, and there, with his long hair, Brahma, the creator god.
If we move it round, there's Kanishka himself wearing the royal garb of the Kushan kings: the great big boots that have clod-hopped all the way across the Hindu Kush; the big coat that looks like a Tibetan tuba and the double crown, the king of kings: Maharaja Kanishka.
You can see why Kanishka and the Kushans chose this as their capital.
Looking towards the Khyber Pass and those routes into Central Asia across westwards to the Mediterranean and eastwards above Tibet to their ancestral home on the edge of China.
And yet, they also ruled 1,500 miles or more that way across the plains of India.
So by A.
D.
130, when the emperor Hadrian ruled the Roman empire in the west and the Han Chinese far to the east, the Kushans under Kanishka ruled the middle of the world, from the Aral Sea to the Bay of Bengal.
Around that time, Kanishka conquered the plains of India and made his new Indian capital the city of Mathura.
An early English traveler in India said that when you come down the grand Trunk road from Afghanistan, it's only when you reach Mathura, with its sacred turtles in the river and monkeys scampering through the streets, that you get the flavor of the real Hindustan.
Mathura became an international city, rich on the profits of the silk road.
"It was heaven on Earth," said one observer, "huge and prosperous, rich in money and people.
" And then, as now, it was also a great religious city, sacred to the god Krishna.
See, we've lost all this in the west, haven't we? But if you'd had come to Canterbury in the time of "The Canterbury Tales," with the hundreds and hundreds of coaching inns for the pilgrims, it would have been like this: a city teeming with pilgrims like this at festival time.
Where have you come from? I will come from Moradabad.
Moradabad.
This is a very long way.
Yeah.
And your husbands? No.
Husbands are there! You've got rid of them! You got rid of husbands.
Yeah.
9 ladies, only ladies.
Well, I hope you have a very happy rest of your tirthayatra.
Yeah.
Thank you.
The ancient Greeks called this city "Mathura Ton Theon," the city of the gods.
If you'd been here in the second century A.
D.
at the height of the Kushan empire, you would have seen Greeks, Romans, Bahtrians, Persians, maybe even the odd Chinese.
All the result of the opening up of the silk route and the contacts between the Mediterranean world, and India and China.
It was an incredibly exciting time and this city was at the center of it.
Dynamic economy, very diverse ethnically, in its religious life, just the place to be and that explains why you have such tremendous achievements in ideas and in art here.
A great historian of the Roman empire, Edward Gibbons, said this period, second century A.
D.
, was the happiest time for humanity in the whole history of the world.
Like the Moghuls and the British, the Kushans were outsiders, a foreign military elite ruling the people of India.
But by encouraging long-distance trade and religious tolerance, the Kushans brought peace to a vast area for more than 2 centuries.
And with this peace, they could foster the arts, literature, and science.
They were behind the development of Sanskrit as a language of international scholarship in the east, like medieval Latin in the west.
And another important area of their patronage was medicine.
One of founders of the Indian tradition of medicine, ayurveda, is said to have been Kanishka's guru and chief minister.
His name was Chanaka.
Here in Mathura, the Gupta family are doctors who, for many generations, have followed the ancient tradition handed down from the Kushan era.
300 different medicinal plants are growing here for healing different kinds of the problems.
So everything for your medicine you grow here yourself? Yes.
This is called Amaltas Rgveta.
It is a family Cassia Fistula, that's very good for constipation.
A system based on natural cures, ayurveda was transmitted east in the early centuries A.
D.
by Buddhist monks on the silk route to China.
This is now nicely aloe vera, which is going very famous now all over the world: aloe vera gel.
And this is what the ladies use for their skin cream and all this sort of stuff? Yeah.
May I look? Sure.
Sure.
Oh, yeah, look at that.
How about that? This is the gel, you know? Ayurveda is the science of life.
The whole body and whole nature is made by natural 5 element: earth, water, fire, air and ether.
50 years old.
More than that.
So, the Kushan era was a great time for the codifying of India's traditions of knowledge.
no electricity and no Like all ancient Indian sciences, ayurveda originally was orally transmitted from master to pupil, father to son.
Only later was it committed to writing.
And this in a form of poetry so the people can remember the poetry because it is difficult to remember the like, full book, so just the poetry poetry.
It's all vata, pitta, kapha disease names, disease symptoms, medicines, descriptions are in the poetry form.
How long, far back in time does it go? This is like all the literature on the Earth's planet.
It started near about 5,000 year before, like 3,000 year before Christ.
But the most important legacy of the Kushan age in world history was brought about by Kushan Buddhist monks and traders who traveled the silk route and took Buddhism to China.
Buddhism reach another great nation, China, around second century.
I always showing my sort of respect to the Chinese Buddhist because they are historically, they are elder student of Buddha; we are younger, so I always respect them.
Buddhism is one of the rich India's tradition.
Of course, recent time, certain sort of ideology or certain sort of political reasons, there's a lot of destructions happen, but time change, the things become more open.
So it is really very right that China, Chinese, again as a student of Indian master.
But the Buddhists were also the traders, and just as the rise of capitalism in Europe went hand-in-hand with the Protestant ethic, capitalism in the East was driven by the commercial ethos of Buddhist merchants who traveled the silk road.
As for Kanishka, his end is a mystery.
But a legend was told in the East for centuries: the king had conquered 3/4 of the world but still could not rest.
And he set off east with an army of white elephants, riding his magic horse.
But when he reached the snowy peaks of the North, a mountainous wall of ice, his horse reared up, unwilling to go any further.
The king spoke to his magic horse, "I have ridden you on all my victorious campaigns.
"Why do you hesitate now? "Why will you not go forward on this road?" I wonder, my king, will the conquest of the East satisfy you? Your hunger is boundless.
What will you do when there are no more worlds left to conquer? On seeing the king's magic horse hesitate, his army spoke amongst themselves and decided to get rid of the king.
Legend tells of assassination and regime change here in Mathura.
History says Kanishka died around 150 A.
D.
and was succeeded by others of his dynasty, but could a distant echo of those dark events have come down to us today? Here in Mathura every year a cycle of plays is performed about the god Krishna.
Part of a tradition of drama here which goes back, unbroken, to the ancient world.
The plays tell the story of young Krishna's overthrow of a great tyrant a fairy tale villain whose name is Kansa.
Now we come to the best bit: the killing of the wicked tyrant of Mathura, Raja Kans.
Great as the Kushans were in the history of India, they were, after all, foreigners.
Just outside Kanishka's former capital of Mathura, there's 1 last clue to the fall of India's forgotten emperor.
Do you could we just ask? Do you know a place called "Tochari Tila," "Tochari Tila"? Tochari Tila? Raja kanishki.
Raja kanishki! Fantastic.
They found a statue of King Kanishka.
Oh, there's a mound in front, can you see? This is Tochari Tila here? Tochari Tila, yes.
Ah, right right.
The place still preserves 1 of the ancient names of the Kushans from the time when they lived on the edge of China before their long march into history.
Unfortunately, the dig wasn't very well done back in 1912, but what they found in this little mound was a temple about 100 feet long by 60 feet wide.
Inside, a big circular feature and statues of the great kings of the Kushan dynasty.
The biggest mystery, though, is when the excavators picked over the remains of the place, the place had been devastated by vandalsdestroyed right at the end of the Kushan period, not in some later period by the Huns or Muslim invaders.
And one statue in particular great royal statue, 7 or 8 feet high had been smashed to bits with almost deliberate venom.
And today, in Mathura museum, you can still see the headless statue of Kanishka, the king of kings, the ruler of all India, "may his reign last for 1,000 years.
" In the early centuries A.
D.
, the Kushans had opened up India's horizons, creating a vast, multi-racial empire.
They put India onto the international map, linking it to the trade systems of the world, adding another layer to the story of India through peace, trade, and tolerance.
But, above all, is the simple civilizing influence of contact.
In the second century A.
D.
, the Indian subcontinent had the world's biggest population as it does today and one of the biggest economies.
And now, as the wheel of history turns full circle, that age looks like a precursor of our own.
Next in "The Story of India" the genius of early Indian technology, the astounding living traditions of the south, and the Indian science of the divine.