Aurel Stein’s Central Asia

The vast territories of Central Asia and area bordering the Indo-Pak subcontinent are known to have been serving as significant culture centres from hoary past. These regions, played a decisive role through the Silk Route in the intermingling of Occidental and Oriental cultures especially those of Indian, Iranian, Chinese, West Asiatic and Hellenistic origin with somewhat localized traits. A notable aspect of Central Asian history was the growth of Buddhism in the pre-Islamic period in its various parts with their own centers of Buddhist art reflecting invariably a successful blend of diverse traditions. However, in the course of time, this rich legacy of Central Asia was completely forgotten, and the credit of its rediscovery goes largely to European Explorers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Sir M. Aurel Stein being the foremost among them. He undertook three successive explorations covering a total span of seven years in Central Asian regions between 1900 and 1916 and discovered scores of Buddhist shrines containing murals and varieties of structural relics besides sculptures and other articles. Later on he also explored extensively several parts of Baluchistan, resulting in the discovery of a large number of protohistoric sites. The exploration reports of Sir Stein were subsequently published in several volumes, of which many went out of print and became rare. Some individual volumes from this series of reports were released in early 80’s but due to the vastness and scope of these monumental works, it became increasingly necessary to make the whole set of reports available in a single set. COSMO PUBLICATIONS are thus proud to release the most important works of Sir Aurel Stein in a beautiful set form. Of these volumes the first ten are primarily related to Buddhist art and varieties of cultural remains of Central Asia and the last one to the early protohistoric archaeology of Baluchistan, which has been mentioned as Gedrosia by Classical European writers. Only a limited edition of this set is available.