Reign of Gondophares, founder of the Indo-Parthian kingdom

Gondophares I ruled Drangiana, Arachosia and Gandhara, and took the Kabul valley, the Punjab and Sindh from the Scythian king Azes. The traditional dates of his reign rest on a rock inscription from Takht-i-Bahi near Mardan, a Buddhist monastery founded in the 1st century: it is dated to the 26th year of the maharaja Guduvhara and to the year 103 of an unnamed era, usually taken as AD 46, which places his accession around 19–20. The numismatist Robert Senior dates Gondophares I earlier, placing his conquests in the former Indo-Scythian lands around 20–10 BC, and assigns the Takht-i-Bahi inscription — and possibly the king of the Acts of Thomas — to a later ruler of the same title, Gondophares IV Sases.

The kingdom was large but loosely organized and broke up soon after his death: Orthagnes succeeded him in Drangiana and Arachosia, his nephew Abdagases I in Gandhara. From the middle of the 1st century the Kushans absorbed its Indian lands, while Indo-Parthian kings held Sakastan until the Sasanian conquest around 224–225. The apocryphal Acts of Thomas tell of an Indian king Gudnaphar, for whom the apostle Thomas was to build a palace; many scholars identify him with Gondophares I, others with a later king of the same name.