The Harald Ingholt papers relating to Gandharan art document one aspect of this Near Eastern archaeologist's broad research interests. Taking its name from the ancient region of Gandhara, which encompassed parts of what is today Pakistan and Afghanistan, Gandharan art is best known for its stone sculptures which blend Buddhist themes with Classical stylistic elements. Alexander the Great's occupation of this area in the fourth century B.C. had been brief, but it introduced a strain of Classical culture which hung on tenaciously. Reinforced by a series of rulers who were culturally influenced by the west and then by the area's location on a thriving trade route, this Mediterranean artistic strain survived as an undercurrent for centuries, before re-emerging strongly in Gandharan art of the Kushan Empire during the first to third centuries A.D.
Publication materials for Gandhāran art in Pakistan form the first series of the archive. Included here are a draft of the text and various phases of plate production for the project, which joined Ingholt's text to photographs by Islay Lyons. Series II is comprised of Ingholt's general research materials on Gandharan art, primarily Gandharan sculpture. The bulk of the material is photographic, with limited additions of notes, letters received, offprints and ephemera.
A small portion of the material in this archive did not originate with Ingholt, but with James Michael Mahar, who held the archive from circa 1980 to 2009. Most of this material can be clearly identified as Mahar's and forms Series III. Although it ranges from notes taken in a graduate school class in Eastern art to more recent ephemera, the bulk of the Mahar material relates to The Meeting of East and West -- An Exhibition of Gandharan Buddhist Art, held at the University of Arizona in 1977. There is also, however, a scattering of material incorporated into the first two series, which may have been added by Mahar. These materials, such as the summary of the production materials in Series I, are distinctive because they are not in Ingholt's handwriting.
