During the rule of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, a traveller sojourned in the main market of Rawalpindi. What he observed was new to him; something that he had not seen before in other cities that he had travelled to. He saw some of the locals selling a large number of coins of great antiquity. The sellers, who did not know much about the history of these coins, mostly came from Rawalpindi and its adjoining areas. The traveller, having little idea about these coins, came to the conclusion that they must have belonged to the forefathers of those offering these for sale.

Today numismatists from all over the world explore areas near Taxila in search of coins. The coin sellers here know the names of just two past rulers, Chandragupta Maurya and Sher Shah Suri. The limited awareness of history is a feature of the general memory of the Gandhara civilisation.

There is a local perception that it was the British who first explored the Gandhara civilisation. This, however, is not true. It was a French general of the Khalsa Army named Jean B Ventura who first wrote to the Maharaja that there were relics of a city or great civilisation, buried at Mankiala. It was not the Brits but the French and other soldiers of the army of Ranjeet Singh who collected hundreds of coins and artefacts in the 1830s from the Rawalpindi, Peshawar and Texila area. Mankiala was the first Gandhara site discovered during the Khalsa period. After that there was a long gap until the British started the archaeological work in the area.

Bhir Mound was the first city and the earliest settlement of Takshashila, now known as Taxila. Archaeologist John Marshall and his colleagues excavated Bhir Mound between 1913 and 1925. Later, Wheeler-led excavations in 1944 and 1945, excavations by Dr Sharif in 1967 and 1968 and an excavation done from 1998 to 2001 revealed more stratums of different periods.

The Achaemenid emperor, Darius I conquered Gandhara in the 6th Century BC and founded the place that served as a provincial capital of the Achaemenid Empire. In 331, Raja Ambhi became the first ruler to establish sovereignty. The region later became part of the Mauryan Empire.

There are contested histories of the Achaemenid presence in Bhir Mound.

Archaeologist Saifur Rahman Dar writes: “although we can stretch the date of Bhir mound’s foundation to the 4th or late 5th century BCE, there is no conclusive evidence of an Achaemenian presence in this city”. Dar believes that the oldest layers of the city – Stratum IV in the excavated record – cannot be definitively attributed to a particular ruler prior to the 4th Century BCE.

Archaeologist Saifur Rahman Dar writes: “although we can stretch the date of Bhir mound’s foundation to the 4th or late 5th Century BCE, there is no conclusive evidence of an Achaemenian presence in this city”.

The Achaemenid Persian conquest of the north-west of the Indian subcontinent happened between the 6th and the 4th Centuries BCE. The conquest of the areas as far as the Indus River is often dated to the time of Cyrus the Great, in the period between 550 and 539 BCE.

The Behistun language inscription gives a date of 518 BCE for the Achaemenid arrival in the Indus Valley, which occurred in several phases, starting from northern parts of the River Indus, later moving southward. These areas of the Indus valley became the formal Achaemenid satrapies (provinces), as mentioned in the several Achaemenid texts. The Achaemenid occupation, followed later by the Greek, Scythian and Kushan occupations, introduced India to the outer world. Bhir Mound, as the capital of the Achaemenid India, was at the crossroads of the main trade roads of Asia. The city was populated by Persians, Greeks and other people from throughout the Achaemenid Empire. Strabo, the Greek geographer, writes that when Alexander III of Macedonia was in Taxila, one of his companions named Aristobulus noticed that in the city the dead were being fed to the vultures, a clear sign of the Zoroastrianism presence in Bhir.

The Aramaic, an official language of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, originated in India. Some of the edicts of Ashoka in the north-western areas of Ashoka’s territory, in modern Pakistan and Afghanistan, used Aramaic (the official language of the Achaemenid Empire). Kharosthi or the Taxila inscription were written in Aramaic. According to Ammianus Marcellinus, a 4th Century CE Roman author and soldier, Hystaspes, the father of Darius I, studied under the Brahmins in India, thus contributing to the development of the religion of the Magi or Zoroastrianism:

“Hystaspes, a very wise monarch, the father of Darius I, who while boldly penetrating into the remoter districts of upper India, came to a certain woody retreat, of which with its tranquil silence the Brahmins, men of sublime genius, were the possessors. From their teaching he learnt the principles of the motion of the world and of the stars, and the pure rites of sacrifice, as far as he could; and of what he learnt he infused some portion into the minds of the Magi, which they have handed down by tradition to later ages, each instructing his own children, and adding to it their own system of divination.”

— Ammianus Marcellinus.

According to ancient sources, Hystapes is sometimes considered identical to Vishtaspa (the Avestan and Old Persian name for Hystapes), an early patron of Zoroaster. Historically, the life of the Buddha also coincided with the Achaemenid conquest of the Indus Valley. The Achaemenid occupation of the areas of Gandhara – which was to last for about two centuries – was accompanied by Achaemenid religions, reformed Mazdaism or early Zoroastrianism, to which Buddhism might also have in part reacted.

According to Christopher I Beckwith, the early Buddhist concepts of karma, rebirth, and affirmation that good deeds will be rewarded in this life and the life after, probably find their origin in Achaemenid Persian Mazdaism, which had been introduced in India in the time of the Achaemenid conquest of Gandhara. During the time of the Mauryans, Taxila enjoyed the status of a principal city and great learning centre. After the fall of the Mauryan Empire in the 2nd Century BCE, Graeco-Bactrians shifted the city to Sirkap.

Bhir Mound is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The official version of the history cannot be read on the board due to its poor condition. A Raja Group inscription in Urdu is prominent and can be easily read. It also sometimes serves as a cricket field to tennis ball cricketers in absence of the Archaeology Department guards. The place has a large portion still needing excavation.

The recent promotion of Pakistan as home to three civilisations has emerged mostly from a political rhetoric rather than a genuine acceptance of the civilisations. Celebrating the past through iconographic representations, naming places, institutions and buildings after heritage sites is a way towards owning one’s history and heritage. It is not strange to many that there is not a single street or road named Gandhara in Pakistan, though there is one in Sri Lanka.

The writer tweets @Ammad_Alee