Taxila, Takshashila, sat at the junction of the routes from central Asia, Kashmir and the Ganges plain, in what is now Rawalpindi district. It was a city for a thousand years and a centre of learning for most of them.
It was Achaemenid, then taken by Alexander in 326 BCE, then Mauryan under Chandragupta and Ashoka, then Indo-Greek, Scythian, Parthian and Kushan.
The tradition holds that Chanakya taught here and that Chandragupta Maurya was educated here. Whether it was a university in any institutional sense is doubted; the evidence supports a concentration of teachers taking pupils rather than a college.
Three separate city sites, Bhir Mound, Sirkap and Sirsukh, plus a large number of Buddhist monasteries and stupas including Dharmarajika and Jaulian, make up the archaeological complex. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The White Huns destroyed it in the fifth or sixth century and it was not reoccupied.
It is in Punjab, in Pakistan, ninety minutes from Islamabad, and it is not part of the story most Punjabis tell about themselves.
The site is three cities in sequence: Bhir Mound, Sirkap and Sirsukh, occupied from about the sixth century BC into the early centuries AD, with monastic complexes around them.
It was a centre of learning in the Buddhist accounts and in the Greek ones, a provincial capital under the Mauryas, and a Gandharan city under the Kushans.
It is a world heritage site near Rawalpindi. Its finds are in the Taxila museum and in Lahore, and it is the largest excavated site anywhere in the Punjab region.