Tochari

This article is about the people mentioned by Greco-Roman sources. For the populations of the Tarim Basin whose languages are conventionally called Tocharian in modern scholarship, see Tocharians.

The Tochari (/ˈtɒkəraɪ/; Latin: Tocharī, from the Ancient Greek exonym Τόχαροι Tókharoi), also called the Tukharas (/tʊˈkɑːrəz/) or Tukhars (from the Sanskrit exonym तुखार Tukhāra [stem form] and the Classical Persian exonym تخار Tukhār or طخار Ṭukhār [singular]), were an ancient people of Bactria, a historical region in Central Asia roughly corresponding to northern Afghanistan and parts of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The Tochari were sometimes thought to be a branch of the Turkic peoples, but are now generally considered to have been part of the Yuezhi, a group of Indo-European-speaking tribes mentioned by Chinese sources. The Tochari settled in the eastern parts of Bactria in the 1st century BCE.