American Art Historian John M. Rosenfield wrote in his ‘Dynastics Arts of the Kushans’: “As carefully depicted by the sculptors, the clothing worn by Indo-Scythian men and women in their portraits and devotional images is basically non-Indian. The men are garbed in heavy material that has been tailored and sewn, differing completely with the diaphanous costumes, untailored and unsewn, worn by native Indian nobles shown in early Buddhist reliefs. Both the Kushans and the Arsacids [rulers of the Parthian Empire] retained their ancestral costumes long after they had abandoned a nomadic way of life. This practice was an outgrowth of what Rostovtzeff called the purposeful conservatism of these once pastoral nations as they adapted their native concepts of statecraft, warfare, and economics to new imperial realities. The Kushans, presenting themselves clearly as foreigners in their Indian dominions, affirmed their national integrity. Indeed, the creation of an empire extending from the Oxus River to the Ganges was not the act of a people devoid of a sense of its own unity and destiny.
In the art of Mathura and Gandhara, the lndo-Scythian costume shows considerable variety, but some elements remain constant and characteristic. A tunic of varying length may be either coatlike or sheathlike. Pantaloons are full and bloused or tight-fitting with jodhpurs. The shoes or boots, in which the pantaloons are tucked, are sturdy and at times padded (the native Indians were always shown barefoot or in sandals). Finally, a wide waist belt is worn outside the tunic. The Kushans had their own mode of headdress, but on a few occasions they were shown wearing turbans.
This costume was a variant of Central Asian dress which has remained remarkably unchanged from its representations in Achaemenian and in Greco-Roman art to the present, largely because of its practicability in an equestrian society and in the climatic extremes of the steppes. During the first century A.D., it seems to have been a standard male costume throughout much of the Iranized parts of Western Asia as well as North India and Afghanistan, reflecting thereby the political hegemony and influence of the once-nomadic Kushans and Arsacids.
Most articles of Kushan clothing were heavily decorated with metal plaques and beads, reflecting a passion for personal adornment which extended into other types of jewelry torques, earrings, bracelets-and to ornate helmets. Many original plaques have been excavated at Sirkap and Begram. At Sirkap, these included small rosettes of gold inlaid with green paste or feldspar and with small hoops on the back for attachment to the garments. The disks from Begram were thin and undecorated gold pieces found in level II of the “Palace.” The sculptures of the Kushanshahr show these attached to clothing, usually along seams and hems, but occasionally they are in over-all patterns. Plaques were used in much the same way in southern Russia, where thousands of them have been found in Sarmatian graves.”
Even judging by the depiction of clothes above, the question arises of whether the dogma that the Scythians migrated from the south to the north holds. Or was the movement the other way around?
“Royal Scythia, Greece, Kyiv Rus” book provides new food for thought in that regard.
Scythian clothes of the 4th century B.C. on the famous vase from a Barrow in Ukraine >
