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This bearded face flanked by floral rosettes is a piece of Gandharan art. The unique sculptural tradition that flourished in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and northern Punjab, Pakistan between roughly the 1st and 5th centuries CE.

The reason it looks European is no mystery. For over 600 years, Greek artistic technique was continuously practised in this region.

In 327 to 325 BCE, Alexander the Great crossed the Hindu Kush and campaigned through Gandhara. After his death in 323 BCE, Greek influence stayed put. His general Seleucus founded the Seleucid Empire, and the Indo (Indus) Greek Kingdoms (c. 200 BCE – 10 CE) followed. Greek-descended kings ruling cities like Sirkap at Taxila.

Minting coins with Greek inscriptions, and patronizing Buddhism. King Menander I, known in Pali sources as Milinda, engaged in famous philosophical dialogues with Buddhist monks, preserved in the text Milindapanha.

By the time the Kushan Empire, a Buddhist and zoroastrian power, rose in the 1st century CE, greek artistic technique had been practised in Gandhara for 300 years. The Kushans inherited that tradition and applied it to a new subject. The Buddha.

The sculpture shows the hallmarks of late Hellenistic technique.

Naturalistic facial modelling. Brow, nose, and beard in deep three-dimensional relief. Wavy, voluminous hair. A convention inherited from Greek depictions of figures like Zeus and Poseidon.

Floral rosettes flanking the face. A Greco-Roman architectural motif adapted by Gandharan workshops in Ancient Pakistan.

This was likely part of a frieze or cornice on a Buddhist stupa or monastic complex. Possibly an Atlas figure or mythological mask. Decorative elements borrowed from Greek architecture and placed on Buddhist religious buildings.

Gandharan art was the first tradition in history to depict the Buddha in human form. Before Gandhara, the Buddha was represented only by symbols. A footprint. A tree. An empty throne. The earliest standing Buddha statues came out of workshops in Taxila, Peshawar, Swat, and Charsadda. All from Ancient Pakistan.

When Buddhism spread along the Silk Road into Central Asia, China, Korea, and Japan, the Buddha image travelled with it.

Every later Buddha statue across East Asia. The Bamiyan Buddhas, the Longmen Grottoes, the Great Buddha at Kamakura. All of them descend stylistically from these Pakistani originals.

>The image of the Buddha as developed in Gandhara became the prototype for the representation of the Master throughout the entire Buddhist world.

— Rowland, The Art and Architecture (Pelican, 1953)

This weathered face is a small fragment of one of the most extraordinary cultural fusions in human history. It happened inside Pakistan and shaped the visual imagination of half the world.

The photograph captures something specific about the mood (smiles) of September 1965 a country of just from its independence 18 years suddenly at full-scale war with a neighbour seven times its size, and the men going forward to fight were doing it with grins on their faces.

The 1965 war began on the night of 6 September 1965, when India launched a three-pronged offensive across the international border into Pakistani Punjab aiming for Lahore, Sialkot, and Kasur.

The plan was reportedly to capture Lahore by breakfast. Indian forces crossed the BRB Canal and reached the outskirts of the city. They never got further.

What followed was 17 days of some of the largest tank battles since the Second World War, the Battle of Chawinda in the Sialkot sector saw over 600 tanks engaged, making it one of the biggest armoured clashes of the post-WWII era.

The Battle of Asal Uttar in the Khem Karan sector saw Pakistani forces hold against superior numbers. The Pakistan Air Force flying largely American F-86 Sabres against a numerically superior Indian Air Force, established remarkable parity in the air pilots like MM Alam and Sarfraz Rafiqui and Sajjad Haider became national legends.

The men in this jeep, kit on their backs and rifles between their knees, were part of the infantry surge that held the line at the Lahore and Sialkot fronts. The dust on their faces is from the roads of central Punjab, somewhere between cantonment and forward position.

The war ended in a UN-brokered ceasefire on 23 September 1965 and was formally settled by the Tashkent Declaration in January 1966.

Both sides claimed victory the territorial map ended up roughly where it had started. But for Pakistan, 1965 became a foundational national memory the year a young state stood its ground against an army many times its size.

Photo was taken from PakDef.info archives.

Ex-Sawar Shah Baz served in the 34th Poona Horse Regiment and was pensioned off in 1916 he couldn't remember exactly when he enlisted, but recalled he had seen not quite five years service when Queen Victoria died in 1901 putting his enlistment somewhere around 1896-97.

By 1955 he was roughly 80 years old, still on horseback, still tent-pegging.

His son had also completed 25 years of army service by this point.

For those unfamiliar tent-pegging is picking a peg from the ground with a lance while riding at full gallop. It's been a cavalry sport on the subcontinent for centuries and remains a competitive discipline in Pakistan's military today and common sport through out Pakistan and especially in Punjab.

Some Indus seals seem to show possible Mesopotamian influence, as in the motif of a man fighting two lions (2500–1500 BCE)

Several Indus Valley seals show a fighting scene between a tiger-like beast and a man with horns, hooves and a tail, who has been compared to the Mesopotamian bull-man Enkidu, also a partner of Gilgamesh, and suggests a transmission of Mesopotamian mythology