Historical Perspective on the Kushan Empire

Excerpted from ISSA-The Greatest Story Never Told, by Loise Drake.

“When I first reviewed the archeological findings about the Kushan civilization, I was intrigued by the possibility of an interconnection between this people and Jesus during his “lost years,” ages 13 to 29, unrecorded in the Bible.

“The Kushan information, combined with stories of Jesus in India and Nepal—from mysterious Buddhist records and legends—gave me a vehicle for my fictional account of a young boy who would someday become a spiritual king.

“If a teenaged Jesus had traveled east as postulated in several works citing the Buddhist documents and regional folklore, he would have encountered the influence and possibly even the key players of the Kushan kingdom.

“The Kushans established a large empire throughout ancient Bactria and portions of modern China, Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and India. Their kingdom flourished well into the third century.

“Who were the Kushans and where did they come from?

“The mystery begins in the northwestern desert of China, in the sands of the Tarim Basin along an ancient silk route.

“There, in the early 1900s, explorers and archeologists began to unearth mummified bodies, many of them perfectly preserved, with their clothing intact, as a result of the dry desert conditions. The oldest mummies are about 4,000 years old.

“Western scholars have long known of their existence, but the mummies became more widely researched and discussed beginning in the 1980s and ’90s.

“Scholars sometimes refer to them collectively as the mummies of Ürümchi, named for the town in China’s Uyghur Autonomous Region in which they are housed.

“The mummified bodies raise interesting questions. These people had neither Chinese nor Mongolian characteristics. The hair of the mummies is light colored—blonde to light brown or shades of red. Their stature is tall. Their noses are high bridged. The patterns of their woven wool fabrics are similar to ancient Celtic or European patterns.*

“From ancient Chinese accounts, we know that a nomadic people called the Yueh-chih settled in the Tarim Basin and coexisted peacefully with the Chinese prior to the time of Jesus’ birth.

“Eventually one of their kings, Kajula Kadphises, succeeded in rising to power and uniting them. They became known as the Kushan people.

“Although the Yueh-chih/Kushans coexisted peacefully with the Chinese, they were at war with the ancestors of the central Asian Huns. The first attacks of the Huns drove them from the Tarim Basin and its surrounding mountains, and they subsequently migrated into the area of Afghanistan and northern India.

“We find evidence of their empire in the art, coins, gold decorations, statues, and stone tablet work of the region. The Kushan influence extended east to Iran and then further south into Pakistan and India.

“In the second century, a Kushan ruler, Kanishka, assembled a Buddhist council that was instrumental in the spread of the Mahayana school of Buddhism. Yet he and previous Kushan kings fostered religious tolerance, which enabled Hinduism and a panoply of religions to flourish in the area side by side.

“Investigators theorize that some of the people traveled back to the Tarim Basin, where scholars have found Buddhist texts written in the now-extinct Tokharian language. A number of authorities believe Tokharian, unknown until the beginning of the twentieth century, may have been the language of the Yueh-chi/Kushans.

“As I contemplated these facts, the historical setting of my story evolved. I chose to juxtapose the challenges of the worldly kingdom of the Kushan royalty with the wisdom of the East and the trials of the young Jesus in an unfamiliar land.

“The ancient people provided material to portray the preparation of two future kings—one to inherit an earthly realm and one who would become known as the Savior.”

*See Elizabeth Wayland Barber, The Mummies of Ürümchi (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).

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