The Alchon Huns, called Hunas in Indian sources, entered the north-west in the later fifth century, broke the Gupta hold on the region and ruled from Sakala, generally identified with Sialkot, under Toramana and his son Mihirakula.
Mihirakula is described in Buddhist sources as having destroyed monasteries on a large scale. Taxila did not recover from this period.
The Huns were defeated in the sixth century by a coalition of Indian rulers including Yashodharman, whose pillar inscription at Mandsaur claims it.
Their arrival ended the Gandhara Buddhist establishment and coincides with a major reorganisation of society in northern India, including the emergence of the Rajput clans, whose origins some historians connect to these incursions and others do not.
Punjab was the first region hit by every invasion from the north-west, from the Achaemenids to the Durranis, and the effect of that on how the region developed is a subject on which everyone has an opinion and there is very little evidence.
They came through the north west in the fifth and sixth centuries, and their invasions ended the Gupta order in the plain and destroyed the Buddhist establishments of Gandhara and the Punjab.
Toramana and Mihirakula are the two rulers named in the inscriptions and in the Chinese pilgrims' accounts, and the destruction those accounts describe is the last picture we have of Buddhist Punjab.
What follows is the least documented period in the region's history. Between the Hunas and the Ghaznavids there are almost no sources at all for the Punjab.