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Afghanistan: Plaque with engraved girl playing a flute and a woman at the foot of a tree. Bagram, 1st-2nd century CE

In the 320s BCE, Alexander the Great captured the city of Bagram and established a fortified colony named Alexandria of the Caucasus. The new town had brick walls reinforced with towers at the angles. The central street was bordered with shops and workshops.

After his death in 323 BC, the city passed to his general Seleucus, who traded it to the Mauryan Dynasty of India in 305 BC. After the Mauryans were overthrown by the Sunga Dynasty in 185 BC, the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom invaded and conquered Northwestern India (Present Day Pakistan) with an army led by Demetrius I of Bactria. Alexandria became a capital of the Eucratidian Indo-Greek Kingdom after they were driven out of Bactria by the Yuezhi in 140 BC.

Bagram (Kapisa) became the summer capital of the Kushan Empire in the 1st century, whereas their winter capital was in Peshawar. The emperor Kanishka started many new buildings there. The central palace building yielded a very rich treasure, dated from the time of emperor Kanishka in the 2nd century: ivory-plated stools of Indian origin, lacquered boxes from Han China, Greco-Roman glasses from Egypt and Syria, Hellenistic statues in the Pompeian style, stucco moldings, and silverware of Mediterranean origin.

The 'Bagram treasure' is indicative of intense commercial exchanges between all the cultural centers of Classical times, with the Kushan empire at the junction of the land and sea trade between the east and west. However, the works of art found in Bagram are either purely Hellenistic, Roman, Chinese or Indian, with little indication of the cultural syncretism found in Greco-Buddhist art.