Swat, a district in Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, 160kms northwest of Islamabad, was once a part of Gandhara, a historical region (1^st to 5th century AD) in present-day northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan. Its centre was the basin around the present-day city of Peshawar (known in ancient times as Purushapur). Gandharan culture, however, radiated far beyond this heartland all the way to Bamiyan in Afghanistan in the northwest and into the Punjab.

The earliest mention of Gandhara appears in the tenth book of the Rigveda (ca 2^nd century BC), a sacred ancient Indian text, and also the oldest surviving literary work. The recorded history of Gandhara goes back to 6^th century BC, when it was a province of King Darius I of Persia. It then came under the Greeks in 4^th century BC, who ceded it to the Maurya kings, and it thus became a part of the Indo-Greek kingdom until the arrival of the Kushan kings in the 1^st century AD, who had been driven away from their Central Asian ancestral lands. The secular traditions of Gandhara were initiated by the Kushans, who supported all religious faiths. Predominantly Zoroastrian, they also worshipped Oesho and a number of other deities. Their support of Buddhism in Gandhara led to an unparalleled flourishing of Buddhist culture. A great many of the concepts that were to characterise Mahayana Buddhism were developed in Gandhara, and the Buddha himself was first represented during the Kushan period. The deification of the Buddha and the concept of the role of the bodhisattva – originally a person striving for enlightenment – can be documented very early on in Gandharan Buddhist art, which was a unique mix of highly diverse cultural and religious influences.