DefinePK

Abstract

The following pages present a relief brought to light during the excavations of the Buddhist sacred area of Saidu Sharif I (Swāt, Pakistan) by the Italian Archaeological Mission and identified by the author during a survey in the Mission House. The relief represents the episode of cūḍā-chedana (the cutting of the hair), rarely depicted in Gandharan art. Apart from two reliefs (one from Kunduz and the other from uncertain provenance and kept at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford), the relief of Saidu Sharif I is the only one coming from a documented archaeological context. The discovery of this relief sheds new light on the contribution of Saidu Sharif‟s workshop in the Gandharan artistic phenomenon, a subject that deserves further study.