Qualla: Taxila

Taxila: Introduction

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Khalid Mahmood, CC BY-SA 3.0. Before Oxford, before Bologna, before anything the Western world would call a university, there was Taxila. On the Pothohar Plateau of Punjab, about thirty-five kilometers northwest of modern Rawalpindi, the ruins of four successive cities lie stacked across a valley floor -- each one built by a different civilization, each one destroyed by the next. Persians, Greeks, Mauryans, Scythians, and Kushans all ruled here. Alexander the Great accepted the city's surrender without a fight in 326 BCE. Chanakya taught statecraft to the young Chandragupta Maurya in its classrooms. The grammarian Panini codified Sanskrit within its walls. For nearly a thousand years, this was where the ambitious came to learn.

Read more: Taxila on Qualla

Image: Khalid Mahmood | CC BY-SA 3.0

Taxila: City of Cut Stone

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Khalid Mahmood, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Sanskrit name Takshashila means "City of Cut Stone" or "Rock of Taksha," a reference to the Ramayana legend that Bharata, brother of the deity Rama, founded the city and named it for his son. The Greeks, arriving with Alexander, rendered it as Taxila -- and that pronunciation...

Read more: Taxila on Qualla

Image: Khalid Mahmood | CC BY-SA 3.0

Taxila: An Empire at Every Turn

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας, CC BY-SA 3.0. The settlement at Taxila dates to at least 1000 BCE, with Neolithic remains going back further. By 900 BCE, pottery shards show trade connections with Pushkalavati, the other great city of Gandhara. The Achaemenid Persians absorbed the city around 540 BCE, making it the capital o...

Read more: Taxila on Qualla

Image: Ἀλέξανδρος ὁ Μέγας | CC BY-SA 3.0

Taxila: Where Knowledge Was Sacred

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Salman Rashid, CC BY 4.0. Taxila's university was not a campus with dormitories and lecture halls. It was a constellation of individual teachers, each running an autonomous school from his own house, answerable to no central authority and bound by no standardized curriculum. A student studied until his te...

Read more: Taxila on Qualla

Image: Salman Rashid | CC BY 4.0

Taxila: Chanakya's Classroom

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dawoodmajoka, Public domain. The roster of Taxila's students and teachers reads like a who's who of ancient South Asia. Chanakya -- also known as Kautilya -- taught statecraft and political philosophy here before mentoring Chandragupta Maurya, who studied at Taxila for eight years and went on to found the Ma...

Read more: Taxila on Qualla

Image: Dawoodmajoka | Public domain

Taxila: Four Cities in One Valley

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sasha Isachenko, CC BY-SA 3.0. The lost city of Taxila was not identified until 1863, when Alexander Cunningham, founder of the Archaeological Survey of India, corrected errors in Pliny's distances by cross-referencing the travel accounts of seventh-century Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang. What Cunningham found -- an...

Read more: Taxila on Qualla

Image: Sasha Isachenko | CC BY-SA 3.0