Kingdom of Kapisa

rdf:langString Kingdom of Kapisa

rdf:langString The Kingdom of Kapisa (known in contemporary Chinese sources as Chinese: 漕國 Caoguo and Chinese: 罽賓 Jibin) was a state located in what is now Afghanistan during the late 1st millennium CE. Its capital was the city of Kapisa. The kingdom stretched from the Hindu Kush in the north to Bamiyan and Kandahar in the south and west, out as far as the modern Jalalabad District in the east. The name Kapisa appears to be a Sanskritized form of an older name for the area, from prehistory. Following its conquest in 329 BCE by Alexander the Great, the area was known in the Hellenic world as Alexandria on the Caucasus, although the older name appears to have survived. In around 600 CE, the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang made a pilgrimage to Kapisa, and described there the cultivation of rice and wheat, and a king of the . In his chronicle, he relates that in Kapisa were over 6,000 monks of the Mahayana school of Buddhism. In a 7th-century Chinese chronicle, the Book of Sui, Kapisa appears to be known as the kingdom of Cao (Chinese: 漕國 Caoguo). In other Chinese works, it is called Jibin (Chinese: 罽賓 Jibin). Between the 7th and 9th centuries, the kingdom was ruled by the Turk Shahi dynasty. At one point, Bagram was the capital of the kingdom, though in the 7th century, the center of power of Kapisa shifted to Kabul.