Greeks, Kushans and the Face of the Buddha

1When a Big Empire Falls Apart

Ashoka's empire was the largest thing India had ever built. Fifty years after he died it was gone. Understanding why is more useful than memorising the dates, because the same thing happens again in Parts 6, 9 and 10.

1.1 — What happened

Ashoka died around 232 BCE. Within about fifty years the Mauryan empire had shrunk to a fraction of itself. Around 185 BCE, the last Mauryan ruler was killed by his own army commander, a man called Pushyamitra Shunga, who took the throne himself.

The Shungas ruled a much smaller territory in the Ganges plain. The north-west — Punjab, Gandhara, the Indus valley — was no longer theirs.

That is the bare fact. The interesting question is why.

1.2 — Why big empires come apart

This is worth spending a page on, because it is a pattern rather than an accident.

An ancient empire is not held together by nationality or by shared identity. Nobody in Punjab in 250 BCE thought of themselves as Mauryan. It is held together by four things, and if any of them fails the whole structure is in trouble.

One: the ability to move an army. If a province rebels, the centre must be able to get soldiers there before the rebellion sets. With no railways and no telegraph, that means weeks or months. The further away the province, the weaker this gets.

Two: the ability to collect tax. Armies eat. Officials must be paid. Tax collection needs officials who are loyal, literate and supervised, in every district. This is enormously difficult and expensive.

Three: local elites deciding it is worth going along with. No empire has enough soldiers to force every village. It rules through local men who calculate that cooperating pays better than resisting. Change that calculation and the empire evaporates without a battle.

Four: a clear rule about who rules next. This is the one that kills most empires. If the succession is disputed, the army splits, the provinces pick sides, and the empire spends its strength on itself.

Ashoka's empire was probably too big for the technology of the time in the first place. And Punjab and the north-west were both the furthest from the capital at Pataliputra and the closest to the passes through which outsiders arrived. When head office weakened, this was always going to be the first region to go.

1.3 — What "the dark age" is really describing

You will sometimes see the period after the Mauryas described as a dark age or a period of decline and chaos. Be careful with that phrase.

1.4 — What Punjab looked like in the gap

Not chaos. Something more interesting.

When the Mauryan structure withdrew, what was left was not emptiness. It was the older layer that had always been underneath — cities with their own governments, and tribal republics.

Punjab and its surroundings had a long tradition of these. Groups such as the Yaudheyas, the Malavas, the Arjunayanas and the Madras were not kingdoms in the usual sense. They were confederations, run by assemblies of leading men rather than by a single hereditary king. Several of them issued their own coins, which is how we know they existed and roughly where they were.

They survive a very long time. They are still there, and still being mentioned, seven hundred years later in the Gupta period — which is Chapter 7.

2The Greeks Who Stayed

Alexander left and his army went home. But not all of them. Two centuries later a Greek king was ruling Punjab from Sialkot, and a Buddhist scripture records him asking a monk whether the self exists.

2.1 — Where they came from

When Alexander died in 323 BCE his generals carved up his conquests. The eastern share went to Seleucus, whose empire ran from Turkey to Central Asia. Part 4 covered what happened next: Chandragupta Maurya pushed him out of India, and Seleucus settled for a treaty, some territory and, reportedly, five hundred war elephants.

But north of the Hindu Kush, in what is now northern Afghanistan and southern Uzbekistan, there was a province called Bactria — settled with Greek soldiers and colonists, with Greek cities, Greek gymnasia and Greek coinage, sitting on very rich farmland.

Around 250 BCE its governor, Diodotus, stopped taking orders from the Seleucids and declared himself king. Bactria became an independent Greek kingdom, two thousand kilometres from Greece, with a Central Asian population and a Greek ruling class.

And when the Mauryan empire weakened, that kingdom looked south.

2.2 — Into India

Around 180 BCE a Bactrian Greek king named Demetrius crossed the mountains into the Indus valley. Over the following decades Greek rulers held territory across Gandhara, Punjab and at times further east.

Historians call them the Indo-Greeks, to distinguish them from the Bactrian Greeks north of the mountains. They are, on any measure, one of the strangest political entities in world history — a Greek-speaking dynasty ruling Indian territory, with Greek gods on one side of their coins and Indian writing on the other.

2.3 — Menander

The greatest of them, and the one who matters most for Punjab, was Menander I, who ruled roughly 165 to 130 BCE.

His capital was Sagala. Sagala is modern Sialkot, in Punjab, Pakistan — about a hundred kilometres north of Lahore.

His coins are found over an enormous area, which suggests a long reign and a wide territory. Greek and Roman writers knew of him. And then there is the extraordinary thing.

2.4 — The king in a Buddhist scripture

There is a Buddhist text, preserved in Pali, called the Milindapanha — "The Questions of Milinda". Milinda is Menander.

It is a long dialogue between the king and a Buddhist monk named Nagasena. The king asks hard questions; the monk answers with arguments and analogies. They discuss what a person actually is, whether there is a permanent self, how rebirth can happen without a soul that carries over, and what makes an action good.

The most famous passage is about a chariot. Nagasena asks the king what a chariot is. Is it the wheels? The axle? The frame? The pole? None of these alone is the chariot, and yet remove them all and nothing is left. So "chariot" is a word applied to an arrangement of parts, not a thing existing on its own — and, the monk argues, a person is the same.

The text says at the end that Menander was persuaded and became a Buddhist. That may be devotional framing rather than fact — texts like this often end with the important person converting. But something in it is real: Buddhists chose a Greek king as the questioner, which means his interest was plausible to their audience.

And there is a hint from another direction. Some of Menander's coins carry the eight-spoked wheel, a Buddhist symbol. A Greek and Roman source reports that when he died, his ashes were divided between cities that each built a monument over their share — which is precisely what Buddhist tradition describes being done with the Buddha's own remains.

2.5 — Reading history off coins

Now the awkward part, and it applies to the next two centuries of this story.

We know about the Indo-Greeks almost entirely from their coins. Something like thirty or forty kings are known. For most of them, the coins are all there is. No chronicle. No inscription. No tomb. Just money.

2.6 — Greeks becoming Indian

One piece of evidence deserves its own moment, because it shows the direction of travel.

At Besnagar in central India there is a stone pillar. Its inscription records that it was set up by a man named Heliodorus, who describes himself as a Greek, an ambassador sent from a Greek king to an Indian court.

The pillar is dedicated to Vasudeva — a form of Vishnu — and Heliodorus describes himself as a devotee.

3The Long Domino Chain

A war on the Chinese frontier pushed one people west. They pushed the next. That one pushed the next. Four dominoes later, Punjab had new rulers — and the chain is one of the clearest demonstrations in history that this region was never isolated.

3.1 — The chain

In the second century BCE, on the northern frontier of China, a confederation of nomadic peoples called the Xiongnu became powerful. They fought their neighbours and won.

Among the losers were a people called the Yuezhi, who were driven west out of their pastures in what is now western China.

The Yuezhi, needing somewhere to go, moved into the lands of the Sakas — the people Greek writers called Scythians, herders of the Central Asian steppe.

The Sakas, displaced in turn, moved south and west. Some went into Iran. Some came down through Afghanistan and into the Indus valley and Punjab.

And the Yuezhi followed them, eventually settling in Bactria — where they ended the Greek kingdom there — and later moving into India themselves as the Kushans, who are Chapter 4.

3.2 — The Sakas in Punjab

The first Saka ruler we can name in the north-west is Maues, around the early first century BCE, based around Taxila. After him the most prominent is Azes, whose coins are found in enormous numbers across Punjab and Gandhara.

Historians call them Indo-Scythians. Their coinage keeps the Indo-Greek pattern — Greek on one side, Kharosthi on the other — which tells you they inherited a working administration and did not smash it.

Alongside and after them came the Indo-Parthians, from Iran. Their best-known king is Gondophares, ruling around the middle of the first century CE from the Taxila region.

3.3 — A script from the west

One thing these rulers used, and Punjab used for centuries, deserves a section of its own.

The Kharosthi script was the writing system of the north-west — Gandhara, Punjab and the Indus valley — from roughly the fourth century BCE to the third or fourth century CE.

It descends from Aramaic, the administrative script of the Persian empire, which arrived when Persia ruled this region in the period Part 4 covered. And it kept an Aramaic habit that no other Indian script has: it is written from right to left.

Ashoka, in Part 4, used both: Brahmi across most of his empire, Kharosthi in the north-west, because that is what people there read.

And then Kharosthi died. It went out of use in India by around the fourth century CE, survived a while longer along the Silk Road in Central Asia, and then vanished completely. It has no descendants. Every modern Indian script comes from Brahmi instead.

Punjab had its own writing system for seven hundred years, and it left no children. That is worth sitting with — it is the second writing system this land has lost, after the Harappan one.

3.4 — A calendar that never stopped

One thing from this period is still running.

An era of year-counting began in 78 CE and became known as the Saka era. Its origin is disputed — it is traditionally attributed to Kanishka, though the dating of his reign now sits somewhat later, and other explanations are offered.

What is not disputed is what happened to it. The Saka era spread across India, was used for dating inscriptions and manuscripts for the next two thousand years, and in 1957 was adopted as the official national calendar of the Republic of India.

4The Kushans

A herding people driven off the Chinese frontier built an empire that stretched from Central Asia to the Ganges, sat astride the Silk Road, put every god they had ever met on the same coinage, and sent Buddhism to China.

4.1 — From refugees to emperors

The Yuezhi arrived in Bactria as a displaced people in five separate groups. In the first century CE, a leader of one of those groups — Kujula Kadphises — brought the five under one authority and started expanding south.

His successors pushed into Gandhara, Punjab and down into the Ganges plain. By the early second century CE the Kushan empire ran from the edge of Central Asia to Mathura and beyond.

Their principal cities were Purushapura — modern Peshawar — and Mathura, with Bactrian centres to the north. Punjab sat squarely in the middle of it, on the main road between the two.

4.2 — Kanishka

The most famous Kushan ruler is Kanishka, whose reign began around 127 CE.

Under him the empire reached its greatest extent and its greatest wealth. He is remembered in Buddhist tradition as a great patron — the ruler who called a major council, built enormous monuments, and helped Buddhism spread outwards.

4.3 — The Silk Road

The Kushan empire's real significance is where it sat.

The Silk Road is not a road. It is a name for the network of routes carrying goods between China, Central Asia, India, Iran and the Mediterranean. Nobody travelled the whole length; goods were handed on from trader to trader, changing hands and gaining price at every stage.

The Kushans controlled the junction where the routes from China, the routes from Iran and the routes into India all met. Everything moving between those worlds passed through their territory, and they taxed it.

What moved: silk and lacquer from China. Spices, cotton, ivory and gemstones from India. Horses from Central Asia. Glass, wine and coin-silver from the Roman world. And travelling with the goods, as always, ideas.

4.4 — Every god on one coinage

The single most revealing thing the Kushans left is their coins, and specifically which gods are on them.

Across Kushan coinage you find deities from at least four traditions:

• Greek — the sun and moon, Herakles, and others inherited from the Bactrian Greek tradition.
• Iranian — a large group, including a sun god and a widely worshipped goddess of the region.
• Indian — a figure usually identified with an early form of Shiva, shown with attributes that later become standard.
• Buddhist — and this is the famous one. Some of Kanishka's coins show a standing Buddha, with his name written beside him in Greek letters.

4.5 — How Buddhism reached China

This is the Kushans' largest effect on world history, and it happened through Punjab and Gandhara.

The mechanism was simple and slow. Traders moved along the Silk Road. Monks travelled with the caravans, because caravans were the only safe way to travel. Monasteries were built along the routes, partly as religious institutions and partly as the ancient equivalent of roadside inns, offering shelter to travellers.

Each monastery was a node. Monks taught, texts were copied, local people converted, and the next monastery was founded further along the road.

Following that chain out of Gandhara and across Central Asia, Buddhism reached China in the first centuries CE. From China it went to Korea, and from Korea to Japan.

5Gandhara: The Face of the Buddha

For five hundred years after his death, nobody made an image of the Buddha as a man. Then, in this region, somebody did — and gave him wavy hair, a heavy robe with deep folds, and the features of a Mediterranean god. That image conquered half the world.

5.1 — The centuries with no Buddha

The Buddha died around the fifth or fourth century BCE. For roughly the next five hundred years, Buddhist art did not show him.

This is not a gap in the record. There is plenty of early Buddhist art — carved railings and gateways at great monuments, crowded with figures, animals, trees and scenes from the Buddha's life.

He is in those scenes. But he is not shown.

Instead, artists marked his presence with a symbol:

• A pair of footprints, where he stood.
• An empty throne, where he sat.
• A wheel, for his teaching.
• A tree, for the moment of his awakening.
• A parasol held over an empty space, marking where an important person was.

You can see scenes where a crowd kneels, gestures and looks — at nothing. The figure they are worshipping is simply absent.

Why? Nobody is certain. Proposals include: that a being who had escaped rebirth could not properly be shown in a body; that his absence was itself the point; or simply that it was not the custom and nobody had thought to break it.

5.2 — And then a face

Around the first century CE, in the region of Gandhara — roughly the Peshawar valley, the Swat valley and the Taxila region, sitting immediately north-west of Punjab — sculptors began making the Buddha as a man.

And the man they made looks, to anybody familiar with classical sculpture, startlingly Mediterranean.

• Wavy hair, gathered into a topknot, carved in the manner of Greek and Roman statuary — quite unlike the tight curls of later Indian images.
• A heavy robe with deep, naturalistic folds, draped over one shoulder and falling in the way a Greek or Roman garment falls.
• Facial features — the straight nose, the modelled brow, the calm proportion — following classical conventions.
• Standing poses with the weight resting on one leg, a classical device for making a figure look relaxed rather than rigid.

The material is usually a grey-blue stone called schist, quarried locally, and later stucco.

5.3 — But there was a second workshop

At the same time, roughly, images of the Buddha also began appearing at Mathura, far to the south-east, on the Yamuna — also inside the Kushan empire.

The Mathura Buddha looks quite different. Carved in a distinctive mottled red sandstone. Broader, heavier, more powerfully built. The robe thin and clinging rather than heavily draped. The face rounder, the expression more direct. It grows visibly out of earlier Indian traditions of carving nature-spirit figures.

Two schools. Two very different-looking Buddhas. Both under the same empire, both starting at around the same time.

5.4 — Why this is Punjab's largest export

The Gandharan Buddha did not stay in Gandhara.

It travelled the route Chapter 4 described — out through the passes, along the Silk Road, into Central Asia, on to China, then Korea, then Japan. At each stage local artists adapted it. The features changed. The proportions changed. The robe changed.

But the fundamental decision — that the Buddha is shown as a seated or standing human figure, calm, robed, with a topknot and elongated earlobes — held all the way.

6How People Actually Lived

Kings and coins are the easy part. Here is what can be reconstructed about ordinary life — the cities, the trade, the languages, and the oldest Buddhist books that survive anywhere in the world, written on bark.

6.1 — Taxila

The best-excavated site of this whole period sits at the north-western edge of Punjab: Taxila, near modern Rawalpindi.

Taxila was not one city but a sequence of them, built near each other over centuries as rulers changed. Excavation has exposed successive settlements, each with its own layout.

One of them, usually called Sirkap, was laid out on a grid — a main street running the length of the city with side streets crossing it — in the manner of Greek town planning. Within it, archaeologists found houses, workshops, shrines and a Buddhist monastery, along with jewellery, coins, tools and imported objects.

6.2 — Trade

Two directions, and both left evidence.

Westward, to Rome. A Greek merchant's handbook from the first century CE, written for traders working the Indian Ocean, describes ports, routes, sailing seasons and — usefully for us — what to buy and sell at each place. It names a port at the mouth of the Indus, and lists goods coming down from the interior: turquoise, lapis lazuli, cotton cloth, silk and indigo.

That is a description of the Punjab and Gandhara trade reaching the sea.

Northward and eastward, along the Silk Road. Chinese silk moving west, horses moving south, and the whole exchange described in Chapter 4.

6.3 — What language did people speak?

Several at once, depending on who you were and what you were doing.

• Gandhari, a Prakrit — the everyday spoken and written language of the north-west, written in the Kharosthi script.
• Greek, in administration and on coinage, for centuries after any Greek ruler had gone. It survived as a script and an official language long after it stopped being anybody's mother tongue.
• Bactrian, an Iranian language written in Greek letters, used by the Kushans — the language of the Rabatak inscription.
• Sanskrit, increasingly, as a formal and religious language, gaining ground through this period.

A merchant in Taxila might well deal in three of these in a working day. Multilingualism was not remarkable; it was the ordinary condition of a trading crossroads.

6.4 — The oldest Buddhist books in the world

This is the most extraordinary survival of the whole period.

In the 1990s, a collection of ancient manuscripts came to light — scrolls of birch bark, written in Gandhari in the Kharosthi script, dating to around the first century CE. Further finds followed.

They are Buddhist texts: sermons, commentaries, verse collections, monastic material.

They are the oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts anywhere in the world. Older than any surviving manuscript from Sri Lanka, Tibet, China or Southeast Asia.

6.5 — Religion on the ground

Buddhism was strong in the north-west in this period — the monasteries, the art, the manuscripts all say so, and it clearly had elite and royal support.

But it was never the only thing. Shiva-like figures on Kushan coins, the Heliodorus pillar from Chapter 2, Iranian deities in the Kushan pantheon, and continuing local worship all point to a landscape of overlapping practice rather than a single official religion.

7The Guptas, and Why Punjab Was Barely In Them

The Gupta period is taught as India's golden age. It was centred six hundred kilometres east of Punjab, and Punjab was never really part of it. Both of those facts are worth examining.

7.1 — The empire in the east

Around 320 CE, a ruler called Chandragupta I established a kingdom in Magadha, in the eastern Ganges plain — the same region the Mauryas had ruled from.

His son Samudragupta expanded it enormously. His grandson Chandragupta II presided over its height. The empire lasted, in strength, until the middle of the fifth century.

This is the period associated with a great deal of what is now considered classical Indian civilisation — Sanskrit literature and drama, mathematics and astronomy, temple architecture, and sculpture of extraordinary quality.

7.2 — Punjab's actual relationship to it

Here is the part usually skipped.

Our best single source for the extent of Gupta power is a long inscription carved onto a stone pillar — a pillar that Ashoka had already used, six hundred years earlier, for his own edicts. Samudragupta's court poet added a record of his conquests to it.

What matters is how the inscription describes different territories, because it does not treat them all the same.

• Some kingdoms are described as conquered and absorbed — mostly in the Ganges plain, the empire's core.
• Some southern kingdoms are described as defeated and then restored to their rulers, who acknowledged Gupta supremacy.
• And then there is a third category: frontier kingdoms and tribal republics who are described as submitting, paying tribute and obeying commands — but who are plainly not being annexed.

Punjab and its neighbours are in that third category. The peoples named include the Yaudheyas, the Malavas, the Arjunayanas and the Madrakas — the same self-governing confederations from Chapter 1, still there six hundred years later.

Meanwhile the far north-west — Gandhara and beyond — was under the control of successor rulers of the Kushans and their overlords, and was not Gupta territory at all.

7.3 — Golden for whom?

8The Hunas

The last arrivals of this part came through the passes in the fifth century, ruled from Sialkot, and are remembered in Indian and Chinese sources as destroyers. Whether they deserve that reputation is genuinely unclear — and the reason it is unclear is instructive.

8.1 — Who they were

In the fifth century CE a new group came down through Afghanistan into Gandhara and Punjab. Indian sources call them Hunas. In European and Chinese sources related groups appear under other names, often translated as White Huns or Hephthalites.

Their relationship to the Huns who attacked the Roman empire at roughly the same time is debated — they may be connected, or the name may simply have been applied broadly to steppe peoples. What is agreed is that they came from Central Asia, they were mounted and militarily formidable, and they arrived in force.

8.2 — What happened

Around the middle of the fifth century they pressed on the Gupta frontier. The emperor Skandagupta claims in an inscription to have defeated them, and for a time the frontier held.

But the effort was costly, and Gupta strength declined afterwards. By around 490 CE a Huna ruler named Toramana was in control of a substantial territory in north-western and central India.

His son Mihirakula followed him, from around 515 CE.

And Mihirakula's capital was Sagala — Sialkot. The same city that had been Menander's capital seven hundred years earlier, at the start of this part.

Around 528 CE, a ruler from Malwa named Yashodharman defeated Mihirakula, and recorded the victory on stone pillars. Huna power in India broke soon after.

But the Guptas did not recover. The empire fragmented over the following decades, and northern India entered a long period of regional kingdoms.

8.3 — The reputation

9What Seven Centuries of Outsiders Did to Punjab

Greeks, Scythians, Parthians, Kushans, Hunas. On paper, seven hundred years of foreign rule. In practice, something much stranger and more interesting happened — and it says something about what Punjab is.

9.1 — The pattern

Line up what happened to each group after they arrived.

The Greeks. Within a century and a half, a Greek ambassador is putting up a pillar to an Indian god and calling himself a devotee. A Greek king is the questioner in a Buddhist scripture. Their coins carry Indian script, Indian titles and Buddhist symbols.

The Sakas and Parthians. They keep the existing bilingual coinage and administration. They take Indian titles. They patronise Buddhist institutions. Within generations they are indistinguishable in the record from local rulers except by name.

The Kushans. They put Indian gods on their money alongside Iranian and Greek ones. They fund Buddhist monasteries on an enormous scale. They adopt Indian royal titles. The art made under them becomes the defining art of Indian Buddhism.

The Hunas. Even here — Huna coins follow the existing regional coin types, and Huna rulers appear as patrons of local cults. Later Indian genealogies absorb Huna groups into existing social categories rather than treating them as permanently outside.

9.2 — Why this happens

Three reasons, and none of them is about anybody's virtue.

One: numbers. Every arriving group was vastly outnumbered by the people already here. A ruling class of some thousands over a population of millions cannot impose its language and customs even if it wants to.

Two: the machinery of government is inherited. Tax registers, weights, scribes, local headmen, courts — these take generations to build. A conqueror who destroys them destroys his own income. So he keeps them, and with them he keeps the language and the categories they run on.

Three: legitimacy is local. To be accepted as a ruler you have to look like one to the people you rule. That means funding their institutions, honouring their gods, using their titles. A king who refuses is a permanent occupier, which is expensive; a king who complies becomes, in time, simply the king.

9.3 — What Punjab actually gained

Not nothing, and not simply "foreign influence".

• A permanent position on the world's main trade route, and the wealth, cities and cosmopolitanism that came with it.
• Gandharan art, and through it the image of the Buddha that half the world uses.
• A role in transmitting Buddhism to China, Korea and Japan.
• A gold coinage and a monetised economy at a scale not seen here before.
• A calendar that is still India's official national era.
• A tradition of religious plurality visible on the coins themselves.

9.4 — And what it permanently lost

This needs saying too, because the losses were real and final.

The Kharosthi script. Punjab's own writing system for seven hundred years, gone completely by around the fourth century CE, with no descendants. This is the second writing system this land has lost.

Gandhari. The regional language in which the oldest Buddhist books in the world were written. Extinct.

Gandharan Buddhism. An entire religious civilisation — hundreds of monasteries, a great artistic tradition, a distinct scriptural language — reduced to ruins by the seventh century and never rebuilt.

10An Honest List of What We Do Not Know

This part rests on coins, a handful of inscriptions, some excavated cities, and religious texts written by people with a case to make. Here is where that leaves us.

Genuinely unknown

• The order and dates of most Indo-Greek kings. The list comes from coins and stylistic judgement, and different specialists produce different sequences.
• How long any of them ruled, or how much territory they actually held. Coin distribution is a rough guide, not a map.
• Whether Menander became a Buddhist, or whether the text simply ends the way such texts usually end.
• Whether Kanishka converted, or patronised everything.
• Which came first, the Gandharan or the Mathuran Buddha image — and whether the question is even well-formed.
• Why Buddhist art was aniconic for five centuries, and what changed.
• Almost everything about ordinary people. No personal letters, no household records, no accounts of a normal life. We have kings' coins and monks' books.
• How much of the destruction in the north-west the Hunas actually caused, as against patronage collapse and trade disruption.
• What the tribal republics were actually like inside — how their assemblies worked, who could speak, how decisions were made.
• The origin of the Saka era of 78 CE.
• What the population of this region was, at any point in these seven centuries.

Solid

• The Mauryan empire ended around 185 BCE and the north-west separated from eastern control.
• Greek kings from Bactria ruled parts of Punjab and Gandhara from around 180 BCE, and Menander's capital was Sagala — modern Sialkot.
• The Milindapanha exists, is a Buddhist text, and takes a Greek king as its questioner.
• Indo-Greek coinage is bilingual, Greek and Kharosthi, and that bilingualism is how Kharosthi was deciphered.
• Sakas, then Parthians, then Kushans ruled successively in the north-west, and each kept the existing administrative and monetary system.
• Kanishka's reign began around 127 CE. The Rabatak inscription gives the Kushan royal genealogy.
• Kushan coinage carries Greek, Iranian, Indian and Buddhist deities, including a Buddha labelled in Greek letters.
• Gandharan sculpture used classical techniques and produced the human Buddha image that spread across Asia.
• The oldest surviving Buddhist manuscripts in the world are Gandhari birch-bark scrolls from this region.
• Samudragupta's inscription lists Punjab's peoples as tributary frontier groups, not annexed provinces.
• The Hunas ruled in the north-west from around 490 CE, with Mihirakula seated at Sialkot, until Yashodharman's victory around 528 CE.
• Kharosthi and Gandhari both went extinct, leaving no descendants.