According to ancient Indian literature, the old name of Assam is ____.

Ancient Indian regions and kingdoms are often known today by different names than the ones recorded in early literature — the Puranas, epics, and inscriptions preserve these older place names.

The Brahmaputra valley region that forms present-day Assam was known in ancient Indian literature as Kamarupa. This name appears in the Kalika Purana and the Yogini Tantra, in the Mahabharata, and in epigraphic sources such as the Allahabad Pillar inscription of Samudragupta and the travel account of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang, who visited the kingdom in the 7th century CE.

• Gandhara — an ancient region centred on the Peshawar valley, in present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (Pakistan) and eastern Afghanistan.

• Kuru — an ancient Janapada in the upper Gangetic plains around present-day Kurukshetra and Delhi.

• Trigarta — an ancient hill kingdom in the region of present-day Kangra district, Himachal Pradesh.

• None of these three correspond to the Brahmaputra valley, confirming Kamarupa as the region's recorded ancient name.