Tocharians

The Tocharians or Tokharians ( ; ) were speakers of the Tocharian languages, a group of Indo-European languages known from around 7,600 documents from the 6th and 7th centuries, found on the northern edge of the Tarim Basin (modern-day Xinjiang, China). The name "Tocharian" was given to these languages in the early 20th century by scholars who identified their speakers with a people known in ancient Greek sources as the Tókharoi (), who inhabited Bactria from the 2nd century BC. This identification is now generally considered erroneous, but the name "Tocharian" remains the most common term for

Karasahr or Karashar (), which was originally known in the Tocharian languages as Ārśi (or Arshi), Qarašähär, or Agni or the Chinese derivative Yanqi (), is an ancient town on the Silk Road and the capital of Yanqi Hui Autonomous County in the Bayingolin Mongol Autonomous Prefecture, Xinjiang.

Kangju (; Eastern Han Chinese: kʰɑŋ-kɨɑ < *khâŋ-ka (c. 140 BCE)) was the Chinese name of a kingdom in Central Asia during the first half of the first millennium CE. The name Kangju is now generally regarded as a variant or mutated form of the name Sogdiana. According to contemporaneous Chinese sources, Kangju was the second most powerful state in Transoxiana, after the Yuezhi. Its people, known in Chinese as the Kāng (康), were evidently of Indo-European origins, spoke an Eastern Iranian language, and had a semi-nomadic way of life. The Sogdians may have been the same people as those of Kangju

thumb|400px|A mid-15th century Republic of Florence|Florentine world map based on the 1st (modified conic) projection in [[Jacobus Angelus's 1406 Latin translation of Maximus Planudes's late-13th century rediscovered Greek manuscripts of Ptolemy's 2nd-century Geography. Serica is shown in the far northeast of the world.]]

Spread of Buddhism through the Silk Road

script used to write the Tocharian languages