The Kingdom of Khotan is an ancient Saka Buddhist kingdom at the intersection of the Silk Road, which runs along the southern tip of the Taklimakan Desert in the Tarim Basin (modern Xinjiang, China) and had lasted for over 1000 years (~300 BCE - 1006 AD). The Saka people used Eastern Iranian Saka and Indo-Aryan Gandhari Prakrit, which is related to Sanskrit! From the 3rd century C.E., there was also a visible linguistic influence on the Gandhari language spoken in the Khotan royal-court. There are four versions of the legend of the founding of Khotan. These can be found in the description by Xuanzang, a Chinese pilgrim and in the Tibetan translation of the Khotanese documents. All four versions suggest that the city was founded around the third century BC by a group of Indians during the reign of Ashoka. The Saka people were known as the Sai in ancient Chinese records. These records indicate that they originally inhabited the Ili and Chu River valleys of modern Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. In the Chinese Book of Han, the area was called the "land of the Sai", i.e. the Saka. The Saka crossed the Syr Darya into Bactria around 140 B.C. Later the Saka would also move into Northern India, as well as other Tarim Basin sites like Khotan, Karasahr, Yarkand and Kucha. One suggestion is that the Saka became Hellenized in the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom, and they or an ethnically mixed Greco-Scythians either migrated to Yarkand and Khotan, or a bit earlier from Taxila in the Indo-Greek Kingdom. Later Khotanese-Sakalanguage documents, ranging from medical texts to Buddhist literature, have been found in Khotan and Tumshuq (northeast of Kashgar). Similar documents in the Khotanese-Saka language dating mostly to the 10th century have been found in Dunhuang. This largely Buddhist kingdom existed for over a thousand years until it was conquered by KaraKhanid Khanate in 1006. (Credit: Kingdom_of_Khotan, Wikipedia)