Does the Kavardo Cross Really Shed Light on Early Christianity In Baltistan?
By
Salman Rashid
Jul 12 2020
Kavardo is
a sprawling village in a narrow valley on the right bank of the Indus River,
just across from Skardu. Recently a large marble cross was found in a remote
part of this valley. Finely carved out of white marble, it is in the shape of a
Latin cross, that is with three equal arms and the fourth longer than the rest.
This is the classic shape of the cross used in Christian worship.
The Taxila Cross/Photo by the writer
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From the
couple images available, it clearly seems to be of very fine, apparently
modern, workmanship and reportedly measures 7x6 feet. According to one
Professor Naeem Khan who has seen it, it appears to have come ‘directly from
the heavens’. He estimates it is 1,000 to 1,200 years old. In consequence, it
is being billed holy and a certain sign of very early Christianity in
Baltistan. These ‘experts’ are forwarding extravagant theories of Nestorian Christians
living in Baltistan in the early Middle Ages.
The
gentlemen quoted in the news report have evidently heard of early Christian
travellers in or near Baltistan. Clearly they have not had recourse to any
literature on those travellers. This refers to the 17th and 18th century Jesuit
missionaries who travelled to Tibet and China from India. It will be too
tedious to list all the missionaries who undertook this journey. I will
therefore refer the curious reader to Cornelius Wessels’ Early Jesuit Travellers
in Central Asia.
From
Wessels we learn that none of the dozen Jesuits who undertook this journey
passed through Baltistan. The first, Bento de Goes, arrived in Lahore in 1595
and, having travelled through Kabul, Badakhshan and Wakhan, eventually died in
China in 1607. All the rest travelled by the direct route from Srinagar through
Kargil and Ladakh either into Tibet or over the Karakoram Pass to Yarkand and
on.
Of all
those medieval travellers, only Ippolito Desideri who — having come through
Srinagar and Kargil — was in Ladakh in 1715-1716 and devoted a paragraph
describing “Little Tibet … called Baltistan”. His account is based entirely on
hearsay, however. Had there been a community of Christians living in Baltistan,
these devoted missionaries would have been overjoyed and would certainly have
travelled the extra miles to meet with their co-religionists. Sadly, they make
no mention of believers carving large marble crosses to commemorate the
suffering of Christ.
In October
1892, encamped at the foot of the Zoji Pass en route to Kargil, at the end of
his exploration of the Karakoram Mountains, William Martin Conway ran into
Reverend Donsen, a Dutchman heading the Ladakh Mission. At that time, the
reverend had been in Baltistan off and on for five years. Even Donsen showed no
knowledge of or excitement concerning the earlier signs of a thriving Christian
community in the area.
The
earliest literature on Baltistan is Mirza Haidar Daughlat’s Tarikh-i-Rashidi
(circa 1530). A cousin of Babur’s, the Mirza was part of a Mughal army come
down from Yarkand to plunder Baltistan. He saw a few Buddhists, but the
majority were Muslims in the country. Once again, cross-manufacturing
Christians were missing.
A photo of the marble cross discovered in Skardu, as printed in a
newspaper| Courtesy Salman Rashid
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The news
report on the Kavardo cross quotes Wajid Bhatti, a PhD research scholar at the
Quaid-i-Azam University of Islamabad, as saying the cross might belong “to
early Christians of the Parthian dynasty”. He is quoted as saying that
“Nestorian settlements in Northern Areas used to live and worship cross like
this [sic].” This is, of course, without any evidence whatsoever.
The cross
is the oldest talisman known to humankind. It was easy to draw and because of
that and the equilibrium it represented, it became a holy symbol. If enclosed
with a circle, it was the sun and, without it, was the world. It was found in
Mesopotamia 4,000 years before Christ and in the Indus Valley a little later.
Much later, we find a plethora of the cross and its variant, the swastika, all
over the place, from pre-Buddhist times to the Muslim period.
The
postulate arising out of the Kavardo cross harks back to another double cross
that occurred nine decades earlier. In the 1930s, the famous Taxila Cross was
found and presented to Cuthbert King, the deputy commissioner of Rawalpindi.
Taxila had been excavated and shown to be as ancient as the early third
millennium BCE, and so the cross was taken to be a sign of Christianity in this
ancient city. Today, this cross, duly framed, adorns a wall in the Cathedral at
Lahore.
Now, in
1822, 100 years before the Taxila Cross was discovered, a manuscript came to
light in Syria. Written circa 230 CE in Syriac, by an anonymous author, it was
entitled Acts of Saint Thomas. It told of this apostle’s first century CE
journey by boat to India to the court of Gondophares, where he converted
virtually everyone to the ‘one and only true faith’. Going by this account, Gondophares
held court in a coastal city either in Sindh or Gujarat. Christian Europe
celebrated the Acts as validation of the universality of their belief and that
even the India they considered heathen had already converted within decades of
the death of Jesus.
The 1930s
were a time when archaeologist John Marshall had uncovered the secrets of
Taxila and we knew that Gondophares, the Parthian, was ruling over this
wonderful city in the first century CE. And so, DC King, with an obvious
smattering of knowledge, was not alone in celebrating the Taxila Cross. The
church in India embraced it as proof of what had never been.
It was an
altogether another thing that, even at that time, Acts of Saint Thomas was
known to be a fictional work. Apparently the class of ‘historian’ that we know
as Nasim Hijazi here was not unknown in antiquity. But if in our times, the
high and mighty of Pakistan can advertise a Turkish soap opera as real history,
we can forgive devout Christians for believing in the fictional Acts.
The cross
that misled King and others was found not by an archaeologist but by a farmer
just outside the ruins of Sirkap, the second city of Taxila. It was not from a
stratum that could be dated. That research scholar Bhatti believes that the
Kavardo cross belongs to Parthian Christians shows that he has heard of the
Taxila Cross but it also illustrates the poor standard of PhD research in
Pakistan.
As for the
cross in antiquity: it was not a symbol of Christian worship in the 1st century
CE when Saint Thomas supposedly came to India. At that time, it was a hateful
sign of oppression and cruelty. Interestingly, when the Acts of Saint Thomas
was being written in Syria or southern Turkey, another devout Christian, the
Roman barrister Marcus Minucius Felix, living in Algeria, was writing that
Christians did not worship the cross ‘like pagans do’.
The cross
became a holy symbol only after the Roman emperor Theodosius (reigned 379-395)
abolished execution by crucifixion. It was only now that its cruel and negative
associations were lost. Thereafter, it did not take long for the cross to
become a sign of Jesus’ sacrifice for the rest of mankind.
The
researchers who have declared the Kavardo cross as having descended directly
from the heavens or those who deem it a sign of very early Christianity in
Baltistan need to hold their horses. They should recall the time, less than
three decades ago, when the greatest names in Pakistan archaeology declared the
Dalbandin find of the ‘mummified body of an Achaemenian princess’ as authentic.
That would mean the mummy was more than 2,000 years old. Within weeks it was
found to be a 1930s cadaver, dressed up by a clever fraudster to sell for a few
million dollars.
The only
pragmatic word on the Kavardo cross comes from the respected Baltistan
historian Abbas Kazmi. He notes that artisans from the court of the great Raja
Ali Sher Anchan (1591-1625) could possibly be authors of this artefact.
In my view,
the Kavardo cross is nothing to get excited about, and it has nothing to do
with Christianity.
Salman
Rashid is a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society
Original
Headline: DOUBLE-CROSSED BY HISTORY
Source: The Dawn, Pakistan
URL: https://newageislam.com/interfaith-dialogue/kavardo-cross-really-shed-light/d/122355
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