Taxila is one of the most important archaeological sites in Asia, and a place that it would be a pity not to visit if you are in Pakistan. It covers an area of 25 km2 and tells a story that goes back several millennia. At the crossroads of three major trade routes, one from East India, the other from West Asia and the third from Central Asia and Kashmir, the city of Taxila gradually developed to reach its golden age between the 1st and 5th centuries AD. It then became a central place of Buddhism, where students and pilgrims came from Central Asia and even from China. Taxila was in turn under the control of the Achaemenid Persians (Darius the Great conquered it in 518 BC), Alexander the Great (who occupied it in 326 BC)C. but will only keep it for a few years), Chandragupta and his successors (including Ashoka, the grandson of Chandragupta who had the great stupa of Taxila built), the Greeks of Bactria (an ancient region located in Afghanistan), the Scythians, the Parthians and the Kushans (an empire that played a dominant role in North Indian history for almost two centuries). Then, the trade routes that converged in Taxila lost their importance, and the city gradually sank before being destroyed by the Huns in the 5th century AD. According to UNESCO, which has classified the site as a World Heritage Site, "Taxila illustrates the stages of urban development of an Indus city that is influenced by Persia, the Hellenic world and Central Asia". In his famous book Tristes Tropiques published in 1955, the ethnographer Claude Lévi-Strauss devoted a chapter to Taxila, which he visited. "But it would still be underestimating Taxila to reduce it to the place where, for a few centuries, three of the greatest spiritual traditions of the Old World lived side by side: Hellenism, Hinduism, Buddhism; for the Persian of Zoroaster was also present, and, with the Parthians and Scythians, this civilization of the steppes[...]. With the exception of the Christian, all the influences that permeate the civilization of the Old World are gathered here," he wrote.

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