Kingdom of Kapisa
former country
The Kingdom of Kapisa, appearing in contemporary Chinese sources as Caoguo (漕國) and Jibin (罽賓), was a state located in what is now Afghanistan during the late 1st millennium. 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 BC by Alexander the Great, Bagram and the surrounding area were known in the Hellenic world as Alexandria on the Caucasus in reference to the Hindu Kush as the "Indic Caucasus", although the older name appears to have survived.
In the early 7th century, the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang made a pilgrimage to Kapisa, and described there the cultivation of rice and wheat, and a king of the Suli tribe. 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 as the realm of Cao (Middle Chinese pronunciation *Dzaw). In other Chinese works, it is called Jibin (*Kjej-pjin), a name appearing as early as the Book of Han (Old Chinese *Krads-pin or Krats-pin) in reference to Kashmir and surrounding areas.
Between the 7th and 9th centuries, the kingdom was ruled by the Turk Shahi dynasty.
“Kingdom of Kapisa” enters the record as former country. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Kingdom, Kapisa and former can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kingdom of Kapisa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.