The Gandhara Art flourished during the period

Q. The Gandhara Art flourished during the period

1. Guptas
2. Mauryas
3. Kushanas
4. Satavahans

Answer: Kushanas

Gandhāra was an ancient kingdom situated along the Kabul and Swat rivers of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was one of sixteen Mahajanapada of ancient India. During the Achaemenid period and Hellenistic period, its capital city was Charsadda, but later the capital city was moved to Peshawar by the Kushan emperor Kanishka the Great in about AD 127.

Gandhara art, style of Buddhist visual art that developed in what is now northwestern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan between the 1st century BCE and the 7th century CE. The style, of Greco-Roman origin, seems to have flourished largely during the Kushan dynasty and was contemporaneous with an important but dissimilar school of Kushan art at Mathura (Uttar Pradesh, India).

Gandhara existed since the time of the Rigveda (c. 1500–1200 BC), as well as the Zoroastrian Avesta, which mentions it as Vaēkərəta, the sixth most beautiful place on earth, created by Ahura Mazda. Gandhara was conquered by the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BC. Conquered by Alexander the Great in 327 BC, it subsequently became part of the Maurya Empire and then the Indo-Greek Kingdom. The region was a major center for Greco-Buddhism under the Indo-Greeks and Gandharan Buddhismunder later dynasties. It was also a central location for the spread of Buddhism to Central Asia and East Asia. It was also a center of Bactrian Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. Famed for its local tradition of Gandhara (Greco-Buddhist) Art, Gandhara attained its height from the 1st century to the 5th century under the Kushan Empire. Gandhara "flourished at the crossroads of Asia," connecting trade routes and absorbing cultural influences from diverse civilizations; Buddhism thrived until 8th or 9th centuries, when Islam first began to gain sway in the region. Pockets of Buddhism persisted in Pakistan's Swat valley until the 11th century.