Strategically located on pan-Asian trade networks in modern-day northwestern Pakistan and Afghanistan, the region named Gandhara was of tremendous economic importance in the early centuries of the Common Era, a locus of exchange between cultures, both in terms of trade and ideas. Over the centuries, it was successively occupied by Achaemenid, Mauryan, Greco-Bactrian, Scythian, Parthian and finally, Kushan rulers, with each of these foreign dynasties leaving imprints of their visual culture and belief systems.