Taxila Museum

Introduction

Taxila Museum is situated in Taxila a tehsil of Rawalpindi. This is a site museum and its collection mainly focuses on Gandharan art. These sites at Taxila date back to 600 or 700 BC.

History

Construction of Taxila museum started in 1918, its foundation stone laid by Lord Chelmsford, Viceroy of India in 1918. Construction was concluded in 1928 and the museum was opened for public by Sir Habibullah then the Minister for Education. Sir John Marshall who was going to be retired from the post of Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India in 1928, could not complete its original plan. The government of Pakistan constructed the northern gallery in 1998.

Collection and displays

There are some 4000 objects displayed, including stone, stucco, terracotta, silver, gold, iron and semiprecious stones. Mainly the display consists of objects from the period 600 B.C to 500 AD. Buddhist, Hindu and Jain religions are well represented through these objects discovered from three ancient cities and more than two dozen Buddhist stupas and monasteries and Greek temples in the region.

Gandharan art

Taxila Museum has one of the most significant and comprehensive collections of stone Buddhist sculpture from the first to the seventh centuries in Pakistan (known as Gandharan art. The core of the collection comes from excavated sites in the Taxila Valley, particularly the excavations of Sir John Marshall. Other objects come from excavated sites elsewhere in Gandhanra, from donations such as the Ram Das Collection, or from material confiscated by the police and custom authorities. The whole collection contains more than 1400 objects, and 409 have been published

Numismatic collection

The Taxila Museum is a site museum and is the repository for the majority of the numismatic material found during archaeological work in Taxila. Digging began in 1917 under John Marshall, then director of the Archaeological Survey of India, and continued until 1934. Since those excavations, work has continued to the present day. The museum contains a large collection of coins from the period of the Indo-Greeks to the late Kushans. Some of these are published in Marshall's original excavation reports, and an ongoing project exists to publish the full collection.