The Kushan Empire started as a branch of the Yuezhi, a confederation of ethnically Indo-Europeans nomads who lived in eastern Central Asia. Some scholars connect the Kushans with the Tocharians of the Tarim Basin in China, Caucasian people whose blonde or red-haired mummies have long puzzled observers.

Around the year 20 or 30 CE, the Kushans were driven westward by the Xiongnu, a fierce people who likely were the ancestors of the Huns.

The Kushans fled to the borderlands of what is now Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, where they established an independent empire in the region known as Bactria. In Bactria, they conquered the Scythians and the local Indo-Greek kingdoms, the last remnants of Alexander the Great's invasion force that had failed to take India. From this central location, the Kushan Empire became a wealthy trading hub between the peoples of Han China, Sassanid Persia and the Roman Empire. Roman gold and Chinese silk changed hands in the Kushan Empire, at a very tidy profit for the middle-men.

Given all their contacts with the great empires of the day, it is hardly surprising that the Kushan people developed a culture with significant elements borrowed from many sources. Predominantly Zoroastrian, the Kushans also incorporated Buddhist and Hellenistic beliefs into their own syncratic religious practices. Kushan coins depict deities ranging form Helios and Heracles to the Buddha and Shakyamuni Buddha, to Ahura Mazda, Mithra and Atar, the Zoroastrian fire god.

They also used the Greek alphabet, altered to suit spoken Kushan.

Height of the Kushan Empire:

By the rule of the fifth emperor, Kanishka the Great (c. 127-140), the Kushan Empire had pushed into all of northern India, and had expanded east again as far as the Tarim Basin, original homeland of the Kushans. Kanishka ruled from Peshawar, now in Pakistan, but his empire also included the major Silk Road cities of Kashgar, Yarkand and Khotan, in what is now Xinjiang or East Turkestan.

Kanishka was a devout Buddhist, and has been compared to the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka the Great in that regard. However, evidence suggests that he also worshipped the Persian deity Mithra, who was both a judge and a god of plenty.

During his reign, Kanishka built a stupa that Chinese travelers reported as about 600 feet high and covered with jewels. Historians believed that these reports were fabricated, until the base of this amazing structure was discovered in Peshawar in 1908. The emperor built this fabulous stupa to house three of the Buddha's bones. References to the stupa have since been discovered among the Buddhist scrolls at Dunhuang, China, as well. In fact, some scholars believe that Kanishka's forays into the Tarim were China's first experiences with Buddhism.

Decline and Fall of the Kushans:

After 225 CE, the Kushan Empire crumbled into a western half, which was almost immediately conquered by the Sassanid Empire of Persia, and an eastern half with its capital in the Punjab. The eastern Kushan Empire fell at an unknown date, likely between 335 and 350 CE, to the Gupta king Samudragupta.