Light shining from a Dark Age?

When Rome dominated much of the western world and the Han dynasty ruled China, another empire straddled the Silk Road in modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Kushan civilisation was centred, until its collapse in the fifth century AD, on fortress cities like the spectacular Bala Hisar at Charsadda on the fertile flood-plains of Peshawar.

Excavations by Dr Robin Coningham of the Department of Archaeological Sciences, collaborating with Professors Taj Ali, Mukhtar Ali Durrani and Ihsan Ali of the University of Peshawar, have cast new light on this enigmatic site. The received wisdom relies on an exploratory dig by the legendary Mortimer Wheeler - a Bradford Grammar School alumnus - whose work in the former Raj still influences South Asian archaeologists.

Sir Mortimer's seven weeks at Charsadda marked the last major project of his career. Dr Coningham explained: "Wheeler was fascinated by documentary history, individual characters and stories, and by theories on the diffusion of civilisations. He was a formidable individual and perhaps had an idea of what he wanted to find before he started digging!" Carbon dating technology can now test Wheeler's conjectures as to what Charsadda, one of the subcontinent's earliest cities, owed to external influences like the Achaemenid Persians and Greeks who successively ruled it. Home-grown developments and borrowings from neighbouring cultures or trade partners can be pinned down.

The successful three-season re-excavation of Wheeler's 1958 dig questioned whether he had revealed the very defences built against the month-long siege of Alexander the Great (327 BC). Traces of an early Buddhist semi-circular mudbrick building were discovered, on top of the remains of a pillared hall.

So pillared structures were not a novelty introduced to the region by the Alexandrian colonisers but may have been built by local people, influenced by what they saw closer to the heart of the Achaemenid empire. The pillared edifice could have been burned down by Alexander's forces - but the presence of red burnished pottery on earlier levels suggested urban settlement already on the site in pre-Persian times. "This great strategic citadel could pre-date the Persians by many centuries," said Robin. "We may find that a complex civilisation flourished in what was considered a Dark Age of South Asian early history."