When the Sanscrit-speaking races first broke up from their original settlements in the valley of the Oxus, they passed through the valley of the Cabul river on their way to India, and lingered, in all probability, both there and in the Punjab before reaching their first permanent position on the Saraswati--the true “Arya Varta”--between the Sutlej and the Jumna. It is also nearly certain that they remained the dominant caste in these countries down to the time of Alexander’s invasion, and during the supremacy of the Bactrian kingdom. About 130 years, however, before the Christian Era, if we may trust the Chinese accounts,[92] the Yuechi, and other tribes of Tartar origin, were on the move in this direction. About that time they struck down the Bactrian monarchy, and appear from thenceforward to have permanently occupied their country. It is not clear whether they immediately, or at what interval they penetrated into the Cabul valley; but between that time and the Christian Era successive hordes of Yuechi, Sakas, Turuskas, and Hunas, had poured into the valley and the western Punjab to such an extent as to obliterate, or at least for the time supersede the Aryan population, and supplant it by one of Turanian origin, and with this change of race came the inevitable change of religion. Turania would therefore for our purposes be a more descriptive name than Ariana; but it is not sufficiently precise or well defined. No people, so far as is known, ever adopted and adhered to the Buddhist religion who had not a large proportion of Turanian blood in their veins, and the name would consequently include all the people who adopted this faith. Gandhara is, on the contrary, a local name, which certainly, in early times, included the best part of this province, and in Kanishka’s time seems to have included all he reigned over, and, if so, would be the most appropriate term we could find. It has, moreover, this advantage, that it is essentially Buddhist. In the time of Asoka, it was Kashmir and Gandhara to which he sent his missionaries, and from that time forward Gandhara is the term by which, in all Buddhist books, that kingdom is described, of which Taxila was the capital, and which is, as nearly as can now be ascertained, conterminous with our architectural province.