Jongeward David. Kushan Mystique

Introduction by Joe Cribb. — Spink Books, 2020. — 272 p.Kushan Mystique is in part a personal narrative, and in part a profile of people and places encountered as a result of David Jongeward’s Kushan research and travels. The story begins in a lakeside cottage in northern California where the author describes circumstances leading to his departure from a career in cultural anthropology to a slowly evolving interest in the ancient history of Central Asia, eventually specialising in Kushan coinage and the Buddhist sculpture of Gandhara. The narrative includes accounts of meetings with collectors and curators and other specialists, detailed descriptions of Mr. Jongeward’s museum-based research, as well as his visits to major archaeological sites in Pakistan that date to the Kushan era. The book includes discussions on the succession of Kushan kings and the Kushan pantheon of deities. With a foreword by Joe Cribb.David Jongeward is an independent cultural historian and a departmental associate with the Royal Ontario Museum, Department of World Cultures, Toronto, Canada. He was visiting scholar from 2005 to 2013 with the Asian Institute, Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto. His most recent project is a catalog of the Gandhara sculpture collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford University, forthcoming in 2015. He coordinated and coauthored an interdisciplinary collaborative research project: Gandharan Buddhist Reliquaries, published in 2012.Joe Cribb is the former Keeper of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, where he worked for forty years as a curator of Asian coins and currencies. He has published many articles on Kushan, Kushano-Sasanian, and Kidarite coins and on the processes of numismatic research. In 1997 he was awarded the Ikuo Hirayama Silk Road Art and Archaeology prize, in 1999 the Royal Numismatic Society’s medal, and in 2008 the American Numismatic Society’s Archer M. Huntington Medal. He was President of the Royal Numismatic Society 2005–2010, and has been Secretary General of the Oriental Numismatic Society since 2011.