North - Western Hybrid Cultures
A series of hybrid cultures formed in the region of northwestern India, around modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, due to remnant kingdoms left by Persian and Greek conquests, who were later supplanted by invading nomads from central Asia.
These unique cultures often dominated the area of the silk route where trade and culture from India, China and Persia met, gaining influence from cultures throughout the world, and spreading Indian developments to other countries connected along the trade route. Their rulers adopted Buddhism and Hinduism, and their culture influenced north Indian styles.
Indo-Greeks
The Indo-Greek Kingdom (or sometimes Greco-Indian Kingdom) covered various parts of northwest and northern India from 180 BC to around 10 AD, and was ruled by a succession of more than thirty Greek kings, often in conflict with each other.
The kingdom was founded when the Greco-Bactrian king Demetrius invaded India in 180 BC, ultimately creating an entity which seceded from the powerful Greco-Bactrian Kingdom centered in Bactria (today's northern Afghanistan).
Indo-Scythians
The Indo-Scythians are a branch of the Indo-European Sakas (Scythians), who migrated from southern Siberia into Bactria, Sogdiana, Kashmir and finally into Arachosia and then India from the middle of the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century BCE. They displaced the Indo-Greeks and ruled in northern India from Gandhara to Mathura.
Indo-Parthians
The Indo-Parthian Kingdom was established during the 1st century AD, by a Parthian leader named Gondophares, in an area covering today's Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India.
The Parthians ended up controlling all of Bactria and extensive territories in Northern India, after fighting many local rulers such as the Kushan Empire ruler Kujula Kadphises, in the Gandhara region. They were known in India as Pahlava.
Indo-Sassanids
The Sassanid empire of Persia, who were close contemporaries of the Guptas, began to expand into the north-western part of ancient India (now Pakistan), where they established their rule.
The mingling of Indian and Persian cultures in this region gave birth to the Indo-Sassanid culture, which flourished in the western part of the Punjab and the areas now known in Pakistan as the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan. The last Hindu kingdom in this region, the Shahi dynasty, also may have arisen from this culture.*This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "History of India".