Pre-Islamic period of Afghanistan: Encyclopedia II - Pre-Islamic period of Afghanistan - The Kushan Empire ca. 150 BCE - 300 CE

Pre-Islamic period of Afghanistan - The Kushan Empire ca. 150 BCE - 300 CE

In the third and second centuries BC, the Parthians, a nomadic Iranian people, arrived in ancient Afghanistan. The Parthians established control in most of what is Iran as early as the middle of the 3rd century BC; about 100 years later another Indo-European group from the north - the Tocharian Kushans (a subgroup of the tribe called the Yuezhi by the Chinese) - entered the region that is now Afghanistan and established an empire lasting almost four centuries.

The Kushan Empire spread from the Kabul River valley to defeat other Central Asian tribes that had previously conquered parts of the northern central Iranian Plateau once ruled by the Parthians. By the middle of the 1st century BCE, the Kushans' base of control became Afghanistan and their empire spanned from the north of the Pamir mountains to the Ganges river valley in India. Early in the 2nd century under Kanishka, the most powerful of the Kushan rulers, the empire reached its greatest geographic and cultural breadth to become a center of literature and art. Kanishka extended Kushan control to the mouth of the Indus River on the Arabian Sea, into Kashmir, and into what is today the Chinese-controlled area north of Tibet. Kanishka was a patron of religion and the arts. It was during his reign that Mahayana Buddhism, imported to northern India earlier by the Mauryan emperor Ashoka (ca. 260 BCE - 232 BCE), reached its zenith in Central Asia. Though the Kushanas were predominantly Zoroastrian themselves, they also supported local Buddhists and Hindus as well as the worshop of various local deities.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "The Kushan Empire ca. 150 BCE - 300 CE", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki