Gandhari language in the context of "Birchbark manuscript"

Gandhara (IAST: Gandhāra) was an ancient Indo-Aryan civilisation in present-day northwestern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. The core of the region of Gandhara was the Peshawar and Swat valleys, extending up to Kabul and Bagram in the west and the Pothohar Plateau in the east. However, the cultural influence of Greater Gandhara extended as far as the Bamyan valley in the west and the Karakoram range in the northeast. The region was a central location for the spread of Buddhism to Central and East Asia, with many Chinese Buddhist pilgrims visiting the region.

Between the third century BCE and third century CE, Gāndhārī, a Middle Indo-Aryan language written in the Kharosthi script and linked with the modern Dardic language family, acted as the lingua franca of the region, and through Buddhism, the language spread as far as China based on Gandhāran Buddhist texts. Famed for its unique Gandharan style of art, the region attained its height from the 1st century to the 5th century CE under the Kushan Empire, which had their twin capitals at Kapiśi and Puruṣapura, ushering the period known as Pax Kushana.

The Gandhāran Buddhist texts are the oldest Buddhist manuscripts yet discovered, dating from about the 1st century BCE to 3rd century CE and found in the northwestern outskirts of Pakistan. They represent the literature of Gandharan Buddhism and are written in the Gāndhārī language which has been grouped by many scholars in the Dardic language family. The texts constitute the largest collection of Gāndhārī manuscripts known to date and are now housed at the Islamabad Museum in Pakistan.

They were sold to European and Japanese institutions and individuals, and are currently being recovered and studied by several universities. The Gandhāran texts are in a considerably deteriorated form (their survival alone is extraordinary), but educated guesses about reconstruction have been possible in several cases using both modern preservation techniques and more traditional textual scholarship, comparing previously known Pāli and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit versions of texts. Other Gandhāran Buddhist texts—"several and perhaps many"—have been found over the last two centuries but lost or destroyed.

Gandhara (IAST: Gandhāra) was an ancient Indo-Aryan civilization in present-day northwestern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. The core of the region of Gandhara was the Peshawar and Swat valleys, extending up to Kabul and Bagram in the west and the Pothohar Plateau in the east. However, the cultural influence of Greater Gandhara extended as far as the Bamyan valley in the west and the Karakoram range in the northeast. The region was a central location for the spread of Buddhism to Central and East Asia, with many Chinese Buddhist pilgrims visiting the region.

Between the third century BCE and third century CE, Gāndhārī, a Middle Indo-Aryan language written in the Kharosthi script and linked with the modern Dardic language family, acted as the lingua franca of the region, and through Buddhism, the language spread as far as China based on Gandhāran Buddhist texts. Famed for its unique Gandharan style of art, the region attained its height from the 1st century to the 5th century CE under the Kushan Empire, which had their twin capitals at Kapiśi and Puruṣapura, ushering the period known as Pax Kushana.

Buddhist texts are religious texts that belong to, or are associated with, Buddhism and its traditions. There is no single textual collection for all of Buddhism. Instead, there are three main Buddhist Canons: the Pāli Canon of the Theravāda tradition, the Chinese Buddhist Canon used in East Asian Buddhist tradition, and the Tibetan Buddhist Canon used in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism.

The earliest Buddhist texts were not committed to writing until some centuries after the death of Gautama Buddha. The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts are the Gandhāran Buddhist texts, found in Pakistan and written in Gāndhārī, they date from the first century BCE to the third century CE. The first Buddhist texts were initially passed on orally by Buddhist monastics, but were later written down and composed as manuscripts in various Indo-Aryan languages (such as Pāli, Gāndhārī, and Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit). These texts were collected into various collections and translated into other languages such as Buddhist Chinese (fójiào hànyǔ 佛教漢語) and Classical Tibetan as Buddhism spread outside of India.

Shanshan (Chinese: 鄯善; pinyin: Shànshàn; Uyghur: پىچان, romanized: Pichan, lit. 'Piqan') was a kingdom located at the north-eastern end of the Taklamakan Desert near the great, but now mostly dry, salt lake known as Lop Nur.

The kingdom was originally an independent city-state, known in local Gandhari documents as Kroraïna (Krorayina, Kröran) – which is commonly rendered in Chinese as Loulan. The Western Han dynasty took direct control of the kingdom some time after 77 BCE, and it was later known in Chinese as Shanshan. The archaeologist J. P. Mallory has suggested that the name Shanshan may be derived from the name of another city in the area, Cherchen (later known in Chinese as Qiemo). A local variety of Gandhari was used in the kingdom for administrative, literary, and epigraphic purposes. Scholars such as Thomas Burrow have suggested the local population might have spoke a hypothetical Tocharian C, as evidenced by the loanwords in those Gandhari documents.