Taxila is an important archaeological site in Indian subcontinent located in the modern city with the same name in Punjab, Pakistan. It lies about 32 km (20 mi) north-west of Islamabad and Rawalpindi, just off the famous Grand Trunk Road. Ancient Taxila was situated at the pivotal junction of the Indian subcontinent and Central Asia. The origin of Taxila as a city goes back to c. 1000 BCE. Some ruins at Taxila date to the time of the Achaemenid Empire in the 6th century BCE, followed successively by Mauryan Empire, Indo-Greek, Indo-Scythian, and Kushan Empire periods. Owing to its strategic location, Taxila has changed hands many times over the centuries, with many empires vying for its control. When the great ancient trade routes connecting these regions ceased to be important, the city sank into insignificance and was finally destroyed by the nomadic Hunas in the 5th century. The renowned archaeologist Sir Alexander Cunningham rediscovered the ruins of Taxila in the mid-19th century. In 1980, Taxila was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 2006 it was ranked as the top tourist destination in Pakistan by The Guardian newspaper.
By some accounts, the University of Ancient Taxila was considered to be one of the earliest (or the earliest) universities in the world. Others do not consider it a university in the modern sense, in that the teachers living there may not have had official membership of particular colleges, and there did not seem to have existed purpose-built lecture halls and residential quarters in Taxila, in contrast to the later Nalanda university in eastern India. In a 2010 report, Global Heritage Fund identified Taxila as one of 12 worldwide sites most "On the Verge" of irreparable loss and damage, citing insufficient management, development pressure, looting, and war and conflict as primary threats. However, significant preservation efforts have been carried out since then by the government which have resulted in the site being declared as "well-preserved" by different international publications. Because of the extensive preservation efforts and upkeep, the site is a popular tourist spot, attracting up to one million tourists every year.
Taxila was known in Pali as Takkasilā, and in Sanskrit as तक्षशिला (Takshashila, IAST: Takṣaśilā; "City of Cut Stone"). The Greeks pared the city's name down to Taxila[19][20] which became the name that the Europeans were familiar with ever since the time of Alexander the Great. Takshashila can also alternately be translated to "Rock of Taksha" in reference to the Ramayana which states that the city was named in honour of Bharata's son and first ruler, Taksha. According to another derivation, Takshashila is related to Takshaka (Sanskrit for "carpenter") and is an alternate name for the Nāga, a non-Indo-Iranian people of ancient India. Faxian who had visited the city had given its name's meaning as "Cut off Head". With the help of a Jataka, he had interperted it to be the place where Buddha in his previous birth as Pusa or Chandaprabha cut off his head to feed a hungry lion. This tradition still persists with the area in front of Sirkap (also meaning "cut off head") was known in the 19th century as Babur Khana ("House of Tiger"), which alludes to the place where Buddha offered his head. In addition, a hill range to south of Taxila Valley is called Margala ("cut off throat").
The sites of a number of important cities noted in ancient Indian texts were identified by scholars early in the 19th century. The lost city of Taxila, however, was not identified until later, in 1863-64. Its identification was made difficult partly due to errors in the distances recorded by Pliny in his Naturalis Historia which pointed to a location somewhere on the Haro river, two days march from the Indus. Alexander Cunningham, the founder and the first director-general of the Archaeological Survey of India, noticed that this position did not agree with the descriptions provided in the itineraries of Chinese pilgrims and in particular, that of Xuanzang, the 7th-century Buddhist monk. Unlike Pliny, these sources noted that the journey to Taxila from the Indus took three days and not two. Cunningham's subsequent explorations in 1863–64 of a site at Shah-dheri convinced him that his hypothesis was correct.
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