ISLAMABAD: An old Buddhist temple discovered last year in Pakistan’s Barikot town has been featured in the Top 10 Discoveries of 2022 by the renowned Archaeology Magazine.

Barikot is a town located in Pakistan’s northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province. It serves as an entrance town to the picturesque Swat Valley in KP province, where thousands of tourists flock to each year to vacation in the mountains.

The Gandhara region makes up part of present-day northern Pakistan and northeast Afghanistan. The area is famous for its Gandhara style of art which is heavily influenced by the classical Greek and Hellenistic traditions.

This region in northwestern Pakistan was a crossroads for the exchange of goods and culture among the civilizations of the Middle East, Central Asia and India from the sixth century B.C.

In its Top 10 Discoveries of 2022 section, Archaeology Magazine featured the old temple, discovered by archaeologist Luca Maria Olivieri of Ca’ Foscari University and his team in December last year, saying that the monument dated back to at least as early as the end of the second century B.C.

“This makes it the oldest known Buddhist temple in the region and places its construction firmly during the period when Barikot is known to have been a center of Buddhist teaching and a sacred pilgrimage site,” the magazine said.

Olivieri told the magazine that he did not expect there to be Buddhist monuments in the city at such an early stage. “Until now, we have not excavated any evidence of Buddhist presence in Barikot dating to before the end of the first century A.D.,” he added.

The remnants excavated from the site include a 10-foot-high apsidal structure on which a circular shrine was later made. The building also contains an iconic cone-shaped Buddhist stupa.

“Olivieri’s team was surprised by the building’s shape, which is well known from Buddhist structures in India at this time but is very rare in Gandhara,” the magazine wrote. “The team has also found Buddhist sculptures and inscriptions.”