The princes of the Kushan dynasty ruled a vast empire which, in the first three centuries of the Christian Era, stretched from the Ganges River Valley into the oases of Central Asia. This empire, here called the Kushanshahr, was created by a nation of former nomads whose language and culture were probably Iranian. The Kushan princes themselves seem to have been cast in much the same mold of Iranian heroic princely ideals as Darius and Xerxes, or Timur and ...
