Post-Gandharan Swat. Late Buddhist rock sculptures and Turki Śāhi’s religious centres

The article aims at framing in one and the same context different pieces of archaeological evidence from Swat .having in common a Hindu affiliation, in particular rock sculptures representing Surya, the Vaisnava temple of Barikot and the still unexcavated site of Tindo-dag. Significant chronological, topographic and ideological connections have been detected and highlighted. Especially when considered together, they provide the first, important witness to non-buddhist cults during the period that we can label as Śāhi or, more precisely, judging from the archaeological context, Turki Śāhi (7th century CE). Thus, rock reliefs of non-Buddhist subjects (an apparently anomaly in an otherwise coherently Buddhist context, can no more to be regarded as the extemporaneous expression of some unknown will but as the outcome of a foreign culture that had to find its own space in a stranger land and among its rooted traditions.