Taxila

One of the ancient world's great seats of learning, in the northwest of the subcontinent, where Chanakya is said to have taught before guiding the rise of the Mauryan empire.

Taxila lay where the routes from Central Asia, Persia, and the Ganges plain converged, and it changed hands often enough to accumulate Persian, Greek, Mauryan, and Kushan layers. Students came for medicine, archery, grammar, and law rather than for one curriculum, attaching themselves to individual teachers. Chanakya is remembered as one of those teachers, and the tradition that he found Chandragupta here and made a king of him has the shape of a good story whether or not it happened.