A series of reliefs from ancient Gandhāra (Peshawar Valley and neighbouring areas, North Pakistan) show dancers in Iranian (sometimes Hellenistic) attire accompanied by musical instruments of western (Near Eastern, Iranian, Greek) origins. A distinctive trait of these figures is the fact that each of them joins his/her hands to produce a snap (the ‘Persian snap’), meant to mark the time. The Gandharan reliefs are the starting point of an overview of the iconographic evidence of similar dance scenes in diverse artistic traditions (first and foremost, in Classical vase painting and Hellenistic terracottas), in which Iranian-garbed dancers, captured in postures closely comparable to those witnessed in Gandhāra, perform the ‘Persian snap’ which, however, had never been recognised as such in previous studies.