Place · Gandharan capital · Pakistan
Pushkalāvatī / Charsadda
Also known as Pushkalavati, Charsadda, Bala Hisar, Shaikhan Dheri, Peukelaotis
The older capital of Gandhara, at the confluence of the Swat and Kabul rivers, before Purushapura took over under the Kushans. Mortimer Wheeler dug the Bala Hisar mound in 1958 and found a defended city with an Achaemenid-period ditch, and Alexander's general Hephaestion besieged it for thirty days in 327 BCE.
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.150, 71.730
Worth knowing
The name means lotus city and it is named in Panini's grammar and in the Ramayana as a foundation of Bharata's son Pushkala, which puts a Gandharan capital inside the epic's own geography. The Shaikhan Dheri mound beside it produced the Indo-Greek and Saka levels that date the whole north-western sequence.
Connections (3)
- Successor capital ofPurushapura / Peshawar
Pushkalavati at the Swat and Kabul confluence was Gandhara's capital before Purushapura took over under the Kushans. Panini names it, the Ramayana makes it a foundation of Bharata's son, Hephaestion besieged it for thirty days in 327 BCE, and Wheeler's 1958 trench through the Bala Hisar mound found the Achaemenid-period ditch under all of it.
- Successor capital ofTakshashilā / Taxila
Pushkalavati, Purushapura and Taxila are the three capitals of Gandhara in succession, within a hundred kilometres of each other, and the sequence tracks the powers that held the region: an Achaemenid-period ditch at the first, Kushan gold at the second, and all five layers stacked at the third. Everything entered the subcontinent past one of them.
- BirthplaceAbdul Ghaffār Khān (Bāchā Khān)
Bāchā Khān was born in 1890 at Utmānzai, in Charsadda district — the same district as Pushkalāvatī, the Gandharan capital, a few kilometres away. He started with schools: the Azad Islamia madrasas, on the conviction that the frontier's problem was illiteracy rather than the British, and the Khudai Khidmatgār grew out of that work in the 1920s. The movement was organised from villages of this plain, which is why Charsadda and Mardan rather than Peshawar were its strongholds.
On these journeys
- The Silk Road — Antioch to Chang’an, through India
- The north-west — Gandhara, the Indus and the Hindu Kush
Sources
Wikipedia, “Pushkalavati”. Mortimer Wheeler, Charsada: A Metropolis of the North-West Frontier (1962); Arrian, Anabasis, book IV, on Hephaestion's siege.
Open Pushkalāvatī / Charsadda in the repository →