Taxila, crossroads of the north-west

Taxila sat on the road from Bactria to the Ganges, in a province the Persian kings had ruled. Alexander's army was received there in 326 BCE, and within a decade or so the city was Mauryan; Ashoka's Kalinga edicts name Takhasila, with Ujjeni, as a seat from which a prince sent out officials.

Marshall's excavations at Sirkap turned up an Aramaic inscription of the Mauryan period, probably Ashokan: the chancery language of the Persian empire still at work under an Indian one. Kharoshthi, the local script derived from Aramaic, carried Gandhari Prakrit for centuries after. The Buddhist Jatakas remember Taxila as a place students travelled to for teachers; no single "university" has been found in the ground.