Indus Epochs: Rohri, Bukkur & Sukkur History — Part 2 (95 BCE–496 CE)

Part 2 of a series on the Indus epochs of Rohri, Bukkur and Sukkur. Part 1 ended at 145 BCE with the last Indo-Greek kings. This part takes up the same river crossing at 95 BCE. Part 3 begins at 564 CE, with the Sindh Kingdom and the Rai dynasty's capital at Aror.

Bukkur fort on its island in the Indus, between Rohri and Sukkur. Whoever held this island held the river gate of Upper Sindh. Painting: Rohri.net.

One river, three towns, five thousand years of rulers. Between Rohri and Sukkur the Indus squeezes through the Bukkur gorge, with the fort on an island in the middle and the limestone Rohri Hills rising to the east. Part 1 followed the gate from the Indus cities to the Indo-Greeks. This part follows it through five more powers — from Iran, from Central Asia and from the steppe — each of which wanted the same thing: a toll on the river.

The timeline at a glance

Date	Power	Covered in
278 BCE	Maurya	Part 1
178–145 BCE	Indo-Greek and Greco-Bactrian	Part 1
95 BCE	Parthian (now Iran)	Part 2
21 CE	Indo-Parthian (Gondophares)	Part 2
81	Kushan	Part 2
251	Sasanian	Part 2
496	Hephthalites	Part 2
564	Sindh Kingdom (Rai dynasty, Aror)	Part 3
711	Umayyad	Part 3
751–862	Abbasid and local dynasties	Part 3
1193	Ghurid	Part 4
1207–1462	Delhi Sultanate, Samma	Part 4
1559–1844	Mughal, Persian, Afghan, Talpur	Part 5
1844–1947	British India to Pakistan	Part 5

The five dates in this part — 95 BCE, 21 CE, 81, 251 and 496 — are not dates of battles at Rohri. No source records a single battle at the gorge in these centuries. They are the dates when a new power began to shape the trade, the coinage and the religion of the Indus corridor, and when the crossing answered to it, directly or through rulers who lived a few days' sail away.

95 BCE: Parthian influence from Iran

A Parthian-age river port on the Indus at Rohri and Sukkur, where caravans met cargo boats. Persian silver, horses and glass came east; spices, cotton and timber went west. Painting: Rohri.net.

In 95 BCE the Parthian Empire of the Arsacid dynasty — the state that gave modern Iran its name and much of its memory — held the Iranian plateau from Mesopotamia to the edge of Afghanistan. The Parthians never ruled the Rohri gorge directly. What reached the Indus was their trade: Iranian merchants, Parthian silver, horses, wine and glass moving east, and Indian spices, cotton, timber and steel moving west along roads that ended at the river.

Their deeper influence was political. Parthian governors and Parthianised dynasties in Sistan, Arachosia and Gandhara pushed south and east into the Indus valley. When those rulers struck their own coins they copied Parthian models, and when they fought they used Parthian cavalry tactics. By the time a Parthian house ruled in the north-west as the Indo-Parthians, the crossing at Rohri and Sukkur was already part of a commercial world that ran from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea.

A riverside fort and landing on the Indus at Rohri and Sukkur. The crossing worked as a toll point for river traffic long before any document describes it. Painting: Rohri.net.

21 CE: The Indo-Parthian Kingdom and Gondophares

The Indo-Parthian Kingdom is the point where the Parthian world became local. Its best-known king, Gondophares — Guduvhara in the local scripts — ruled from about 19 to 46 CE from Taxila, and his coins and inscriptions reach across Gandhara and the Punjab. A much-quoted inscription at Takht-i-Bahi, dated to his twenty-sixth regnal year, is one of the fixed points of early South Asian chronology.

Gondophares' coins are a document in themselves. One face carries the king's portrait; the other mixes Greek legends with Kharosthi script, and Iranian, Greek and Indian deities share the same field. That mixture is close to what Upper Sindh looked like in the first century CE — a river port where a boatman from Rohri, a merchant from Bactria and an official from Taxila could all do business.

The trade they served ran down the Indus to the sea. The Greek sailing manual known as the Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, written in the first century CE, names the Indus ports of Barbarikon and Minnagar and describes the routes inland to the capital of a king it calls Mambarus. River boats carried what the sea ships took: grain, cotton cloth, timber from the hills, and the flint and stone that Rohri had exported for three thousand years.

Christian tradition adds a stranger detail. The Acts of Thomas says the apostle Thomas was sold as a carpenter to a king called Gundaphorus — almost certainly the same Gondophares — and travelled to his kingdom in the north-west. History or legend, the story shows how far the name of this Indus dynasty travelled.

81 CE: The Kushan Empire and the Silk Road

The Kushan centuries turned the Rohri crossing into a Silk Road market: lapis, grain, pottery and coin changed hands on the jetty. Painting: Rohri.net.

By 81 CE the Kushans had displaced the Indo-Parthians in the north-west. Coming from the Yuezhi confederacy of Central Asia, they built an empire that at its height stretched from the Oxus to the Ganges, and they made the Indus corridor one of its main arteries. Their greatest king, Kanishka, is placed by most scholars around 127 CE, on the strength of an era he founded that northern India used for centuries.

Under the Kushans the Silk Road reached its first great age. Caravans from China, Central Asia, Persia and the Roman world met at Kushan cities, and the river route down the Indus joined them to the ports of the Arabian Sea. Kushan gold coins, the first large gold coinage of South Asia, turn up in hoards far from their mints, and their gold and copper issues circulated in Sindh as well.

The Kushans also changed what the river looked like. Buddhism, already old in Sindh, became an imperial religion. Monasteries, stupas and carved Buddhist art spread along the trade routes, and Gandhara in the north produced the image of the Buddha in human form that later travelled across Asia. In Sindh the evidence is thinner than in Gandhara — mostly coins, seals and early Buddhist texts that already knew Aror — but the corridor belonged to the same religious landscape.

251 CE: The Sasanian Empire, silver and Zoroastrianism

Sasanian silver drachms and Persian glass moved through the Sukkur landing, paid for in Sindhi wheat, dates and cotton. Painting: Rohri.net.

In 224 CE the last Parthian king fell to Ardashir I, founder of the Sasanian Empire. By 251 CE, under Ardashir's son Shapur I, the Sasanians had taken over the Kushan lands east of the Hindu Kush, and their governors, the Kushano-Sasanians, minted for a “King of Kings” from Balkh to the Indus.

Sasanian influence reached Upper Sindh as silver. The Sasanian drachm — a thin, wide coin with a fire altar on the reverse — became a trade currency of the region and was imitated by local rulers long after the empire itself had gone. The Zoroastrian religion of the Sasanian court left a permanent mark as well: centuries later, Zoroastrians fleeing Iran after the Arab conquest settled in Sindh, and the community that grew from them in Sukkur is described in our history of the Parsi community of Sukkur.

This is also when Aror (Alor) begins to appear in the record as a city worth having. Early Buddhist texts and later Arab chroniclers both describe it as a great centre on the Indus, a few kilometres from modern Rohri. Its rise belongs to Part 3, but its wealth rested on the crossing described here.

Eroded mound and cave at Aror (Alor), the ancient city on the Indus near Rohri. The brick is gone; the ridge that carried the city is not. Photo: Rohri.net.

496 CE: The Hephthalites and the end of the old order

Hephthalite cavalry at the Indus landing near Rohri in the late fifth century, when the White Huns controlled the trade corridors. Painting: Rohri.net.

The last power in this part came from the steppe. The Hephthalites, called the White Huns in older books, built a state in Bactria and Tokharistan in the fifth century and pushed south and east into Gandhara and the Punjab. In 484 they defeated and killed the Sasanian king Peroz I, and by 496 their influence reached the Indus valley.

Their effect on the corridor was destructive and lasting. Cities and monasteries in Gandhara were sacked, the Buddhist network that had carried trade, learning and charity along the river thinned out, and the coinage of the region broke into a scatter of local imitations. In Sindh, Hephthalite rule was indirect at most, but the world around the crossing became poorer, more fragmented and more local.

Mounds of rubble and eroded brick on the ridge at Aror near Rohri, in late light. Photo: Rohri.net.

What survived was the river. The boats still went down to the sea, the palla fish still ran, the fort on the island still commanded a gorge that every cargo had to pass, and the farmers on the floodplain still paid whoever held it. The Hephthalite century is the hinge between the ancient trade world of the Kushans and Sasanians and the medieval world of the Rajput and Brahmin kingdoms that came next.

What the gate looked like around 500 CE

Pull the five eras together and one picture emerges. A wide, fast river narrowing at a gorge. An island in the middle, good for a fort and a toll. Limestone hills to the east, with flint and stone that people had quarried for three thousand years. Boats carrying grain, cloth, timber and horses. Coins from Iran, Central Asia and India in the same market. And over all of it an idea older than every empire in this series: whoever controls the crossing controls the trade.

No inscription gives the name of the man who first fortified the island. Bukkur's own history is a palimpsest of Hindu, Buddhist, Arab, Afghan, Mughal and British layers, and the fort later became Sher Garh, as told in When Bukkur Became Sher Garh. But the strategic logic was already fixed by 500 CE. Everything after this point is a change of garrison, not a change of geography.

Timeline progress

• ✅ Lakheen-Jo-Daro (c. 2000 BCE) — mature Indus Bronze Age craft centre at Sukkur. Read the site guide.
• ✅ Indo-Aryan period (1500 BCE) — post-urban riverbank farming and pastoral communities.
• ✅ Maurya Empire (278 BCE) — imperial integration under Emperor Ashoka.
• ✅ Indo-Greek Kingdom (178 BCE) — early Hellenistic trade and coinage along the Indus.
• ✅ Greco-Bactrian influence (159 BCE) — Central Asian trade expansion and coinage.
• ✅ Later Indo-Greek rule (145 BCE) — the Menander I era and trade consolidation.
• ✅ Parthian influence (95 BCE) — Iranian trade connections along the Indus.
• ✅ Indo-Parthian Kingdom (21 CE) — the Gondophares era and the Silk Road trade bridge.
• ✅ Kushan Empire (81 CE) — golden age of Silk Road trade, gold coinage and cosmopolitan culture.
• ✅ Sasanian Empire (251 CE) — Persian trade, silver drachms and cultural integration.
• ✅ Hephthalite / White Hun era (496 CE) — Central Asian cavalry influence and trade transition.
• ⏳ Rai dynasty and the capital at Alor (564 CE) — indigenous kingdom, royal capital at Aror. Next in this series.
• ⏳ Umayyad Caliphate and Fort Bukkur (711–717 CE) — the Muhammad bin Qasim campaign and the Battle of Aror.
• ⏳ Habbari dynasty of Sindh (862 CE) — independent Emirate of Mansura and river trade in Upper Sindh.
• ⏳ Ghurid dynasty and Delhi Sultanate (1193 CE) — the medieval centuries that follow.

Coming next: Part 3, from 564 CE

Part 3 starts at 564 CE with the Sindh Kingdom — the Rai dynasty, whose kings ruled from Aror (Alor) on the Indus, a short distance from modern Rohri. It follows the Rai kings and the Brahmin Chach dynasty that replaced them, the Umayyad campaign of 711–712 and the Battle of Aror, and the local Muslim dynasties after that, down to the Ghurids in 1193.

AI-assisted reconstruction of Aror (Alor) as a walled capital of Sindh, seen at the river. Under the Rai dynasty the city became the seat of a kingdom; the Arabs took it in 712. Art: Rohri.net.

Read next on Rohri.net

• Part 1: 2500–145 BCE — Lakheen-jo-Daro, the Mauryas and the Indo-Greeks.
• Rohri, Sindh: complete history, heritage and travel guide — the full picture in one page.
• Raja Dahir and Aror, the ancient capital of Sindh — how this story ends.
• Bukkur Island: the fort in the middle of the Indus.
• Suhagan and Duhagan tombs near Aror — the medieval monuments on the old capital's ridge.
• Sadh Belo: the temple island upstream on the Indus.
• The rivers of Pakistan — why this crossing mattered.

Sources

• Parthian Empire — Wikipedia.
• Indo-Parthian Kingdom — Wikipedia.
• Gondophares — Wikipedia.
• Kushan Empire — Wikipedia.
• Kanishka — Wikipedia.
• Sasanian Empire — Wikipedia.
• Hephthalites — Wikipedia.
• Rai dynasty — Wikipedia.
• Aror (Alor) — Wikipedia.
• Periplus of the Erythraean Sea — Wikipedia.
• Barbarikon — Wikipedia.
• Silk Road — Wikipedia.
• Chach Nama — Wikipedia.

Photographs are of the sites as they stand today. The Bukkur, riverside and Aror fort scenes are paintings or AI-assisted reconstructions made for Rohri.net; the details of clothing, buildings and faces are interpretive rather than archaeological evidence.