The Peshawar Museum in Retrospect

Abstract

Peshawar Museum was established in 1905 and is the fourth oldest museum in Pakistan. It presents a blend mixture of British and Rajastani architectural elements. It has the largest Gandhara Buddhist collection of panel reliefs and other sculptures. A lot has been written on the museum collection but the museum building itself has always been ignored. Was the museum building originally designed for the display of antiquities or for some other purpose, if the building was not originally designed as a museum, how did it end up in becoming a magnificent repository of sculptures are the kind of questions which needed to be properly addressed. An attempt is made in the following pages to answer these question. This research is based on the archival material now available. A detail description of the architectural features is given here for the first time.