BAMIYAN BUDDHAS, a pair of enormous sixth-century statues of the Buddha carved into the Bamiyan cliffs in Afghanistan. The statues were set among hundreds of caves adorned with murals and religious statuary that were used by Buddhist monks before and during the Islamic conquests of Afghanistan. In March 2001 the statues were destroyed by the Taliban government, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, over the course of twenty-five days, an act that was universally decried by the international community. In 2003 the statues were listed by UNESCO as both a World Heritage Site and as endangered.
In the wake of the destruction researchers were able to carbon-date the Buddhas from pieces of the rubble. The larger statue, referred to as the “Western Buddha,” was hewn between 591 and 644 CE, and the smaller statue, the “Eastern Buddha,” between 544 and 595 CE. The Eastern Buddha, called Shahmama (“Queen Mother”), was depicted as the Sakyamuni Buddha and was identified as a female figure; she stood 125 feet tall. The Western Buddha, assumed to be male and known locally as Solsol, was identified as the Vairocana Buddha and stood 180 feet tall. The bodies of the figures were carved directly out of the sandstone cliffs; other features were added on and made of a mud-and-straw mixture and coated with stucco. This mixture was supported by wooden pegs for stability and then painted to enhance details in the face, hands, and the folds of the robes. Solsol was originally painted carmine red while Shahmama was multicolored. The flowing draped robes and long curls of hair the statues once had testified to the Gandharan Buddhist aesthetic influence.
Buddhist activity in Bamiyan began in the second century under the Kushan Empire. The Hephthalites conquered the region in the fifth century, and it was under Hephthalite rule that monasteries were founded and the statues constructed. The heterogenous style of the Buddhas, an amalgam of Indian,
Asian, and Greek influences, attests to the Bamiyan Valley’s status at the time as a crossroads on the Silk Route. Bamiyan remained a site of Buddhist religion up until the final Islamic conquest of the region in 977; carbon dating of the murals in the caves around the Buddhas suggests that the monks’ artistic activity continued up until then.
The Bamiyan Buddhas stood for over fourteen hundred years, and though the Taliban succeeded in destroying them, they were not the first to try. Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, wrote that he had ordered both statues to be destroyed in 1528. The later Mughal emperor Aurangzeb attempted to raze the statues but succeeded only in breaking the Buddhas’ legs. And the eighteenth-century Shah of Persia, Nader Afshar, ordered cannons to be fired at them. These attempts left the Buddhas partially damaged but still very much intact.
The Taliban captured the Bamiyan Valley in September 1998 during the Afghan Civil War. Local commander Abdul Wahed ordered the Buddhas to be blown up, but his superior, Taliban founder Muhammed Umar, prevented him, issuing a decree in 1999 to preserve the statues for potential tourism revenue. In 2000 local authorities even asked for UN assistance to restore the drainage system around the Buddhas, so it appeared the statues were in no immediate danger. A few months later, however, the Taliban began to target cultural artifacts and non-Islamic idols. In early 2001 a party of senior Taliban officials entered the Kabul Museum and smashed ancient statues and other objects in the museum’s collection deemed un-Islamic and idolatrous. After the news broke, Muhammed Umar signed off on a hastily composed ordinance that provided legal cover for idol-smashing. On February 27, 2001, in a complete reversal of his 1999 decree, Muhammed Umar ordered the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, declaring them un-Islamic idols. Years later, ostensibly claiming he did not actually want to destroy the Buddhas, Umar explained in an interview that he had been upset when foreigners approached him about repair work for the Buddhas as a result of rain damage, given that at the time Afghanistan was facing famine after years of civil war and drought. “Had they come for humanitarian work, I would have never ordered the Bud-
dhas’ destruction,” he said.
The declaration of intent to destroy was greeted with a chorus of international condemnation. UNESCO objected strenuously, and many countries mobilized around the issue, proposing a host of alternatives to destroying the Buddhas, including moving them to different countries. The Taliban pressed forward and carried out the act in multiple stages beginning on March 2. Initially antiaircraft guns, artillery, and antitank mines were used, but large portions of the statues remained intact. It eventually required all manner of explosives and a rocket to ultimately separate the Buddhas from the rock they were carved into. After the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, fifty more caves were discovered, twelve of which contained murals and paintings. Upon analysis, it was discovered that these were the oldest surviving oil paintings in the world, predating European oil painting by six centuries.
Later in 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the United States invaded Afghanistan and removed the Taliban from power, installing Hamid Karzai as interim president. Karzai pledged to reconstruct the Buddhas, and international funding poured in to support the effort to preserve the artifacts of the area. In 2008 archaeological excavations in the valley unearthed a sixty-two-foot-long reclining Buddha statue, and in 2011 the UNESCO Expert Working Group on Afghan cultural projects drew up numerous plans for the site, some of which included multiple museums, reconstruction of one or both Buddhas, and restoration of some of the caves. The German branch of the International Council on Monuments and Sites did in fact start to rebuild the base section of the Eastern Buddha in 2013, but it was ordered to halt by UNESCO on procedural grounds. The wealthy couple Janson Hu and Liyan Yu funded a project in which, for one night in 2015, the empty niches were filled by 3D light projections of an artist’s rendition of what Solsol originally looked like. The holographic technology was donated to Afghanistan’s culture ministry.
In 2021 the Taliban overthrew the American-backed government and reestablished the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Though the new government has pledged to safeguard the artifacts of the Bamiyan Valley and continues to tolerate tourists at the location, preservation work has stopped.