A team of 30 Malaysian researchers have conducted a seminal study of the 2000-year-old Gandhara civilisation in Peshawar. “Pakistan is home to some of the world’s greatest and oldest civilisations and the Gandhara civilisation which flourished in north-west of Pakistan some 2,000 years ago, is one of them and it is great to learn about researchers from Malaysia going to Peshawar to map the remains of this rich civilization,”Pakistan High Commissioner Shahid Kiani said. The team was led by Professor Mokhtar Saidin, director of the Centre for Global Archaeological Research (CGAR) of University Sains Malaysia’ (USM) which conducted this month-long research as part of the USM-University of Peshawar (UoP) framework signed on April 3. The research team visited Peshawar from June 4 until July 2, 2013 and mapped the famous Kashmir Smast site besides studying its early civilisation, prehistory and reconstruction of the palaeoenvironment there. Kiani welcomed the research, calling it historic and epoch-making given the new insights it had provided into the great Gandhara civilisation. He said Pakistan would continue to welcome such initiatives and further encourage academic exchanges and collaborations between Pakistani universities and their counterparts elsewhere in the world to bring out new facets of the rich civilisations which had flourished for centuries in different areas of Pakistan. Saidin also praised the project as a great learning opportunity for the university. The team did a complete magnetic anomaly mapping of the Kashmir Smast Cave (Great Cave), Kashmir Smast monastery, spring water tank and great water tank to identify their future research potential. During the mapping exercises, the team made two discoveries of Gandhara stone tools inside the UoP campus and an ‘adze’ stone tool at the Kashmir Smast site. The results of the preliminary studies prove the importance of Kashmir Smast in the prehistoric period and early civilisation.
