Original subtitles

(MEN CHATTERING)

WOOD: Civilisation is made by many things,

but most of all by human interaction,

by contact and exchange.

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 civilisations adapt and grow,

the way people learn about themselves and others,

discover new ideas and new worlds.

In the time of the Roman Empire,

the opening of the Silk Road and the spice route

saw the beginnings of a world economy.

And at the centre was 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 three things,

the produce of a weed,

of a grass and of the larva of a beetle

changed the course of Indian history,

brought about the growth of civilisation

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.

(MAN CHATTERING ON RADIO)

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 da 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 1 st century AD, Roman trading ports

dotted the shores of the Red Sea, East Africa and India.

WOOD: Ah, here we are. Yes.

SAILOR: Yemen, you have been?

It started with the discovery of the monsoon.

Ah, right.

Aden, Oman, Muscat, Salalah, Somalia...

July, August time, monsoon, you are sailing or not sailing?

No.

In May, in June...

-July, August... -Dangerous time.

-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 monsoon for themselves.

And the man who did it, according to the story,

was a sailor called Hippalus in about 1 50 BC.

And what Hippalus discovered was this.

In June, the southwest 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 northeast monsoon blows you back the other way.

And this is what they came for,

the Spice Coast of Kerala.

And if you were a Mediterranean merchant,

wouldn't you like stay here?

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.

-WOOD: How long is this boat? -This boat is 70 feet.

-MAN: 70 feet? -WOOD: 70 feet. Yeah.

They recently built a monster here,

1 70 feet long,

bigger than the 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,

mortise and tenons and a dowel through so it was incredibly strong.

Could cope with really heavy seas.

And then putting the frame in,

the 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 was 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 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 pepper, a Tamil word.

And another south Indian word, ginger.

''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 civilisation.

Food is an essential of life

and, for all cultures, eating together, one of life's great pleasures.

Indian was perhaps the first international cuisine.

And here you can see the beginning,

borne 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, ginger fresh, 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.

(BELL CLANGING)

The stuffed dormice never caught on here in vegetarian south India,

but many other commodities and ideas did.

SURESH: The Romans wanted many things from India.

Spices, pepper and cardamom and many more.

Gemstones, beryl,

and one little known thing, peacocks.

They say south Indian peacocks

were a favourite pet among

the ladies of the Roman aristocracy.

Fantastic!

But 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.

The greatest was called Muziris,

the first emporium of India, as the Roman geographers called it.

Everyone came here.

The apostle Thomas, doubting Thomas,

is supposed to have landed here in AD 50.

The Syrian Christians have been here ever since.

Jews, later Muslim Arabs, all religions came here peacefully

and stayed on the banks of the Periyar River.

(BELL CLANGING)

But Muziris itself has disappeared...until now.

In 2005, the site of Muziris was found a mile or two inland

under a tangle of pepper vines and banana trees.

The clues which led the archaeologists here were Roman coins,

beads and glass and broken pottery

dug up by the local people in their gardens.

Well, how about that?

Oh, yeah.

Actually, it continues further.

So that is the plot where we excavated, there.

WOOD: Yeah, yeah.

And we found similar structures little about three metres that side,

in the regular trench we excavated.

The place was probably a Roman treaty port,

next door to an Indian village, which is still here.

SHAJAN: This is a habitation mound. WOOD: Yeah.

This whole area is,

I mean, spread with a lot of pottery,

bricks, tiles, everything. Every cultural thing.

And this is what everybody had been looking for,

the site of Muziris, hadn't they?

Everybody had wondered where it was.

We dug a trench measuring two metre by two metre,

and at a depth of about one metre we found a brick structure in this trench

and further below, we found a lot of amphora,

original Roman amphora pottery

and small coin fragments.

And this is the best piece of amphora.

-Oh, it's the bottom of an amphora, yes. -Yes, it's the bottom of the...

It's fantastic.

I've seen these all along the route from Egypt.

The Red Sea ports

and even in the Egyptian desert.

And this amphora was used for importing wine

and also, to some extent, olive oil

and a kind of fish sauce called garum.

In the temple here in Muziris,

there was a statue of the Emperor Augustus.

So, Queen Victoria wasn't the first Western ruler

whose image stood on the banks of an Indian river.

WOOD: 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 recognise this scene.

(MAN SHOUTING IN MALAYALAM)

But ancient south India was more than a string of trading ports.

It was a great, classical civilisation

whose centre of power lay over the mountains to the east.

Over the Western Ghats, the spine of India.

There are two 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 three harvests a year.

And the capital of this southern civilisation 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 civilisation.

It's people still live comfortably both in modernity and in sacred time.

(CHANTING)

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, Meenakshi.

WOOD: So, Meenakshi you'd especially go to for marriage?

WOMAN: Yes, especially for marriage.

WOOD: Also for babies?

(SPEAKING TAMIL)

If her son can get received in the engineering college over here,

she has come for that, pray God.

All right, for success in his studies.

Today Tamil is India's last living classical language.

2,000 years ago, Madurai was the centre of south Indian culture.

Wow, this is extraordinary, isn't it?

So this is Silapadikaram.

This palm leaf manuscript is a late copy of an epic poem

composed here in Roman times.

It's only 1 00 years old?

So still, in Tamil Nadu 1 00 years ago,

they were writing palm leaf manuscripts.

So this is how the ancient scribes wrote?

(SPEAKING TAMIL)

WOOD: In the hand.

(SIVAKKOLUNDHU SPEAKING TAMIL)

-Right to left. -Really?

-Rare, rare. -Rare?

Rare manuscript.

Wow, that's confusing, isn't it? You get...

Right to left is a rare manuscript, left to right...

Normal script, left to right, rare manuscripts, right to left.

WOOD: Oh, I see, coal and oil. Soot.

Soot, soot and oil, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

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...

WOOD: Thank you.

-Hello. -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 colour.

-There's more colours. -Very, very nice.

WOOD: This is pashmina?

Cotton, of course, is native to India.

Beautiful.

-Sir, this, pashmina shawls. -Oh, it's lovely.

But it's how the Indians dye it that has always dazzled visitors.

-You can make one of these in one 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, a market 450 years ago.

This is a big market, like a stock exchange.

-Madurai's a marketing town. -Marketing town.

It's a centre, it's a centre.

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.

WOOD: So this is a necklace of coins?

They're traditional, you know, when we get married

and those kind of special occasions.

Our parents give us dowry as gold.

Second thing, we like to decorate ourselves with ornaments.

-WOOD: May I lift up? -Yeah, sure.

So this is the necklace made out of very small coins?

MAN: Yes.

Size of the little gold coins that the Romans sent over here.

MAN: Yes.

WOOD: Goddess Lakshmi, goddess of wealth.

-Of wealth, yes. -MAN: Yes.

Roman writers talk about 1 00 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 India began to trade with the Mediterranean by sea.

The first glimmerings of a global economy.

The rulers here in Madurai would even send their own embassies

to Emperor Augustus in Rome.

But, at that moment, far to the north,

events were unfolding that would spread Indian trade and culture and religion

by land as far as China.

Beyond the great chain of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau,

a powerful new nation was rising in the deserts of Central Asia.

They would come to rule in India

and galvanise commercial and cultural exchanges between East and West

along a new trade way, the Silk Route.

This is Merv in Turkmenistan in Central Asia.

And it was in the 1 st century BC, 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 they?

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?

The empire that controlled the Silk Route

began as a confederation of tribes

who had migrated from the edge of China across Central Asia

to conquer Afghanistan and then India.

They called themselves the Kushans.

The story of the Kushans' forgotten empire takes us to Kabul in Afghanistan,

where they first made their capital on the edge of the Indian subcontinent.

I filmed this 1 0 years ago, during the first war with the Taliban.

When they came to rule in India, the Kushans adopted Buddhism

and fostered a great flowering of Buddhist culture here,

all paid for by their control of trade on the Silk Route.

These pieces of Kushan Buddhist art in the Kabul museum

have now been smashed by the Taliban,

just as they blew up the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan.

Look, here's a Greek-period Buddha.

This headless statue of a Kushan king was also pulverised.

But what has survived is a crucial inscription in Greek letters,

addressed to a great king of the Kushan Empire.

It was this text that led to the decipherment of their lost language.

SIMS-WILLIAMS: It was in 1 957 that the French archaeologists

in Afghanistan discovered a complete inscription.

And that was, of course, the key.

It was something you could get your teeth into, complete sentences, verbs.

I mean, for a linguist, it's very tiresome having texts

on coins and seals, because they're just phrases,

just names and epithets and no complete sentence.

The excitement of the code-breaker.

And the decipherment has continued as further artefacts

have come out of war-torn Afghanistan.

Letters, contracts, deals, even magic spells.

More insights into the Kushan culture

that survived for centuries here in Afghanistan.

SIMS-WILLIAMS: This is a legal contract.

And the custom was to write serious legal contracts like this,

to write it in two copies

and then one copy would be rolled up, as you see here,

and sealed so that it couldn't be altered

and then a second copy would be left open to be read.

It has opened up the lost civilisation, hasn't it?

Or at least a civilisation that most of us knew nothing about.

I mean, where did the Kushans come from?

And what lead to them using Greek?

The Kushans were probably the chief clan really

of the people known as the Yueh-chi,

that's the Chinese name for these people.

They're first attested in Chinese sources.

And they come from somewhere in China, far to the north and east.

And they gradually came to what is now Afghanistan,

to the northern part of Afghanistan in about the 2nd century BC.

And it was only after they had arrived there,

that they came to know the Greek script,

presumably their language had not been written before that.

And they learnt the Greek script,

which is known in the area ever since the time of Alexander.

And now a second inscription has thrown dramatic new light

on the greatest king of the Kushans, Kanishka,

and his vast Indian Empire.

SIMS-WILLIAMS: This inscription is not nearly as well-preserved

as the inscription of Surkh Kotal, as you can see,

but, actually, it's an even more important historical inscription

because it describes the deeds of the great king

and the extension of his power across India

and the cities which had submitted to him

right across the north of India.

But, of course, from other sources we know also that the Kushans

extended their power well into what is Chinese Turkistan,

deep into Central Asia.

So above Tibet, up towards the Aral Sea

and down towards the Bay of Bengal.

That's right, it's a huge area.

The new inscription also tells us about the great king himself.

It also describes his genealogy,

himself, Kanishka, and his three predecessors,

his father, his grandfather and his great grandfather.

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 Nana

and from all the gods.

So he was the divine...the ruler with divine right, apparently.

So, like the Moghuls and the British after them,

the Kushans were outsiders

who became rulers of one of the biggest Indian empires.

An empire that controlled the Silk Route

and stretched all the way from Central Asia deep into India

connected by the Khyber Pass.

The Khyber Pass really came into its own as the connecting tradeway

between India and those great desert oases of Central Asia.

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.

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.

(READING IN GREEK)

Apollodotus.

King Apollodotus.

On one side, an Indian elephant

and on the other side, with the local script,

a humpbacked 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, Adsho, is it, on one side.

Although on their coins you get the Buddha,

you get Athene, Hercules, Shiva,

the gods of everywhere between the Mediterranean and India.

Architect of the great salvation, Kanishka the Kushan,

the righteous, the just, the autocrat

who obtained the kingship from all the gods,

inaugurated Year 1 and proclaimed his edict to the whole of India.

''May the gods keep him ever fortunate.

''And may he rule all India for 1,000 years. ''

The Kushans had conquered northwest India in about 80 AD,

filling a power vacuum left by the collapse of local dynasties.

And their first capital inside India

was the ancient city of Peshawar in today's Pakistan.

Peshawar has been a caravan town ever since,

making its money from its old Silk Route contacts.

DURRANI: Baber said that this was a garden city.

He said that if you put a blind man towards Peshawar,

the moment he is within the environment of Peshawar,

through its smell and beautiful air,

he will say, ''Well, I am in Peshawar now. ''

This is the Khisti Akbari, built in the time of the Akbar.

WOOD: 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 are coming from the Silk Route,

the old Silk Route connections with Central Asia, Bukhara, Samarkand.

Oh, yes, 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 invader or they were travellers or they were writers.

So this was the place where they say intermingle with the people

over endless cup of the green teas.

-Sipping their green teas. -Endless cups of green teas?

And the richest cargo on those camel caravans

that used to ply down the Khyber right up to the 1 9 70s was silk.

Raw Chinese silk,

to be turned by Indian weavers into works of art.

MAN: Seven months' time to make one each.

-WOOD: Fantastic. -All one piece, no any joint 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.

WOOD: Very fine.

That is just knockout, isn't it?

ALI: Then you should be careful, it's slippery.

WOOD: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, it's been a bit washed by the rain, hasn't it?

Yes.

ALI: It's for the country, for the world,

and, to my mind, this culture belongs to everybody.

It's not only ours.

WOOD: Yeah, yeah.

ALI: 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 1 0, 1 5 cards.

WOOD: (CHUCKLING) Even the British are already stratified.

So the Moghuls are about six feet down?

Yes.

So that's 500 years.

ALI: You can see that in about 1 0 feet you are covering about 1 ,000 years.

WOOD: The Kushans are about 24 feet deep.

ALI: Yes, about 24 to 26.

And you still haven't got to the bottom yet?

No, no, we haven't reached to the 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.

WOOD: The earliest living city in the whole of South Asia.

ALI: So far.

So what was it about the Kushans' rule

that brought about this boom time in population, in towns and economies?

WOOD: 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 the religion of peace, no war.

And Buddhism is the vital clue to the story of Kanishka.

When the Buddha himself was here, in Gandhara, he made a prediction.

500 years after his death,

a mighty king would rise.

At the stated time,

Kanishka came to the throne

and he ruled the whole world.

At first he despised the Buddha's law,

but one 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 four 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 Hazar Khani.''

Yes. Hazar Khani is this way.

Okay.

Today the site has been completely swallowed up by modern Peshawar.

(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

About two, three kilometres from here.

Okay. That's fantastic.

And this is the largest graveyard of Peshawar.

Okay.

(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

Thank you very much.

(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

Does he know anything about the story of the place?

(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

Great news, this gentleman knows this was the place.

Shah-ji-ki-Dheri, the Mound of the Great King.

He doesn't know who the great king was, but that was the place.

Thank you very much.

(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)

-This is it? -Yeah, yeah.

These, all Shah-ji-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.

WOOD: Sufis still come here?

Yeah, yeah. Every year.

Every year?

WOOD: When I was in Calcutta,

they have 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 talk about five 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 one could compare to this in solemn beauty and majestic grandeur. ''

WOOD: 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 imagine 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. ''

(BELLS TINKLING)

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,

those are 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 chuba

and the double crown.

The king of kings, Maharaja Kanishka.

(HORNS HONKING)

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 AD 1 30, 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.

WOOD: An early English traveller 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 flavour of the real Hindustan.

Mathura then was an international city,

sacred to the Hindu god Krishna,

whom the Greeks and the Kushans identified as Hercules.

It was a famous pilgrimage place, as it still is today.

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.

WOOD: Where have you come from?

-I will come from Ahmadabad. -Ahmadabad.

-Ahmadabad? This is a very long way. -Yeah.

And your husbands?

-Husbands are there! -You've got rid of them!

-You got rid of husbands. -Yeah, yeah!

Nine ladies, only ladies.

Well, I hope you have a very happy rest of your tirthayatra.

WOMAN: Thank you.

The ancient Greeks called this city ''Madoura ton Theon, ''

the city of the gods.

WOOD: If you'd been here in the 2nd century AD,

at the height of the Kushan Empire

you would have seen Greeks, Romans, Bactrians, 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 centre 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 Gibbon,

said this period, 2nd century AD,

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 two 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 Charaka.

Here in Mathura, the Gupta family are doctors who for many generations

have followed the ancient tradition handed down from the Kushan era.

GUPTA: Three hundred different medicinal plants

are growing here for healing different kinds of the problems.

So everything for your medicine, you grow here yourself?

GUPTA: Yes.

This is called amaltas... It is a family of Cassia fistula.

That's very good for constipation.

A system based on natural cures,

Ayurveda was transmitted east in the early centuries AD

by Buddhist monks on the Silk Route to China.

This is now, nicely, aloe vera,

which is growing very famous now all over the world, aloe vera gel.

WOOD: And this is what the ladies use for their skin cream

and all this sort of stuff.

-WOOD: May I look? -Sure, sure.

Oh, yeah, look at that. How about that?

GUPTA: This is the gel, you know?

GUPTA: Ayurveda is the science of life.

The whole body and whole nature is made by natural five element,

earth, water, fire, air and ether.

MAN: 50 years old. GUPTA: 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 full book,

so just the 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 travelled the Silk Route and took Buddhism to China.

DALAI LAMA: Buddhism reached another great nation, China,

around 2nd 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 are a lot of destructions happen,

but time change, the things become more open.

So it is really, very right that China, Chinese,

again is a student of Indian master.

Nearly 2,000 years on from first receiving the Buddha's message,

the Chinese government has announced it wishes to find harmony

by rediscovering its Buddhist past, seeking again the wisdom of India.

As for Kanishka, his end is a mystery.

All we have is a strange legend from China.

MAN: Riding his world in circling steed,

Kanishka had conquered three of the world's four regions.

Only the East remained.

So he set off on one last war of conquest

with an army of Hu barbarians who were riding white elephants.

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.

(SCATTING)

The legend tells a tale

of assassination and regime change here in Mathura.

History gives us no clue.

We know Kanishka died around 1 50 AD

and was succeeded by others of his dynasty,

but could there be a distant echo of these events

in Mathura's famous cycle of Mystery Plays?

The tradition of drama here in Mathura goes back to the ancient world.

Every year a cycle of plays is performed about the god Krishna.

(SINGING)

These plays tell the story of the overthrow

of a great tyrant here in Mathura.

His name is Kans or 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 one last clue to the fall of India's forgotten emperor.

Could we just ask... Do you know a place called Tokri Tila?

(SPEAKING HINDI)

Classic, they found a statue of King Kanishka.

Oh, there's a mound in front, yeah, can you see?

-This is Tokri Tila here? -Yes.

Ah, right, right, right.

The place still preserves one of the ancient names of the Kushans

from the time when they lived on the edge of China

before their long march into history.

WOOD: Unfortunately the dig wasn't very well done back in 1 91 2,

but what they found in this little mound

was a temple about 1 00 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 vandals.

Destroyed.

Right at the end of the Kushan period,

not in some later period by the Huns or Muslim invaders.

And one statue in particular,

a great royal statue, seven or eight 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, ruler of all India.

''May his reign last for 1,000 years. ''

In the early centuries AD,

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.

They laid the foundations for what would follow in the Middle Ages,

adding another layer to the story of India

through peace, trade and tolerance.

WOOD: But above all is the simple, civilising influence of contact,

exchange and dialogue.

In the 2nd century AD, 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.

(SPEAKING TAMIL)

Where God is the great dancer.

And in medieval India they didn't just invent zero.

They even wrote the world's first great manual on sex.

The next chapter in The Story of India is the Golden Age.