page_title: Gandhara
section_title: Achaemenid Gandhara
hierarchical_section_title: Gandhara / History / Achaemenid Gandhara
caption_attribution_description: English: Athens coin discovered in Pushkalavati. ATTICA, Athens. Circa 500/490-485/0 BC. In 2007, at the site of ancient Pushkalavati (Shaikhan Dehri) in Pakistan, a small coin hoard was discovered that contained this tetradrachm of Athens, in addition to a number of local types, some blank flans, and four cake-type cast ingots. Dated to circa 500/490-485/0 BC, this coin is the earliest known example of its type to be found so far east.
context_page_description: Gandhāra was an ancient region in the Peshawar basin in the far north-west of the ancient Indian subcontinent, corresponding to present-day north-west Pakistan and north-east Afghanistan. The centre of the region was at the confluence of the Kabul and Swat rivers, bounded by the Sulaiman Mountains on the west and the Indus River on the east. The Safed Koh mountains separated it from the Kohat region to the south. This being the core area of Gandhara, the cultural influence of "Greater Gandhara" extended across the Indus river to the Taxila region and westwards into the Kabul and Bamiyan valleys in Afghanistan, and northwards up to the Karakoram range. During the Achaemenid period and Hellenistic period, its capital city was Pushkalavati, modern Charsadda. Later the capital city was moved to Peshawar by the Kushan emperor Kanishka the Great in about 127 AD.
  Gandhara's existence is attested since the time of the Rigveda, as well as the Zoroastrian Avesta, which mentions it as Vaēkərəta, the sixth most beautiful place on earth created by Ahura Mazda. Gandhara was one of sixteen mahajanapadas of ancient India mentioned in Buddhist sources such as Anguttara Nikaya.
context_section_description: The main Vedic tribes remaining in the Indus Valley by 550 BC were the Kamboja, Sindhu, Taksas of Gandhara, the Madras and Kathas of the River Chenab, Mallas of the River Ravi and Tugras of the River Sutlej. These several tribes and principalities fought against one another to such an extent that the Indus Valley no longer had one powerful Vedic tribal kingdom to defend against outsiders and to wield the warring tribes into one organized kingdom. The area was wealthy and fertile, yet infighting led misery and despair. King Pushkarasakti of Gandhara was engaged in power struggles against his local rivals and as such the Khyber Pass remained poorly defended. King Darius I of the Achaemenid Empire took advantage of the opportunity and planned for an invasion. The Indus Valley was fabled in Persia for its gold and fertile soil and conquering it had been a major objective of his predecessor Cyrus The Great. In 542 BC, Cyrus had led his army and conquered the Makran coast in southern Balochistan. However, he is known to have campaigned beyond Makran (in the regions of Kalat, Khuzdar, Panjgur) and lost most of his army in the Gedrosian Desert (speculated today as the Kharan Desert).
  In 518 BC, Darius led his army through the Khyber Pass and southwards in stages, eventually reaching the Arabian Sea coast in Sindh by 516 BC. Under Persian rule, a system of centralized administration, with a bureaucratic system, was introduced into the Indus Valley for the first time. Provinces or "satrapy" were established with provincial capitals:
  Gandhara satrapy, established 518 BC with its capital at Pushkalavati (Charsadda). Gandhara Satrapy was established in the general region of the old Gandhara grave culture, in what is today Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. During Achaemenid rule, the Kharosthi alphabet, derived from the one used for Aramaic (the official language of Achaemenids), developed here and remained the national script of Gandhara until 200 AD.
  Gandhara Kingdom/Takshila in Punjab was conquered by the Achaemenid empire in 518 BC. During this time, King Pushkarasakti, a contemporary of Emperor Bimbisara (558–491 BC) of the Magadha empire of Haryanka dynasty, was the king of Gandhara. King Pushkarasakti was engaged in power struggles against his local rivals. The Achaemenids under Darius penetrated to the region in 516 BC and annexed other parts of modern-day Punjab, Pakistan west to the Indus river and Sindh.
  The inscription on Darius' (521–486 BC) tomb at Naqsh-i-Rustam near Persepolis records Gadāra (Gandāra) along with Hindush (Hənduš, Sindh) in the list of satrapies. By about 380 BC the Persian hold on the region had weakened. Many small kingdoms sprang up in Gandhara. In 327 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Gandhara as well as the Indian satrapies of the Persian Empire. The expeditions of Alexander were recorded by his court historians and by Arrian (around 175 AD) in his Anabasis Alexandri and by other chroniclers many centuries after the event.
  Sir Mortimer Wheeler conducted some excavations there in 1962, and identified various Achaemenid remains.
caption: Athens coin (c. 500/490–485 BC) discovered in Pushkalavati. This coin is the earliest known example of its type to be found so far east.[29] Such coins were circulating in the area as currency, at least as far as the Indus, during the reign of the Achaemenids.[30][31][32][33]
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