~The Kushan Dynasty.~--The Yuechi in turn were driven southward to the Oxus and the Kabul valley and under the Kushan dynasty established their authority in the Panjab about the middle of the first century. The most famous name is that of Kanishka, who wrested from China Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan, and assembled ~a~ notable council of sages of the law in Kashmir. His reign may be dated from 120 to 150 A.D. His capital was at Purushapura (Peshawar), near which he built the famous relic tower of Buddha, 400 feet high. Beside the tower was a large monastery still renowned in the ninth and tenth centuries as a home of sacred learning. The rule of Kushan kings in the Panjab lasted till the end of the first quarter of the third century. To their time belong the Buddhist sculptures found in the tracts near their Peshawar capital (see also page 204). ~The Gupta Empire.~--Of the century preceding the establishment in 320 B.C. of the Gupta dynasty at Patna we know nothing. The Panjab probably again fell under the sway of petty rajas and tribal confederacies, though the Kushan rule was maintained in Peshawar till 465 A.D., when it was finally blotted out by the White Huns. These savage invaders soon after defeated Skanda Gupta, and from this blow the Gupta Empire never recovered. At the height of its power in 400 A.D. under Chandra Gupta II, known as Vikramaditya, who is probably the original of the Bikramajit of Indian legends, it may have reached as far west as the Chenab. ~The White Huns or Ephthalites.~--In the beginning of the sixth century the White Hun, Mahirakula, ruled the Panjab from Sakala, the modern Sialkot. He was a worshipper of Siva, and a deadly foe of the Buddhist cult, and has been described as a monster of cruelty. The short-lived dominion of the White Huns was destroyed by the Turks and Persians about the year 565 A.D. ~Panjab in seventh century A.D.~--From various sources, one of the most valuable being the Memoirs of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hiuen Tsang, who travelled in India from 630 to 644 A.D., we know something of Northern India in the first half of the seventh century. Hiuen Tsang was at Kanauj as a guest of a powerful king named Harsha, whose first capital was at Thanesar, and who held a suzerainty over all the rajas from the Brahmaputra to the Bias. West of that river the king of Kashmir was also overlord of Taxila, Urasa, Parnotsa (Punch), Rajapuri (Rajauri) and Sinhapura, which seems to have included the Salt Range. The Peshawar valley was probably ruled by the Turki Shahiya kings of Kabul. The rest of the Panjab was divided between a kingdom called by Hiuen Tsang Tsekhia, whose capital was somewhere near Sialkot, and the important kingdom of Sindh, in which the Indus valley as far north as the Salt Range was included. Harsha died in 647 A.D. and his empire collapsed.